About the Play:
In Gun Metal Blue Bar, Ricky needs to get paid for the week and make it to the pawn shop before 8 pm to rescue his dad’s cufflinks, but one final gruesome task stands between him and the money, and the memories of his father that he holds dear.
Produced by:
FUSION Theatre Company is a nine year old 501-c-3 non-profit organization based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is the only producing AEA theatre in the state. FUSION produces the annual short works festival, “The Seven”, which is where “Gun Metal Blue Bar” world-premiered as a winning entry. (FUSIONabq.org).
About the Author:
K. Frithjof Peterson’s plays have been performed in Chicago, DC, New York, Albuquerque and throughout Michigan. He is a recipient of two Frostic Awards in creative writing and a Creative Scholar Research Grant through Western Michigan University. He received FUSION Theatre Company’s 2009 Jury Prize for their annual festival of short works- “The Seven.” His plays have been finalists for The Kennedy Center’s National Ten-Minute Play Award, and the 2010 Heideman Award through Actors Theatre of Louisville. As a drama editor for Third Coast, he published new plays by Jose Rivera as well as numerous emerging playwrights. His play Where the Whandoodle Sings was selected for the 2010 WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory.
K. Frithjof’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?
K. Frithjof Peterson (KFP): I started working on plays when I was living in LA. I was doing some entertainment and television writing when a couple of the actors I knew asked if I would write some short pieces for their theatre company. The collaborative experience was ridiculously rewarding and I started looking for any opportunity I could to continue working in theatre.
The short play going up at here at the Samuel French OOB Festival really feels like a big accomplishment for me as a playwright. In terms of theatricality, one of the indispensable tools playwrights have at their disposal is the ability to really inspire the audience’s imagination to flesh out the larger world of a piece. The fact that this short play seems to really transport people into this unusual world and that the world can feel fairly fleshed out in a relatively short time frame really feels like an accomplishment and has helped streamline some of the longer pieces I’m working on.
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?
KFP: Gun Metal Blue Bar really started out with the closing stage picture involving the fate of the pigeons. There was a wonderful stage metaphor in those closing images and writing the piece was really an exercise in working backwards to find the best way to arrive at that moment.
The inspiration for the play came from some old timers I knew in Michigan who raced pigeons. Their passion for the sport and everything that went into it was very inspiring. They traded all these legends about famous bird pedigrees and loved the work that went into training the birds. It sparked me to do some research on my own.
I hope at the end of the day as unfamiliar as the world of this play may be that it can be boiled down to a fairly simple, yet dysfunctional father/son story. That heart is what grounds the piece.
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?
KFP: I’ve had a pretty successful run with this particular piece. It started out with a concert reading at The Mid-American Theatre Conference in Chicago and I got some really good feedback from the audience. After some significant rewrites and dramaturgical work through KCACTF’s Region III Festival, it was a finalist for the Kennedy Center’s National Ten-Minute Play contest. Through that process the piece really got streamlined before its performance in DC. It was also a finalist for the Heideman Award this past year and received the Jury Prize at Fusion Theatre Company’s “The Seven.” Through all these wonderful opportunities the piece has evolved immensely and after seeing Fusion’s production last summer I feel really good about where it has arrived.
OOB: Tell us a little about your producer? How did you come to form your relationship together?
KFP: Fusion Theatre Company from Albuquerque, NM is producing the piece. They selected the play to receive their annual Jury Prize for their festival of new work “The Seven.” I was really blown away with their work not only on my play but on the other six as well. It’s nice to see so much care and professionalism go into these shorter pieces and it made for a really exciting evening of theatre.
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?
KFP: What got me into theatre was the real sense of community and collaboration that it offers. Last summer I had a full-length play developed through Western Michigan University’s New Play Project. It was seven and a half weeks where the playwrights received two weeks of intense rehearsals on their play and spent the other five weeks doing dramaturgical working for the other playwrights. That development experience really created that sense of community and collaboration that epitomizes all the things that drew me to theatre in the first place. Watching playwrights and actors and directors work on multiple pieces really gave me a well rounded view of each of the artists and a greater appreciation for all of their talents because of the diverse work I got to see them do in a very short period of time.
