A Multimedia Piece By Ginger O'Neill
There is always a moment before.
Hildebrandslied, an 8th-century Old High German heroic poem, tells of Hildebrand, a warrior returning after thirty years of exile, who encounters his son Hadubrand on the battlefield; they do not recognize each other. Bound by warrior code and mistrust, father and son are assumed to have fought - but did they?
RIGHT BEFORE is...
- right before a sword is raised
- right before the hit
- right before you can't take it back
- right before assuming the ending
- right before September 11
- right before the inevitable
- right before the breakthrough
- right before freedom.
Summary
RIGHT BEFORE
By Ginger O'Neill, Playwright, 2026
New York City, 2001.
In a Soho rehearsal studio, a group of actors is preparing to perform a radical new adaptation of the ancient German heroic poem Hildebrandslied - "the Song of Hildebrant." The play centers on an impossible encounter: an aging warrior meets the young man who turns out to be his son, neither recognize each other, and the two are drawn toward a fight neither one can imagine surviving.
In this version, it is set in modern times and the characters are written as women.
The older actress, a formidable veteran of the stage, plays Hildebrand. The younger actress plays Hadubrand. Their fight training is led by a professional fight coordinator who teaches them that stage combat is not about anger. It is about control. Distance. Trust. Timing. The ability to stop, and flow.
As rehearsals continue, the ancient story begins to bleed into the actors' lives.
The older actress carries a history of violence within a relationship she has rarely discussed. The younger actress has her own experience with a relationship in which anger, control, and fear gradually became normalized. Neither woman initially sees herself in the other. Neither wants to become a victim, or agressor.
The rehearsal keeps returning to the same question:
What happens in the moment before?
Before the sword comes down.
Before the hand strikes.
Before the door slams.
Before you let it all go.
Before the world opens up and your life is yours.
The play becomes increasingly a multimedia experience, moving between the rehearsal room, fragments of the ancient Hildebrandslied, projected images, live video, recorded testimony, sound, memory, and the city outside. The audience is sometimes allowed to see what the characters cannot. At other moments, the audience is asked to make choices, replay moments, or witness different possible versions of the same encounter.
The ancient manuscript itself becomes a metaphor. The Hildebrandslied survives without its ending. We know the warriors prepare to fight. We know later traditions developed the story toward tragedy and other versions - resolve. But the original manuscript does not tell us what happened next.
The playwright takes that missing ending seriously.
What if the missing page of the old tale is not a gap to be filled with the expected violence?
What if it is the place where choice lives?
As the actors approach opening night in September 2001, the rehearsal becomes haunted by another story of inevitability. The audience knows what is coming. The characters do not.
Or perhaps they do.
The production is designed so that it can end in two ways.
1. 1st Option:
In one ending, the rehearsal proceeds toward the historical date we know is coming. The ancient father and son raise their weapons. The women playing them confront the violence in their own lives. The city continues toward September 11. The audience experiences the terrible power of knowing what the characters cannot know.
2. 2nd Option:
In the other ending, the actors stop.
Not because the danger was imaginary. Not because victims are responsible for what happens to them.
They stop because, at least once, someone recognizes the moment before.
A weapon can be lowered.
A person can walk away.
A conversation can be interrupted.
Someone can ask for help.
Someone can choose not to answer violence with violence.
The final question of RIGHT BEFORE is not whether history could have been changed.
It is whether we are willing to recognize the moments in which history, relationships, and our own lives are still being written.
The last page of the Hildebrandslied is missing.
The audience is given the choice of what to do with the silence.
Ginger O'Neill
Playwright, Director
Ginger O’Neill holds a BFA in Acting from the State University of New York at Fredonia, and is a graduate of the Rod Serling Performing Arts High School. Her early professional work included a Western New York tour of her original play Nourish, which she wrote, directed, and performed. A theatrical exploration of hunger and human dignity, Nourish earned her the Artist Against Hunger Distinction from Harry Chapin’s World Hunger Year (WHY).
O’Neill’s work as a playwright has often grown directly from her experiences with communities and social issues. While living in Niger, West Africa, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as Business Manager of the U.S. Embassy’s Recreational Center, she wrote stories and pieces inspired by the lives and experiences of the pre-teen girls she worked with, both in her village and in the capital city. She sent these stories home to New York, where they became the foundation for a community-based theater project presented through Manhattan Theatre Source’s EstroGenius Festival in 2007, 2008, and 2009.
O’Neill had previously volunteered as a grant writer for Manhattan Theatre Source. In connection with her work in Niger, the theater auditioned young women from East Side public housing projects in Manhattan. The girls developed and performed their own short pieces about their lives alongside West African monologues and songs inspired by the stories and experiences of the girls in Niger. The resulting performances created a theatrical exchange between young women in New York and the girls whose lives had inspired O’Neill’s work in West Africa.
The project transformed theater into both a vehicle for storytelling and a means of direct support: performances raised funds and school supplies for the Young Girls Scholarship Program in Niger for girls who weren't making it past middle school. O’Neill’s Estrogenius work (and its Niger sister-city project "the Pangea Music Festival," with co-producers Michelle Stoner and Sheena Washington) was subsequently recognized with support from Rotary International and the Niger Minister of Youth and Sports.
This history of bringing lived experience, cultural exchange, community voices, and social action into theatrical spaces continues in RIGHT BEFORE, a multimedia work inspired by the ancient German heroic poem Hildebrandslied and set in New York City in 2001. The piece draws on O’Neill’s experience as an actor, playwright, director, and artist committed to exploring hunger, violence, dignity, human connection, and the choices we make in moments of profound uncertainty.