About the Author:

Trey Tatum was raised on the Alabama Gulf Coast where he received much acclaim on the stage as Olympic Traveler #3 in his third grade play. He now enjoys a more comfortable role offstage as a playwright and composer. He received a BA in theatre arts from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in playwriting at The Actors Studio Drama School/Pace University in Manhattan. His plays have been performed throughout Alabama, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York City. As a composer, his music has received performances in Alabama, Tennessee, New York City, Pennsylvania and Prague. His full-length play The River Valeo will be presented this August as part of the 14th Annual New York International Fringe Festival.  He is currently in Washington DC for the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive. He now lives in beautiful, boring Jackson Heights, NY.  

About the Play:

In Black Meat, on an unexpected Mother’s-Day-Out, parent and child stand divided by their ideals, what they want for the future and a tub of ice cream.

Trey’s 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?

Trey Tatum (TT): South Baldwin Community Theatre is this tiny community theatre in Gulf Shores, Alabama where I grew up. When I was in the ninth grade I played Ezekiel Cheever the town douchebag from The Crucible. Shortly after that, someone mentioned that the theatre was looking to do a kids show written by kids. Three friends and I had the script finished within the week. I always thought that I really wanted to be an actor and that I wrote to fill the void in opportunities for myself. I was wrong. I hate acting. I much prefer the backstage realm.Proudest moment? …My first full-length was this historical play about a hurricane that tore my hometown apart in 1906. I had the granddaughter of one of the survivors come up to me after a production and tell me how accurate my portrayal was. Getting to sit and talk about a man I had researched but never met was an amazing experience.

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?

TT: My Uncle Emmett grew up on a farm in Cullman, Alabama – which at the time was the Strawberry Capital of the World. Anyway, one day he went down to the crick for a swim and was gone all day. When he came back up his family had packed up and moved out, leaving him and his Father behind. His dad was a drunk and my uncle assumed that his family forgot him in their hurry to run off.

Years later he reconnected with a brother and sister who corroborated his thoughts, claiming that by the time they realized Emmett wasn’t there, it was too late to turn back. He managed to reconstruct healthy relationships with his siblings. On his brother’s deathbed, his brother tells him that his family had left him intentionally – someone had to look after Dad and the farm.

This story has always captivated me but I’ve been unable to interpret it dramatically. An early draft dealt with a brother’s confession in a hospice care situation. Slowly it augmented to the characters as they are now. I hope I’ve done Uncle Emmett justice.

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?

TT: This is a play that I wrote back in 2008 and revised a lot last year. It’s had a previous production at a theatre out in New Jersey but not one that I was involved in. This is the only one-act that Bridget Leak, my director, and I haven’t work-shopped together. I’m very excited to see how the story tightens, evolves and grows as a result of intense rehearsing, investigating, rewriting… the whole works.

The real benefit of the relationship that Bridget and I share is that the hard work has already been done. We’ve worked so extensively together that the common language is in place. I know how she works, she knows my process – making the play better becomes effortless in some ways. I’ll cut a line in a rehearsal and she’ll lean over and say, ‘I knew you were going to cut that four rehearsals ago – I’ve been waiting you out.’ Actors will have questions about ways in which the script augments and Bridget tells them, ‘just go along with it – this is how Trey works.’ Maybe it helps that we’re dating…

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?

TT: Self-producing is a bitch! Bridget and I were talking last year about the challenges post-grad school and segueing from doing shows in the school’s black box to mounting full productions on our own was our largest concern. Since October of last year we’ve self-produced four productions: three one-acts and a full-length reading. Thank God, because it was a steep learning curve in some aspects and I’m glad to have them behind me at this point.

I feel like we’re going into OOB with a game plan and enough experience to say, ‘We got this. Our cast rocks, they’re totally receptive and they have great insight – this is a piece of cake.’ A full-length of mine just got accepted to FringeNYC (the day after I got my acceptance from Sam French). I think that’s the next HUGE uphill battle. BRING IT!

OOB: Congrats on your NYFringe acceptance; you have a very busy summer! Can you tell us a bit about your Fringe play? When will that be up and running?

TT: My full-length-ish play (75 minutes… almost) The River Valeo opens sometime in late August. One of my secret loves is reading old issues of National Geographic and this one had this tiny article on a town in Italy that had been submerged when the government built a dam for power. Every decade or so they drain the man-made lake for maintenance and people are allowed to visit their old homes. Being from the South, we had to learn about the Tennessee Valley Authority every year in school and I knew that they did that a lot. So I thought, what if a runaway had the chance to come home and all that was left was a specter of her hometown, her childhood home, her family?

OOB: Your bio says you compose as well. Please talk a little about your composition career. How do you find that being a musician affects your approach to playwriting? Do you ever write music for your plays? Musicals?

TT: My neighbor growing up was this older woman who lived by herself. Her name was Ellen Hammett. She was raised on an Indian reservation where her Father was principal of the schools (Her Indian name was Rainey because of how much she cried as a child) and so her house was full of rattlesnake rattles, cow skins, tomahawk heads – the coolest place for a sixth grader to hang out. I don’t really remember how it came up but one day she offered to give me free piano lessons.

She had a baby grand in her living room and I said, ‘yeah, sure.’ So for the next three or four years I spent every afternoon from when I got off the bus until eight at night at her house. One day we’d have piano lessons, the next day she would teach me about classical music and theory and the next day I’d learn how to make perfect vodka martinis. My piano skills suck today because at one point she figured out that I liked to write music and said, ‘forget learning how to play, let’s teach you how to write.’ I still compose when I get the chance, I wrote a musical for my senior thesis in college (book, music and lyrics – I don’t know what I was thinking), I’ve composed music for a variety of straight plays (usually not my own… just not enough hours) and wrote book and co-lyrics for a new musical with Bobby Cronin for Step Theater Company that had a workshop back in March. It’s shocking but my playwriting habits are identical to my composing habits, from collaborating with directors to how I clue in creatively and on down the line. The only difference for me is that the instant I finish a new play my first thought is, ‘Okay, when do I get to stage this thing,’ whereas with composing it’s the total opposite. I’ll finish a song and think, ‘That’s enough,’ – total contentment. Currently, my little brother and I are writing a musical about the end of world as seen from back-woods Alabama in 1996. He’s a better writer and composer than me so it’s pretty exciting.

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?

TT: I played James in a student production of Children of a Lesser God when I was in college. The director picked the play because his Mother was a teacher at the Alabama School of the Deaf and Blind. He had a foreign exchange student living with him and his family, a girl named Jonna (Yawn-ah). We developed a close relationship for the time that she was in America and having the opportunity to get to know her and to be able to communicate with her was an opportunity I wouldn’t trade for anything. I drove her from Birmingham to Troy, Alabama for a Track meet and along the way she asked why I wasn’t listening to music. I told her I didn’t want to insult by listening to something she couldn’t experience with me. She turned on the stereo. Nina Simone’s Sinnerman was playing and Jonna could tell that the song was singer, piano and drums from the vibrations. Truly amazing! I wouldn’t recommend driving and signing though. Not on Alabama interstates anyway.