Mar 26, 2013

I Interview Playwrights Part 565: Kirsten Vangsness


Kirsten Vangsness

Hometown: Porterville & Pasadena CA

Current Town: Los Angeles, CA

Q: Congrats on the LA Weekly nomination. Tell me about the show you were nominated for.

A: I was Nom. for best play of the year for the play I wrote, Potential Space.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now, I am finishing up the season of CM (where I play Garcia, and I also help write her lines), and I working on a one person show I am doing at the Hollywood Fringe Festival and also rewrites on Potential Space which I will be re-mounting in the fall.

Q: How would you characterize the LA theater scene?

A: The L.A. theatre scene is a vibrant, quirky, wonderland. It's almost like a magical city within the city that you have to KNOW about to know it's there, folks sometimes think L.A. is a vat of TV Shows and people wanting on TMZ, but in reality there is this vibrant world of creatives making new content for the stage. Theatre is where the conversation starts, we are the great birth-er of dreams and ideas and often no credit goes to it. I am so honored to be part of 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: I had a lisp that made it impossible to understand me sometimes and dyslexic so at school I had speech therapy for years and a reading class, it consisted of me having to talk endlessly to the speech pathologist and have her correct me and write letters and read things and learn the way other people saw things (the right way). I loved telling her stories, I loved to see her look pleased and I loved the paradigm shift my brain would make when I could understand how a word looked and was spelled the correct way-- that are so many ways that things look different to different people. I feel good when I can bend words and see people smile or understand a thing because of how I chose to say it.

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

A: MORE ATTENDANCE.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Scott McKinley. Helen Mirren. Teresa Rebeck. Eddie Izzard. The entire company of Theatre of NOTE.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I love a play cocktail of funny, absurd, & sexy with a good dash of high stakes.

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

A: WRITE. Just write. And Delight yourself, write what your soul longs to know and read and play in.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: Starring in Kill Me, Deadly the movie opening later this year written by Bill Robens

Mess written by me, at Theatre of NOTE during the fringe festival (don't have dates yet)

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