CALLBOARD: The Spark of Connection

Stephen Sheffer, Playwright of Lean-To

I’m writing to you from smack-dab in the middle of the Adirondack High Peaks Wilderness, where I have just completed a solo camping trip in the backcountry.

I set foot to trail on this trip four days ago and started off on day one by hiking through Indian Pass, a very remote area of the Adirondacks. Several miles through dense brush brought me to a lean-to shelter, and I thought I might make camp there for the night (what with lean-tos on my mind these days). But I decided to forge on forward. My map showed another site a few miles up the trail, so why not? I kept hiking.

Upon arrival, my destination site was no longer available, being re-wilded. But no problem! Another site was marked up ahead another mile and a half or so. At this point, it was approaching dusk but I trudged on.

I arrived at the back-up to the Plan B site and it was occupied. My heart sank just a little bit. So I kept walking, quickening my pace a bit, as if I could outrun the setting sun.

The light of day was going, going, gone. I pulled out my headlamp and flashed it on, illuminating my steps as I hopscotched rock-to-rock through the mud.

Then, finally, a beacon in the night — a trail sign marked "Flowed Lands Lean-To: .2 miles." I surged with energy as I closed the gap on this fourteen miles-hiked day.

I approached the lean-to, my headlamp illuminating its unoccupied interior. What a relief to find it available to me. I dropped my pack, made quick work of setting up camp and then cozied in with a hot meal as the rain grew in intensity.

In that moment I felt safe. I felt protected. And the next day, I carried on.

There’s something very human, universally so, perhaps, about wanting to feel safe and protected. And this is what a small three-walled structure made of logs out in the middle of somewhere offers to weary hikers like me, and what makes a lean-to feel magical.

This is what the characters in Lean-To are looking for as well: to feel safe. To feel protected. That yearning.

I wrote the first draft of Lean-To during the deepest, darkest depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. I remember feeling very isolated at that time, and lonely. In an effort to feel a part of the world in a way I hadn’t been, I planned a hiking trip. To feel a part of something larger than myself or the walls of the Brooklyn apartment in which I had been cooped up.

This time, my adventurous spirit took me to the Catskills, the trails of which I’ve traversed a million times at this point. I hiked from the northern boundary of the park in very late fall. It was cold. It was damp. A big storm had just passed through, and all the colored leaves had fallen save the last golden yellow hangers-on.

I arrived at a lean-to shelter at the base of Blackhead Mountain and settled in for the night, gathering wood for a campfire to fight off the bone-chilling late-fall air. And then, a couple wandered in. They, too, had planned to stay at this lean-to. And that’s kind of the deal with these remote wilderness shelters — you share them.

We gathered together by the fire and shared stories as the sky grew dark around us, surrounded by the wild natural world.

The events of that night were a springboard for what became Lean-To. The story of the play is only very loosely based on the events of that night. For one, the couple who arrived in real life were friends, not romantically involved. And all the other elements that comprise the play are pulled from other experiences, and my imagination.

But the core of the play is what I felt with those two strangers that night: connection, the human desire to feel safe and protected with others.

Xavier, Yvonne and Zed — the characters who populate Lean-To — are looking for this kind of connection. They meet in the middle of the cold, crisp forest and there’s a spark, a warmth between them, amplified by the campfire they build and gather around. My hope is that audiences will identify with these characters, their struggles, their yearnings and lean into the wild world of Lean-To. 

Lean-To runs September 10 - October 10, 2026. Buy tickets here.

Header image: Stephen Sheffer. Photo by Justin Belmondo.