PETE BARRY is a playwright, screenwriter, actor, director and musician. Along with Drop, his short plays Nine Point Eight Meters Per Second Per Second and The Banderscott have been selected for performance in the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival. His screenplay 10 Crimes in 2 Hours was a finalist in the 13th Annual Writers Network Screenplay and Fiction Competition. He is a co-founder of the Porch Room, a theater and film production company. He has produced and directed several collections of short plays, including Five Cornered Thinking at the New York Comedy Club and Burt Reynolds Amazing Napalm Powered Oven and Other Paid Programming in the 2001 New York Fringe Festival. A collection including four of his short plays, Accidents Happen, won the 2009 NJACT Perry Award for Outstanding Production of an Original Play. Pete lives in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania with his wife Jean and his daughter Lia.
The OOB Festival (OOB): Since last year’s OOB Festival where has life taken you and the rest of the Porch Room?
Pete Barry (PB): It’s been a pretty exciting year for the Porch Room. After our success at the Samuel French Festival, the New Jersey Association of Community Theaters presented us a Perry Award for Outstanding Production of an Original Play – that was for Accidents Happen, a collection of our short plays. We’ve set up an online script library at the Porch Room website, so students, professionals and community theaters can take use any of our non-published scripts for free (we only ask that producers consider a suggested donation). Our plays continue to be performed throughout the tri-state area and we hope to continue expanding.
Pete Barry and J. Micheal DeAngelis
OOB: At Samuel French, we know you almost exclusively from your partnership with follow DROP author J. Michael DeAngelis. Can you familiarize us a bit with your solo projects?
PB: Yes…always under the shadow of the great J. Michael DeAngelis…someday, someday when his back is turned, I’ll be free of him once and for all…
Sorry, what was I talking about? Oh yes. Me.
Well, my play Nine Point Eight Meters Per Second Per Second (which was also a finalist in last year’s OOB Festival) was selected to be included in Eric Lane’s upcoming anthology Shorter, Faster, Funnier. I have to thank Roxane Heinze-Bradshaw and everyone at Sam French for everything they did to get that play some notoriety.
My Porch Room associates have told me for years that my low-budget writing needs to get more producible, so stop writing things about guys falling out of airplanes and murdering live octopi and whatnot. So I’m currently working on a full-length play called Gravity and Ground, which takes place in a zero-gravity environment aboard a futuristic space station. I think that should be easy enough.
The Porch Room is also raising a bit of capital to produce my screenplay Hundredth Monkey, which is our first attempt at a feature-length film.
OOB: In addition to being DROP’s author, you also make up the creative core of The Porch Room, which produced DROP for the Festival. Can you talk a bit about acting as your own producer? What kind of challenges/advantages do you face as the producer of your own work?
PB: With Drop, I got to produce, act, write, and co-direct. The advantages of doing everything yourself are that you’ve got complete control over the work, and you don’t have to pay anyone. Or, at least, you don’t have to feel guilty about the people you’re not paying.
But you have to be careful not to handicap yourself by working alone. For me, making theater is like making music – you can do a solo act, but my favorite way to play was in a big jam session, inviting everyone in to add to the mess. That’s how the best inspiration strikes, in collaboration. In theater, there’s no way to do everything yourself – there’s always going to be an audience, which is a living, breathing part of the show.
The plays I write are geared towards low-budget productions that can be adapted towards many different spaces, partially out of necessity, but also because I like theater that can be produced easily, and inexpensively, and anywhere and by anyone.
So the problem-solving aspect of producing theater with no money is just another part of play creation for me. It’s exciting to write a fantastic line of dialogue, but it’s also exciting to find an old desk in your basement, turn it sideways, and say, “Yeah, that could be a roller coaster.”
OOB: In addition to some very funny short plays, Porch Room also seems to do a lot of film work. You’ve written several screenplays; how is you approach to film work different than your approach to works onstage? Do you have a stronger inclination to one over the other? (Pete, I’d love to link to some of your short films here—is that ok by you?)
PB: I don’t have a preference for any one medium over another. To paraphrase the late great Douglas Adams, when the idea comes, that’s the moment you ask yourself, what is this? A play, a movie, a song, a video game, a jigsaw puzzle? Sometimes it’s easy to see what the idea lends itself to, or maybe you go against the grain and try to write a shooting spree road trip story for stage just to see what happens. And the same idea can take more than one form – I’ve rewritten short stories for the stage, and screenplays into novels. John Dowgin, J. Michael and I have performed live our rendition of my film Early Morning in the Tenement. I love making theater and I love making movies, and I’m not going to give one up for the other.
The boundaries between writing for film and theater are pretty thin for me. There are different envelopes to push in each form – you can shoot a film in black and white, or you can put plants in the audience for a stage piece. I think when I write theater, I’m often thinking about how I could feasibly produce it, which gives me constraints and often helps channel the creative forces. If I’m writing a film and it’s obvious this would cost millions of dollars to produce, I’m going to try to sell it, not produce it, so the sky’s the limit. It’s a hard sell to write an alien crystal-monster for stage, but in a film script, no one blinks.
We have some of the films I’ve produced with the Porch Room up on our site at www.porchroom.com/film.htm.
OOB: Finally, any plugs or upcoming performances? Final words?
PB: Check out www.porchroom.com for all of our upcoming shows and appearances. John Dowgin is directing Othello at Circle Players in Piscataway (www.circleplayers.com) and his short play The Fruppum, Alabama Chamber of Commerce will be a part of Piper Theatre Productions’ The Living Series. I’m finalizing a date for a charity one-acts show at Insomniak Theatre in Nazareth, PA (www.insomniaktheatre.com), and J. Michael is heading up our entry for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival this coming summer.
As I’ve mentioned: The Porch Room is home to a group of award-winning writers. Theater groups, film production companies, students and educational programs are welcome to peruse our scripts online, print them, and perform them or contact the Porch Room for rights and availability. You can read, and in many cases perform, any of our unpublished stage plays for free. Look through our list of titles to find a play of the right length, cast, and genre. Again, just go to www.porchroom.com.