Talking With Writers is a series of short conversations with PlayGround writers.
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Talking with Writers: Daniel Heath
May 19, 2009
On Sunday, May 24th, the 13th annual Best of PlayGround festival presented a staged reading of Daniel Heath's full-length commissioned work, Fifty Years Hungry, at the Thick House. Daniel, whose short play Wednesday is also part of the Best of PlayGround 13 festival, graciously agreed to talk to PlayGrounder Sam via Gchat the week before the reading:
Sam: So tell me about this play.
Daniel: It's about a brother and a sister who have moved to opposite coasts to escape their family. A death in the family brings them back together for a little quality dysfunction and recrimination.
Sam: So it's a comedy.
Daniel: You know those plays that make you want to leave the theater after ten minutes because everyone is so awful and it’s so grindingly depressing? This is not that play! I swear!
Sam: Okay.
Daniel: The play spans three days, but each consecutive day presents an alternate reality in which a different family member has died.
Sam: How'd you come up it?
Daniel: I'm interested in how tragedy *doesn't* change people. So I wanted to use the structure of changing who was gone, following a single arc, to explore what is not different, and what is.
The problem was that I had that structure with a totally different story. That story, as it turned out, was lousy. I gave it quite a try, spent a couple of months working on it, but it never came together. SO, now it's December, and there was supposed to be a table reading of this script in January, and I can't get the script off the ground because my story is no good. Then I found out that Barbara Oliver was going to direct my still-unwritten play, and it reminded me of a ten-minute piece I did that she directed at the Monday Night (it didn't make it into the festival, so probably no one remembers it...it was about a mother and a daughter preparing a funeral meal for a grandmother). Anyway, I realized that story would be a good fit, with additional characters, with the switch-who-dies structure.
So, three weeks before the table read, I started working on this story as fast as I could type. I added the mother's ex-husband and his second wife, gave the daughter a brother...the grandmother starts off dead, like the ten minute play, but as the first act switches to the second, she comes back, so we get to meet her, too. Anyway, that's how I got the idea. The original playground topic was “Recipe”. Food is still important in the play. Vegetarianism specifically--which is kind of like Satanism or communism where I come from.
Sam: Any other projects coming up?
Daniel: Well, a few meddlesome individuals at this year's festival have gone and given me some ideas about how to expand “Wednesday” [the play in this year’s Best of PlayGround festival] into a full length...Or rather, a series of linked short pieces, one for every day of the week. I'm also going to be working on another comedy that involves voting, because the first one [Forking] was so much fun.
Oh, and, the original short, “Fifty Years Hungry”, will be playing at the Inspirato festival in Toronto the first two weekends in June.
This year is Daniel Heath's third Emerging Playwright Award (following Seagull in 2007 and Leo in 2008). Daniel is a recipient of the 2008/2009 Playground Fellowship commission; the resulting full-length play, Fifty Years Hungry, will be read as part of this festival on May 24th. His short plays have been performed on both coasts, and his full-length comedy "Forking" recently completed a run in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Fifty Years Hungry by Daniel Heath, directed by Barbara Oliver
Fifty Years Hungry tells the story of three generations of one family gathered for a funeral. A brother and sister who have fled to opposite coasts return for three long days with a family where not even death will get you the benefit of the doubt. The play takes place across three days and three parallel realities; each day the death of a different character changes — or does not change — the family left behind.