About the Play:
A phone develops artificial intelligence and takes over Sam’s love life.
Produced By:
and
About the Author:
Nick Jones is a playwright, director, puppet designer, and performer. Plays include: Jollyship the Whiz-Bang (Ars Nova, The Public Theater) Little Building (Galapagos), Straight Up Vampire: A History of Vampires in Colonial Pennsylvania as Performed to the Music of Paula Abdul (Philly Fringe Festival, other places) The Nosemaker’s Apprentice (The Brick, with Rachel Shukert) and The Colonists, a puppet work for children (Best Puppet Show, L Magazine, 2009). He has also performed music or theater at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, the Dublin Fringe Festival, The Kitchen, P.S. 122, and the Edinburgh Fringe. He has been an artist-in-residence at Galapagos Art Space, the Bowery Poetry Club, Flux Factory, the O’Neil Puppetry Conference, The MacDowell Colony, and at the Hoontown Puppet Festival in Bangkok, and was an inaugural member of Ars Nova Play Group. Other honors include: Best of New York 2008(L Magazine and Gothamist, for Jollyship), Best Music Video (Coney Island Film Festival, 2007) Nomination for Best Show at the Dublin Fringe Festival, and a 2007 grant from the Jim Henson Foundation. In addition, he and partner Raja Azar were deemed “Best Grown Men Who Still Play With Dolls” by the Village Voice in 2009. Nick was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska and earned his Literature/Creative Writing BA from Bard College. He is currently a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellow at Juilliard, where he was a recipient of the fancy sounding Lecomte du Nouy Prize. His play The Coward will premiere at LCT3 this November, and has been optioned for a film by Big Beach. Outstanding commission from Center Theater Group: Homunculus (with Sam Gold, Dave Malloy).
Nick’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?
Nick Jones (NJ): I started writing plays while at Bard College. I was in Bob Holman‘s performance poetry class and I started writing solo performance pieces, in which more and more characters kept appearing. After a certain number of characters, it stops becoming a solo piece, or so I am told. One of my first public performances was in the cafeteria. I got a bunch of actors and musicians together and we launched into a spontaneous musical during dinner. Afterwards, everybody said they liked it, and a girl I was in love with went home with me. So then I started writing more plays. I wrote one every semester. I was always the star. It was a little like Rushmore, except they were always in stupid locations. Finally, the theater department asked me to direct someone else’s play in the actual theater, and it was a disaster, according to them. I think really they were just mad because they found out I wasn’t even a theater major and they shouldn’t have spent any money on me, that I was just some loser ex-poet guy who wrote plays as a way of meeting women. And I have never looked back.
OOB: You’ve worked a lot in puppet theatre and you mention your 7-year stint manning the amazing Jollyship the Whiz Bang. For our readers out there who might have not experienced Jollyship, can you talk a little more about that project? How have your puppet theatre project helped shape your more conventional play, if at all?
NJ: Jollyship the Whiz-Bang is a puppet show that I created with my friend Raja Azar, about a lovable illiterate pedophiliac seafaring murderer named Captain Gregory Clamp. It started as a musical skit we performed in a circus we were helping out in, and grew over the years into one, then several, full length puppet rock musicals. Eventually, Ars Nova offered to produce us, and Sam Gold got involved as director, and we made the “definitive show” that premiered at Ars Nova in 2008. The show is basically a rock band putting on a nautical puppet show. Some people are playing rock music and singing behind a mic while also voicing puppets that other people are handling in other parts of the stage (I am one of those people.) The story is not important, but I will say that there is one, and that I basically learned to write dialogue while working on this project; which is to say I learned to write dialogue by writing it for puppets. I am now trying to un-train myself to write it for real humans, and exploit the richer subtleties of subtext available to characters who can move their faces.
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?
NJ: Originally I wanted to write a full length thriller called Autospell, in which this guy’s phone, as well as anticipating what he’s going to text, begins inferring what he “means to say,” and then begins extrapolating on other decisions he would make “if he had the guts.” Eventually it develops artificial intelligence, like the satellite in the end of the first Star Trek movie. Alternately, I thought the play could be about a refurbished phone that used to belong to a psychopathic murderer, so the autospell would sort of remember what the psycho might text, and “in yr hood” would become “bitch kill blood” or something. In the end, I couldn’t think of how to make either of those premises particularly “stageworthy,” so I did something else.
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?
NJ: I wrote a short play last year that I really liked, so I made a decision to write more short plays this year, and this is one of them. I’m really happy for the chance to see it performed. I like to rewrite everything a lot, but this feels pretty completed. I’m sure once we start rehearsing, I’ll rewrite it completely though. Maybe I’ll go back to that murderer phone idea.
OOB: Tell us a little about your producer? How did you come to form your relationship together?
NJ: Juilliard is the silent producer, and I used their stationary for the cover letter, but actually my company Terrible Baby will be producing. We have been working together since our inception. Lila Neugebauer is directing this, and this is our first project together, so that’s really exciting. I think it’s going to be great. I’m very much an advocate of self-production. Until recently I self-produced everything I wrote. If I hadn’t, none of it would have ever been seen, and I wouldn’t have had any motivation to keep writing plays.
OOB: Since the time you were selected for this festival, you’ve had some exciting news: It was announced that your play The Coward would be produced at Lincoln Center next fall. Can you talk a little bit about that play?
NJ: The Coward is about dueling with pistols in the eighteenth century. Jollyship seemed like a successful show from my perspective, but it only half opened the door for me as a writer. If comedy writers have to sit at the children’s table, as Woody Allen said, then puppet show writers apparently have to eat in the garage. I wrote The Coward quite consciously to look like a play that a playwright would write, so I would look like a playwright for writing it. I think of it as the play Moliere would have written if he had more time, and was me. And apparently, the gambit paid off, because it is already by far my most successful play, and it hasn’t even been produced yet.
That LCT3 is producing this is a mind blowing dream come true. I think maybe they’re confusing it for another play. This play involves a lot of firearms and over the top stage violence. We had our first production meeting recently and I couldn’t even believe I wrote some of things people were talking about realizing on stage. Sam Gold is also directing this and the team he’s put together is pretty incredible, as is the cast, so far (not done casting). I’m VERY VERY excited about The Coward. For better or worse, it is really going to be something to see.
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?
NJ: I spent over 7 years performing in JOLLYSHIP THE WHIZ-BANG, which is a pirate puppet rock show, in weird places all over the world. One of my favorite memories was performing in a giant paper mache clam shell on New Year’s Day in Bangkok. I was wearing a shower cap and my face was painted silver, so it would look like my head was a pearl. And I sung this song about why crabs always go to hell. And halfway through the song, I realized that some stray dog had peed in my clam shell the night before. But I thought to myself, “this is it, right here, I’m living the life—who needs the seventies?—this is fucking REAL. This is not gay, this is PUNK ROCK!”
And that’s what I hope they put on my tombstone.
A Video of Nick’s Jollyship the Whizbang below, during a recent performance at the Public:
