SCOTT ELMEGREEN’s shows include COLLEGE The Musical (NYMF Award for Excellence in Writing; Richard Rodgers Award finalist), and Vote for Me: A Musical Debate (commissioned by Aged in Wood Productions). As resident composer of The Assembly, Scott composed for What I Took in My Hands (Ontological-Hysteric Incubator; Brick Theater); Daguerreotype (Abingdon Theater); We Can’t Reach You, Hartford (Bedlam Theater; Fringe First nomination); and Joyce Carol Oates’ Tone Clusters (Fringe Report Award, Best Play). Scott is a graduate of Princeton University.
The OOB Festival (OOB): How has life been treating you since last year’s OOB Festival?
Scott Elmegreen (SE): It’s been great! I’m pretty sure life gets better as you go, like any good play. This past fall, I learned to surf and also the first show I wrote with Drew, COLLEGE The Musical, was published. We’ve been delighted to see some licensed productions of that start to crop up around the country, and we’re excited to see where it takes us next. Drew and I also have a new musical in development, which we hope you’ll be seeing soon! And in the meantime, I’m finishing up a young adult novel I’ve had in the works for some time, I’m illustrating a children’s book (I guess I just never grew up…), and I’m writing a play on my own. Solo projects yield far fewer high fives than collaborations, in my experience, but they’re rewarding in their own ways.
OOB: You and writing partner Drew Fornarola have also recently been developing a full length play. Can you tell us more about this project?
SE: Oh, yes, that, too! Well, simply put, Drew is terrific and working with him is a blast, so I’m always looking for the next excuse to collaborate on something. After the great time we had last summer working on Thucydices, we just couldn’t help ourselves–we had to try our hands at a full length piece of straight theatre. So the play is called Straight and it’s a challenging and fun little drama for three actors.
OOB: How have you found the process of developing a full length to be different than that of a shorter work?
SE: You know, in theory, writing a full-length play is very different from writing a shorter one. It takes a lot longer, for one thing. You can’t finish it in a weekend (or at least you probably shouldn’t), and there’s a lot more to keep in mind. When writing any show, I think you have to be able see the whole picture of it in your head at one time for the structure to work right, and that necessarily gets harder as the picture gets larger. But you also have more distance to play with in a longer piece–it’s not an all-out sprint the way short works are–and so there are places where you can artistically catch your breath.
But that’s just in theory. In practice, I imagine it’s sort of like the difference between juggling six flaming knives instead of three. Sure, the technique varies slightly, but it’s insane either way, and fundamentally, both the process and the goal of what you’re doing is the same regardless of the scope. With plays, the goal is to write a complete story told dramatically from the perspective of interesting characters in as few words as possible. If the idea of the piece is quite large, then you can stick to these rules and still come out with a show that sustains three hours. If the idea is smaller, then the piece might only be ten minutes. But either way, the success or failure of the play is measured by the same criteria–whether or not you cut your audience’s head off.
OOB: I’m really interested in your history as a playwright and how you came to playwriting. When did you know that you wanted to become a writer? Were you always writing plays or was it something you fell into?
SE: My parents are both professional astrophysicists and my sister is getting her PhD in atmospheric and oceanographic studies, so it’s only logical that I would have gone into the arts.
I get the “black sheep” question a lot at parties, but it all makes perfect sense to me. I remember being very young and asking my parents what it was that astrophysicists actually did all day, and they told me that basically, what they did was write. They get ideas, they write them down, and they publish them. Now, with their ideas, the math needs to work out. But that’s still not so different from what I do all day, when you think about it.
In any case, it was all I did as a kid, was sit next to my parents as they poured over their data and equations and wrote their astronomy papers, me writing and drawing up stories while my imagination worked overtime synthesizing a diet consisting mainly of Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dick Tracy, Batman, Robocop, Super Mario Brothers, and the horror movie, Alien. Looking back on it, I guess I never really “became” a writer, and certainly never decided to. As a 5 year-old, for fun, I wrote stories, and as a 25 year-old, for fun, I’m still writing them.
Playwriting specifically was something I fell into a little more in college, where we had a small and very supportive theatre community on campus, with lots of great opportunities for young writers. I liked playwriting in particular because it was so collaborative. If the process of writing a novel involved getting a bunch of awesome people together and having them laugh and smile and read to you and bring your characters to life every day, I’d probably write more novels. But beyond that, I don’t really think much about genre. I’ve never really seen a difference between them because it all satisfies the same itch in my brain, and the avenue of expression just comes down to whatever suits the story best. My thought process is less about what play I want to write next and more about what story I want to tell next, and once I have that figured out, I ask myself how the story would best be told. If the answer turned out to be a flip book, then my next project would be a flip book.
But it’ll probably be a play.
OOB: Although you are fairly young in terms of your career, you already have two published works as well as many accolades. What advice would you give other writers of plays and musical theatre in terms of achieving early success? Do you have any important stories/lessons you’d like to elaborate on?
SE: The spelling of the word “playwright” confused me for the longest time–why is it not spelled “playwrite”?–until I realized the wisdom of it. We really aren’t writing plays. We’re building them.
Making a career for oneself as a playwright is a lot like constructing a skyscraper-sized brick wall where you have to design the wall yourself, lay every brick with your own two hands, and, oh, also, make the bricks and the mortar from scratch. It’s every bit as methodical and detached from dumb luck as that, it’s every bit as daunting, the daily gains are just as small, the yearly gains are just as relatively large, it’s about as glamorous, and while lots of people will be happy to help, no one’s going to do it for you. As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a “big break” and it’s no use waiting around for one. You hear about that happening for people but you might as well wait to win the lottery.
That said, everyone in theatre is eager to find new talent. We love it. We can’t get enough of it. The catch is that we are all very busy and generally only have time to look for it as far as the room we’re in. (And I don’t mean that figuratively–I mean we literally are only able to look as far as to the corners of whatever room we’re currently occupying). So the bulk of one’s job, in the early stages of one’s career, is to get either oneself or one’s material into the right room, again and again. The good news is that that’s not impossible to do, given the whole six degrees of separation thing, which is actually only maybe two degrees of separation in this case, because the theatre industry’s a lot smaller than the whole entire world.
But like anything else, success in theatre comes down to the long hours, late nights, and good friendships, and is every bit as much about determination, planning, and delayed gratification as any other skilled profession from law to medicine to academia to…you name it. The difference is that in those fields, there is an established path, and as long as you follow it, you’ll probably be fine. In theatre we all make our own way. While that’s certainly scarier, the idea that because of it talent is just found or not found, and either way it’s up to chance, I think is a misconception. Talent eventually bubbles its way to the top in any field, no matter what, and that’s true for playwriting, too. Like Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
OOB: Finally, any plugs/future shows/projects you’ve not discussed already?
SE: Thanks for asking! There’s a lot coming down the pipeline, and still more swimming frantically around the primordial soup of my creative subconscious, but I think we’ve hit the highlights.
There is this one little side project I’ve started working on at night instead of sleeping…it’s called Life Inanimate, and it’s a webcomic! It’s…well, it’s pretty much poking fun at the lives of inanimate things (tautology!), and it’s a lot of fun. Writing comics is a lot like writing micro-plays–it’s all about the dialogue–and I enjoy drawing, so it’s a nice way for me to blend some of my interests in my spare time. You can see for yourself at www.lifeinanimate.com!
Finally, I can’t say enough how much I enjoyed being a part of the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival last year. This festival is first-class in every way, the plays are all terrific, and the people who run this company are incredible. Being a part of the Samuel French community is a dream come true for me. Thank you all so very much!