Interview: Jon Tuttle of BOY ABOUT TEN at Trustus Theatre

FULL DISCLOSURE: The interviewer is an employee of Trustus Theatre and the director of this play.

This is your sixth production with Trustus; tell us about your relationship with the theater.

My relationship with Trustus has evolved according to no particular plan any of us had. Jim [Thigpen - the late founder of Trustus] selected THE HAMMERSTONE for the 1994 [Trustus Playwrights'] Festival slot, and I was of course thrilled, and he encouraged me to send in whatever else I had. So a few years later I sent DRIFT, which was a very different kind of play, but he selected it again. Immediately before that production, he asked if I'd like to be Playwright in Residence. Dumbest question I've ever been asked. Shortly after the production, he asked if I would serve as Literary Manager, which was a paid position and, I learned, sometimes pretty work-intensive. But I said yes and kept that job for 12 years. A few years later came HOLY GHOST, which Dewey [Scott-Wiley - Trustus Company member and former Artistic Director] directed (so, so well), and which is probably the heaviest lifting I've ever attempted as a dramatist. That play won the Sprenger-Lang New History Play contest and got produced in Washington DC, then in Hollywood. Those three plays comprised my first book, THE TRUSTUS PLAYS. At about that time my cat died and I sat down to exorcise that grief, the result being THE SWEET ABYSS, which went into production despite the fact that it wasn't ready. By now, Trustus was suspending the contest and just saving the August slot for me, which God knows I appreciated, because it's not right to hold a contest (and charge entry fees) only to select an in-house play, so we didn't. After SWEET ABYSS, I felt I had to give up the Literary Manager position--I wasn't approaching it with the right energy any more - so they asked Sarah Hammond to step into that role, which she did, admirably. One last time, I told Jim I was a year away from having a producible script - this was 2014 - and he penciled me in for the August 2015/Festival slot, and that was THE PALACE OF THE MOORISH KINGS, a play I'm very proud of because it's so linear and crystalline. After the transition, nobody was sure what my role was anymore, and that was fine, because there's a lot of talent around Columbia and some terrific writers, so when I sent Chad [Henderson -Artistic Director] a (late) draft of BOY ABOUT TEN, I made no assumptions about his accepting it and would certainly have understood if he didn't. But [he and director Patrick Michael Kelly] decided to use it as an incubator for a new development process, which was just what the play needed. It's come a long way in the past 12 months, and when this run at Trustus is over, I'll give it another airbrushing and send it to my publishers.

What made you want to write this play?

I wrote this play first to have as much fun as I possibly could. Writing had become...not a chore, but a difficulty. I wanted to get away from the feeling that I was supposed to commit an Act of Literature and go back to what first attracted me to writing, which was the opportunity to amuse myself with my invisible friends. Also, there was a song by Harold Budd called "Boy About Ten." It's a haunting violin solo, mostly, and once it got in my head it wouldn't leave me alone. It made me wonder what happened to this poor ten year old kid. So I sat down and listened to what the play told me. It told me some really strange things. But I promised myself I would just go with it, not edit myself, and not worry that my mother might hate it, which she kind of did, I think. I had no "ideas" about this play. I just wanted to goof around and giggle at stuff I typed. Which I kind of did.

How long have you been working on the play?

Since I think the summer of 2014, when the Artistic Director at the Salt Lake Acting Co. invited me to write something and workshop it there. So I did. It was a very rough sketch, a long way from the play it is now. So we workshopped in February 2015, and I had a great time with some terrific and talented people, then came home, polished I a few more times, and sent it to Chad Henderson. It wasn't done yet, I knew, but I was tired of flogging it at that point and wanted to get it onto someone else's desk.

What's your favorite part of developing a new play?

Seeing it on its feet reveals to me when certain sequences are too long, when they bog down, or, conversely, when they pop. In my head, everything seems plausible and fine, but put a play on its feet and you see the vestigial limbs that need hacking off, and you have epiphanies about characters because the actors did something unexpected. Actors, as I like to say, think about a character vertically, whereas I think about them on a horizontal plane. I see them interacting, but I don't look as far down into their motivations and demons. Actors do that. Actors show me things they don't know they're showing me.

What's the hardest part of developing a new play?

Hmm. I suppose unmooring myself from preconceptions. Re-imagining a play that I've already imagined: that's hard. You get stuck in a certain mode of thought, a certain belief system about this character or that one, and it's hard to look at him differently or cut lines. At a certain point, you have to STOP re-imagining your play because it will get away from you, it will drift too far from your original conception and then you won't know what it is. That has not happened with BOY. This process has helped me find out what it wants to be, what it needs, what its secrets are. Again, I'll revise it one more time based on what I've seen in the production, and then send it off for publication, at which time it will achieve permanence. For better or worse. I say that because I've published two other plays (none of the above) that I'd like to un-publish because the benefit of age and hindsight has shown me they are deeply flawed.

What do you hope people leave the theater with after seeing the play?

Ambiguity. In some plays there are protagonists and antagonists but in this play, it's hard to say who is which. Is Todd a bad seed, or damaged by his upbringing? Is Terry charming and childlike in his exuberance or a bully and a moron? Is Tammy a responsible parent or a tyrant? And finally: does Timmy stand a chance? There is no message, no polemic in this play or, I hope, in any of my others. Plays exist to ask questions. I want audiences to discuss them and maybe answer them on the drive home.

What's next for you?

I think I may retire as a playwright, at least for awhile. The publication next March of THE TRUSTUS COLLECTION, by Muddy Ford Press, which will contain all six plays, will be the culmination of my almost 25 year relationship with Trustus, and it's something I never could have imagined. By "it," I mean a 25 year relationship with a professional theatre and a greatest hits album, which is essentially what the book will be. I'm going to work on other things, for instance a collection called SOUTH CAROLINA ON STAGE, which will include plays about South Carolina, set in South Carolina, by South Carolina playwrights going back to 1805. There's also this novel in my head, the first chapter of which already won the Porter-Fleming Award for fiction. Also there's a beach nearby. I find that very alluring.

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