About the Play:
Europeans Kiss on Three Cheeks sports a small gift box containing a disgruntled teenager. Let’s call him Jesus. Perry Como would.
About the Author:
Tom Grady’s plays have been produced by Trinity Repertory Company, The Drama League of New York, Actors Stock Company NYC, The Midtown International Festival and others. American Cocktail won the Clauder Competition and was produced by Actors Stock Company and Trinity Repertory Company. Opposing Roses won the CODAC Award for Playwriting Excellence. Global Village was selected for the Drama League’s New Plays Initiative from Playwrights Horizons’ script library and was directed by Rob Urbinati. Keith Oncale directed it in Dallas for Actors Stock Company. I Love You Virus won Boston’s New Acts Playwriting Slam and was selected for Ashland New Play Festival, Actors Theatre in Santa Rosa, The Boston Theatre Marathon and Creative Mechanics, NYC who published it in STAGE THIS! Mind the Gap was performed at the Brooklyn Working Artists’ Coalition, Cuchipinoy Productions, Culture Park as well as the Midtown International Festival. He studied dramaturgy under Oskar Eustis and served as story consultant to David Henry Hwang. He has directed theater in Boston, Providence and Cape Cod, and has been in residence at Yaddo, Byrdcliffe and other artist colonies. He has also written three screenplays.
Europeans Kiss on Three Cheeks was first staged at Culture Park’s Short Play Marathon. It has since gone on to be a finalist in the Tennessee Williams One-Act Play Contest.
Tom’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?
Thomas Grady (TG): I wrote my first play after college, and it won a big award. I attribute being in a state of overstimulation ever since. I carry a glimmer of hope that my voice has a place with audiences ever since Geoffrey Rush said in his Tony acceptance speech, “existential absurdist tragicomedy rocks.”
I would say my proudest accomplishments are the inestimable contributions from a slew of tireless collaborators. Good people pulling all-nighters hammering sets together. Wakening to a 5 AM phone call from a Cajun director reading the rave review of a risky premier. Awards are great and forward your career, but making an audience laugh and cry (in the right places) and the relationships you forge are where it’s at.
OOB: You’ve mentioned that EUROPEANS KISS ON THREE CHEEKS is something of an existential absurdist tragicomedy – can you explain more about what that means to some of our readers who might be new to playwriting?
TG: Yikes. Well, far more learned minds than I have defined this with wicked deepitude, but here goes: this type of theater explores the vain pursuit of meaning when that pursuit is outside of the self. So, if you believe that most, if not all, social institutions are predicated on oppression and exclusion, then looking to those institutions for meaning makes for great folly. So, theatrically, it can be really funny and really sad.
OOB: Did you ever write in a more conventional (non-absurdist) style? How did your current style of writing come to be?
TG: I read and saw many plays in high school, and was blown away, especially by the Greeks. That sounds dirty. Anyway, I felt they told all the tales that we’re seeing today, mashed up in some form or another. I found that I would get hung up when attempting drama since I’d recall better writers who trafficked in similar themes and plots, whereas with comedy or tragi-comedy, I felt more original. I was commissioned by Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre to write a “straight” drama called Blood Makes Noise which centered around the real unsolved murder of a young girl. Reading the transcript of the trial of a man accused of the murder was sobering and made me feel like anything I did with this would result in her exploitation. I made this the focus of the play, since the conventional approaches (detective, trial) seemed worn out. Admittedly the results were mixed, so I returned to making fun of stuff.
OOB: Talk about some of the artistic influences on your work. Is there a particular performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art that has had an impact on the way you approach your plays?
TG: My family is very funny. So are Aristophanes, Albee, Ionesco, and early Sam Shepard. Any work associated with Philip Glass in the eighties was deeply influential. Currently, Robert Lepage and Complicite never cease to inspire. As for this particular play, I’ve been obsessed with this old postcard and felt compelled to dramatize it. The films, Distant Voices, Still Lives and Grey Gardens are in there. So’s Amy Sedaris and Dawn French. There are liberal doses of Maude, Unitarians and William Faulkner, too. Since I wrote the play for the three actors performing it, their stage work inspired me as well.
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?
TG: I don’t trust history. Any of it. I doubt everything unless I’m experiencing it, and given my quixotic state of mind, even that’s up for grabs. The play is pastiche of everything that is true right now: A 1991 postcard, my grandmother’s testament to her love of her demented husband, the texture of vinyl records, godlessness.
As a means of staving off a lifelong battle with insomnia, I opportune the window of consciousness usually ascribed to the transition to sleep as a way to play out theater ideas and dialogue in my head, the rigor of which usually wrings out a few gems and then loud snoring. This play’s particular comic nature resulted in a number of slumber-intended moments being interrupted by sudden outbursts of laughter. This did not sit well with my partner. Things worsened when, after the Tourette’s-like guffaws, he’d watch as I’d stumble away from the bed to scribble down a few notes, snickering to myself. We had a little chat after that.
I’d like to take away a really great time. I’d like people to laugh. I’d like to provoke people to drop their dependence in believing in the certainty of things. I’d like to feel acknowledged, affirmed and inspired to keep writing. I’d like to meet lots of nice people.
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?
TG: Culture Park had encouraged me to submit a play for their annual Short Play Marathon last year. I’ll be watching and listening with the objective of expanding this to a full-length evening at the theater. I’d like to see Jesus apply to Catholic school. I’d like Mother Knuckles’s excessive wheelchair showboating to result in speed bumps being installed in her apartment. I’d like Merv Griffin to rise from the dead. I think Child Protective Services should be involved, don’t you?
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?
TG: Culture Park is committed to proving Oskar Eustis’s axiom that, “all theater is local.” Often, when deliberating over the roster of plays for their annual marathon, they will advocate for those playwrights whose roots in the community (New Bedford, MA and its environs) may slightly outweigh their finesse as writers. For instance, every year a fellow in his 90’s proffers a typed manuscript for consideration. His acceptance call is always answered by his wife. The ensuing delay between her, “Hold on, he’s in the next room,” and his arrival to the phone is interminably sweet.
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?
TG: Got a million of these.
Was I ten? Yes, ten. I just scored my first plumb acting role as young Patrick in Mame for a local community theater. The Mame in this production was loathed by most cast members and for good reason. She was a nasty bitch diva who pitched fits regularly. I recall that this didn’t upset me; rather, I’d sit in awe of her wretchedness as she’d caterwaul and flip out on a regular basis and think, she’s no worse than anyone in my family. Play on! I’d catch some flak from her on occasion, but please, I was Irish growing up with four sisters, and a mom who threw down with store clerks, Jehovah’s Witnesses and my exasperated principal on a regular basis. It was my mom who taught me how to upstage her by holding out my hand and turning her back to the audience during a key scene. This Mame promised to “break my ass” if I did it again. So I did. We sang our duet “My Best Girl” through gritted teeth that night. That year they waived the tradition of giving the lead actress a bouquet of roses on opening night curtain call. Weeks later, after a few Schlitz, my father told me it would make a great musical and said I should write it. “How’s this for a title, son: She Got No Roses.” Oh and she did not break my ass. No one did.
