I Interview Playwrights Part 199: Alice Tuan

Alice Tuan

Hometown: Los Angeles, CA

Current Town: Valencia, CA

Q:  What are you working on now? 

A:  COCKS CROW is a play I wrote the first draft of in Shanghai...Americans trying to do business in China but not understanding how Chinese business 'practices' work...shrinking superpower entitlement.

Q:  What was Shanghai like? 

A:  Infinitely interesting...a great place from which to think about the 21st century. It made me realize what I love about the U.S., namely psychic freedom and the possibility of self-determination.

Q:  You're the Head of Writing for Performance at Cal Arts. Can you tell me about that?

A:  The Writing for Performance program at Cal Arts is for innovative creator minds who are interested in collaborating with different and interdisciplinary artist minds and forging new kinds of performance...what might be the theater of the 21st century? Cal Arts is the place to explore...

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

A:  My grandfather, who was a Lt. General in Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist army, lived with us in his later years. I woke to the sound of beeping one morning...beep beep beep, endlessly...and found my grandpaps bent over the microwave, pressing numbers, trying to warm his tea. He could not find the start button, and my screamed explanation to the 93-year-old man sparked a moment of the past trying to start 'fire by buttons' in the modern world. This literally was the first scene I ever wrote. I think playwriting was a way to try and fuse contradictions, old/new, east/west, male/female power which has led me to a synthesis point in which my drama thinking stems from, always striving for that point above the original plane of conception.

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

A:  The set paradigm which keeps new voices and rhythms of the internet mind from being seen on stage.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you? 

A:  Seeing new populations and sensibilities enacted, ones that articulate the new complexities of 21st century behavior, even if it is a classic re-imagined (like Cromer's Our Town)...or avant garde frag/satire with emotional payoff (Austin's Rude Mechs, The Method Gun).

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

A:  Go to the edges of your mind to find your voice, but have the knowledge and flex of understanding how the market works.

Q:  Plugs, please: 

A:   Rima Anosa's Myopia (race satire through consumer lens and absurdist events), Candrice Jones' Crackbaby (non-TV movie treatment of exacerbated social issue critting the Public school system of the United States of America with a crack dialect stemmed from Gertrude Steinesque riff) + above mentioned, Cromer and Rude Mechs.

I Interview Playwrights Part 198: Alice Austen

Alice Austen

Hometown: I moved around as a kid and spent a lot of time in the Bay Area and the Northern California coast. I went to high school in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, a rural community near Eugene -which happened to be where Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, Jerry Garcia and a lot of the Dead lived. So my first writing teacher was actually Ken Kesey.

Current Town: I’m a Chicago playwright. I live in Milwaukee.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I took a couple years off from playwriting to write a novel that’s generating a lot of excitement. I have four plays in circulation, three are new. There’s a production of DESTRUCTION OF CURVES coming up this fall – a reverse chronology play about four people trapped on a train after a bomb goes off. HER ONLY FAULT, a play about Emilie du Chatelet and Voltaire, has been championed by my SHANGHAI LOW THEATRICALS partner, the inimitable Steve Pickering. BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS – about fathers, sons and war - recently had a staged reading at Route 66 with a superb Stef Tovar in the lead role. And this spring I wrote a ruthless little two-hander called PLAZA HOTEL BALLROOM about media and the collapse of civilization that I’m working on with the talented director Robin Witt.

Q:  You graduated from Harvard Law, and you were the first American to receive a fellowship to the Court of Human Rights at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. You lived in France, Belgium and Prague where you worked as a translator, writer and international attorney. I have to ask. Why playwriting?

A:  It was a complete accident. I did creative writing at Harvard and wrote fiction. And then later, I was living in Brussels and commuting to Prague. I had a lot of down time in the Frankfurt airport between connections. My friend and colleague, the Irish actor Brian Hartnett, talked me into writing a play where he and another friend could throw things at each other and shout. I did and the play was produced. It was kind of thrilling because I was working for another playwright – Vaclav Havel - at the time.

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 was the second fastest runner in the fourth grade. The fastest was my best friend Jimmy Salvador. We had played football at recess and we were all sweaty and muddy and tired. The bell rang. I remember looking up the slope of the playground and seeing a police officer standing on the edge of the grass with the principal and our teacher. Everything was very still for a second. Then Jimmy took off. The cop started chasing him and we were all shouting at Jimmy to run faster. But really, there was no way the cop was gonna catch Jimmy. And he didn’t. I never saw Jimmy again. The next day our teacher told us that he and his family were illegal – like that was news. And later still I found out that Jimmy's whole family had disappeared. From this I learned that nothing is permanent and things are never as they seem, you can’t trust the people in charge to understand or protect your best interests and it’s important- always - to be the fastest runner.

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

A:  The seats are sometimes extremely uncomfortable.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Work that’s truthful and genuinely audacious – NEXT’s recent production of WAR WITH THE NEWTS comes to mind.

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

A:  Theatre is collaborative – find the people you can work with and mentors who will guide you. I’ve had mentors over the years who have challenged and helped me and I’ll always be grateful to them, from the philosopher/writer Robert Grudin, the poet Michael Blumenthal to Chicago Dramatists Artistic Director Russ Tutterow. After that, follow Michel Houellebecq's advice, Dig into the subjects no one wants to hear about. Truth is scandalous. But without it, there's nothing of value.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  This year, SHANGHAI LOW THEATRICALS acquired the theatric adaptation rights to Alastair Reynolds DIAMOND DOGS -stay tuned.

http://shanghailow.typepad.com/home/alice-austen.html

http://www.chicagodramatists.org/catalogue/pwdetail.html?command=search&db=%2Fdatabases%2Fpwdb.db&eqpwiddatarq=9032&titlesort=1&titlesdir=as

I Interview Playwrights Part 197: Jeffrey Sweet

Photo: Jeff in green sweater surrounded by New York cast of BLUFF.

Jeffrey Sweet

Hometown: Chicago

Current Town: New York

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m fiddling with re-writes on a play about Lyndon Johnson and how his greatest political accomplishment was accomplished by one of his greatest personal betrayals. It’s called TEXAS BOOT. And I’m researching and writing notes for a play set in Provincetown about two people who can’t be married but can’t not be.

Q:  Tell me about Victory Gardens.

A:  I had the good luck to stumble into Victory Gardens on a recommendation. I wrote a book about the origins of Second City called SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY. It came out in 1978. I was visiting Chicago to plug the book when one of the producers at Second City, Joyce Sloane, noticed that it said on the cover that I’m a playwright. She said she was on the board of a small theatre and would I like an introduction to the artistic director? I said yes. She got on the phone and said, “I’m sending over a young writer. Be nice to him.” I got on the 22 bus and arrived at Victory Gardens’s then home, a couple of blocks north of the Cubs ballpark. I met Dennis Zacek, the artistic director, and gave him a copy of my play PORCH. He promised to read it.

In the meantime, in NY, I’d become involved with an off-off-Broadway company devoted to opera called the Encompass. For reasons I can’t fathom, they asked me to be a literary manager. Well, I knew little about opera, but I’d always wanted to see a production of Marc Blitzstein’s REGINA, based on Lillian Hellman’s THE LITTLE FOXES. They took my advice (it turned out to be a big hit for them). During rehearsal, I realized that the set for the porch in REGINA could do double duty for my play. The artistic director said I could put it up as long as it didn’t cost her anything. So I got a cast and a director and we rehearsed in the loft of one of the actors. We put the show on as a dark-night project at the Encompass, the first-string critic of the NY TIMES (who turned out to be a fan of SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY) came and gave it something close to a rave. Not long after, Dennis called to say he’d like to do a reading. With a little chutzpah I said, “Hey, it just got a good review out of the TIMES. It’s cheap. Why don’t you just put it on?” And he did. And it was a surprise hit. That was 1979 and I’ve been working with Dennis and Victory Gardens ever since.

I think we’ve done 14 shows together. A lot of different kinds. On one end, there are BLUFF and WITH AND WITHOUT, which are contemporary comedies with a little darkness. On the other end, there are pieces like THE ACTION AGAINST SOL SCHUMANN, FLYOVERS and BERLIN ‘45, which are more dramatic and pretty specifically about people coping with social or political forces. I tend to alternate between working with Dennis and Sandy Shinner. I don’t know how Dennis decides which plays he’s going to direct and which plays he’s going to assign to Sandy, but I have happy working relationships with both of them. Sandy has twice directed sensational New York productions of plays that were first done in Chicago – BLUFF, which she’d directed in Chicago with Tim Grimm and Jon Cryer but was even better in New York (largely because we changed the set and the space made a lot of difference) and FLYOVERS. FLYOVERS was complicated because Dennis directed a pretty perfect production in Chicago with William Petersen, Amy Morton, Marc Vann and Linda Reiter (Gary Cole and Teddi Siddall replaced Billy and Amy later in the run). Dennis was supposed to direct it in New York, but something very serious came up and Sandy found herself in the awkward position of having to sub for him here. Her production was substantially different, but then it would have had to have been given that the cast was so different – Richard Kind, Michele Pawk, Kevin Geer and Donna Bullock. And it was pretty close to perfect, too. So I’m always delighted to work with either of them.

Knowing that I have a theatre-home is hugely helpful. It’s not just that I know my stuff is probably going to be done there, it’s also that there are people associated with the place I look forward to working with again and again. There isn’t a formal acting company there, but Dennis and Sandy and I certainly have strong relationships with particular people, and sometimes I’ll write something with the idea of getting together again with favorite players. I will always want to work with Tim Grimm and Gary Houston, for instance. And Linda Reiter, Melissa Carlson and Kristine Thatcher are special to me. I could name many other actors I’ve enjoyed working with, but these are people who have done multiple projects of mine.

Q:  What other Chicago theaters would you recommend?

A:  The Chicago theatre movement happened largely because Paul Sills pioneered improvisational theatre there. In order to understand Chicago theatre – including many Chicago playwrights – you need to visit the key improv-based theatres: Second City, iO (yes, that’s a real name) and the Annoyance Theatre. There's a direct relationship between improvisational theory and playwriting theory.

The theatres that won Tony Awards in Chicago – Victory Gardens, the Goodman, Steppenwolf and Chicago Shakespeare – all deserve them and deserve visits. You also can’t go wrong at the Writers Theatre, the Eclipse, American Blues Theatre and Shattered Globe. You’re not terribly likely to break in as a writer at any of these places though. There are other, scrappy theatres with smaller budgets that are constantly popping up in storefronts and back rooms. Some of these outfits are actually looking for new plays and new writers. Another tip: non-Equity theatre in Chicago is taken very seriously, so don’t be put up off from going to or submitting to a theatre just because the company may not be Equity. The long-running, critically-lauded off-Broadway revival of OUR TOWN started as a non-Equity project.

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’m told that when I was a toddler someone asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I replied, “A typewriter.” This wasn’t quite the Davy Crockett hat they had expected as the answer. Why did I want a typewriter? “To write my dissertation.” Of course, I had no idea what a dissertation was, but my dad was working on his, and that probably meant that it was a fine thing to work on. My dad dreamed of being a writer, but he couldn’t see how to support a family while trying to be the 1950's answer to Ernest Hemingway, so he wrote public relations for universities instead and put food on the table. I always felt that my choosing a writing career in some way was me picking up and fulfilling his unrealized desire. I never risked embarrassing him by asking him that question directly, but I knew he was a steady ally and I loved him dearly. He was trained as a historian, and I don’t think it’s an accident that I’ve written so many plays that have touched on historical or political subjects. He brought me up with stories about the past and how they related to the present, and a couple of times was able to feed me some research on projects I was working on. My mother? She was a professional violinist, and my enthusiasm for music was probably fed by that. It’s not surprising that with this background I’ve written some musicals.

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

A:  To provide real residencies for playwrights. We’re always treated as guest artists rather than having real homes in the companies – our own desks in the building, our own health plans, responsibilities outside of work on our own stuff. I find it particularly upsetting that more literary managers make livings in the theatre (and are covered by insurance through their theatre employment) than playwrights.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Plays and productions that collaborate with the imagination of the audience. The audience is there as a partner; it mostly doesn’t need a lot of elaborate sets and technical tricks. This partially draws from my enthusiasm for Second City, which is based on actors working with little more than a stage and some chairs. I also love good musicals, though these days they only pop up once every couple of years.

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

A:  Don’t be passive. Don’t wait for permission from someone else to be a playwright. Start off writing stuff easy to produce for younger actors so that if it's good there's no reason for someone not to produce it. Court talented directors on the way up; directors generate more productions for writers than agents do. Take acting classes, especially improvisation, so you know how a scene works from the player's perspective. Understand that only half the playwright’s job is facing a blank page. The other half is social. Theatre is a social profession, and if you want to be a part of it you have to be an active part of the community. People tend to want to work with people they know. Volunteer to help small theatre companies and learn how they work. Visit the O’Neill Center in the summer and grab lunch in their dining hall; you'll meet very cool people. Attend readings and begin making lists of actors and directors you want to work with, and don’t be shy about approaching them and inviting them out for coffee. Learn how to produce yourself if necessary. Be useful to other writers. Don’t put off joining the Dramatists Guild; you want to be a member before you need their help.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Books: THE VALUE OF NAMES AND OTHER PLAYS (anthology from Northwestern University Press), SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY (oral history of Second City from Limelight Editions), THE DRAMATIST’S TOOLKIT and SOLVING YOUR SCRIPT (texts on playwriting from Heinemann). Available to consult and run workshops through Facebook. Teach in New York through HB Studios (http://www.hbstudio.org/), the Magnet Theatre (http://www.magnettheater.com/), and Artistic New Directions (http://www.artisticnewdirections.org/retreats.html). Also, FLYOVERS (with William Petersen and Amy Morton) has just been released on CD.

I Interview Playwrights Part 196: Dan LeFranc

Dan LeFranc

Hometown: Dana Point, CA

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m working on commissions for Yale Rep and Berkeley Rep as well as adapting my play Night Surf into a rock musical in collaboration with Nathan Allen, artistic director of The House Theater of Chicago. Meanwhile, I’m gearing up for a production of my latest play The Big Meal at American Theatre Company in Chicago, directed by Dexter Bullard. So I’m doing a lot of work in Chicago at the moment which is wonderful because I have a lot of family there who hasn’t seen my work yet. They’re very excited and I’m very scared. But that’s how it’s always worked! Besides that I’m continuing to develop a number of other plays that are at various stages of completion.

Q:  You just won the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award. Congrats! What can you tell me about that and about the play you won it with?

A:  Thanks! The New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award is awarded annually to a playwright who’s recently received her or his New York debut. It’s an incredible and humbling honor and a cool way to give recognition to playwrights who might otherwise fall under the radar.

The play is called Sixty Miles to Silver Lake and it was produced last winter by Page 73 Productions and Soho Rep. It’s about a divorced father and his teenage son on a weekend ritual that’s probably familiar to many children of divorce like myself—the car ride from one parent’s house to another’s. In this case, the drive is from the son’s soccer games in Orange County to the father’s new apartment in Los Angeles. But what we initially perceive to be a single ride soon reveals itself to be a much larger journey. Time and space isn’t necessarily moving at the same pace as the car, it’s more slippery than we originally suspect. Anne Kauffman directed the hell out of the original production with two amazing actors—Joseph Adams and Dane DeHaan. The whole thing was a terrific experience.

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, I grew up in Orange County, a suburb about an hour south of Los Angeles, and that landscape is featured prominently in many of my plays. The beaches, the stucco, the endless stretches of freeways and strip malls. But that doesn’t really explain much about who I am, I guess. Landscape is important to me but it’s only a backdrop. I wish I had a snappy story that neatly summed me up, but I don’t.

However, I will say that I grew up in a simultaneously nurturing and destructive environment. Lots of love and support but also a ton of friction and fear. And I guess looking back that tension was critical in making me the kind of writer and person I am today. I learned early on that when the outside world proved too much to handle, I could retreat into my imagination and find solace there. I’m sure a lot of artists had a similar experience at a young age.

So, my creativity was born out of wounds, but what I discovered there was absolutely joyous. Not only an escape, but a treasure, a gift, a balm. And so a number of my plays, while investigating people and landscapes and ideas, also serve as a kind of celebration of the imagination and its enormous powers for healing and hope and wonder and destruction. But I’m not interested in imagination for imagination’s sake—I’m interested in the way it relates to our most visceral needs and desires. Imagination with blood, sweat, tears, heart, humor, and teeth. Not the whimsical variety. The Hamlet variety. The Fefu and Her Friends, Buried Child, Glass Menagerie variety.

Quite frankly, imagination of this kind is at a premium in the American theater. Works of powerful imaginative and visceral force are often dismissed in favor of the comfortable and familiar—works of modest creativity, ambition, and temperament. I do everything in my power to create works in the spirit of the former. I haven’t succeeded yet—not even close!—but it’s what I strive for every day I sit down to write. And if the American theater is going to remain culturally relevant in the face of more compelling material being developed for television and film and the internet, it’s what theaters across the country should strive to nurture and produce.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I have so many theatrical heroes—writers, directors, actors, designers, etc. who have rocked my world over the years. There are way too many to list here, but at the moment I’ve got a big old crush on Thornton Wilder.

Also, I’ve been blessed with a host of incredible mentors, true heroes in my life, people who pushed me closer to my passions and obsessions and the ways in which I can best shape them—Paula Vogel, Naomi Iizuka, Erin Cressida Wilson, and Bonnie Metzgar, to name a few. Each of them changed my life enormously.

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

A:  Write your truth, whatever that is, however that manifests itself on stage. No matter the style or content or whatever—just be true to yourself and the stories you carry with you. Everything else will follow.

I Interview Playwrights Part 195: Andrew Hinderaker

Andrew Hinderaker

Hometown: Madison, WI

Current Town: Chicago

Q:  Tell me please about your play at the Gift.

A:  "Suicide, Incorporated" is set inside a company that edits its clients' suicide notes. The company's boss, seeking to expand and ultimately franchise his business, targets the male demographic (since men ultimately complete 80% of all suicides). So he hires a hotshot male writer, straight out of Hallmark, to be his star employee. But from the get go, it's clear that the new hire has little intention of helping his clients die.

The piece begins as office satire, but ultimately lands in the realm of drama, exploring the often undiscussed relationship between suicide and masculinity. The play was developed at a number of wonderful Chicago institutions - Steppenwolf, Victory Gardens, Chicago Dramatists - but ultimately found a home at a tiny storefront I *love* called the Gift Theatre.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I have a play entitled, "Kingsville," that's set in an America where children of all ages can legally carry guns to class. That piece premieres at Chicago's Stage Left Theatre in October, so we're just finishing up casting right now.

I also have a short piece in American Theatre Company's Silver Project, and am honored to be on a bill with the likes of Maria Irene Fornes and David Henry Hwang. And I'm just finishing up a play called "Dirty," about a porn company for the social good. I'm developing that piece with Chicago Dramatists and we'll have a public reading of the play at the end of July.

Q:  If I had six months to spend in Chicago, what plays, theaters or artists would you suggest I check out?

A:  First, make sure those six months are October-March, because Chicago is lovely in the winter.

Chicago artists... at the risk of leaving out some extremely talented folks, I'd insist that you get to know the following artists: Playwrights - Mia McCullough, Tanya Saracho, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Marisa Wegrzyn; Directors - Jonathan Berry, Meghan Beals McCarthy, Megan Shuchman; Actors - Michael Patrick Thornton, Phillip James Brannon, Brenda Barrie, Francis Guinan; Dramaturges - Aaron Carter, Jennifer Shook; Artistic Directors - Russ Tutterow, Vance Smith, Thornton

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

A:  Okay, this is truly embarrassing, but when I was a boy I used to collect those Starting Lineup sports action figures. Remember those things? They're actually worth a lot of money now. Like, if I'd kept them in the packaging, I could sell them for a lot more than I can sell my plays.

But honestly, what kid keeps his action figure in the box? So I'd tear them open, get the action figure out and play a pretty healthy game of make-believe. But I wouldn't just concoct stories of sports triumphs; I'd give each of the figures backstories, personal struggles that they had to overcome in order to hit that grand slam in the bottom of the 9th. Looking back, it's kind of ridiculous; I mean, I was like 6. But I guess from the beginning I've been fascinated by questions of character and getting to the root of who we are as people.

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

A:  Make it more approachable. To me, this involves a number of fundamental shifts. First, theater needs to be more affordable. Second, the stories themselves need to reflect the broader audience that theaters wish to attract. Third, we artists need to do a better job building a relationship with the audience. I'd like to replace every post-show talkback with a post-show announcement that says, "The entire cast and crew will be at the bar next door. Come join us for a beer and we'll chat." And for that matter, let the audience bring a beer into the theater and relax. This should be a place where we can enjoy ourselves.

Finally, I think we all need to be very careful that we're not just writing and performing exclusively for the theater community. What I mean to say is this: theater professionals read a lot of plays. A lot. It's inevitable that we're drawn to pieces that feel new and different. But before selecting and hyping one of those plays, we need to ask two questions: 1. Is it entertaining; and 2. Does it have something to say? I'm all for smart plays but I have no patience for intellectual exercises. I love experimental work, but plays that are weird for the sake of being weird drive me nuts. And to me, that kind of work exacerbates the stereotype that theater is for nerds and elitists. To me, theater is about telling a story in the most exciting way possible - before a live audience.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A;  I'm inspired by artists who are both honest and fearless. The list is exhaustive, but absolutely includes Shakespeare, Chekhov, August Wilson, Sarah Kane, Conor McPherson, Stephen Adley Guirgis, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Michael Patrick Thornton.

So apparently, if you've got three words in your name, you're on my list.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  My favorite plays that I've read/seen this year have been "Love Person," "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity," "The Brothers Size," and a couple plays by Sam Hunter. These are writers with wildly different styles -- Aditi Brennan Kapil's writing is lush and gorgeous; Kris Diaz's play is vibrant and fun; McCraney is supremely theatrical and Hunter's work walks this unbelievable line between morbid, peculiar and poetic.

But I think all four of them are talking about the American experience in a very personal, yet profound way. And more specifically, they so brilliantly depict figures who are left on the outskirts of that American experience. And that type of character fascinates me.

At the end of the day, I hope to write plays that are entertaining, emotionally honest, and wildly ambitious in how deeply they explore the human experience. The plays mentioned above set the bar incredibly high on those fronts.

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

A:  See and read a ton of plays. Get a sense of the companies and the artists that are doing the kind of work that inspires you. Get to know those people. It's about building relationships and that takes time.

Blind submissions are tricky. I use them for competitions and playwriting conferences, but no longer submit blindly to theater companies. It's been my experience that plays aren't produced that way.

Find a supportive community, whether it's a writer's group, theater company, etc. It's crucial to get feedback from people you trust, and giving good feedback makes you a better writer.

Above all, be gracious. This is an extraordinary community where people will go out of their way to go to bat for your work. Remember to thank them and remember to do the same for others.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  "Suicide, Incorporated" runs through July 25th at the Gift Theatre: www.thegifttheatre.org

"Kingsville" runs October-November at Stage Left Theatre: www.stagelefttheatre.com

And complete info on my work can be found on my website, www.andrewsplays.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 194: Brett Neveu

Brett Neveu

Hometown: I grew up in Newton, Iowa, but spent most of my adulthood in Chicago.

Current Town: Los Angeles, California

Q:  Tell me please about your play coming up at the Royal Court.

A:  RED BUD is about a group of forty-somethings on their annual trip to "Red Bud," a championship motocross race. The group has nearly rung their mutual friendship dry and use the overnight camping party to relive past glories, play asinine games and beat the holy hell out of each other. The fly in the ointment (or the catalyst, I suppose) is the eighteen year old "girlfriend" of one of the forty-somethings. So lots of frustration, weirdness and old baggage comes to the surface from the get-go.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I have a play titled ODRADEK, directed by Dexter Bullard and music by Josh Schmidt, opening with The House Theatre and another play titled DO THE HUSTLE, directed by William Brown, with Writers' Theatre. Both shows open in January. I'm also working on a few TV projects in LA as well as a number of other theatre things in development with places like A Red Orchid Theatre (where I'm a ensemble member) and some other joints, too.

Q:  How would you characterize the Chicago theater scene?

A:  The word I've always used to describe the scene is the word "vital." Chicago theatre is vital to the progression of American theatre; it's vital to helping shape and grow sublime and smart actors, designers and audience members; it's vital in helping playwrights secure and wrangle their unique voices for Chicago and beyond. The Chicago theatre scene is where I got my start and where I'll always feel the most safe and secure. Its vitality has shaped and molded every part of my writing, as I think it does for every artist who dives head-first into it.

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

A:  When I was fifteen or sixteen (is that childhood? eeeh, I guess it'll have to do), my American Literature teacher, Mrs. Spiker (yeah, that was her real name) held up to the class a copy of a book called "Lyrical Iowa." "Lyrical Iowa" is an anthology of poetry put out every year for writers in Iowa and it has an open submission policy, including a "high school" category. As she held the book aloft, Mrs. Spiker went on an on about how she had a student ten years previous published in the anthology and how great and amazing and excellent and awesome that student was and that nobody in our class was even smart enough to even try to even get in that damn freakin' anthology blah blah blah.

Okay, I may be misremembering her severely harsh attitude (but I'm not), but her cruel push made me want to completely prove her wrong. Or prove to myself I could write something. Anything, in fact. So I wrote a poem and sent it in. The poem totally got into "Lyrical Iowa." Mrs. Spiker was so proud and pleased, she even smiled. But all I could mostly think was, "In your face, Mrs. Spiker! Woooooo!!!" And I also found out that I really liked writing. And I also thought maybe she did all that with the book and the cruelty to trick one of us into attempting to write. And I then thought how smart it was of her to use her harshness to get us to do something besides sit in our desks like blobby lumps. So I guess I love Mrs. Spiker and thanks, Mrs. Spiker. You were the awesome one.

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

A:  Writers continued stabs at the typical. It frustrates me to sit through plays that aren't about something or have no personal investment. Even if a writer just wants to "just write a comedy," they should give it some heft, clearly define the conflict and make bold choices. In drama, subject matter seems to be the bold choice these days but individual choices within the plays are often weak. Playwrights must do the same thing directors require of actors: discover a range of choices and pick the strongest one, fear of consequences be damned.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Pinter, Sheppard, Chekhov and Mamet. And my friend Rebecca Gilman.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The opposite thing that bothers me about theatre. When I see a show that makes bold choices all around, then I'm there. I'm engaged. It doesn't matter the size of the company or even the quality of the show. If I see theatre artists making strong, informed and clear choices, then I'm exited about what I'm experiencing. If the show commits to its world, then I as an audience member, will do the same.

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

A:  Self produce. That's pretty much how I started. In the back of a bar with a suitcase full of puppets or working with an actor friend using a slide projector for lights and then playing to three or four people. I didn't wait until somebody would eventually produce a full-length play. I wrote something small. Something shoe-string producible and did it myself. Then I saw shows at theatres (as well as sent out press releases) and invited folks to come.

So, I guess to distill my advice: do shows and see shows and let people know you exist. Make an audience and meet a community. Do both and do good.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A: 
RED BUD directed by Jo McInnes at The Royal Court in London
October 25th 2010, following previews from October 21st and running to November 13th, 2010.

ODRADECK, directed by Dexter Bullard and music by Josh Schmidt, with The House Theatre at The Chopin Theatre
January 7th, 2011 to February 26th, 2011

DO THE HUSTLE, directed by William Brown, at Writers' Theatre
January 25 – March 20, 2011