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1100 Playwright Interviews

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Apr 18, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 148: Beau Willimon


Beau Willimon

Hometown:  St. Louis, MO

Current Town:  Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m currently working on two new plays – one that will have a production this fall here in New York, and another that’s a commission for MTC. One of my older plays – LOWER NINTH – is having its UK premiere this fall in London in a Donmar Warehouse production, so I’ll be gearing up for casting and rehearsals soon on that. In terms of film, I’m working on screenplay for Summit Entertainment to star Sam Worthington (AVATAR). TV-wise I just completed a treatment for a new pilot that I’ve been hired to write, and I hope to finish that by the end of the summer. So I’ve got my hands full at the moment!

Q:  You're one of those people who has lived many lives. It seems like every time I sit down with you I find out something new about you. Apart from being a writer, you used to be a pool shark, you used to fly planes, you worked for Howard Dean and wrote at least one speech for Bill Clinton, you went to South Africa on a visual arts fellowship, you curated a festival of Iranian films. How does one person do all these things? What is the obsession you have that I don't know about?

A:  Well you make my life sound a lot more exciting than it actually is. When you condense all those things in a short list it must seem like I’m doing anything and everything but writing plays! But most days I’m alone in my apartment with my cat trying to punch out pages, although I’m usually more successful procrastinating with online Scrabble or Risk.

As for obsessions you might not know about, I guess one of my biggest is maps, and that stems from my love for travel. I own dozens of maps and map-books, and can’t get enough of them. I like to track all the places I’ve been, but I’m more interested in all the places I have yet to explore. One of my favorite forms of travel is good old walking. That started about a dozen years ago when I trekked the Dingle Peninsula and Northeast Coast of Ireland on foot. I fell in love with the solitariness of it, and the way you really absorb your surroundings in a very intimate way. I’ve been doing similar treks ever since.

When I first moved to Brooklyn eight years ago I realized I knew very little about the borough, so I consulted my maps and began organizing walking tours for myself. Over the course of a summer I hit all 80-odd neighborhoods in Brooklyn and have since started branching out into the other three outer-boroughs. And this summer I plan to walk 100 miles through New York over the course of five days – 20 miles in each borough – literally walking from Manhattan to Staten Island on foot. I’ll have to get special permission to walk across the Verrazano Bridge (which has no public walkways), but I’m working on that so keeps your fingers crossed.

Last September I completed an 85- mile coast to coast trek along Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. There was something that attracted me to the idea of following this ancient wall from end to end and seeing where it took me. My ultimate plan (and it may take me 20 years to do it) is to traverse the length of many of the world’s famous (and not-so-famous) walls. Some of these I won’t be able to do on foot because of their length, but among those I’ve singled out are the Gorgon Wall (Iran), Trajan’s Wall (Romania, Moldavia, Ukraine), The Great Wall of China, The U.S.-Mexico Border Wall, the DMZ between North and South Korea, the former course of the Berlin Wall, and Morocco’s long military ramparts in the Sahara. Anyway…as you can see I’m clearly obsessed haha.

Q:  As someone who has successfully written both for the stage and the big screen do you have any tips for a playwright trying to write a screenplay?

A:  Every writer has his or her unique process, but for a screenplay I personally think outlining in advance is extremely useful. With a play you’re rarely dealing with more than ten to twenty scenes, so the structure is more manageable. But with a movie you may have well over a hundred scenes and that can be a bit daunting. Even a very rough outline of the major beats can help keep the structure from getting out of control.

Another thing to keep in mind is that movies (in most cases) are primarily visual, as opposed to plays, which (in most cases) are dialogue driven. So it’s important to really visualize what’s happening in every scene, what you’re actually seeing in the frame. And you’ll find that much of your story can be told without dialogue at all – the way a character cracks her knuckles, or the glance between two lovers, the silent moments film can capture in more detail than the stage.

My friend and mentor, the legendary screenwriter William Goldman (BUTCH CASSIDY, MARATHON MAN, ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, THE PRINCESS BRIDE, MISERY…the list goes on and on) wrote two amazing books about screenwriting which I recommend to anyone who’s writing a movie for the first time. They’re called ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE and WHICH LIE DID I TELL? Goldman recounts his personal experiences on the many movies he’s written while simultaneously providing wonderful advice on the craft of screenwriting. An added plus is that the books are as entertaining as they are useful – wildly funny, and at times quite moving.

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

A:  My Dad was in the Navy until I was ten years old. During my first decade on the planet, my family moved every two or three years. We lived in Washington DC, Hawaii, San Francisco, Philadelphia and eventually settled in St. Louis when my Dad retired from the service. Every move meant an entirely new city, a new school, a new community, new friendships and experiences. It meant constantly adapting and re-inventing myself. This fostered a wanderlust in me (see above) and introduced me to a wide spectrum of people and their stories. It made me deeply curious about the world around me. And I think a strong sense of curiosity is important to any writer. It’s what compels us to tell other people’s stories, not just our own. And it helps us ask questions of ourselves and others are that both difficult and unexpected. It’s what helps us tap into the mysteries which breathe life and magic into the stories we hope to tell.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Every type of theater that’s out there – past, present and future. The old stuff and the stuff that has yet to be invented. Every –ism under the sun and everything that can’t be labeled with an –ism. I find it interesting when playwrights rail against a certain type of theater. You have some people who think “naturalism is dead” or others who think the avant-garde is “pretentious.” You have folks writing manifestos as to what theater should and shouldn’t be. I don’t get it. The more types of theater out there the better. The more voices, the more forms, the more stories – they all keep theater alive and exciting. I’m glad there’s so many playwright out there writing completely different stuff than me and each other. Otherwise theater would be boring and homogeneous. My first experiences at the theater were seeing the big musical road-shows that came through St. Louis – like THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN and BRIGADOON – which I loved. But when I moved to New York I fell in love with the Wooster Group and ended up interning there while they were creating TO YOU, THE BIRDIE. I love that the theater has room for both big musicals and the Wooster Group, that it’s diverse and unpredictable.

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

A:  I think the single most important thing is to find the friends and peers you really believe in, and who really believe in you, and stick together. It’s a tough business and a hard life, and you’ll get strength from those people. Nobody can do it alone. When things are going good for you, help your friends out, and when things are going good for your friends, hopefully they’ll return the favor.

On a practical note – we all know that the economics of playwriting are abysmal. There are very few playwrights, even the most established ones, who can make a living just from writing plays. It’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult. If you need to do a day job, I recommend work that’s easy on the brain and leaves you enough energy for your REAL job, which is writing plays. I’ve done any number of jobs over the years – factory work, bussing tables, detailing cars, teaching SAT prep courses, etc. They didn’t pay great, but none of them drained me to the extent that I couldn’t find time or energy to write. Of course, if you’re lucky enough to get work teaching or writing movies or TV, that’s great – at least you’re being paid to do something somewhat related to your writing. But until those opportunities come along, make sure to protect your headspace and your time.

Todd London, who runs New Dramatists in New York, just published an amazing book on the current state of the theater and the challenges of getting new plays to the stage. I recommend it to all playwrights, not just those starting out. It’s published by TDF and is called OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE NEW AMERICAN PLAY.

Q: Any plugs?

A;  Yes – I plug Adam Szymkowicz! If you’re reading this blog, then you already know what an amazing thing he’s done in conducting all these playwrights interviews. Take an afternoon and read them all if you haven’t already. It’s one of the most valuable resources on playwriting and the theater that I’ve ever seen, and it will introduce you to a ton of great writers you haven’t heard of yet, as well as giving you terrific insights to writers you might already be familiar with. I also plug Adam as a writer of plays, not just a conductor of interviews. Adam’s plays are wonderful – funny, unique, perceptive, exhilarating – so go see one of the many productions he usually has up somewhere in the country, or order his plays from DPS and read them, or both!

Apr 17, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 147: Greg Keller

 
Greg Keller

Hometown: Manhattan

Current Town: Brooklyn

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

A:  It's called Dutch Masters. It's a period piece. 1992 is the period. It's inspired by a true story. Something that happened to a friend of mine in high school. It's about two young men that meet on the subway, and shortly into the conversation, one mentions he's sticking people up. And that's just the first 6 pages!

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I act too, double-threat style. I'm doing the play K2 by Patrick Meyers at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in June. And I'm writing a new play called The Millers. It's kind of groundbreaking in that it's about a family.

Q:  How do you find your acting informs your playwriting and vice-versa?:

A:  I like to think my plays are enjoyable for actors to perform. I also like to think they're enjoyable for audiences to watch, but perhaps you've heard otherwise. (Rimshot!). I mean I know the lessons I should be learning from being an actor. Things like, plays should be playable. What's fun for an actor is getting to do something onstage. Not just say things, but pursue something with language. But instead I like to write talky, inactive scenes and rationalize them by saying the characters are pursuing something internal.

To answer that less stupidly, an impactful experience for me as an actor was while I was a non-speaking waiter and understudy in a Shaw play (You Never Can Tell) when I first got out of undergrad. As an opening night gift, one of the actors got a leather-bound manuscript version of the play, with Shaw's notes and corrections and bad crossed-out jokes rewritten in the margins. This blew my mind. Up until that point I had a tendency to think those canonical works just sort of descended from the heavens. "You can't cross out lines from a Shaw play, that's a Shaw play." It reminded me that Shaw is just a guy named Bernie who wants his play to be funny. And that plays aren't meant to be worshipped, they're meant to be irreverently brought to life. I think in both my writing and acting I hope to eschew a kind of preciousness. As Robert Bresson once said, "Don't run after poetry, it seeps unaided through the joins" (I know two quotes and that is one of them. The other is Marx: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living")

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

A:  In New York, there are these after-school sports clubs for kids that pick you up in a van and take you to where there's grass. On my van, there were a couple kids, like Josh Shermer and Sebastian, who would talk about having sex with their pillows and giving their stuffed animals blowjobs. We're all about 8 years old, by the way. All I could picture was a hairdryer, and combing out my Leo the Lion's mane. So that night at dinner I asked at the table, "What's a blowjob?" My dad said "Look up 'fellatio' in the dictionary". I excused myself from the table and found the definition. "Oral stimulation of the penis". I came back into the dining room and said, "You mean they talk to it?" I don't know what that means about me as a writer but I think it's a funny story.

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

A:  It would be affordable. Both to do and to see.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I'm pretty peripatetic in my tastes. Sometimes I like theater to excite me, but sometimes I like theater that calms me. I like theater that reveals complexity and makes me feel small and sublimely melancholy, but I also like theater that reflects my understanding of the world, and makes me feel all warm inside. I like laughing and crying and thinking and being surprised. I remember in NTUSA's Chautauqua last year when all of a sudden a 30 person dance number broke out to George Benson's "On Broadway", it made me do all those things at once. I like stuff like that but I also love Harley Granville Barker plays and The Starry Messenger where people sit in chairs and talk for three hours.

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

A:  Read plays. Go see plays. Get involved with a company that put on a play you really like. Chances are you'll share tastes with those people and there will be people there that you'll end up collaborating with in the future. It's very important in this bumpy artistic career to have a supportive home that can sustain and inspire you. It's easy to feel like you're on the outside in this biz, so cultivate a place where you're on the inside.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Go see Dutch Masters at The Cherry Pit. May 14-30. http://www.labtheater.org/onstage/lsdp.html

Apr 16, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 146: Les Hunter


Les Hunter

Hometown: Tucson, Arizona.

Current Town: Jackson Heights, in Queens, New York.

Q:  Tell me about 167 tongues. How did this collaboration work?

A:  Ari Laura Kreith, our director, wanted to have an open developmental process on a new piece about her neighborhood, Jackson Heights, which is the most diverse neighborhood in the world. The name 167 TONGUES is taken from the number of languages spoken here.
 
Ari got together a group of 11 exciting playwrights (including Jenny Lyn Bader, Jennifer Gibbs, Rehana Mirza, Jeffrey Solomon, and Stefanie Zadravec, among others) that represent a broad range of voices. Some of us, like me, live in the area, while others were new to it. All of us went through a kind of crash course in Jackson Heights: we walked around, we talked to locals, and we were given a historical presentation by our dramaturg, Angie Balsamo. Then we drew a large map of the neighborhood and imagined characters that would inhabit this world. For me, this was easy, I know the characters that inhabit Jackson Heights. I told them about my neighbors: like the head of the co-op board in my building who only will let you live here if you profess a love for animals and compliment her Chihuahua, and the Eastern-European bookseller who lives in his van. With Ari and Angie’s help, we writers came up with a long list of other characters, then we went home and wrote scenes about them.
 
Later we came back and to workshop the scenes, and started to find interesting points of connection. If two people used the same character, we discovered which scenes would go first, and why. Then we rewrote. Then we came back together, talked, and rewrote again. Later, when actors started showing up, we did more rewrites based on their feedback. The result is something very collaborative and, I think, quite original. The final piece will involve interwoven continuous narratives with street scenes, movement, and found sounds.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m working on a musical for the first time. It’s been exciting because I’m working with the composer Ben Morss who is a great musician just full of ideas, though it’s been a steep learning curve trying to understand the way musicals work.
 
Q:  Tell me about Brooklyn Playwrights Collective.

A:  BPC is a Brooklyn-based, playwright-centered project that some friends and I started five years ago to workshop, develop, and occasionally produce new plays. The group has an open format, anyone can come and workshop their play. It’s kind of like the AYSO of playwriting (“everyone plays”). Not everyone, however, gets to produce work with BPC. There’s a little bit of a socialist model at work here: the more work you put in to the group the more production you get out of it.
 
For the last few years, BPC’s major production event has been an annual festival of new plays that each year responds to a different theater practitioner. The person that we write new works in response to is picked in alphabetical order. So the first year we wrote new short plays responding to Artaud, and we called it “Cruel and Unusual.” The next year we produced “Beyond Brecht,” followed by “Confronting Chekhov.” This year BPC’s festival was called “Dramatizing Dante,” which I unfortunately didn’t get to take part in.

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 a sixteen I went to go see Angels in America at Centennial Hall, the performing arts center at the University of Arizona. I was mesmerized; I loved it. I walked out a different person. I wanted more. Unfortunately, tickets were sold out for the only performance of part two the next day. Desperate, I managed to sneak my way in by assertively walking past the ticket taker—I tried to look like I belonged there—and it worked.
 
Not only was the experience of seeing Angels my “ah ha!” theater moment, when I decided I wanted to work in the theater, but the act of weaseling my way in served as one of my first lessons in the theater. My first few years of writing no one would produce my work, so I did it myself. I still do lots of leg work for my own shows. I’ve had to follow the model I established by sneaking into Angels when I was sixteen: if I can’t get in the old fashioned way, I take matters into my own hands.
 
Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
 
A:  The single biggest issue in theater is its slow, general decline in popularity as an art form. For example, it’s terrible that The Ohio Theatre is closing, that’s an important playhouse that supports amazing new work. I don’t know what’s to be done about the decline that we’ve seen. So much of it has to do with new technologies and shifts in the way people take in information. I’m excited by a lot of the ways that people use technology in theater, but I think we need to remember what makes theater theater: the immediacy of the actor in the presence of the audience.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you

A:  I love words and language, so heighted language plays are exciting for me. I also like theater that’s aware of it’s own theatricality. It’s important to me that a piece has a reason to be theater, and not television or some other genre. Will Eno’s work, for instance, amazes me.

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

A:  Read your blog’s tips on “Advice for Playwrights Starting Out.” Subscribe to “The Loop.” Find some friends who will help you put up your work. You may have to put up their work too, in the process.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I’m really excited to see Erin Browne’s TRYING at Bushwick Starr and Gary Winter’s COOLER at The Chocolate Factory.

Apr 14, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 145: Anton Dudley



Anton Dudley

Hometown:  Montreal, Quebec.

Current Town:  Brooklyn, New York.

Q:  Tell me about the play you have coming up at Theater Row.

A:  Several years ago, before the media had really focused its attention on the AIDS crisis in Africa, I saw several articles appear in the back of some high end women's fashion magazines about women and AIDS in remote parts of the continent. I started to question the context of where our information about the rest of the world came from. I am constantly amazed how, as Americans, we have to completely victimize a community before we start to take action to care for them (think of how civil rights movements were/are galvanized around slavery, AIDS, natural disasters, rape, etc.). I think it is our nature to objectify the "other" - I wanted to obliterate the idea of "other" altogether in this play and really understand what it means for us to share the planet equally as human beings.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  My pop musical TINA GIRLSTAR (written with Charlie Sohne and Brian Feinstein) is being developed by commercial producer Olympus Theatricals. My cabaret musical THE RE-HYDRATION OF EDITH PILAF (written with Charlie Sohne and Keith Gordon) is currently in development. I am under commission from the Cherry Lane Theatre to write a new work, and I recently completed two new plays, one which was developed with MCC Theatre and Partial Comfort Productions, the other at the Lark Play Development Center, co-written with Arthur Kopit. My play GETTING HOME which premiered at Secondstage Theatre Uptown will be published next year in an anthology by Vintage Books.

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 had a stuffed bear named Teddy and a stuffed cat named Kitty . . . one of my favorite puppets as a child was a unicorn - a woman in the grocery store asked me his name, I responded Horny - the group of adults around me laughed hysterically and I went home and cried. My Mum said maybe he could have a more formal name in public, so I named him Prince Albert - this got an equally vicious guffaw. From then on when I was asked his name, I would answer, "you have to get to know him really well first, only then will I tell you."

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

A:  Abolish entirely its relationship to commerce.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre that is cheaply produced and embraces the coexistence of beauty and horror, humor and pain.

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

A:  Work constantly, do everything you can in theatre: direct, act, design, produce, choreograph, and for fork's sake read: all of this will make you a better writer. Find an artistic home or two where you can always return when you doubt yourself. Make a lot of friends, real ones, it's a small world - chose to love and be loved.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Sorry, I'm not a doctor, but I hear Propecia works pretty well.

Apr 12, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 144: Aaron Carter


Aaron Carter

Hometown: Bowling Green, OH

Current Town: Chicago

Q:  What are you working on now?


A:  I'm working on the second draft of my play THE BOOK OF ASTAROTH. It's about a young mixed-race kid obsessed with a graphic novel called, yep, The Book of Astaroth. In the play, he tells the story of how he meets the author the the novel. In the process, he reveals the story of his parents divorce and the roles that race and religion play in his life.

I've also started research for a possible new play triggered by reading about the recent cancer cluster at The Acerage. I think it will be about the intersection of private enterprise and government. We'll see.

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 remember the first Christmas after my parents divorce. My father had bought us three kids matching bikes. This was a very expensive thing for him to do - our family income had suddenly been split into two single incomes, and my dad faced periodic layoffs at the factory. The only problem? None of us really wanted bikes. But I remember running interference with my brother and sister and making sure that we acted like it was the best Christmas ever. That it was perfect and was exactly what my father had hoped/planned it would be.

That role as mediator --whether it be between my siblings and my parents, between my black heritage and my white heritage, between religion and the secular-- and the need for a mediator to be able to access other points of view... that is at the heart of my playwriting.

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


A:  Well, if I could magically move us closer to the center of the cultural conversation, I would. I don't necessarily want to be as central as television or pop music. There's some freedom in operating at the fringes. But if theater was considered more of a vital part of how we as a culture figure out who we are and what we do, that'd be exciting.  Somehow related is my desire to overcome that part of theater's self image that can confuse political speech with political action. Maybe if we were actually closer to being a vital part of the cultural conversation we wouldn't feel the need to make grand statements about how theater can foment revolution. Don't get me wrong: I love politically engaged theater. I just think if we're serious about change, our work starts by performing a challenging play, it doesn't end there.

Q:  You're the Literary Manager at Victor Gardens which means you probably read a lot of plays.  Has the way you write changed since you took on this job?  How?  What plays have you read recently that you've fallen in love with?


A:  Yes, I do read a lot of plays. I think the biggest change to my writing process (besides having far less time to write than I used to) is that I am a lot harder on myself. I have a much clearer sense of what it takes to stand out in the giant stack of slowly churning submissions, and frankly I'm not sure that I've written something yet that reaches that level. I remember the first year on the job, I had the opportunity to revisit a play of mine for a workshop unrelated to VG. When I re-read the play, I had a mind-bending moment when I realized that I would've passed on my own play had it been submitted to me. I didn't make my own cut.

I've recently been quite taken by The Aliens by Annie Baker. I also re-read Evie's Waltz by Carter Lewis and found it even more emotionally penetrating on the second read. And I'm really hoping that Joel Drake Johnson's The Boys Room will be on a Chicago stage soon.


Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Visual, theatrical, intelligent and honest theater excites me. I also like theater that complicates or challenges the social-political status quo. I'm talking the status quo of the theater world, by the way. I think far too many of us have a far too low of an opinion about the views of the "masses." And as a result, we create pieces that embody viewpoints that we in theater take for granted and assume that we're "challenging" the "everyday folk." Work that actually reflects the complex and contradictory political and personal lives of working class folk (as opposed to what trust fund kids who have spent their entire lives in unpaid theater internships followed by a funded bohemian lifestyle THINK of working folk) is exciting to me.

The most amazing thing I've seen recently was The Method Gun at Humana. Developed by The Rude Mechanicals, it was a stunning feat of emotional and physical risk. I don't know if there will be other opportunities to see it, but if you get a chance: SEE IT.
 
Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?


A:  I'm not sure about self-production (I mean, I think its a great idea but I don't do it myself so I can't very well advise it). At the very least, find good actors you trust to read your work out loud. You've got to hear it a few times before you start submitting it. Target your submissions - be honest about whether or not the work has anything to do with the theater's production history. If you work in theater as your day job, find a way to make non-theater experiences, people and work a part of your life. Stay informed, but don't just hear an NPR story and write a play. (Yes, I'm talking to me there). If you're writing about something outside your experience, do enough research to earn the right to write about it. If you're young and just starting out, do an internship if you can afford one. Its worth noting that a diverse background of non-theatrical experiences always outweights theater experience when it comes to my review of internship applications at VG.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I wouldn't be a good lit manager if I didn't plug our current show at VG: The Lost Boys of Sudan by Lonnie Carter. Gorgeously realized, a lyrical beat-poet blizzard of language and imagery. Check it out. And if you miss that, up next is the hilarious Jacob and Jack by James Sherman.

Apr 10, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 143: Jerrod Bogard


Jerrod Bogard

Hometown: All over- I'm an Air Force brat.

Current Town: Astoria, New York City

Q:  Tell me about the production of Noah's Arkansas you have coming up.

A:  Noah's Arkansas is a piece of theatrical realism. It's the story of a blue collar guy in a small southern town who finds himself suddenly with a teenage son on his doorstep and his elderly father trying to sneak into his grave. It gets belly-laughs in spots, and it manages to jerk a few tears too. The talent on this project is amazing. What a strong ensemble! And the set is going to be spectacular from what I've seen so far. Wide Eyed Productions really does go above and beyond, and I'm so stoked that they're working on my play.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  Funny you should ask, I've got a new musical in the works. My composer, Sky Seals, and I are working on a very serious rock-musical about the War in Iraq. It's called GRUNTS. The first number from the show is going up this this weekend (April 8-11) at the Players Theatre Loft.

Q:  You started out as a puppeteer. How does that color the way you write plays or how you see theater?

A:  Love that question! I actually started as an actor, and then I came to puppetry, and then to playwrighting. But puppetry has had a major influence on my writing as well and directing. Puppet shows are usually the essence of simplicity when it comes to story, and that's a beautiful thing, because all stories, no matter how seemingly complex, should be very simple. Puppet theatre gave me that gift of "keeping it real." Also, it has completely freed me of any notion of the impossible. In puppetry- if you can dream it, you can do it, and most likely for less than $20.

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 4-years old I would scribble circles and lines onto blank paper and show it to my mother. I'd say, "What does this say?" And my mother would glance and say, "that's says nothing, Jerrod." And I would get very upset at this. I'd cry, "I want it to say something!!!" And even though I've learned to write since then, I still find myself in the same mind set... I want it to say something!!!

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

A:  The price tag. It's a crime that people can see five movies for the price of a partial-view seat to one live play. Theatre is a vital art- but at a luxury cost. Professional theatre should be affordable to the masses. A sense of entitlement from many and a maladjusted system of values in this country has caused American theatre to be an artistic money pit instead of what it could be- a national treasure.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Well told stories told well. I just saw Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre. There's a masterpiece done masterfully.

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

A:  Ha! I feel like I'M a playwright who's just starting out. But I can say this- if you surround yourself with people that you respect, people who you feel lucky to know and work with, then you'll be headed in the right direction. Treat those people well, and write for them. They'll return the favor.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I'll be acting in Henry VI part 3 this July at the 13th Street Theatre, another production of Wide Eyed in conjunction with Columbia University. It's going to be amazing!