About the Play:
Two friends must confront the truth about themselves and each other as the rising sun reveals their future.
Produced By:
About the Author:
Mark Snyder’s plays include As Wide As I Can See, Lila Cante, The Beanbag Game, Lilith on Today, and The Sounds of Ice, as well as many one-acts and shorter plays. His latest play, A Decent Stretch, will premiere this fall in New York. For three summers, he hosted and performed in Red Light Nights at New York’s The Slipper Room (Firecracker Productions). His plays have been produced and developed in Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, and Minneapolis. His interviews and essays have appeared in Queerty, ThePeeq, and at Maud Newton.com, and he has read new work at Pete’s Candy Store (courtesy of the2ndHand.com) and throughout downtown NYC. BA, Otterbein College. MFA, Ohio University. Mark was born in Warren, Ohio and can be found at www.facebook.com/markbsnyder.
Mark’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?
Mark Snyder (MS): Oh, mine’s that familiar tale. I was a bookish kid living in Midwest Ohio in the 80s and early 90s: sports ruled our town, and any theatrical culture to speak of could be found in community theaters (my performance as Tim in Noises Off is infamous) and the public library. I started reading Shakespeare and reading Agatha Christine plays and reading Tennessee Williams, and then I found the collected plays of Edward Albee when I was twelve, and my views about the world were forever altered. I realized I could combine my brainy side with this formidable and theatrical personality. The theater grounded me in many ways and gave my youthful energy some focus.
My first original play was a murder mystery set in science lab (picture 8th graders dragging each other around through secret passages), but I didn’t start REALLY working until I was a sophomore in college and my teacher (the great Dr. Jim Bailey at Otterbein College) told me I had talent and I needed to respect it. I’ve been writing plays ever since.
My proudest accomplishment thus far is the discipline of sitting down in the chair every day and writing. No matter what the successes and struggles continue to be, it always comes back to that simple routine. It’s the only way to make any sort of significant progress as a writer, I find.
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?
MS: Wipe Away started as a ten-minute play, written during my first semester of graduate school. I’ve known a lot of girls like Gina in my life (particularly in Ohio), and I once snuck off on my own during a class trip to Niagara Falls, and this play sprang out of that experience of wandering about and tasting the thrill (and terror) of freedom. I also tend to write about about people who feel like visitors in their own lives, and this pair is definitely at one end of that spectrum, waiting for (what they think will be) their lives to start. And I think audiences will identify with how they feel and respond to each other – as the specifics of their circumstances are slowly revealed.
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?
MS: Wipe Away has been produced in several different versions: the 10-minute was produced in graduate school, and a slightly expanded version was produced at the Bailiwick Theater in Chicago in 2003. But this will be the premiere of this final version of the play – I feel like it’s taken me this long to really dig as deep as I could to find the truth behind these characters and their story. Their relationship is much more complicated and strange now, but the essential facts about them has remained very simple and pure. Plus, I’m working on my new play A Decent Stretch (which will appear in New York this fall) at the same time, so it’s really been really interesting to seesaw back and forth between these characters and brand-new ones. My relationship to this play is a specific one, and I’m really looking forward to celebrating it on a New York stage.
OOB: Mark, we’d love to hear a little more about the upcoming A Descent Stretch. Who is producing this play and what is it about?
MS: A Decent Stretch is a dark and funny play about a self-stylized guru who decides to start helping other people realize their best selves to mark her 50th birthday, and proceeds to wreak havoc over two other women even as her own life is imploding around her. The play is about this current climate of over-sharing in the media and the self-victimization culture. The play was inspired by a bunch of different manifestos and scandals, and the characters are based on many women I know in my life who celebrated their fifth decade with a very different sort of energy and life-philosophy than their sixth – and I’m always thinking: “What happens during that decade that causes this shift?” The play is in part to answer that question (and others) as well as give three actresses some really great characters (who are not the mother/daughter role or the bitch who stirs stuff up) to play. I was very conscious about that when I was writing it. Nick Leavens, who is working with me on Wipe Away, directed a reading of the play in May, and there will be a staged reading this September for At Hand Theatre (www.athandtheatre.com), where I am an artistic associate. I also have another play poking around as well called As Wide As I Can See …
OOB: Tell us a little about your producer? How did you come to form your relationship together?
MS: Nick is producing the play through his company The Claque, and I couldn’t be more thrilled for us to be finally working together! Nick and I see a lot of theater together, and our post-show conversations are always lively and near-combative. We approach theater in such different ways, and I’m always fascinated by what he has to say. I’ve self-produced a bit, and I definitely prefer to just be the writer during the process of putting on a play, and focusing on the text and its relationship to all the other elements. My favorite part of working with a team is seeing what the designers come up with — I learn so much from those perspectives. In fact, the first person who encouraged me to keep working on this play was the original sound designer, Matthew Given.
OOB: You’ve already started rehearsals for Wipe Away—how has the production process been thus far?
MS: I think the rehearsal process is going pretty well – Nick and I found two great young actors for the roles of Travis and Gina, and both are working with such focus. I rewrote a significant part of the script now twice, so there have been lots and lots of changes — which is both exciting and grueling (I’m sure) for them — but I think we are making progress. Nick and I have also been using this opportunity to collaborate with lots of outside artists on this project, including designer Eric Beauzay (who’s working miracles with our shoestring budget), filmmaker Dan Murphy and singer-songwriter Nan Turner (who both contributed to the trailer for the show). It’s starting to feel like a small tribe putting this show together, which is wonderful.
OOB: What has been your biggest challenge in terms of bringing it to the OOB stage and how are you working to overcome it?
MS: My biggest challenge has been to return to the 23 year-old writer that had the initial impulse for this play, and to honor that even as the play continues to grow. This will be the final and definitive version of the text, which is both a relief and a thrill because the opportunity to work on it again has made it a better play. My process is always about finding the truth behind the impulse to write the play and holding on to that. I think we’ve accomplished that in this production.
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?
MS: If we’re talking favorite productions, watching Closer by Patrick Marber in London at the National Theatre was pretty thrilling – I knew nothing about the play and it was still playing in the tiny Cottesloe, and the tension in the (typically reserved) British audience was palpable. I thought the place was going to explode at the end of Act One!
But I think a definitive moment for me as a playwright was watching the final dress rehearsal of Lanford Wilson’s brilliant play Book of Days at the Purple Rose Theater Company in Michigan (again – a tiny theater). Jeff Daniels directed the production, and this wonderful ensemble of twelve local actors created an entire town and its community through the power of their voices. As I listened to them create a rainstorm shooting across the prairies, I welled up with this feeling of tremendous possibility. I couldn’t wait to get back to my own play that I was writing at the time.
See Mark’s and Producer Nick Leaven’s Samuel French OOB Festival video interview:
Mark Synder, author of WIPE AWAY, and his producer Nick Leavens, of The Claque, talk about what they are doing to prepare for the upcoming Samuel French Off Off Short Play Festival, July 13-18, 2001.
See a video preview for WIPE AWAY:
