My friend Brendan Huffman was nice enough to take my picture in front of the SEPTA add for my play. He told me I had to smile or he would sock me one.
THE SECOND QUESTION FROM A CURIOUS TEMPLE U. STUDENT
(I went back and added some stuff to my answers. I always think of just the thing to say afterwords.)
2. What inspired you to write this play? Did you change DASEIN's
story line at all for WHISKY NEAT?
I'm not sure I know what inspiration is -- at least not as far as writing is concerned. My plays are just these very powerful daydreams. Not sure how to explain... There are times I become aware that I am daydreaming of something very specific: a world that seems as real -- more real even -- than this one. It's more of a choice to further explore that world or try to shut it out. I've never had much success at shutting it out completely. There are some I have the courage or misfortune or obsessiveness or luck or stupidity to follow. And some I don't for some reason. I've never figured out why. These dreams, of course, contain many elements from my everyday life, just as any normal dream tends to have these elements. For instance, I worked as a parking valet at maybe half-a-dozen restaurants around Philly, so that is a central element to the play. For some reason the dream that began as DASEIN never left me. I don't know why. Perhaps because it was pretty much my first experiment with real narrative. My plays before that point -- before I was 24 or so -- were these sort of strange experiments with rhythmic language. Almost every line of WHISKY NEAT is completely different than DASEIN, and it's more than double in length. It's the same characters though. The through line is the same in the sense that the same big dramatic event occurs. (I don't want to give anything away by mentioning what that is.) But DASEIN was closer to a short story in structure. It really just had one dramatic movement: a big bang happens and we watch how the characters deal with that. In a full-length drama there needs to be -- for me at least -- a kind of ricochet effect. There are a chain of events -- an arch rather than a snapshot.
Elena Bossler didn't truly get started with us until March 14, the day this little clip was taken. Notice that on her first day of rehearsal she sort of casually throws the script on the table, and continues word perfect. In this little moment her character, Alex, is talking to Handsome (Luigi Sottile) about her BMW. I was actually attempting to take a still photo, but had the wrong setting on the camera.
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