About the Play:
In A Different Kind of Animal, Teddy and Kat have finally sucked it up and moved in together, but there’s a problem: they are not alone. As they attempt to rid themselves of what appears to be a terrible rodent infestation, they find they may be forced exterminate another kind of animal entirely.
About the Author:
Thomas Higgins is the author of many short plays, including The Blasphemy Tree (Naked Angels Lab), The Family Dungeon (Columbia Arts Initiative), The Home Front (Columbia University Arts Initiative), The Wild Life (Source Theatre) and The Dying Breed (Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival Winner 2008).His full-length plays, This Modern House, The Elephant Party, and The Home Maker have been nominated for the L. Arnold Weissberger Award at Williamstown and the Cherry Lane Mentor project. He graduated cum laude from Northwestern University and just received his MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University on the Dean’s Fellowship. Current projects include: The Fun House (a short film); Chaos Theory (a new musical featured in ARS NOVA’s ANT FEST 2009); and Wild Animals You Should Know (a new play, which will be work shopped this summer at the Ojai Playwrights Conference).
Thomas’ Forty Days to Forty Plays Interview:
OOB Festival (OOB): Tell us a little about your playwriting career. When did you start writing plays? What are some of your proudest accomplishments as a playwright?
Thomas Higgins (TH): I was training to be an actor when I fell into playwriting. I think that happens to a lot of people—you start with other people’s words, until you find your own. And as an actor, you’re told—or at least I was—that you have to have all of these monologues prepared and ready to go. This is how you audition in school and, you’re told, how you’ll audition once you’re out of it. But there’s just only so many out there to learn. And few that are stand-alone enough to be of any use. So one semester, we were encouraged to write our own, and I just kind of went overboard with it, and it never really stopped. Everyone else brought in a paragraph and I had, like, pages. The ironic part is: I’m not sure anyone has ever actually asked me to perform a “monologue” since I moved to New York. So the fact that I got started writing plays because of some obsolete acting requirement is, well…telling of my acting career, I guess.
As far as accomplishments go, I’m notorious for being dissatisfied with myself, like, hours after any victory. It’s a kind of preservationist flaw that I’ve never been able to shake. But I think—and this is going to sound stupid, but—I think I’m most proud about what I’m writing right now. And I kind of think that’s enough. I mean, just finishing a play sometimes is worth celebrating. And I really hope people get to see the ones I’m working on now.
OOB: Talk about your entry to this year’s festival. How did you come to write this play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation? What do you hope festival audience will take from your play?
TH: It’s funny, in the last year or two, my approach to playwriting has shifted a lot. In that, I went from trying to write “The play”—you know, the one that you think will somehow mean “you’ve arrived”; like, “Where have you been? We’re so glad you made it! Here’s a production; and a Pulitzer!”—to simply trying to write plays that stand a chance of me getting to see them. What I mean to say is: when you’re locked in a room with yourself for too long (like I was for my first year out of grad school) you start to forget that people actually have to do the thing you’re writing. So when I saw the deadline for Samuel French approaching this year I thought: I’m gonna ask two actor friends to tell me about a character they’d like to play, and I’m gonna write that play for them. A long weekend later, I’d written this one.
As far as the subject matter is concerned, I lived in a loft in Brooklyn for two years that was quite seriously infested by rats. And as a last resort, I and my roommates were forced to hunt them with an airgun I’d bought at Walmart. I can still remember feeling very alone and very helpless about the whole thing—like I was being called upon to, I don’t know…fight for something; and in doing so, was forced to access some ugly part of myself to get the job done. I’ve killed four rats; one with a crowbar. It wasn’t pretty. Anyway, I think it’s safe to say I’ve been haunted by that experience for some time, but I’ve always hoped that someday I’d find a way to use it. So, in strange way, this is a very personal play. And I hope, for the audience, that that part of the play resonates. Not the crowbar part; but the fear part. The fear of the unknown; of the animal. The part that says: you know what? It’s okay to be scared. Because sometimes shit is terrifying.
OOB: What is the history of your festival entry? Do you plan to hone and further develop the play in upcoming rehearsals? Has it already been produced?
TH: This is a brand new play, so we’re making history as we go, I guess. But since it was written for two very specific people, my hope is to continue to tweak it toward their strengths. I’ve written some moments that may or may not be a stretch, so now it’s about us all meeting in the middle, so that they can make it their own. There’s also a visual element, in the end, which is kind of new territory for me—I’m usually a “put it all in the lines” kind of guy—so I’m really excited to see how we can actualize something that, on the page right now, is a little abstract.
OOB: Tell us a little about your producer? How did you come to form your relationship together? If you are self-producing, please talk a little about that process—have you ever mounted your own work before?
TH: My producer, Dean Carpenter, is a wonderful theatre artist and a fellow Columbia grad. We’ve worked together in the past and he’s always been a champion of my work—even when we were producing little one-offs at school. He actually—it’s funny—he actually agreed to produce this play sight unseen, as I was a little last minute with the application procedure and wanted to focus on the play right down to the deadline—god, why do we always do that? I say this, however, because that’s the kind of producer you want in your corner—someone who believes in the work before they’ve even seen it. Having self-produced before—which is important, I think, for every playwright to experience mounting your own work—I’m very excited this time around to have a collaborator who’s far more experienced a nd professional than I am on that front.
OOB: Looking back over your personal history in the theatre, what emerges as your favorite memory? Is there a particular story you’d like to share?
TH: Well, since I’m on the subject of working with friends, I think one of my favorite memories so far—and I swear I wasn’t paid to say this—was made while participating in the Sam French festival two years ago. One of the set-pieces for my play—which was an otherwise very minimally designed play—was this park bench we’d borrowed from the Atlantic Theater —I actually have no idea where it is now, so I hope they don’t read this—and because we were interested in being authentic, it was extremely heavy—like over a hundred pounds, easy. Anyway, after the show my director and I were told to make our way to the bar for the results of the evening but we had this enormous bench we had to carry and no place to store it. And what’s more, no time to make it to the Atlantic and get back for the party. One of my friends suggested we just take it to the bar with us, so that’s what we did. And I have this amazing image still in my head, of this train of excited young theatre people (some from the show, some not) marching toward the Hudson, with this enormous bench—which probably looked stolen—but nevertheless, this thing that my play had just taken place on. I mean, it was still a prop in my mind, and now it was being paraded around the city. Like: hooray for this bench! Or something. And we took pictures with it, and sat in the middle of 10th Avenue with it, and put it next to other real benches because, I don’t know, it seemed funny at the time. And I suppose it’s not that significant, but to eventually show up at this bar, with this bench, and the people you love—it’s this weird reminder that the play—that theatricality, really—doesn’t end when the curtain drops and the house-lights come up. When you’re working with friends, it’s all play.
See Thomas Higgins, director Jimmy Maize, and producer Dean Carpenter’s Samuel French OOB Festival video interview:
Thomas Higgins (playwright, A DIFFERENT KIND OF ANIMAL) talks with producer Dean Carpenter and director Jimmy Maize about their play, as they prepare for the upcoming Samuel French OOB Festival.
