Platonov! Platonov! Platonov! Or The Case of a Very Angry Duck is a parody of Chekhov. Any particular play of his, or just all of them?
Actually it is a loose adaptation of his play Platonov, more the story than anything...the play is kind of long and boring but the story is amazing...
What makes Chekhov ripe for this kind of treatment?
I was kind of itching to do a Chekhov play for awhile because I liked his characters so much...I mean you always have a rambling old man, a drunken bohemian in love, an angry girl-student in love, a maddened widow without money that she wants, a extremely rich jerk who isn't willing to share and so on...and I wanted to farcicalize the situation to a point of extreme madness just to see what would happen. In all truth it was an experiment with text and acting and I just wanted to see if something like that would fly.....and I would have been just as happy if it blew up into a miserable failure...actually Ross (Peabody, the director) and I wanted to really just irritate the Chekhov purists, because purists in general are usually annoying and devoid of soul......
You are also an actor, as well as a writer. For you, how does one inform the other?
I never took any formal playwriting classes. The first time that I was exposed to writing in theatre was working with Liz Swados in a workshop with Marymount and La Mama; and we had to create a musical with her. We workshopped material for about a year. After that experience I kind of had a bit of confidence about putting up my own work...and really not worrying about whether it was good or not, but really whether it was engaging to an audience.....and of course at first writing was definitely a way to create vehicles for myself and still are (damn right)... Well as an actor I enjoy difficult phrasing and making sense of it and I enjoy repetition and making it different and I enjoy a physical workout as well as mental and I think that that truly comes out...
Do you have a preference or do you like them both equally?
Well...acting is what I yearn to do every day...the past few months I haven't been acting as much as I was and I felt like something was missing and now I'm getting back on track...but its kind of like acting is the craft that I have to constantly strive to be better in and improve upon whereas writing is more like this tic in my head and soul that annoys me until I spill it out on the page...and I keep on spilling and spilling and spilling and then I go back and figure out why I spilled everything all over the place...I hate hearing “stream of consciousness” I think that that is too general a phrase...especially when it’s very emotional...but I like working on both crafts constantly....
Who are your influences, as both a writer and an actor?
Lots of jazz absurdity and nutcases...David Lynch, Willem Dafoe, Wooster Group, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Delroy Lindo, Spike Lee, Charlie Parker, Samuel Beckett, Robert Johnson, Henry James, Mark Twain, Gunter Grass.......to name a few...
You’re a member of Feed The Herd Theatre Company. How did you get involved with them?
I got involved in a production of Waiting for Godot right at the end of my senior year of college and was confused on what to do as an actor and Brian Snapp was directing the play and the next thing I knew he was saying "Well I have a theatre...we produce a lot of plays...we could use someone who has veins popping out of their heads...."
A lot of the Feed The Herd company members, including yourself, are graduates of the theater program at Marymount Manhattan College. What’s up with that? Is this the emergence of the Marymount Manhattan theater mafia?
It’s completely random for me. I think that they all knew each other...so it was sort of a base...but in truth I knew none of them...they had graduated five years earlier than myself...
You say you grew up “in a country Republican town.” I assume that was a bad thing.
I grew up in Tunkhannock, PA. It has the largest Procter and Gamble (the toilet paper producer) in the country, and is the home base for the company. IF you work at the company, in any job, for 35 years you will receive a $1 million pension. Because of this it was an easy out for a lot of my high school classmates to immediately 'jump to' right out of school.....and there is also a Chevrolet dealership located in the town as well that was owned conveniently by the Republican Congressman who has controlled the town with his family for more than 40 years. I learned then what it meant by being closed-minded...towns like these are why George Bush has been elected twice (or once, the first time was a coup and the second time could have been fixed) - there is kind of a cycle in the town - you go to high school, have a baby, buy a pickup truck, work at the plant, and most of all don't bother anybody and do what you’re told...that is a country Republican town.
What do you do when you’re not doing theater?
I work on films.
What other things do you like to do outside of the arts?
Not much for me outside the arts and politics, which should always go hand in hand...long live Brecht......sad to say I'm a little boring.
You have a new play going up in Feed The Herd’s upcoming Stampede Festival. What is it, and what’s it about?
Robert and the Dawn......well James and Elizabeth - James is an employee/aide of the President, he is his personal chemist the guy who creates all of the biological weapons to terrorize the world. Because of his important and confidential position his whereabouts are never known and he is moved around from city to city at any time that the President feels that it is unsafe. His wife Elizabeth travels with him. One day a man name Robert comes to move them...or that is what they think...James has been angry with his job and with the fact that he has no life anymore...Robert is there to silence James for the government so to speak...So that is the central part of the play...On the other side of the stage is James and Elizabeth's children with their grandmother, who are watching the action as a film and the grandmother is teaching them a lesson on control and the wickedness of liberalness. Still another part of the play resides with the suicidal Clown who is Robert’s father, who throughout the play sings dances and tries to explain to Robert the beauty of freedom and why he is going to blow his own head off with a shotgun......
What’s next for you after that?
Well, I am, as an actor, starting work on a project that will be workshopped at the Soho Think Tank during the festival and I will also be shooting a short film during the festival...I am also fundraising and working out the pre-production aspects of a film that I wrote called The Adventures of the Angry Henry and the Cocaine Kid....as far as theatre I have several plays that I am writing and several ready to be produced - look for Bulldog and A Rabbit is Drunk. As an actor I am trying to get into as many plays or films as possible so I hope you see me soon.