INTERVIEW Part I

The other day I got this really cool message from a Temple student. I think she was writing an article for the school paper. She asked me questions about my play, and I had a great time answering them, though now I think I may have freaked her out with my insane theater-nuts passion or something because she never got back to me. Anyway, here's the first question. It took me back to college days, and I wound up digging out some artifacts from 2002!

Hi Mr. Walsh,
Thank you so much for getting back to me. If you could answer these questions by this Thursday or Friday that would be fantastic. You can just send them to this same e-mail.
Thanks again!

1. I see that Whisky Neat originally premiered as Das Ein at the 2002 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. What can you tell me about its reception by the audiences?

Actually, the play was titled "Dasein" -- one of Martin Heidegger's philosophy terms. I have no idea why I titled it that. Azuka spelled it "Das Ein" in their marketing materials. I have no idea why they spelled it that way. It's all very mysterious to me. The Fringe show wasn't much of a premiere. It was a 40-min one-act with 3 performances. At that time, I hadn't figured out how to write anything without the pressure of a physical performance planned for a specific date. I asked my friend from college (Dan Kutner, a Temple guy now in New York) if he would direct a play by me. I told him I was working on it, but I really didn't start until after I asked him. I knew the guys that ran the space from a previous show, so they agreed to deduct their money from the tickets. I think I paid the actors -- also my college friends -- $80 a piece for the whole thing. We had no set. We used the door to the theater as an entrance in the play. It was all very ridiculous actually, because there was supposed to be a television in the play, but we had no way of cueing something like that, so people just sort of mysteriously pointed the remote toward stage right. I guess it went over well enough. Fringe audiences -- God bless em -- tend to put up with a lot. The language and the actors had a certain energy that can be entertaining in a small space. Dan did a great job keeping it moving, so you didn't really have a lot of time to start wondering what the hell was going on. I nearly puked the first night -- the first and last night I actually sat with an audience at one of my plays. It was the first time the actors had done the piece in front of people. The lights didn't work. My dad was there. The toilet broke in the men's room. It was horrific. But by the third one, I think people were genuinely laughing and having a good time with it. But "Dasein," for me, was really just the seed of an idea for "Whisky Neat."


Director Daniel Kutner (seen here living it up as a professional director in New York City) believed in my one-act, even though I hadn't written anything yet. He also didn't read into the fact that I had to take an incomplete in Theater 110 our freshman year. I owe you one, Dan.


All this talk about 2002 got me digging through my filing cabinet. I never did find an explanation as to the play's title. But I did discover the original listing in the Fringe guide.