On the Future
nytheatre.com q&a preview by Daniel McCoy
September 30, 2012
What is your job on this show?
writer/performer.
Do you like to read plays, or just perform them?
I love to read plays, and I do so all the time. Outside my role as a Neo-Futurist, I identify primarily as a playwright. Reading plays - published and unpublished, classic and unproduced, good and bad - feeds the hungry baby turtle inside me that really controls operations and tells me what to write.
What was the last show you saw that really excited you, and why?
I saw a show by B-Floor Theatre, a physical theatre group from Thailand, called "Oxygen" a couple months ago at CSV. The show was about our relationship to breath and about oxygen as a metaphor for free expression, something lacking in the troupe's home country. It sounds a bit didactic, but their performance was engaging, funny and poignant. And they did amazing things with tarps. It got me thinking a lot about how much of our theater takes place from the neck up how we could be using our bodies (and objects, and light, and music) to paint the pictures we as writers so often rely on words to.
Do you think the audience will talk about your show for 5 minutes, an hour, or way into the wee hours of the night?
Our audience will talk about the show for 5 minutes, and a hour, and a decade and forever. This will happen in an infinite number of parallel universes simultaneously. The show explains this in more detail. Our audience will also not talk about the show at all and will instead turn into a brace of hyper-intelligent ducks who will take over the world banks, bail out Greece once and for all, and establish a universal monetary system based on bread crumbs.
Which “S” word best describes your show: SMOOTH, SEXY, SMART, SURPRISING?
They all do. Also, SPUNKY, SPIRITED, SATURDAY, SIX, and SEXY.
If you had ten million dollars that you had to spend on theatrical endeavors, how would you use the money?
I would use a good portion of that money for the purchase and renovation of a building to be a permanent home for the New York Neo-Futurists. And I would start a fund to offer financial support to early-career theater artists who are interested in self-producing. That sounds a little generic, but hey, couldn't we all use some of that money? Oh, and I'd spend some of it on my own productions. Shut up, it's my $10 million.
