I Interview Playwrights Part 169: Kenny Finkle

Kenny Finkle


Hometown:  Miami, Florida


Current Town:  New York City


Q:  Tell me please about your play now being performed at the Old Globe.

A:  The play that was at the Old Globe is called “Alive and Well” and is a two-character comedy about a Civil War re-enactor and a Reporter who get lost in the Virginia wilderness together while looking for The Lonesome Soldier – a Confederate Soldier that some locals have sighted and believe to be the real deal… It’s ultimately about America’s love/hate romance with itself. It had its premiere this past fall (Sept 09) at the Virginia Stage Company, who originally commissioned and developed the play.


Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  In July, my new play “Penelope, of Ithaca” is going to open at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, NY which has been my artistic home away from home for the last 10 years. They are opening their brand new theatre this summer and “Penelope” will be the first new play in the space.


In June I’m going to go out to Steamboat Springs, Colorado with the Atlantic Theatre Company to workshop my play “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”.


I’m also in the midst of a rewrite of a commission for commercial producer Matt Murphy.


And finally I’m working with this very cool theatre company – Operating Theatre – on a production of my play “Transatlantica” (which was done at the Flea in 2002) for October in the city.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  Growing up there was this bully on my block named Billy and he used to come over to my house, like once a week to beat the hell out of me.


The first few times he beat me up, I tried to fight back to get him to stop but I didn’t really know how to fight back - I never learned to fight. I think probably my Dad tried to teach me but I was stubborn and refused to learn…


I didn’t tell anyone that this was going on and never asked anyone for help. I basically just spent a lot of time in my room thinking about how I could stop Billy from beating me up. I also spent a lot of time in my room wearing my mom’s nightgowns and dancing around pretending to be Olivia Newton John. Needless to say, neither the dancing nor the thinking helped me solve my problem.


And then one afternoon I was watching “Facts of Life” (my favorite TV show growing up, except maybe for “Diff’rent Strokes”, “The Great Space Coaster”, “Small Wonder”, “The Love Boat”, “Fantasy Island”, “Dynasty”, “It’s a Living” and “Maud”) and Blair’s cousin Jerry, (remember her? She was the one that had cerebral palsy) came on the show and she was wearing that famous t-shirt – “I’m not drunk, I have cerebral palsy” and that somehow made me think of me and Billy and I thought that if I laughed while Billy was whaling on me maybe that would do the trick (now I wonder how I possibly came to this conclusion and I also wonder if this somehow connects to my love of really rough sex…but I think that’s probably a subject for another kind of interview at another time…or maybe not…anyone reading this that wants to discuss rough sex and where the desire for it comes from, feel free to get in contact).


The next time Billy came by to beat me up, I tried my laughing tactic and it totally freaked him out. I remember him stopping his assault and looking at me with a real sense of curiosity…like what strange creature is this?


Billy never came by to beat me up again…and I missed him.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I have this kind of ridiculous idea that theatre artists should have these cards that are given out by a “Committee” that tells them how much time they are allowed to use on stage. Every theatre artist starts out with 10 minutes of stage time at the beginning of their career and each year they are evaluated and given more or less time depending on how they used the time they had allotted. If they were able to fill the 10 minutes completely, then they could move on to 15 minutes and so on and so on. Sometimes artists would be required to go back to smaller amounts of time if they abused the amount of time they had. Sometimes artists could advocate for more time but they’d have to prove that the time was really needed. This idea of course brings up a whole bunch of problems and questions – but I feel like I go see shows all the time that are 15-20-25 minutes too long and I think – “if the Committee had given them less time, this play would have been fantastic!”

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  In no particular order:

John Guare

My Mom

Madonna

Craig Lucas

Moises Kauffman

John Cameron Mitchell in “Hedwig”

Cherry Jones in “The Heiress”

Kevin Moriarty

Jeremy Dobrish

Sheri Wilner

Peter Flynn

Kate Walat

And everyone else in the Good Writer’s Group

Eugene O’Neill

Prince – but not now, back in like the pre and post “Purple Rain” time, probably up to around 1990…

Bjork

Gina Gionfriddo

Jason Schuler and the Operating Theatre

Beth Whitaker

Jack DePalma

Peter Flynn

Chris Hanna

Nicky Martin

Donald Margulies

Robert Anderson

Susan Bernfield

Chekhov

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I’m pretty open as far as style/type…I just need my theatre to be passionate, true, daring and as lean as possible without losing the juicy parts.


I was most recently excited by the Orphan Home Cycle and Keen Company’s production of “I Never Sang for my Father”.


Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:

1. Make your writing your first priority and figure the rest out as you go.

3. Don’t worry about the order of things until the very last minute

2. Take your time getting an agent.


Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come up to Ithaca at the end of July and see my play “Penelope, Of Ithaca” – it’s a hot hot romance and Ithaca is pretty cool too..If you come, I promise to buy you drinks all night at Stella’s Atomic Lounge.

Also

Do you know about these theater podcasts?


http://www.nytheatrecast.com/

I Interview Playwrights Part 168: Kate Moira Ryan

Kate Moira Ryan

Hometown:

My hometown is Yonkers, New York.

Current Town:

Currently I live in Brooklyn Heights section of NYC.

Q: Tell me about Bass For Picasso.

A: In Bass for Picasso a food writer for The New York Times throws a dinner party for her friends recreating recipes from the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. The guest list includes Pilar, her multilingual art detective lover, who has spent time in Guantanamo for visa problems; Bricka Matson, a lesbian widow with a small child and Republican in-laws who are trying to gain custody; Joe, an OB/GYN whose lover is a geographically challenged crystal meth addict; and Kev, a playwright who has recently fallen off the wagon and written a soon-to open Off-Broadway play about all of them.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: Oh God, what am I not working on. Christian Parker the Associate Artistic Director at the Atlantic Theater said to me this weekend that I am probably the most eclectic writer he knows. I am working on the book to a musical loosely based on Diana Oughton, a member of the 70’s radical group the Weathermen. (She got blown up in the townhouse on West 11th street.) David Clement is doing the music. With Linda Chapman (my collaborator from the Beebo Brinker Chronicles), I am working on the obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness, a rather dour groundbreaking Lesbian novel written by an equally dour woman by the name of Radclyffe Hall. And this summer at Williamstown, Judy Gold and I will be continuing our long time collaboration and will be presenting her latest one person show, It’s Jewdy’s Show, My life as a sitcom which will be directed by Amanda Charlton.

Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A: Well, when I was a child, I wanted to be a boy. I think being a boy for me meant not wearing little smocked dresses that my mother had sewn and being able to play with as many guns as possible. Well, I was sent to this very sweet Presbyterian nursery school where they sang songs in French and the teachers seemed like they were 105. One day as I was playing dress up, I put on the batman cape and I was told to take it off because girls did not wear batman capes. And I refused. And I was made to sit in the corner. The great thing is that when my Mom picked me up, she agreed with me. I mean I wasn’t daughter she expected, but my mother has always been an unabashed feminist.

Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A: I would have my work done more. I would lower the production values on new plays and do a ton more new plays. I would cast more disabled people in abled roles. I would call my company ephemeral theater- I’d get the work up, get it seen and then move on to the next one. I’d do the work of emerging, established writers. And I’d also make it cross cultural. I love Eastern European work. This past year I did an adaptation of Olga Mukhina’s play TANYA TANYA for the New Russian Drama Festival at Towson University.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: I love Stephen Sondheim and Tom Stoppard. I am also a huge fan of Moss Hart. I also love the work of my contemporaries like Doug Wright and I have to say David Pittu’s WHAT’S THAT SMELL-will always be among my top ten faves.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Theater that’s fun, inventive and a little off, but you know I am an old show tune queen, so slam me into a seat watching Sweeney Todd and I am in heaven.

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: Produce your own work, don’t be afraid to try TV to support yourself (I wish I had) and work on as many different types of vehicles as possible. Don’t ‘write what you know’ there’s a great goddamn world out there and the public library to find out about it-write what you want to know.

Q: Plugs:

A: Come see BASS FOR PICASS0. You can get twenty dollar tiks by going on ticketcentral.com and putting in the promo code staf (f). It’s a very fun zany play that is horrifying the critics by how demented it is. And the best part is I get you in and out in 75 minutes.

I Interview Playwrights Part 167: Sam Hunter

Sam Hunter

Hometown: A town called Moscow in northern Idaho.

Current Town: New York.

Q:  Tell me about the play you have coming up with P73.

A:  It’s a play that for a long time was called GOD OF MEAT—now it’s called JACK’S PRECIOUS MOMENT (I seem to frequently do this thing where I have an initial title which is replaced by a better one later on). It was the first play that I wrote during my PONY Fellowship year with the Lark, and I developed it in the Lark Playwrights Workshop and with the Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco. Page 73 eventually got a hold of it, and I got to know them a bit better last summer at their Yale Residency. That’s also where I got to know Kip Fagan, who is directing the show and is one of my new favorite people.

The story centers the family of a man from Idaho who went to Iraq for contract work and ended up being beheaded on video. The play takes place shortly after the release of the video and centers around his fundamentalist Christian family who travel to the Precious Moments Chapel in Missouri to find a solution to their grief.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I’m just starting rehearsals for my play FIVE GENOCIDES which will be in Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Festival, and directed by the amazing and talented Davis McCallum. Also, my play THE WHALE is being workshopped in PlayPenn in July with Hal Brooks at the helm, and I’m working on a commission for Partial Comfort Productions that will be produced in September.

Also, I’m officiating a wedding in July in Idaho for my best friend from high school—my third wedding as an officiant!

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person:

A:  I’ll tell three, but I’ll keep them short.

When I was about 12, I was riding my bike home from the video rental store and when I didn’t slow down as I approached a blind alley, I got hit by a pickup. My bike went under the front wheel and I was thrown over the hood and rolled off onto the ground. Moments later, I stood up—not a single scratch on me—and carried my bike and VHS tape home.

Five years later, I had just transferred to a different high school, and one of my first days there I ate a sandwich from a food co-op a few blocks away. I didn’t realize it had a whole bunch of peanut sauce in it. Now, I knew I was allergic to peanuts at the time, but having never had a truly severe reaction to them, I wasn’t as careful as I should have been. I immediately went into anaphylactic shock; my lungs filled up with fluid, and I suffocated. I was entirely purple by the time the ambulance got there. I don’t remember much, but I do remember the moment of letting go—and the moment of being revived thanks to an obscene amount of epinephrine being pumped into my veins. The peanuts eventually worked their way through my system and I got through it, luckily without permanent brain damage.

Five years after that, I was in a refugee camp outside of Hebron working with these guys named Mohammed and Ihab who were part of a theater company there. Around 3 AM, the Israeli Army raided the camp and we all hid. My curiosity got the better of me though, and I went out onto the deck to look. As one of the armored jeeps rode by, there was a huge explosion and I fell down to the floor. I looked up and Mohammed and Ihab were making fun of me, because it was just a sound bomb.

Point is, both in terms of my life and my writing, I often feel very stupid, and very, very lucky.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  First and foremost, speaking as someone who shops in the big-and-tall section, the seats are too small. Second, I’d love to see more playwrights-in-residence at theaters in NYC and around the country. There are so many great theaters out there, and so many playwrights in those communities who need artistic homes.

Also: health insurance, please.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The second I try to identify the kinds of plays that I like and don’t like, I immediately see a play that proves me wrong. Normally I might say that I don’t really care for subtle naturalism, but the brilliance of writers like Emily Schwend and Annie Baker quickly prove me wrong. I think the one thing that is a requirement for me is guts and originality. Guts meaning the willingness to take chances in form and content, and originality meaning offering something more than what I can get for free from a good movie on the Hallmark Channel.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Stop it. No, just kidding.

First, business-wise: buy a laser printer. Seriously. The most important thing I ever did when I was just starting out was buy a printer that could handle me printing out the five to ten scripts a week that I was printing out to send to every single developmental and workshop opportunity I was eligible for. My first year at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, the lovely Sarah Hammond showed me a spreadsheet she had made where she listed all the places she had sent her scripts, and it taught me a valuable lesson. You have to be your own agent. The first few applications and artist statements are going to be incredibly annoying and time-consuming, but it gets easier as you do more and more of them. Back in the day I could throw a full application together in less than 20 minutes. The trick is to send out so many applications that when the rejection letters come, you barely remember submitting and therefore don’t really care.

Second, artsy-wise: be careful about labeling yourself. The moment you decide what kind of writer you are, you limit your writing. Don’t be scared to write the kinds of plays you may think you don’t like.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Go see Greg Keller’s fantastic play DUTCH MASTERS, produced by Labyrinth at the Cherry Pit. Greg and I were classmates at Juilliard and apart from being a kind and generous guy, he’s a crazy talented writer.

Also, if you find yourself in Connecticut this Summer, go see Molly Smith Metzler’s funny and devastating play CLOSE UP SPACE at the O’Neill.

And some shameless self-serving plugs: Go see my play JACK’S PRECIOUS MOMENT, produced by Page 73 and directed by wonderful Kip Fagan, at 59E59. Performances start May 21st. Also, go see FIVE GENOCIDES, directed by the amazing Davis McCallum, produced as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks 2010 at the Ohio (perhaps your last chance to see something there), starting June 13th. Also in Summerworks this year: DOT by Kate E. Ryan and THE SMALL by Anne Washburn. Finally, Partial Comfort has commissioned me to write their Season 8 show, which will open in September at the Wild Project.

Here are some great things you should check out

A bunch  Profiles of Women Playwrights

Theatrespeak interviews

Zach's People You Should Know

5 questions from Clyde Fitch Report's Leonard Jacobs

Portraits of artists and playwrights by Peter Bellamy

I Interview Playwrights Part 166: Johnna Adams

Johnna Adams


Hometown: Austin, TX

Current Town: Astoria, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I have several plays jockeying around in my head, vying for attention. The one that is actually getting written at the moment is a two-person 90 minute play that I am tentatively calling Nurture. It is my first boy-meets-girl kind of script, although my boy and my girl are so seriously screwed up, it is also a satire and black comedy—not at all a (shudder) romance. In addition to that I have an ambitious idea for another verse play (a companion piece to my rhyming verse play Lickspittles, Buttonholers and Damned Pernicious Go-Betweens) taking place in England over the course of a wacky Regency-area house party. Seven women all trying marry one man. A sex-farce in rhyme. I also have three prequel play to the Angel Eaters trilogy in my head, a West Texas tragedy set in the 1950s, and a tentative plan to develop a script about the eighteenth century Bluestocking Circle with my friend, dramaturg Kay Mitchell.

Q:  You moved from LA to NYC not too long ago. How is the theater different there on the West Coast?

A:  Surprisingly, the companies I worked with (mainly in Orange County) are similar to off-off New York companies in quality of work. There are some wonderful storefront theaters that I was privileged to work with back there. The main difference is that there are a lot more small companies in New York. No theaters out in LA are formed by playwrights looking to produce their own plays, either. They are almost exclusively formed by actors looking to showcase for industry, or just in it for the love of theater. The 99 seat contract that the LA theaters work under is more generous to producers than the showcase contracts. While actors are looking to use theater as a spring board to film and TV industry success, playwrights don’t have any real expectations of their plays moving on to bigger productions any where. Some playwrights hope to have things optioned for film—but not moved on to New York. Having even a really small off-off production of a ten minute play in New York is considered a very big deal by most playwrights in California. Most playwrights send their plays out to contests and query large theaters, something that I don’t see most New York playwrights doing.

Q:  Isn't Flux great? Can you tell me about the trilogy of yours they did in rep?

A:  Flux is beyond great. Flux is the most generous, open-hearted and supportive group of people on the planet. The trilogy was a once-in-a-lifetime, beyond my wildest dreams adventure. I am still amazed that they tackled the project and pulled it off so beautifully. It was a miracle to me. I am still, however, apologizing to everyone I meet for the third play, 8 Little Antichrists. I still think it had some great ideas in it that I am proud of, but it was a hot mess. I am so happy that Gus got nominated for an IT award for his fantastic work as Ezekiel in that play, though. That made it all feel worth it. I loved getting to write in such an epic scope and hope to write more plays in what I am consider a cycle instead of a trilogy now.

Q:  How many trilogies of plays have you written? Do you set out to write a trilogy or does one play just lead to the next?

A:  I have written three trilogies, Angel Eaters probably holds us the best. My plays Cockfighters, Tumblewings and Godsbreath are all part of a trilogy I call The Cockfighters Trilogy. That had a reading in Los Angeles a few years ago by Bootleg Theater, but production plans were scrapped because, again, the third play was a hot mess. In that trilogy, Cockfighters and Tumblewings are two unrelated plays that are linked together by the third play. It is very much a precursor to Angel Eaters and deals with same themes. And I have a trilogy that is so old, the first play was written on a Brothers electric typewriter in the early nineties and I no longer have a copy of it. It was a family saga about a family dealing with murder and alien invasion. In a departure from the later trilogies, the third play was the only producible play, The Miracle of Mary Mack’s Baby—which has been produced twice by STAGEStheatre in Fullerton, CA.

Q;  Tell me a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  Just like in my play Rattlers, the undertaker who prepared my mother’s body for burial was in love with her when they were children. And I really do have a second cousin named Snake who takes visitors on tours of rattlesnake nests and participates in rattlesnake rodeos. I visited him when I was 16 and got to touch rattlesnakes. He gave me a box of rattles he had cut off the snakes to take home. The entire cab of his pickup truck was lined with snake skin. He used to throw a live rattlesnake into his pickup when he parked It somewhere and called it his car alarm. Recently someone he took out on a tour got bitten and died (I think of a heart attack). Rattlers, scarily enough, is actually my most autobiographical play.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that makes me laugh a lot and then unexpectedly cry. Theater where you can feel the air leave the room for a minute as the audience holds their breath.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Think quantity over quality. Too many playwrights get bogged down trying to make their early plays wonderful plays. My first six plays (not even including the two lousy full length screenplays I wrote early on) were complete crap. That is eight full length works that were learning scripts. I know that is completely disheartening for a new playwright. But they can take some comfort in the fact that I was a really slow learner and they can undoubtedly improve on that learning curve. However, you have to take an honest look at your early plays and not be disheartened if they disappoint you. Move on. It takes time to get your playwriting to come from your subconscious and for your fingertips to understand your plays as well as your imaginations. Your imagination is inert, but your fingers are agile little workers. Fingers actually do things, fantasies don’t. Your plays live there, not in your head.

Q:  Any plugs?

A:  I am acting in Gus Schulenburg’s Jacob’s House. A beautiful, rich, biblically-scoped retelling of the story of Jacob. I play patriarch Isaac on his deathbed and young Tamar cleaning a toilet. Gus is a playwright everybody should pay full attention to. Go see it (http://www.fluxtheatre.org/). And I am starting grad school in August, studying with Tina Howe at Hunters College toward an MFA in playwriting. That is going to be a dream come true. I have loved her writing for years. And she is unbelievably kind and nurturing. I had dinner with her and my future MFA classmates (Holly Hepp-Galvan, Chris Weikel and Callie Kimball) last night and she has a brilliant theatrical aesthetic, amazing life experience, and a warm, caring heart. I can’t wait.