From ‘Easttown’ to Avalon: The Man Behind the Hit HBO Show and His Local Connections
“Mare of Easttown” creator and writer Brad Ingelsby (left) with his extended family on the beach in Avalon.
When “Mare of Easttown” closes the book on the Erin McMenamin murder case and Mare (we hope) finds some peace in her own life, the credits will roll on the final episode and fans from the Philly suburbs will bid farewell to people and places that were at once singular yet familiar.
“I just wanted to tell a story that was reflective of how I grew up and the kind of rituals of life at home,” says Brad Ingelsby, the creator and writer of this engrossing miniseries.
When Ingelsby talks about “home,” he’s not talking about the house in Irvine, Calif., where he lives with his wife, Lindsey, and their three young children. No, he’s talking about the communities of Chester and Delaware counties; places like Drexel Hill, Coatesville and Aston, where the miniseries was filmed.
“One of the best parts of actually going home and shooting it there was just being home and being surrounded by all my brothers and sisters and my parents; and my wife was surrounded by her family,” says Ingelsby, whose extended family spends their summer vacations in Avalon. “My wife’s parents live in Aston, literally a mile away from the studio where we were shooting.
“I grew up in Chester County. My grandmother was in Drexel Hill, my other grandmother in Springfield, and my aunts and uncles live in Havertown and Broomall. I spent a lot of time in those places growing up; hanging out in the dining rooms, the kitchens, listening to conversations, enjoying pizza nights.”
Asked about how locals have reacted to the miniseries, Ingelsby readily admits that “the most gratifying reaction is when people tell me it feels like home. And that we’ve captured that part of the world in an honest way. Easttown in the show is a composite of a number of different places, but I think in terms of the representation of life in those communities, when someone says, ‘You really captured what it’s like to live there,’ that’s the most gratifying part.
“The other really enjoyable part is when they say, ‘Oh, I need to know who did it! I need to guess who it is!’ It is a real whodunit at its core. It’s something that the audience will hopefully be guessing on until the end.”
Ingelsby, who grew up in Berwyn, is a proud graduate of Archbishop Carroll High School in Radnor and Villanova University, where he studied marketing and where the decision to take a screenwriting class in his junior year changed the course of his life: “I started to realize, ’Oooh, I like this writing thing a lot more than I like this business thing!’ ” His professor, who saw that spark, pulled the self-proclaimed movie buff aside one day and asked if screenwriting was something he was interested in and would he want to give it a shot? Why, yes, he would.
After graduating from Villanova, Ingelsby took a year off to work, plan and research screenwriting programs. If you were a student learning about computers at St. Patrick School in Malvern that year, raise your hand: “Mr. Ingelsby” was your technology teacher. The following year, he was accepted into the screenwriting program at the prestigious American Film Institute in Los Angeles.
Ingelsby has written a number of films since his days at AFI, most recently “The Way Back,” starring Ben Affleck as an alcoholic basketball coach reaching for redemption. Affleck’s character, like Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan, was a high-school basketball star. The basketball backdrop is not surprising. For Ingelsby, basketball is a family tradition: his father, Tom, a starting guard on the Villanova team that made it to the NCAA championship game in 1971, later played in the NBA and ABA; Brad’s brother Martin is the men’s basketball coach at the University of Delaware and Brad’s brother-in-law Baker Dunleavy is Head Coach at Quinnipiac University.
If you’ve been keeping up with “Mare of Easttown,” you’ve likely been as tickled by the references to life in Delco and Chesco as you’ve been intrigued by the murder mystery or the roots of Mare’s trauma. When Mare grabs a Rolling Rock from the fridge to pair with a cheesesteak that mom Helen kept warm for her or Det. Colin Zabel arrives at the station carrying two cups of Wawa coffee – one for Mare – you just can’t help but smile. Ingelsby admits with a laugh that he worked in the iconic green glass Rolling Rock bottles as a nod to his father-in-law “who’s a huge Rolling Rock guy,” adding “we also get Yuengling in there later in the show.”
“There’s definitely a ton of references to local spots,” says Ingelsby, “every episode has some reference. I think people will get a kick out of trying to figure out if the clues lead anywhere: Are they missing something? Are they catching something? What does that mean? How does it relate back to the case?”
And Ingelsby doesn’t overlook the oceanfront counties of New Jersey: From Mare’s Ocean City hoodie to the poster for Richard Ryan’s novel, “May’s Landing,” (we’ll give him the apostrophe in the title as artistic license), Ingelsby tips his hat to the Jersey Shore as well.
Like many of us who grew up in these parts, Ingelsby recalls good times at the shore. He was in his early 20s when his parents moved their summer vacations from Delaware’s Bethany Beach to Avalon, so he has what he calls “older” memories of spending time on the beach in Avalon and going to The Whitebrier and The Princeton with his old high school buddies.
According to Ingelsby, Avalon’s beach compares favorably to West Coast beaches. In his experience, Southern California waves are big and break hard, while Avalon’s waves are gentler and the Avalon beach is “way, way longer,” he says. “A lot of the beaches where I go – Laguna, Crystal Cove, Newport – you don’t get that much sand; the beach itself is much shorter and you don’t get to spread out and enjoy the sand itself. As soon as you step onto the beach, you’re right up against the water.”
Avalon is still a summertime destination for Ingelsby and his family.
“Now my memories are different,” he says. “Every time we go home in the summer now, it’s a much different experience. All my brothers and sisters bring their kids and we all go together. And we get to spend time hanging out on the beach, watching the kids hang out with each other. The days of going to the bar are long gone. By 9 o’clock we’re all on the couch, ready to go to bed. It’s just changed a lot, which I’m not complaining about. I love just getting everyone together, hanging out with my brothers and sisters, enjoying the beach and the atmosphere. So those are my memories now, which I’m very, very happy to have.”
Asked if he has any Avalon traditions, Ingelsby talks about enjoying dinner with his brothers and sisters and their families at the Concord Cafe and taking the kids to Avalon Freeze for ice cream. He hopes to return to Avalon this summer.
“In the past, we’ve come home in August, and I think it just depends on when our kids’ school starts,” he says. “That will be the goal again to get home at some point in August. I’d love to get back and spend a week at the shore!”