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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (June 27, 2018)
COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • JUNE 27, 2018 • 11A Theater Q&A: An evening in Joe Musso’s ‘'Treehouse’ By Zach Silva zsilva@cgsentinel.com T he Cottage Th eatre brought in Joe Mus- so from Alabama on Monday night to discuss his upcoming play, “Treehouse,” which will premiere in town in August. Th e play centers around a 17-year old, Johnny (Mal- akhai Schnell) that insists he is a 53-year-old man trapped in the wrong body and the play follows his journey as he deals with growing up, love and loss. With the help of a grant from the Lane County Cul- tural Coalition, the theatre applied for a play from the American Association of Community Th eatre’s 2018 NewPlayFest. Aft er being selected from a competitive fi eld, volunteers from the local theatre were sent 12 scripts that they pored over until selecting Musso’s entry. Musso was around for the weekend and worked with the cast on the play. On Monday evening, com- munity members came to the theatre where the audience engaged in a question and answer with Musso in addi- tion to seeing the production of one of his 10-minute plays. What follows are some of the answers from Monday’s event that have been edited for clarity. Did you always want to be a playwright? JM: No, I think I actual- ly wanted to be a zookeep- er when I was growing up. I didn’t actually start writing plays until I was almost 40. What did you do before that? JM: Actually, I was a college English professor for four or fi ve years and decided that I needed to go out and make money so then I became a lawyer. And I was a lawyer for many, many years. Now I work in the federal court system as an administrator. I continue to work a full-time job. But before playwriting, I tried writing poetry, I tried writing fi ction. It wasn’t un- til I realized my real talent was in dialogue that I started NEW EXPANDED HOURS Mon- Th urs 11- 9 • Fri - Sat 11 - 10 • Sun 11 - 7 Locally Sourced PIG & TURNIP EST 2015 UNITE German Inspired Fo o d Beer Wine Cider 60 Gateway Blvd. Cottage Grove, Or 97424 541-942-6130 • pigandturnip.com writing plays. How would you say that being a lawyer informed your playwriting? JM: What informed my playwriting most was my love of literature. I’m a voracious reader. But being a lawyer still did help. I’ve taken a few thousand depositions. And I mean, I’m not low-balling, a few thousand depositions. I was thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not going to start a play and not fi nish it.’ So that discipline of just — when I was a lawyer I would sometimes work 80 hours a week and stay up real late at night writing depositions or briefs and that really kind of helped me learn to push my- self beyond my mental limits even though my brain was “Each play usually has a eureka moment. For which I call a kernel. And the fi nal project will look really nothing like that kernel.” — Joe Musso, playwriter And you really get to hear people speak. You get to hear them an- swer questions. A lot of times they want to answer you in the shortest way possible be- cause they really don’t want to be there. Th ere’s oft entimes confl ict but you get to hear a lot of speech patterns, voice pat- terns of people from diff erent socioeconomic standings. From CEOs of companies to a great cross section of soci- ety. It just helped my ear a lot, hearing all those voices. And also, before I became a lawyer I think I was a lit- tle lazy in how I handled my writing projects. Once I be- came a lawyer, it taught me discipline as to, ‘Th ese people are paying me a lot of money to write these very long com- plicated briefs.’ So, you know, I would always fi nish them. When I started writing plays tired. I do my playwriting at night and I usually am very tired when I write and peo- ple always say, ‘I love how you write such short lines’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t have the mental capacity to write long lines at that hour.’ How do you start a new play? JM: Each play usually has a eureka moment. For which I call a kernel. And the fi nal project will look really noth- ing like that kernel. But I will start to get chracters in my head and I will start to think about how these characters think and how these charac- ters sound. Th en I start fi ll- ing up notebooks. I just start writing possible dialogue, what the characters may look like — I doodle. I can’t draw so just stick fi gures. I literally just start fi lling up notebooks and at some point I realize, ‘Okay, if you are go- ing to write a play you have to write dialogue.’ So I just start putting dialogue in that char- acter’s mouth and that helps me. Once I start writing dia- logue, the character becomes more focused in my head. A lot of times I will give that character a name early on but that won’t usually be the name that ends up with the play. Th is case was diff erent. Johnny was Johnny from the start. I’ve written a full- length play since “Tree- house” and it is titled Au- brey and the title character is named Aubrey. But for the fi rst several months her name was Carlotta Sometimes I’ll think of scenes of dialogue and I’ll just write it down. It may take a year or two before I think about putting some of that in a play that doesn’t even exist in my head yet. Where were you when you got the initial idea for Tree- house? JM: I had a play reading in Los Angeles and it was just a charity reading at a li- brary. And so my wife and I are out there and we have some friends that work at the Dorchester hotel group, so we stayed at the beautiful ho- tel Bel Air. So we’d been drinking in the lounge so we thought we would just go for a walk down Stone Canyon Road. So we went walking down Stone Canyon Road and if you’ve ever walked in Bel Air, it’s very dangerous because they don’t want you walking in Bel Air — so they build all their hedges to the end of the road. It’s a windy road and people are driving very fast in their very expensive sports cars. And then these two fi gures start coming down the road and they are wearing white bathrobes. Th is was Oscars weekend. And these two fi g- ures are coming down and, as they got closer, I looked at my wife and said, ‘Th at looks like Oprah Winfrey.’ And it was Oprah Winfrey. She and her friend Gayle. I guess they were going to the spa at the Hotel Bel Air or whatever. I don’t know why they were walking down the middle of the street wearing bathrobes. She’s very nice, by the way. She waved and said hello. She’s from Mississippi, I’m from Alabama so we knew the language. And that was the extent of the conversation — “Hello, hello.” And we kept walking. She was very nice. As we left , I looked at my wife and said the fi rst thing that pops in my head; I need to write a play about it. And so I just looked on the hillside behind this house and I kind of visualized a man covered in blood, standing up, walk- ing down and walking to a house. A woman then says you have to go and then he takes off running down Stone Canyon Road. When you see "Treehouse", you’ll say that has nothing to do with "Treehouse". When I got back to the hotel room — we probably stopped at the bar before we got to the hotel room — I just started writing notes about this 50-some odd year old man and somehow that man became a 17-year-old boy who was in a treehouse and that’s how “Treehouse” came into existence. "Treehouse" runs at the Cot- tage Th eatre from August 10 to August 26. 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E DUCATE YOUR KIDS ABO ABOUT SWIMMING SAFE SAFELY op en w at open ater t er i s no not t th the h e sa same ame a as s sw swi swimmin im ming immi mi i ng g i n a po pool ool ol. ol o l They need to be aware of uneven surfaces, urfaces, river rive currents, currents rrents, ocean undertow an and changing g i g weather. h Whether y you’re ou’re swimming g i in a backyard po pool ol or in a lake, tea teach each h children to swim wim with a partn partner, artner ner, every ry y time. i From m the start, st , teach children childreen to never nev go ne near or r in water w without ithout an n adult a present. You can start introdu introducing troducing your babies to water when they are about 6 months old old. Rem Remember r to always use w waterproof d diapers apers and change them frequently. H a ve y Have Ha your ourr ch ou child chil h il ild dren dr en l ea earn rn n C CPR PR. 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