SRS Bonus Content - Brett Neveu and Scooby Doo

Well, folks, we've come to the stretch just before the finale of our Summer Reading Series (Odradek by Brett Neveu, Monday the 30th @ Swim Cafe, 7:30pm) and with that our last installment of exclusive playwright interviews. With out further adieu...

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Tell us about your play in one sentence...
A troubled boy distances himself from his father and his doctor after a chance meeting with an otherworldly creature who leaves in the shadows of a stairwell.

Is this play like much of your other plays?
No, actually. It's more abstract than even my more abstract work. It's also inspired by a photograph by Jeff Wall (you can see the actual photo RIGHT NOW at the Art Institute) and I don't often base entire plays on a single image.

What was the impetuous for you to write this play?
Ah. I suppose I just said. The photograph, for sure, but also the affects that psychoactive drugs can have on teenagers.

Who is a bigger influence on your life as a writer, Papa Smurf or Thomas Jefferson?
Neither. It was more a Scooby-Doo thing.

What was the worst play you've ever written and how has it affected your life as a writer?
The worst play I've ever written (according to those that remember) was called "Potato Finger". It didn't really affect me too much because I actually liked it.

What are your biggest pop culture influences?
Punk and post-punk rock music, 80's cop dramas and (as I mentioned) Scooby-Doo.

Collision likes to say that our work is a bold collision of the physical, visual, and aural realms. We seem to think that you are a writer that has those values as well. How do you see these realms alive in your writing?
This play has more of those sorts of things than my typical work. I'm influenced by the physical, visual and aural but rarely define them clearly in my plays (leaving those sorts up to my collaborators). With Odradek, there is no choice but to define those elements due to the odd world in which the play lives.

KnockOUT! On to Round Two . . . SRS Bonus Content - Scott Barsotti

With great success we had our first of three installments of the Summer Reading Series last night. We had a wonderful cast to read Joe's play and a great conversation to follow with some friends, family and even some strangers (who are now friends). I also had the best chocolate cupcake I've had in ages! Collision is pretty much in love with our new friend Joe Meno and our lovely summer spot at the Swim Cafe. Thanks to all those who were there last night!

If you have any questions or comments about the Summer Reading Series or any of the three plays or playwrights, please post a comment to blog and we will respond.

Next up is Scott Barsotti's play Brewed. This seven woman wonder is going to be something else! Check out a couple of things that Scott has to say about writing and his play...

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Tell us about your play in one sentence...
Six sisters conduct an ongoing family ritual in solitary shifts, until one sister calls all together and invites an outsider in, causing old venom to emerge.

Is this play like much of your other plays? In what ways?
It is in that it is character and dialogue driven. It has more to do with personalities and ethics than politics and ideas...though these things all intertwine, of course. It's different in that there isn't a great deal of stillness or silence in Brewed whereas there is in my other plays. Long sections of direction where no one speaks, only moves, acts...Plays are typically a minute and a half a page, and my plays often run a little longer than that rule due to those periods of silence and action. Brewed however is less than a minute a page because there is very little silence (part of the point of it), and a great deal of overlapping dialogue and movement.

What was the impetus for you to write this play?
I give myself assignments...rather than choosing topics or themes, I usually start with form and character, I say "This is the kind of play I want to write" rather than "This is what I want to write about." I had written several plays consecutively with a strong female lead and received a lot of positive feedback about those characters, but what I wanted to see was if I could write women in relation to other women, as my female characters were typically opposite men and relating to them, or relating to themselves via monologues. I wanted to write a play that was all women to test not only my ability to write women in relation to each other, but also to test the idea that characters need to be conceived as gendered beings. In Brewed I don't think they needed the constraint necessarily, they're not "women characters," but people.

Who is a bigger influence on your life as a writer, Papa Smurf or Thomas Jefferson?
Thomas Jefferson is on the $2 bill, which makes me think of money. Since I have no money, I'd have to say Papa Smurf by default.

Who or what are your biggest pop culture influences?
That's hard to say really. I do my best to avoid pop culture. I watch a lot of old movies and read plays and books whenever I can. I try not to watch TV at all, and when I do, it's usually an athletic event or educational programming. However, lately, I've been very interested in locations and climates (not in terms of politics and global warming but literally people lost in the desert, buried in snow, sitting on a rock in the middle of the ocean...adversity and fear are very interesting to me because danger--real or imagined--exposes people, which can be crippling or liberating). Part of this interest comes from watching Man vs. Wild with Bear Grylls. It's my new favorite show on the discovery channel where he drops himself into extreme climates with only a knife, canteen, flint and the clothes on his back. It offers insights into necessity and priorities, which in the civilized world have become pretty perverted. That's really interesting to me lately.

Collision likes to say that our work is a bold collision of the physical, visual, and aural realms. We seem to think that you are a writer that has those values as well. How do you see these realms alive in your writing?
My writing has improved (though slowed) since working more as an actor and director in the last 18 months. My plays are usually full of gestures that create sound, gestures that create pictures. The human body is much more interesting than elaborate sets and props. I keep that in mind when I write, and try to create those "collisions" in the text. The most fascinating and curious intersections of sound, impulse, image, shape come from the body; the body shifts, changes, moves.

SRS Bonus Content - Joe Meno

Joe Meno is a born and bred fiction writer and playwright. He has worked with Redmoon and The House, among others, and has published four novels. He is our first playwright in our Summer Reading Series and I asked him a bunch of questions, thinking I would post one or two on our blog—but I like his answers so much, I’m posting them all!

Come see our reading of Joe's play People Who Don't Don't next Monday, July 16th at 7:30pm at Swim Cafe on Chicago Ave!

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Tell us about your play in one sentence...

People Who Don't Don't is about Danny, a kook in his twenties living on the southside of Chicago, who meets Ronnie, an odd single mother-to-be who gives Danny some kind of purpose.

Is this play like much of your other plays/writing? In what ways?

In a lot of ways, this play is similar to other plays and books that I've written: it's set on the southside of Chicago, the neighborhood I grew up in, and which I wrote about in Hairstyles of the Damned. It has a kind of magic, with stories about the lives of saints and ghosts and love, which appear in almost everything I write.

What was the impetuous for you to write this play?

At the time I had started writing the play, I was working on a show for Redmoon, the first all-ages thing I had ever written, and so I began writing People Who Don't Don't because I felt I wanted to do something that was the complete opposite of a fairy tale or a children's show: the characters, their language, the conflicts of the play are based on people who are close to me, the people I actually know, and it deals with complexities of adult life, especially in your mid-twenties.

Who is a bigger influence on your life as a writer, Papa Smurf or Thomas Jefferson?

As a kid in the 80's, the Smurfs were always very upsetting to me: I don't know if it was the fear of Soviet missiles or what, but I always kind of considered the Smurfs, and their little mushroom town, to be vaguely communist. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, isn't someone I really know all that much about, either. I guess they're both part of a kind of American pop mythology, which is definitely something that interests me. I would have to say neither.

What was the worst play you've ever written and how has it effected your life as a writer?

I once wrote a play called The Invisible World of Evildoers, set in the fifties, about a young writer who goes to Hollywood to write films that are going to be very important artistically, morally profound, that sort of thing. Instead of letting the play be about the actual characters, it was more about the ideas I had, and so the characters themselves were not as developed or as interesting as they could have been. After that I realized, it's always better for me to start with an interesting character than an interesting theme.

Who/what are your biggest pop culture influences?

For me, it's always music. Almost everything I write is in someway connected to a song, or some musical artist, not in the lyrics or contents of the song so much, but in the tone or mood. This play is definitely influenced by a few bands I really like, Pit-Er-Pat and Wolf Parade and the Ponys.

Collision likes to say that our work is a bold collision of the physical, visual, and aural realms. How do you see these realms alive in your writing?

For me, everything I write, script or prose fiction, revolves around the characters in scenes with one another. I'm not a very intellectual kind of writer; I don't write long internal monologues. My stories depend on the physical interaction of characters in space. My writing is also very image-driven, a lot of scenes will start out with an image, and I'll have to figure out what the image means. Lastly, music, sound, is incredibly important to me: the way the language sounds coming from the actor's mouth, the sound of actor's voices themselves, which is the most profound and basic storytelling device, and the music which has been the source of inspiration, are all parts of what I do as a writer.