Next in a continuing series of company member interviews! This week we have multidisciplinary man of mystery Ben Allen-Kingsland, who acts, writes and directs. Ben and I discuss writing for the theatre versus self-publishing, which historical figure Ben is writing a musical about, and when in the distant past we actually met.
Seamus: Thank you for joining me tonight, Benjamino. It’s been far too long.
Ben: Oh yes.
Seamus: For starters, tell us how you got involved with Flying V.
Ben: My first official Flying V project was Incurable, written by the dastardly rogue Seamus Sullivan.
Seamus: I hate that guy!
Ben: I played Dale Prewitt for that. It was a great role and a great Fringey experience.
That said, I’d known Jason for several years as a playwright and general theatre colleague. And though we’d never worked together on a project, we kept tabs on each other’s work with an eye towards doing something together someday.
Seamus: Did you meet him at the same little playwrights’ convening at Piratz Tavern where I think you and I had our first proper conversation?
Ben: Ha! (PS: I heard that Piratz Tavern was co-opted by one of those extreme makeover shows, which tried to transform it into a bar for corporate wage slaves, with de-motivational posters on the wall and not a single rum-based drink on the menu. It was such a disaster that the owners pulled out before the episode was aired and raised money to restore their bar to the way it was before.)
Seamus: I heard! Total pirate reversal!
Ben: Shows them!
At any rate, I actually first met Jason at an audition at Adventure Theatre. He was behind the table as assistant director, I believe, for If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. I saw him again, later, at a convening held at Arena Stage for local playwrights. He remembered me and I remembered him, and we talked scripts and all of that. I’m pretty sure you were there too, right?
Seamus: I daresay I was!
Ben: We were both good friends with the actress Branda Lock, who was ultimately the Mouse, and who I’d been on tour with as a National Player for a year.
Seamus: Before we actually met (Which, come to think of it, might have actually been at Myth-App IV?) I think the very first time I ever ran into you was when you were in the Winter Festival of New Work at H Street Playhouse, playing a nebbish guy whose date kept getting derailed by his hallucinations that a booming voice called Mission Control was leading him in a secret war against communist spies. Which has some parallels to Dale in Incurable that are pretty funny, in retrospect.
Ben: Yes indeed, the MadCap Players Winter Carnival. Matt [MacNelly] was in that show too. I remember your show from the Myth-Appropriation. You wrote about alligators in the sewers, yes?
Seamus: Yep! And old-tyme New York Superintendent of Sewers Teddy May, who strangely enough
was not a myth.
Ben: Amazing. “Mission Control” was a fun play to do, and you’re right that it has some similarities to
Incurable; the internal demons who keep a guy from connecting to the lady he loves. It was much more a schmacting kind of piece, I felt, than
Incurable, which I think lent itself to much more emotional truth, through all its craziness.
And I’m not just saying that because you’re the skypemaster here.
Seamus: It is going to look like I cherry-picked these
interviews to talk about how awesome
Incurable was.
Now people who are down with the V will recognize you as an actor, and anyone who saw that Myth Appropriation [Ben wrote “The Volga Goatman” for Rorschach Theatre’s Myth Appropriation: Urban Legends] a few years back may recognize you as a playwright, AND anyone who has been to Bethesda Play-in-a-Day in the past three years will have seen shows that you wrote AND directed. Talk a little bit (or a lot) about how being a triple threat informs each role.
Ben: You know, I was a writing major at Hopkins. Writing has been an interest of mine all the way back to elementary school, while acting is a more recent enthusiasm. I have absolutely no doubt, though, that experience onstage has made me a better playwright. I have a better sense of what feels natural to say, and what kind of lines feel clunky or over-written. I also have a better sense of what I can trust actors to accomplish onstage through the power of their sweet imaginations. For instance, I’m writing an opera with my brother now as a side project, and at one point some characters are on an oil tanker that gets torpedoed by U-boats. I wrote the stage direction “the boat sinks” knowing that in our super-low-budget production, the boat sinking is going to be those actors going down on their knees, nothing more. And I know, because I’ve seen it and done it onstage, that actors committing to something like that will actually
work.
As for directing, I had a professor I really respected whose whole philosophy on directing was that, in theatre, the director should play a supporting role. It’s not the director’s play. No one is coming to the theatre to watch the director. His or her job is to made the playwright’s ideas come to life in a way that’s true to the playwright’s intent, and to create a space so talented actors can take risks and do their work.
So the few times I’ve directed, I’ve seen my role as somewhere between cheerleader and real-time audience member, who can encourage actors to give their best and stay connected to the material, and let them know when something looks strange or muddy.
Having been an actor has definitely informed my tone as a director. I try to be as clear and gentle as possible.
And as a playwright myself, I can totally get behind a directing philosophy that puts the playwright’s wishes first, and any grand concepts or themes I might want to explore second. If I’ve got big concepts to explore, I’d be better served writing my own play to talk about them than trying to layer them on top of someone else’s story.
Seamus: Is there much of a difference between directing your own play and directing someone else’s?
Ben: I’ve found it very simple to direct my own things. That’s probably because I already decided on a particular interpretation of things while I was writing, and so directing is just a matter of bringing that vision forward. Directing someone else’s play takes a lot more work to try and figure out what they were intending. As the director, you’re the one the actors will come to when they have questions and are trying to sort a particular moment out. Trying to answer them while inside that other writer’s head is a trickier thing.
I think it’s better when playwrights don’t direct their own material, though. Part of the fun of theatre is that everyone brings something different to the party. Even a director who’s very faithful to a playwright’s intent is still going to help actors uncover moments and ideas that the writer never could have imagined were a part of the story s/he created. It makes the play richer to have more minds mulling it over.
Seamus: And someone who’s also had to find his or her way inside a work can be a better interpreter.
Ben: I think so. My favorite directors have always been actors too. For better or for worse, playwrights don’t have ultimate control over how their work comes across. I think that’s something that just has to be embraced if you’re going to stick with the discipline.
Seamus: It is frightening to have to admit that, isn’t it?
Ben: Yes. And it’s one reason why I’ve been branching out into fiction in the past year and a half, and why I’m taking more interest in music and short films too. Writing for live theatre, you don’t get to control the experience. Writing a novel, or recording a song? You absolutely do. I see my life as involving all these sorts of things as time goes on. And, to be honest, it makes me less scared to think that I’ll have plays out there, being potentially maligned and misused by oddball theatre artists, knowing that I will also have creative projects that I really sculpted just so out in the world.
Seamus: Speaking of which, you’ve had plays and e-books published. What’s that like, compared to the often very local discipline of doing theatre?
Ben: Having plays published is very strange! I’ll check online and see that random schools in Missouri or British Columbia have performed one-acts I wrote. Aside from knowing that they paid me royalties, I have absolutely no other information. I don’t know how the shows went, or what they did with them, or anything. So it becomes very easy to see it as an income stream and not an artistic outlet. (Though “stream” is far too strong a word; “trickle” is much more apt.)
The first time I saw that somebody tweeted about an ebook I wrote, I was really excited and tweeted him a thank-you, asking him to write a review on Amazon if he had a moment. He did! So that one tiny moment was a more satisfying encounter than anything I’d had with one of these random faceless schools that put on my play. I guess that’s because I’m self-publishing, so there’s no intermediary between me and this tiny little cadre of readers. I actually get to interact with them, if they want to interact with me; the schools and theatres who buy my scripts interact with the publisher. They’re one step removed from me as the artist.
But both of these are incredibly different from having a show go up in the DC area, starring actors I know, for audiences that include friends and family. That’s local all right, and it’s a very different (and pleasant) feeling.
Seamus: Who or what are your big artistic influences right now?
Ben: I’ve been listening to a lot of Queen and The Gregory Brothers (the youtube stars who do “Auto-Tune The News”) lately. So they’re in my head musically. I haven’t sat down to read a play for a while. Someone like Martin McDonagh does a tremendous job mixing the grotesque and the humorous, and creating very satisfying, tight plot structures, so I have lots of respect for him. Honestly, one of my biggest influences lately has been TV shows like Psych and Numb3rs, where you have hapless experts paired with more bad-ass action types. That’s the basic way I’ve laid out my fantasy novels as Ben Rovik.
Seamus: Last one and then I’ll let you go. What’s a dream project that you haven’t gotten to do yet?
Ben: Man. My dream project is a musical I’ve been kicking around since college about John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich and inventor of the sandwich. He was Britain’s Lord Admiral, and was totally inept; I read that Gilbert and Sullivan were lampooning him personally in HMS Pinafore. I love the idea that 1) something as simple as the sandwich needed to be invented, and 2) that figuring out how to put meat between bread was the pinnacle of this man’s life. I have a draft of the first act, but haven’t gotten the rest together yet. I’d love to see it onstage before I die.
Seamus: I think a lot of people would.
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