BWW Interviews: Bryan-Keyth Wilson Talks Playwriting, Eklektix Theatre Company, and The Wilson School

Bryan-Keyth Wilson first made a bleep on my radar this past theatre season when I attended my first show produced by Eklektix Theatre Company. He is continually proving to be a force in the Houston area that is turning heads and doing a lot of big things. To list a few of his credentials, he is a writer, artistic director and founder of Eklektix Theatre Company, and the founder of The Wilson School of Acting & Musical Theatre. Bryan-Keyth Wilson took time out of his busy schedule to fill me in on his writing career, and to let me know what we can expect to see from The Wilson School and Eklektix Theatre Company in the near future.

BWW: You have quiet an impressive bio, tell me when did you decide that you wanted to make a life in theatre?

Bryan-Keyth Wilson: You know, it all started at age five. I remember when I was a little boy, I used to watch the H.E.B. Thanksgiving Day Parade. I remember I was sitting watching the end of the parade at my grandmother's house and there was this big old black woman with this huge fur coat on, and they said that she was a Houston native. She had just won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Effie White in DREAMGIRLS. It was Jennifer Holiday. She performed her song "And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going." They were saying, "If you love this performance, you're going to want to come out and see this production that's coming to Jones Hall." That's when Jones Hall did musicals. (Laughs) So, I went and saw the show with my parents, and I literally said, "That's what I want to do for the rest of my life."

I wanted to be able to be in a theatre and move people the way that she did, and just to be able to be in the same space with the people that wanted to witness what you're putting on the stage. That's just an epic thing. From then on I have just dedicated every minute I had to dance classes, voice lessons, being in shows, and really just trying to learn everything about this business. I wanted to learn everything that I could about it at five years old. That, to me, is when it all started.

As I grew up, I really began to understand how powerful the theatre is, and it's not just about the performance. It's not just about the show. You have an opportunity to touch the lives of people, and you may even have the opportunity of changing the ways someone is thinking or to introduce them to a new culture. Just to know how powerful our position is as theatre artists, that's where a lot of us miss the mark about our goals. We have a powerful role in this world as theatre artists, and I think that's what even made me more so just want to go and excel, be great at it, and go to New York and do everything that I did.

BWW: You released your first play NO WAYS TIRED during your first year at Sam Houston State Univeristy. You have also written the novel Hood Boy Chronicles. When did you decide that you wanted to also be a writer?

Bryan-Keyth Wilson: I remember when I was in college and one of my professors, Dr. James Miller, said that it takes experience and life for you to be able to create something that people really care about. I was thinking, well I've had a very interesting experience growing up in the church and growing up having two parents that worked their butts off to get all of their children through college. I believed that I had to look back at my life, and once I did that the stories came. I never thought, and it still baffles me to this day, that I have stories like that inside of me. That's how I know that there is some kind of divine connection there. I never thought that it would be me to be a writer, or a playwright, or anything like that. I just wanted the stage. That's it. I just wanted to sing, act, dance, and even direct and choreograph.

Once I wrote that show and one of my professors read it and deemed it as being producible (Laughs), I wrote it, directed it, and cast it. It was truly an awesome experience. It was at that moment, with the audience. Whenever you hear somebody laughing, or you hear people crying at a scene or a monologue that you have written, that's how you know that the call is bigger than you. That's when I realized, "Okay, I guess I am a writer. I get it."

BWW: That's great. Well writing is something you certainly sound passionate about.

Bryan-Keyth Wilson: I've always had a love for words, and to this day I love language. To be able to create words for a person, to be able to create a person's story, to craft it down in a monologue format to be delivered to people to get out a point, I just think that is an awesome process. I wrote two Off-Broadway shows, and they were both awesome moments.

Actually, one of the shows that I wrote is one of the shows that I am going to take back to New York this summer. It is a play called THE SUBWAY SERIES. Basically, I took about three months of just researching the New York City subways, talking with people who worked for the New York City subways, and just collecting different stories about what happens on the subway. I also included one of my stories. I remember one day after rehearsing for a play in the East Village, I was getting on the Six train because I lived uptown. I was heading back uptown around 1:00 A.M. At that time, there's no one on the train. I was at the platform waiting to get on, and I could hear a lady screaming. Being a Texas boy, you don't know how to react to something like that. She was yelling "No. Get off of me." It is obvious that this woman was being raped, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know who was watching me for my reaction, and all I did was get on the subway. I got on the train, and I called the police. To this day I don't know what happened. There was nothing in the paper, so I don't know. I wrote about it, and that was my only way of feeling that this woman's story was told. That is why I think that art truly imitates life

BWW: Okay, so I know that you kind of touched on this in the last question, but as a writer, where do you draw your inspiration?

Bryan-Keyth Wilson: I draw my inspiration from life, my experiences, what's going on in our world, and what's going on with people. Honestly, as a writer, director, and choreographer, I never want to be contrived. I never want to sit down and say, "Oh, I am going to write a play today." I don't want to be that person. I think that's probably part of the reasons why my publishing houses for my novel ask, "Okay well what's going to happen next?" Well I can't make it happen. I enjoy the process. I enjoy when a great story comes, and you're just trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. That's where I really begin to feel that the story I am telling is going to be able to move people. I really just try to look at the world itself and figure out if there is a story within that. That's how I truly draw on inspiration. I really try to draw on what's already there. I don't want to reinvent the wheel; it's already here. We've just got to find it.

BWW: Let's talk process. Is there a certain process that you follow with every writing project or does it differ from piece to piece?

Bryan-Keyth Wilson: It's like they say when you're a child. The bible says, "When I was a child, I did childish things." As a young writer, I did young writer things. I just did. One of my early mentors was Reshonda Tate Billingsley, who is a bestselling author and a Houston product that has a movie coming out, just a great woman. But, I was a young writer with over five plays published. I had written my first novel by the time that I was thirty. It was that process of just writing. I would do basic outlines, but not truly in depth, and just writing. I understood that philosophy of just writing and getting stuff out and letting everything else technically happen.

Once I understood that, I really started trying to find my process. I had to find my way of getting a story complete. If not, I would be writing until the cows came home, and it would be on epic proportions. It would be me just writing because I can just keep going. (Laughs)

But there is a method that I am in love with. I teach this method at writer's conferences, and this is one of the two methods that go along with me every time that I teach. It is called The Snowflake Method. It helps you evolve a story. When I think of a story, just like when I think of a character or a piece that I am directing, I think of it as an onion with many layers. You don't want your story to be an apple. You want it to be multifaceted, and to have many layers. You want to be able to drop nuggets of the back story from the beginning of the show to the end, and The Snowflake method really helped me to be able to understand a process. One thing that I really love about this method is that you can make it work how you want it to work, and with understanding that it really helps me to focus on a centralized idea, develop that centralized idea, evolve it, add layers to it, add people's names to it, add sub-conflict to it, and just keep going. Once I've done that for the story, I apply that method to each of my characters, and I do a Snowflake Method on each of my characters. It just helps to make these people multifaceted and multidimensional. This is a process that works for me. It may not work for another writer, but in every writer's conference that I have taught at from 2007 until last year, I have had nothing but success. I've had students write to me and tell me that they have completed their first novel using this process.

There's another thing that I use. I use it more in the theatrical realm, but I bring it with me in the writing realm as well because it helps me to be aware of where I am in the view of the world that I am writing. It is Viewpoints and Composition by Tina Landau and Mary Overlie. It is just the way of looking at the piece from an omnipresent point of view, understanding the movement, understanding the space, and understanding everything about the piece. This is a method that I bring into my process whenever I am creating a piece.

BWW: What has been the most rewarding part of your journey as a writer?

Bryan-Keyth Wilson: There are several rewarding aspects about being a writer, like being able to go into a Barnes and Noble and see your book on the shelf, or being in the search engine at Barnes and Noble; the superficial things. But, that's not necessarily rewarding to me. I think the most rewarding thing to me is to be able to shed light on writing and on understanding the process. I like being able to get in front of people and let them know that if there is a story in them, get it out, get it edited properly, and understand the business. Having a book behind you, gives you a little bit of validity because you can say, "I have a published novel and this is how I did it." To me, the most rewarding part is to be able to mentor and talk to someone about a book and just to be able to have people read your story. Whenever I go on book signings it's rewarding to just be able to talk to people who tell me that they've always wanted to write a book. When people ask me if I will mentor them or help them through the process, I reply, "Hell yes I will, because somebody did it for me."

BWW: Are you currently working on crafting any new plays or novels?

Bryan-Keyth Wilson: Right now I am working on two pieces, HOODIE which is something we're looking to do a stage reading of this fall, and I am in the process of revamping THE SUBWAY SERIES for a limited engagement in New York City in the summer.

BWW: Speaking of new endeavors, tell me about your newest endeavor, The Wilson School.

Bryan-Keyth Wilson: I'm so excited. That's my baby. That's my little baby that I'm birthing into this world. I'm so excited about The Wilson School, and it is a labor of love because I am being sued (Laughs) by a previous employer that thinks that I am stealing their business practices and all of that. But countless to belief, I owned a fine arts academy before I worked there, and I have always had a love of sharing knowledge. I have always had that love ever since God said this is what you're going to do. To be able to share something that is so dear to me, which is the theatre, and to share that with students that are wanting to learn, it does not get any better than that. I am just leaving rehearsal from LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, I also had a Master's Class with my advanced students, and the energy that you get from these young ones that are wanting to learn, that are wanting technique, that are wanting to be better, is just such an awesome thing. We have an awesome support system, an awesome staff, and The Wilson School is truly going to be a force to reckon with in the next five years. I tell you, we've got some great talent coming out of The Wilson School, and I am so excited.

BWW: You are also the artistic director for Eklektix Theatre Company (ETC). As you get ready to kick of another great season, what can we expect from ETC in the near future?

Bryan-Keyth Wilson: One of the things that you can definitely expect from ETC in the future is creatively stepping out of the box with a creative staff that is unlike any other here in Houston, Texas, and a vision that will be a little bit confusing but will be unlike any other. We are not called Eklektix Theatre Company for nothing. I was very, very, specific when I decided to go with this name for the theatre company because I believe we live in an eclectic world, we live in an eclectic society, and we all should have eclectic relationships. I want to be able to be a theatre company where we present something to the people that is unlike any other but truly has some form of humanistic through-line that any walk of life, any race, any social economical group can understand. That is why we say that Eklektix Theatre is bringing theatre for the people, by the people. That's what we want to do. We want to bring performances to the people, and it's not about spectacle for me.

If you notice, we do a lot of shows from a minimalistic point of view. I think, at the end of the day, it is about the story, and it's about the artist. That's what we really want to do. We want to centralize on the stories that we bring to the people, and realize that theatre is a catalyst for change. We can move people. We can start a dialogue with people if we bring things to the forefront. Sometimes it's not a great thing to stand up on television or at a podium to give our point of view or opinion. When you put it on the stage, it makes people look at things differently. That's what Eklektix Theatre wants to be. We not only want to keep doing what we are doing, but we want to go to another level. We want to definitely step out of our box. It's easy to think that you're creative and different, but when you really look at it from an omnipresent point of view, you realize you're just in line with everyone else. Now, it's time to really be eclectic and bring something to the people, and that's what we want to do in these next years. We started the company with some awesome people. People come and go, and we have a great new staff of people that I cannot wait to introduce in January.

For more information on The Wilson School of Acing & Musical Theatre visit www.TheWilsonSchoolAMT.com. Also, don't forget to check out the upcoming season by Eklektix Theatre Company here: http://www.eklektixtheatre.org/.

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