Artwork By Rob Higley.

About the Play:

On a sticky-sweet summer day after high schooler Luke Hanover shoots himself, two good ol’ Midwestern boys drink beer, shoot guns, and reveal too much. RUNNING TIME: 12 minutes.

We Happy Animals will be presented Saturday, July 23 at 3:00 PM.

About the Author:

ANDREW KRAMER hails from Cleveland, OH and is thrilled to be a returning to the Samuel French OOB Play Fest. His play, A Map of Our Country, was in the final 13 selections of last year’s festival. He was a 2010/11 member of the terraNOVA Collective’s Groundbreaker’s Playwrights Group where he developed his solo-actress, multi-character fable Whales & Souls as well as a 2010 Core Apprentice Writer at the Playwrights’ Center (Minneapolis, MN). His play, The Dog(run) Diaries is a finalist for the New Play Project with Pandora Productions (Louisville, KY) and will have a reading at the Wordsmyth Theatre Company (Houston, TX) later this year. He loves you.

OOB Festival: Where do you come from (home state, state of mind, or both)?

Andrew: I’m originally from Cleveland, Ohio. Which, for the record, totally gets a bad rap. It’s an amazing city for culture, experience, and creation. I mean, c’mon, it gave us the incredible Rajiv Joseph!

OOB Festival: Give us five words that describe who you are as a playwright.

Andrew: Interested in language and responsibility.

(But here’s my fun, avant garde alternative: imagination station, queer rhythm nation.)

OOB Festival: 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?

Andrew: We Happy Animals was written for the terraNOVA Collective’s BUG OUT! benefit for the Groundbreakers Playwrights’ Group, where I was a member last season. It was performed for that event at HERE Arts and then again at BAX in Brooklyn with Piper Theatre Productions as part of The Living Series Festival.

Audience members have called this play the following things: offensive, cruel, erotic, sad, sexy, disgusting. And I agree, it is all of these things and I think it should be. The play addresses things I’m really interested in exploring as a playwright, themes that seem to creep into a lot of my work: “masculinity” (yes, in quotes), low/middle class life in the Midwest, and the links between violence, homoeroticism, and sexuality. Plus, there are shirtless boys, beer drinking, and shooting guns. And of the three, I have a great fondness for the first two.

OOB Festival: What is one thing you hope audiences will take away from your Festival piece?  Is there any information you would like them to know before they watch your work performed?

Andrew: No prior information is necessary, but I would like audiences to think about the sort of collective responsibility we have to the other people in our community, especially young people. Whatever community you belong to or associate yourself with, I think there’s a significant amount of responsibility that goes along with it. This sort of collective conscious was in my mind when I wrote this play. The “We” in the title is a sort of accusation. What happens when we, as a community, allow (or don’t allow) certain things to happen? What are the results and repercussions?

OOB Festival: What/who are some of the major influences on your writing?  What’s the most unconventional place/thing that you’ve taken inspiration from?

Andrew: Naomi Wallace and Christopher Shinn are my two favorite playwrights. I mean, who can top them? Their work is so muscular and bold and strange and beautiful and affects me in such an amazing way I struggle to articulate. Wallace’s The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek and One Flea Spare and Shinn’s Four and Dying City are some of my favorite plays every written. Ever.

I also am a HUGE fan of Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Tony Kushner, Lisa D’Amour, Joshua Conkel, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Leah Winkler, and Lauren Feldman.

Playwright and director Jennifer Blackmer has been a HUGE influence to me; she creates such challenging, innovative, intelligent theatre that’s so necessary right now. Also, Jennifer Conley-Darling and James Carter, the AD’s of the terraNOVA Collective are amazing, supportive, smart, fun, theatrical forces. Also the faculty and students of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Ball State University are stunning; their level of craft, creativity, support, and intelligence cannot be contained in words. Seriously, amazing. Especially chair Bill Jenkins. Do you know him? You should know him.

As for the second part of the question, for some reason, I’m really inspired by animals and nature. I was joking with a friend that I want a company to publish my plays in an anthology and call them THE ANIMAL(s) PLAY(s): The Dog(run) Diaries, Whales & Souls, and We Happy Animals!

OOB Festival: What is your “dream play”–that is, if the more restrictive elements of production (budget, space, casting, and technical elements) were not a consideration, what type of theatre piece would you create?

Andrew: I would create intimate theatre that is highly theatrical without garish Broadway-spectacle that brings together some amazing seasoned actors we call “famous” (Kevin Spacey, Tilda Swinton, Kate Winslet) with the incredible lesser-know actors that perform in cities all over the country but aren’t “household names”. Can you imagine the experiences they could give audiences? The plays would feature heightened-language and surreal elements of magic and horror but remain grounded in honesty and realism without a traditional narrative structure.

And there would be water on stage. Lots of water on stage.

I also think an X-Men musical would be amazing. Forget the recent Broadway-Based-On-A-Famous-Comic-Book-Tragedy and think about how cool it would be to see a bitch belting a ballad while controlling the weather or shooting lasers from the eyes?

OOB Festival: If someone saw you on the street, what’s one fact that they would never guess about you?

Andrew: Hmmmm……this is a tough one, I think there’s a lot they wouldn’t know! Uh…I think they wouldn’t realize how much I love campy horror/Sci-fi movies. Stegosaurus Octopus vs. Landshark Zombie? YES. PLEASE.