I really am glad that really seemed to resonate there at the Shaw and now, I hope, at the Crowsnest.” He was struck by the sense of esprit de corps amongst Middletown’s acting company: It was “such a gang of people, you know, such a community thing. “She seemed to have a very clear sense of things.” Going to see the show was a family adventure: “Niagara-on-the Lake seems like it was designed by a little gang of 4-year-olds: Fudge shop, fudge shop, ice cream, park, playground. These days, things are more prosaic: he first heard that the Shaw Festival was interested in Middletown through the publisher Samuel French (Shaw’s artistic director Tim Carroll caught the Eno bug from actor Tom McCamus, who performed in Thom Pain at Tarragon in 2006).ĭirector Meg Roe “was just really great all the way along” the Shaw production process, says Eno. The story of his first big break as a playwright could not be more improbable nor romantic: in approximately 1999, not really knowing what he was doing, he dropped his first play Tragedy: A Tragedy off at the stage door of the Royal National Theatre in London the literary managers read it, liked it, and organized a staged reading. I was too tired to sort of maintain a pose … So it kind of just got down to nouns and verbs.”Īround 2011, he started to make enough money to survive as a playwright, though he still sometimes does teaching and other writing work to supplement the family income (he’s married to the actor Maria Dizzia and they have a 4-year-old daughter, whom Eno describes as “a really, really wonderful person”). While that was “really really rough” work, it did have a purifying effect on his writerly voice: “I was so exhausted I started doing this writing that didn’t have any of what I thought was my personality in it. ![]() And the worst: A stint on Wall Street, making cold calls for $6 an hour. He adds a couple more: Personal assistant to the model Lauren Hutton, who picked him and a friend up while they were hitchhiking in Germany. Construction work for a health-food store? Indeed, and he was paid partly in supplements. Competitive cycle racing? Totally true - he even trained at the U.S. Cat-sitter for the playwright Edward Albee? Check. I ask him to verify all the odd jobs the internet says he’s done to make ends meet. when it played off-Broadway in 2005 - is currently being revived, in a production starring Michael C. The worry is how to discuss this with him without being reductive or mystifying.Īs it turns out, you couldn’t meet a kinder or more easygoing guy than Eno, who slips into a Manhattan highrise lobby to “do some Skyping” with me on his way to the Signature Theatre, where a revival of Thom Pain: based on nothing - the play that made his reputation in the U.S. While Eno’s writerly voice is unmistakable, it’s also elusive: particularly with Middletown - that acclaimed Shaw staging is now being remounted by Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre - he captures the extraordinary ordinariness of people living and people talking, in a purposely ordinary place. I really enjoyed the two productions of his work I’ve seen - The Realistic Joneses at Tarragon, and Middletown at the Shaw Festival. ![]() The prospect of a conversation with the American playwright Will Eno both thrills and daunts.
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