Talking With Writers is a series of short conversations with PlayGround writers.
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Talking with Writers: Evelyn Jean Pine
May 14, 2009
On Monday, May 18th, 2009, the 13th annual Best of PlayGround festival presented a staged reading of Evelyn Jean Pine's full-length commissioned work, Terror Astonishment, Love at the Thick House. Evelyn, whose short play Seen is also part of the Best of PlayGround 13 festival, answered some early-morning questions about her plays and her work with PlayGround via email a few days before the reading:
PLAYGROUND: So what's your play about - the one being presented this Monday?
EVELYN: The turn of a century. A moment when people are mesmerized by remarkable new technologies. How we create change and change creates us. Paris 1895-1915.
PLAYGROUND: Any particular inspiration? why'd you choose to write this story?
EVELYN: There’s a story, a myth really, that at the screening of the first motion picture, people were so scared that the train they saw barreling towards them on screen was an actual locomotive. They fled in terror.
That seemed like a theatrical beginning for a play about change. But what interests me is how people react differently to technology and change. How we think one instant or technology changes our life. And how one instant might actually change our lives.
PLAYGROUND: What kind of audience response are you hoping for?
EVELYN: Enthusiastic. Brainy. Passionate.
PLAYGROUND: What do you want people to walk away with?
EVELYN: Terror. Astonishment. Love.
PLAYGROUND: Has PlayGround had an impact on your writing or on your work/career in general?
EVELYN: PlayGround lets you work with the Bay Area’s best actors and directors so you learn a lot very quickly. Plus the other writers are creative, passionate, and funny as hell.
I’ve written 26 ten-minute plays for PlayGround. Many have been produced around the country. Plus two full-length plays.
PLAYGROUND: Any projects coming up that you're excited about?
EVELYN: Terror, Astonishment, Love Monday, May 18, 7:00 PM. The Thick House in Potrero Hill. Ten bucks at the door. And, of course, The Best of Playground Festival which includes my short play, Seen.
Evelyn Jean Pine is a recipient of a 2008 PlayGround Alumni Commission. Her plays have been produced around the country. Jon Tracy staged her 2007 June Anne Baker Award play, The Secrets of the World, as part of the 2008 Best of PlayGround Festival. She has won two past PlayGround Emerging Playwright Awards (2005 & 2007). Her short stories have appeared in Seventeen, Sassy and Collage. She teaches Performance Studies at San Francisco State University where she is also an MFA student in Creative Writing. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Doug Peckler, and their eleven-year-old son, Gabe.
Terror, Astonishment, Love by Evelyn Jean Pine, directed by Jessica Heidt
In 1895 the first motion picture screening terrifies the audience at Paris’s Grand Café when a train appears to be barreling down on them. Convinced they face certain death, a pregnant girl, a prostitute, an heir to an armament factory, a petty bureaucrat, and a waiter vow to radically change their lives. Twenty years later, a new war rages, another baby is born, and these friends rewind old conflicts and new betrayals.