About the Play:
In The Magician and the Memory, a man with quintuplets, a leaky roof, and a querulous wife builds a large box in his living room with the intention of escaping from his life forever.
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 “The Magician and the Memory” world-premiered as a winning entry. (FUSIONabq.org).
About the Author:
Michael Vukadinovich is a writer living in Los Angeles and is very excited to be in NY. He is the recipient of the Samuel Goldwyn Screenwriting Award, the Reverie Productions Next Generation Playwriting Competition, the Tim Robbins Playwriting Award for Plays of Social Significance, and the Gloria Peter Award for Historical Plays. His work has been produced or developed with Reverie Productions (NY), Overlap Productions (NY), Moving Arts (LA), Playwright’s Arena (LA), The Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble, The Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum (LA), the Ensemble Studio Theatre (LA), Fusion Theatre Company (Albuquerque), the Orlando Shakespeare Theater, and internationally at The Serbian National Theatre, PLUS Teatar, and Edinburgh Fringe Festival. His play Billboard is published by Samuel French.
Michael’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?
Michael Vukadinovich (MV): I became a playwright for the money and respect of critics. I realize now it was all a horrible mistake. I wrote my first my play, called Even Hitler Wrote a Book, as an undergraduate student in a beginning playwriting class and I thought it was a blast. The professor, Kelly Younger, was really encouraging and I loved creating dialogue. I was interested in writing at the time, and wrote horrible short stories and poems, but when I took that class I felt like I had found a medium I enjoyed and could do well. I had the opportunity to stage and direct the play a little later and the whole experience was really amazing and rewarding, even though I had no clue what I was doing. I love the immediacy of an audience, unless of course they’re not liking the play.
That was about seven years ago. Since then some of my favorite accomplishments as a playwright are taking a play to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, being produced at the Serbian National Theater, and having a play done off-Broadway.
OOB: Michael, this is your second year as part of the OOB Festival. Where has life taking you over the past year? Do you have any news or information about new works?
MV: First off, I can’t believe it’s already been a year. That seems insane but I’m thrilled to be in the festival again. I had so much fun last year.
Since then, I’ve had three full-length plays premiere in Los Angeles – two by the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble and the other at Son of Semele. So a lot of the year has been getting plays ready for production, rewriting and rehearsing. Making the plays work on stage seemed to be just as big of a process as writing them and making them work on paper in the first place, but I love the collaborative nature of theater and feel like I learned so much about writing from the directors, designers and actors I worked with. Now that those are all done I’m really excited to start working on some new ideas. I also just found out I am one one of the winners of the Mario Fratti-Fred Newman Political Play Contest in New York so I’m very excited to come back in August for a reading of the play. And I’ve started to work more in film and television, including writing an animation project and developing a television project for Starz.
And most importantly, I got a basset hound puppy named Homer.
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?
MV: I wrote this play because I had never written a 10-minute play before and there are so many production opportunities for them, as well as being a new challenge. So I figured it was time to write one. It’s really hard to tell a complete story in 10 minutes and the whole play becomes about one moment. I don’t know if there was a particular inspiration for the play other than I wanted to have two characters, a man and a wife, one of whom desperately believes in magic and the other who doesn’t, both go through a magical experience. Being a short play about imagination and magic, I hope the audience believes it for a moment.
OOB: This is your first 10 minute play. As someone who has written in a lot of forms, can you talk about your experience penning this work? What are some of the difference in terms of the way you approached the script? What were some of the challenges? What did you enjoy the most about the ten minute play form?
MV: This was my first ten-minute play, but I really enjoy the form. I think because you jump in and out of a world so quickly and only need to sustain the audience’s attention for a short time that the 10-minute play is a great way to experiment and take risks. In a way, because it’s short and contained, you can be bigger and bolder.
A great example is Beckett and what he could do in just a few pages. So many of his most amazing plays are less than even 5 pages. So I guess I feel more freedom in writing shorter plays.
The challenge is, of course, that it’s really hard to tell a story in 10 pages of dialogue and I already tend to overwrite. But I figured out that with a full-length you try and build to a dramatic scene that the whole play hinges on, and with a ten-minute play you’re doing the same thing, only it’s a single dramatic moment you’re building to that the play hinges on.
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?
MV: It was first produced by the Fusion Theater Company in Albuquerque, which has a great annual ten minute play festival called The Seven. I wasn’t able to attend rehearsals or see the production because I was in LA so I’m happy to be able to be part of this production. I’m sure things in the script will change as we start to rehearse and get it on its feet. I’m working with really talented people who are very good at making my work better than I wrote it and telling me what’s not working. So if it’s not good in the end I’ll blame them.
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?
MV: I’m producing with Red Tie Productions, which is a group of actors, directors, designers and writers with a similar aesthetic who I went to school with. We’ve produced new plays in Los Angeles, New York and Edinburgh. So we’re pretty much self-producing it as a group. Self-producing is really hard and expensive but you get a lot more control over your work and get to collaborate with the people you want to be working with, plus no one pays their credit cards anymore anyway. The thing that’s nice about being part of a producing team like this as a writer is that it feels a lot more involved and active as opposed to just sending off a script in the mail and waiting months to hear anything back, which can be really frustrating, even though I do pride myself on my large stack of rejection letters.
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?
MV: One of my favorite experiences was traveling to Novi Sad, Serbia to see a play of mine performed at the Serbian National Theatre in Serbian, which I don’t speak. It’s a really strange experience to see your work performed in a language you don’t understand. I remember trying to follow along and hoping people were laughing at the right times. It seemed to go well but I couldn’t really tell. Who knows? Maybe they were all laughing at the serious moments. But I remember after the show, walking around backstage in these huge, dark old theaters and seeing these disassembled, dusty sets from different eras. My director explained to me that in Serbia plays don’t run every night for a few weeks and then close, but rather run only a couple times a month, a few months a year, and run for years and years. Often they run so long cast members die and are replaced, and in some cases none of the original casts are alive, but the play keeps going. It becomes this bigger thing and I thought that was really fantastic. This sort of multi-generational experience. And then I really hoped people were laughing at the right parts during my play since it might go on for years. There’s something nice about closing.
