The Play’s The Thing: An interview with playwright, Bryan Willis.

Aug 14, 2008 by Susan Wingate

SETTING

Nine people, sitting in a circle of chairs at a playwriting workshop on a drizzly Saturday morning in April, 2006, are attending a playwriting workshop. The workshop is being held in Friday Harbor, Washington, the Gubelman Room, a second stage, at the San Juan Island Community Theatre by Bryan Willis. Tension: palpable.

CHARACTERS

Bryan Willis- Playwright/Workshop Instructor, in his late 40s, thin, tallish, wears glasses.

Susan Wingate- Workshop Participant/Interviewer.

************

SMW: Tell us something about yourself.

Willis: My brother almost flunked third grade science because I ate his bug collection. Hmm, nothing impressive or inspiring about that.

I met my wife with the help of a psychic dog. Actually, I was promoting a play, “Woofer, the Psychic Dog,” when I met my wife-to-be at a public access TV station in my hometown, Olympia. I was instantly smitten, though I had obligations to return to New York and wouldn’t get back to the Northwest for another year or so.

Of course, I wanted to spend some time with her but a mutual friend warned me that no guy had a chance unless Susan’s dog, Pogo, approved. Apparently, Pogo didn’t trust the last beau and wouldn’t let the two of them be alone. The story goes that the soon-to-be-former boyfriend suggested Pogo leave the room and Pogo and Susan suggested he hit the road. I heard this story and fell a little deeper in love. Any gal who trusts her dog to help choose a mate is a gal worth knowing.

So, I made a deal with Pogo. Susan often brought him to the station and one day I took him for a run and then had a guy-to-guy talk with him. Yes, I spoke with him and my side of the conversation went something like this: “Pogo, I will run with you, I will feed you, I will be your best buddy for the rest of your life, but you have to help me out here.”

And just so you know, Pogo, the Quiet Genius, and I both kept our promises. We were best buds for another decade and I still miss him. Susan still works at the station and I’m still writing plays. We’ve been married since 1992 and our boy Zach was born in 1999.

SMW: What ever happened with your play, “Woofer the Psychic Dog?”

Willis: I’ve learned so much from that little play. Over the years I’ve seen every line work and every line fall flat on its butt. It’s no longer popular to quote Woody Allen but he’s right when he says, “Comedy is the most work for the least pay-off.”

Another curious thing about “Woofer,” many of the productions inspire a marriage. Actually, now that I think about it, good things have happened to many of the people who worked on the original workshop and production. The first director is now running NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program, one of [the] co-writers (there were three of us) won an Oscar for screenwriting and one of the original actors won a Pulitzer. The original “Woofer” (a ceramic dog) has retired from theater and now [and] graces my home office.

SMW: Tell me about your teaching experience

Willis: I do a lot of guest appearances at colleges and high schools and I also lead a weekly writing workshop in which the average age in the room is 80. These past four years I’ve had the rare opportunity to teach beginning and advanced playwriting at Western Washington University in Bellingham. We also produce an anthology of short plays and tour the state with an ensemble presenting new plays by Northwest playwrights. This year our tour will culminate with a two-week tour in England. This was a seven-month gig that has now lasted four years.

In a given week I’ll volunteer in Zach’s 3rd grade class, lead the workshop with seniors and 30 days out of the year I’m teaching playwriting at WWU. That doesn’t keep me young or old—it keeps me aware and listening.

SMW: You’ve enjoyed quite a bit of success with your play about the life of Edgar Allan Poe. I assume that involved quite a bit of research.

Willis: I don’t know what happens to us in the afterlife, but if there’s one person I’d hate to have mad at me, that would be Edgar Allan Poe. I spent four years researching his life and works before I wrote a word. The project began when an actor friend of mine asked me to write a Poe piece for him because, as he said at the time, “No one wants to work with me.”

We premiered the play at the Old McCleary Hotel, located in a little timber town near the family farm. The piece is set up as a literary salon from 1849, and I must say that particular production was one of the most satisfying theatrical experiences of my career. The actor, Paul Edward Smith, was brilliant and the audience response was even better than expected.

We ran for three weeks and by the end we had another fort bookings and a tentative offer to tour with the Washington Humanities Commission, which lead to at least one hundred more gigs. That was ten years ago and the show is still touring, though it now features Tacoma actor, Tim Hoban. That little production in McCleary epitomizes the type of theater I most enjoy: high quality work in an unexpected venue.

SMW: How did Dame Judi Dench end up endorsing your one-act play, “Sophie”?

Willis: That little production in McCleary, Washington (the second largest door mill west of the Mississippi) led to a commission from England, a trip to see my show in Edinburgh, a commission from BBC radio and a screenplay commission. Here’s how that happened:

A friend of mine brought and actor friend, Erin Hurme to see the Poe play in McCleary. Erin received a scholarship to the Guildhall in London and had an idea to write a play based on the works of Sophie Large, a young poet who had died in 1998. Erin worked on the play with two other actors and, after six months, came to the miraculous conclusion that what they actually needed was a playwright.

Based on the Poe play, she asked me, and the foundation which had sponsored Erin’s scholarship, The Silver Lining Foundation, commissioned the play “Sophie.” This involved spending a good deal of time with Sophie’s family, getting to know her friends, teachers, and also reading the many boxes of journals and stories she had written during her short but prolific life.

We think of the English as being so uptight and stuffy and, of course, sometimes they are! Even so, this extraordinary family, Cherry, Steven and Sophie’s brothers, Ollie and Jeremy, opened their home and hearts. I’m proud of the script but its success in Edinburgh and on the BBC is mostly due to the work of the family and foundation. They were the ones who rented the venue, secured Dame Judi Dench’s support, made sure the right critics were in the theater, etc. Plus, someone else who saw the play offered a screenplay commission!

SMW: Do you write screenplays?

Willis: I love film and took screenwriting classes while studying playwriting at NYU. Actually, my master’s thesis is a screenplay. However, the chances of a speculative (spec) screenplay getting optioned are about 80,000 to 1. The changes of a spec script getting optioned and then being made and then bearing a remote resemblance to the original script are about (and this is generous), 1,000,000 to 1.

About ten years ago I decided that I would only write a screenplay if I really liked the idea and someone put money in my hand to write it. That’s been happening about every other year for several years now. I go into that world, I have fun, I learn more about the craft, and then I go screaming back to playwriting where my chances of getting my work produced are 1 to 1 and if I don’t like what the producers are doing I can tell them to take a hike.

But the movie money can be so good that most playwrights never return.

SMW: Can you tell us about any recent successes?

Willis: Earlier this week I managed to bake biscuits without burning them too badly. No one got violently ill, which is usually the case when other people attempt to eat my cooking.

I have not attended a teachers’ meeting in three years.

Our little playwrights group, Northwest Playwrights Alliance, is co-sponsoring a tour with the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and we’ve been around just long enough (about four years) to attract some national attention, including recent features in The Dramatist, and Colorlines: The national newsmagazine on race and politics.

“Sophie” will be featured in an anthology published by the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), and will be required reading for all students world-wide who want to be LAMDAites, LAMDAluvians? LAMDAns? Anyway, that deal runs from 2009-2014 and I’m hoping that will lead to more productions of Sophie, which is getting produced on a fairly regular basis.

I have a reading of a new play scheduled in Anchorage, a short play going to England and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing for the overnight festival of plays at the iDiOM Theater in Bellingham, Washington.

SMW: Can you name some favorite playwrights of yours, past and present?

Willis: The Bard, of course. Brecht. O’Neill. All three wrote quite a bit of junk and weren’t afraid to fail. All three continued to challenge themselves and wrote their best work at the end, though I have to stretch that a bit to include Brecht. The Tempest, Galileo, Long Day’s Journey… can’t beat that.

Some of my contemporary favorites are relatively obscure. Eric Overmyer was huge twenty years ago but he’s been busy making the big money and some first-rate shows in TV land for a long time. Irene Fornes, Len Jenkin, Kenny Lonergan (Woofer collaborator!), Ki Gottberg. Tom Stoppard is incredible. He’s been incredible for decades, and he’s had great success on the stage as well as the big screen. Keep your eye out for Dano Madden and Dan Erickson, two superb emerging playwrights.

SMW: Is there a common thread in your plays?

Willis: OK, I’ll confess, no matter what I do there always seems to be an animal of animal imagery in my works. I usually don’t set out to do this—it just happens. Can you guess I grew up on a farm? We raised Sheltand ponies.

I’m intrigued by our lack connection to the natural world. I find it fascinating that we routinely punish our kids with “time out.” As if being alone and thinking is the most horrible punishment possible. “And when you just can’t take it any more you can come back and apologize.” Take away my “Time Out” and I couldn’t make a living as writer.

Every religion in the world describes a great moment in which a single person goes out into the natural world—alone—and thinks. This is becoming an increasingly difficult task in our world.

These themes aren’t in every play I write but I grind those axes on regular basis. There are so many variations!

SMW: What is a normal writing day?

Willis: Ha. I’ll say it again: HA.

I’m sure I read at least one script per day. Contracts. E-mails. Rehearsals. Workshops. Readings. Research.

I get to spend more time with my kid than any other fully-employed dad I know. That’s big plus and it’s one reason I wanted to be a writer. This means, of course, I don’t get to bed until 3 a.m., but I do appreciate the flexible schedule.

Right now I’m producing a festival of fully-staged new plays written by Northwest writers: three full-lengths and over thirty ten-minute plays. Help Mr. Wizard, I don’t want to be an impresario any more!

Most of us need big blocks of time in order to write plays—that’s often true for me. I take a lot of notes and try to put everything else aside to find time to write. And yet, for all the balancing, I find that my total output each year has been amazingly consistent for almost 30 years—except for those years in grad school, which were insanely, gloriously busy.

I’ve always liked to overlap several projects at once. They tend to feed each other and sometimes merge. This technique also helps to lessen those blues so many theater people experience when the show is over. My schedule is constantly changing and I can guarantee that some gig will materialize that will be completely unexpected within the next couple months.

Oh, the bankers hate to hear that. I’ve always made as much or more than my wife (which isn’t saying much–we live in low-overhead Olympia), but I need a note from my mommy to get a credit card. I think it was the fifth time we bought a house that the loan officer reached across her desk, shook my hand and said, “Congratulations Mr. Willis, you’re not a liability.” Indeed. The unpredictable nature of my work would drive some people crazy but I love it. But, it does involve a great deal of balancing.

SMW: How outrageous have you made your main characters? How far do you stretch them?

Willis: Unlike life, the playwright can go back and revise. I go for broke, particularly in the first draft. The playwright’s favorite phrase is, “What if I try this?”

SMW: What type of trouble do you throw at your main character? How does the trouble differ between Act One and Act Three?

Willis: I try to throw in the most outrageous rock that would be believable within the world of the play.

This question ties in directly with your question about the one-act vs. the full-length. I could write dialogue fairly early in my career. The bigger challenge was matching the scope of the idea to the length of the play. Sometimes I would write quite a bit before realizing my one-act was actually a much larger play, or vice versa.

Often I don’t set out to write a play of a particular length, though some commissions are specific to the minute (i.e., BBC Radio).

SMW: How many times do you pose problems for your main character in a short play? How does this differ from a long play?

Willis: Obviously, I have great difficulty with the concept of brevity. It’s a wonder I’ve ever written a short play. However, I’m not sure if it’s the frequency of problems but rather the scope of the problems.

Most plays are, by their very nature, a series of mysteries and questions to be answered. Here’s a little saying I’ve found particularly useful when troubleshooting a play that just isn’t quite working: “Are you asking a question to which anyone wants to hear an answer?”

If the answer is “No,” it’s time to move on to a different question.

SMW: Is the one-act market growing?

Willis: Yes. Consider this fact: the iDiOM Theater produces six overnight play festivals during the course of the year. That would be six weekends, and collectively they pay for the rest of the season.

Now consider this: twenty years ago very few people had even heard of a ten-minute play. One-act plays are also gaining in popularity. This is especially true at the collegiate and fringe level.

It’s encouraging because it’s a way to generate excitement and involve so many actors, directors, and other theatre people.

The drawback is that we’re developing a whole generation of writers who are intimidated by the idea of writing a full-length play. The ten minute play is a deceptively difficult form and those of us who grew up watching TV (and that’s a mighty big club, of course), already tend to write play scenes in 8-10 minute blocks. The concept is this: one laugh per page, build to climax, pause for commercial break, and then answer the climax.

Most of the scripts I read whose writers have written as plays are actually teleplays. The popularity of the ten-minute play feeds that disease.

Now it’s time to launch into the obligatory diatribe about our ever-decreasing attention span. Or not.

SMW: Is there a difference between east coast and west coast markets?

Willis: I’m afraid so.

Seattle, in particular, is essentially an artistic colony in terms of how we see and produce theater. And before anyone shouts Hyperbole! take a look at the plays produced by ACT, Seattle Rep, The Intiman and even the now-defunct Empty Space, during the last 25 years. Ninety-nine percent of those plays were major hits somewhere else – usually in London or New York, and sometimes in Chicago or Minneapolis. The casting directors for the major companies routinely go to NY for casting.

Our most promising theater grads almost always leave the region, sometimes returning, often not. Seattle is in a particularly precarious spot because there’s so little TV and film work here, and even in NY it’s exceedingly difficult for actors to make a living on theater alone.

L.A., of course, has a thriving industry, but “Hollywood North” isn’t Seattle, it’s Vancouver, B.C. The talent is here but the opportunities are limited. Seattle is seen as a stepping stone to bigger and better markets. Oddly enough, this wasn’t the case when I returned to the Northwest in the early 1990s. People were moving TO Seattle because it was routinely listed as one of the top theater communities in the U.S.

Curious, isn’t it, that we’re so strong in the arts in general but that theater lags behind. Can you name five popular American writers who were active before 1915?

Poe, Emerson, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Melville, Longfellow, it’s hard to stop. Now name five popular American playwright who were active before 1915. Name one. (Poe wrote some bad ones). Just about all the theater was coming from Europe. It was the birth of the star system.

My point is that it took many decades before the U.S. theater community caught up with the painters, novelists, poets, and composers. It’ll happen here and I would like that to take place during my life time. I try to take an active hand in making that happen via the Northwest Playwrights Alliance, which is all about helping Northwest playwrights develop work and then getting that work produced and/or published.

SMW: Okay, so here we are at the end of this interview. What advice do you have for the emerging playwrights out there?

Willis: Don’t be afraid to self-produce. Read your work aloud. Walk into your favorite theater, introduce yourself and ask what you can do. If they say, “Can you build sets?” Say, “I can learn.” Hang lights, direct, run the boards, stage manage, act, design sound—do everything you possibly can in theater. You’ll learn to appreciate how it works and that knowledge will make you a better playwright. And, always, but always be nice to your stage manager. The main thing is to write, write, write and find a way to get your work on the boards.

CURRENT PROJECTS?

I was asked that question last spring in Albuquerque and I couldn’t answer. That night I began writing them down and figured out I had something like 23 writing projects going.

Here are some of the projects in progress:

Bootleg, a love story set in Olympia during Prohibition. I come from a long line of Southern moonshiners.

Herland, adaptation of the novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I wrote a kid’s version of this years ago and more recently I’ve coordinated this adaptation, featuring 12 different writers.

Hamlet, collaboration with various playwrights (again, it’s my concept and I’m overseeing the project), set in Port Gamble, WA in 1918 as the community is hit by the Influenza (worst in recorded history) and the end of WWI. The rotten kingdom is a one-man timber town. This is a unique opportunity because the good people of old Port Gamble are giving us the venues (church, mansion, graveyard, theater, board room, etc.) to stage the play.

Northwest Passage, full-length play in progress. It’s been produced but I’m

still tinkering. Reading in Anchorage this spring.

NorthNorthwest, lead editor for NPA’s anthology of ten-minute plays, third edition scheduled to be published this June.

British Arts Tour, currently touring Washington. 15 plays in all, including Evolution of

Chaos. We’ll be taking the tour to England in March.

Festival of Northwest Plays, executive producer and one of my plays will be included among the 33 short plays and three full-length plays. Theater on the Sqauare, Tacoma, Feb. 21-March 2.

Playwriting workshop with Steven Dietz + playwrights forum at Seattle Univ. Cosponsored by NPA and the Dramatists Guild.

New Play Buffet – festival of short plays presented by Japanese college students. This will be my 11th year with this program, 9th as artistic director.

August /Wilson reading series—co-produced by NPA and the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts (Tacoma) and the University of Puget Sound. The plan is to present professional Equity readings of all 10 plays in the August Wilson’s cycle over the course of four years, beginning Jan. ‘09. NPA will help to secure venues, contact directors, etc.

**************

Susan Wingate, novelist, poet and playwright, received a BS in Accounting from AZ State University. Wingate brings a rare and diverse background to her creative writing. Presently, she lives in Washington State and writes full time. Wingate has written three novels. Her second book, BOBBY’S DINER, just received a book contract with eBooksonthe.net and will be released in the fall of 2008. Her short story, “The Lion of Judah” received 1st Place honor (a monetary award and publication) in the August 2008 Fantasy Gazetteer Short Story Contest. One of her most recent accomplishments comes on the heels of completing her third novel, The Last Maharajan, with an excerpt selected for publication in literary journal the Superstition Review, an ASU press publication. She is a contributing writer for several magazines. Since the 2007 publication of her mystery novel, Of the Law, Wingate has kept busy teaching at writing workshops and at her studio. Her short stories and poems consistently receive awards and articles can be found in many magazines, journals and reviews. Wingate publishes an online newsletter called, “Sincerely, Susan” which has a readership of close to one thousand subscribers. She is also a co-founder of the San Juan Island Creative Women’s Group. Currently, she organizes a series of reading events for her local library. These events spotlight the community’s writers and provide a wonderful venue in which to hear their work. For hobbies, Wingate likes to read and paint.