About the Play:
A little girl whose single mother has been deployed overseas is visited by a cantankerous Irish fairy:. Has he come to keep the lonely child company … or to steal her soul?
About the Author:
James McLindon’s play, Comes a Faery, has been selected for the 2010 O’Neill Playwrights Conference. He is currently in residence at CAP21 in New York developing his play, Salvation (formerly, Saving Grace), which will be produced there in 2010-11. His other plays have been developed and/or produced at theaters such as the Abingdon, hotINK Festival, Irish Repertory, Lark Play Development Center, the Estrogenius Festival, Penguin Repertory, Emerging Artists Theatre, Love Creek Productions, and HRC Showcase Theatre in New York; Crossing the Divide Festival in the West End of London; Victory Gardens, Prop Thtr, and Stage Left in Chicago; Lyric Stage and Boston Playwrights Theatre in Boston; Colony Theatre, Theatricum Botanicum, Grove Theatre Center, and Circus Theatricals in Los Angeles; PlayPenn Conference, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, the Arkansas Rep in Little Rock, and the Ashland New Plays Festival in Oregon. His plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing and Level 4 Press.
James’ 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?
James McLindon (JM): I started writing plays in Chicago right after college. I then detoured through law school and practiced law for a while, but found that I still wanted to write, so I came back to it a few years ago. (Turns out, being a part-time lawyer is a great day job.) Proudest accomplishments: any opening night; having my first play nominated for a Joseph Jefferson citation for best new play; being named a finalist for the Heideman Award and the Kaufman and Hart Prize for New American Comedy; having a play selected this year for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.
OOB:Your background in law seems a little unusual for a playwright; can you talk a little more about your transition from lawyer to playwright? Are there any odd places where you find both careers overlapping? How has your experience in law informed your plays, if at all?
JM: I’ve actually transitioned in both directions. I wrote plays before I went to law school and very much enjoyed it, but felt that I needed to live a little more before I really had something that I wanted to say. So, law school. I kept writing while a lawyer — speeches, short humorous pieces, magazine articles – but never really got theater out of my system. Finally, I reached the point where I realized that, if I didn’t try to go back to playwriting soon, I never would. I still practice law on a part-time basis. It’s a pretty great day job in that it makes my day very left-brain, right-brain. When I wear out one side, I do the work that requires the other. I think legal practice has informed my work somewhat. I was a litigator and to depose someone well or to effectively examine them at trial, to really figure out what about their version of events makes sense and what doesn’t, you have to understand human nature, just as you do when writing a play. Oddly, one is good training for the other.
OOB: Congratulations on being accepted into the O’Neill’s summer playwright’s conference! Can you tell us a little more about your conference selection and what you hope to gain from the O’Neill experience?
JM: I hope to greatly improve my play for starters and I’m looking forward to their process. Coincidentally, the play that I have at the O’Neill, under the title of Comes a Faery, grew out of my play at the OOB, Knuckleheads. In fact, Knuckleheads more or less is the first scene of the full-length version.
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 the festival audience will take from your play?
JM: For a long time I’ve wanted to write a play about an Irish fairy in contemporary America, probably since the time I read about claimed sightings of fairies in New York by Irish Immigrants in the 19th century. And not Disneyfied fairies, but the dark, capricious, dangerous fairies of unfiltered folklore. What took me a while was finding the right contemporary story with which to pair the fairy. I’ve long been interested in the cost of war to those left behind and particularly the difficulties faced by single parent and other non-traditional parents. When I found a way to combines all these disparate elements, Knuckleheads was the result.
What I hope the audience will take from Knuckleheads is an appreciation of the stress and, in some cases, trauma that war inflicts on the children of our soldiers.
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?
JM: The play has not yet been produced. I wrote the play about a year ago as an exercise in my attempt to find the right story for the fairy that I wanted to write about. Knuckleheads received a reading at Ledig House International Writers Residency in New York last fall as well as a staged reading as part of the Humble Play: Appalachian New Play Festival where it was a “Pick of the Festival.” While the play is complete in itself, I’m happy to say that, out of it has come a full-length play entitled Comes A Faery that received a reading at the id Theater’s Bridgeworks Play Reading Series last November and will be developed at the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference this summer.
I’m sure I’ll make changes, both because the play is fairly new and because it’s hard not to tinker. In fact, when I found out Laying Off had been selected, I read it through for the first time in a while and immediately began making changes. Also, the play has some comedy as well as darkness to it, and so, until I get to see it in front of an audience once or twice, I know I’ll have work to do to get the balance between those two elements just right.
OOB: Please talk about the process of self-producing.
JM: I am self-producing, at least at the moment, although that might change. I’ve done this a couple of times before and the key, I think, is finding a good director who both gets the piece and gets deeply involved in it. After that, while it’s still a lot of work, the heavy lifting is behind you.
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?
JM: My first play, which I wrote with Scott Burris, was a comedy that clocked in at nearly three hours at our first preview – then and still, I think, the longest comedy ever written. (Who knew about one-minute-a-page?) We realized that we had to take close to an hour off the running time between that night and the opening, just one preview and 48 hours away. And so we began, right there on the stage while the theater producing the play held a noisy debate about whether to pull their name off the production. (They didn’t.) We cut scenes, we moved scenes around, we prayed that no one in the cast would enter and begin a scene which was no longer in the script, we prayed they wouldn’t kill us. Miraculously, it all came together on opening night and left us all with a much greater sense of energy and camaraderie than any flawless set of previews could. But I don’t recommend this approach.