10 Jun Meet Our 2010 Festival Playwrights, Week Three!: Say hello to….Cory Hinkle
Cory Hinkle, a Brown MFA graduate, is the author of Ciper, Little Eyes, Phosphorescence, and SadGrrl13. We were blown away by the In the Rough reading The Killing of Michael X, a New Film by Celia Wallace, and are thrilled to be developing this exciting piece even further in the Festival this summer.
- How long have you been writing for the theatre? What was the creative spark that led you to become a playwright?
I’ve been writing for about 9 years. At first I wanted to be an actor, but I hated the actor’s life (I liked acting, but not headshots, auditions and all the other stuff). While I spent a couple of years becoming disillusioned with all that, I was writing a scene or a monologue here and there, but didn’t take it seriously until I finished my first full-length. As soon as I finished that first play, I knew it was what I wanted to do – even before I heard it aloud. For me, the creative spark has always been people – the way they talk, interact and why they do what they do and I think my acting background still comes through in my writing – in terms of the language and the richness of the characters.
- What inspired the creation of your play, The Killing of Michael X: A New Film by Celia Wallace? Tell us a little about the process of writing this piece.
I wanted to explore the subject of grief and what it means to lose someone close to you, but I didn’t want to deal directly with my own personal experience, which would have been too difficult. So, the character of Celia Wallace came to me. She’s a young Midwestern girl obsessed with the loss of her brother and in love with the movies he shared with her before he died. I’ve always been a movie fanatic. When I was a teenager I did my own survey of old movies with my own brother – we watched noirs and French New Wave and the great American films from the seventies. That personal experience was the real inspiration for the character.
The play came to me quickly. I wrote the first half at MacDowell in about two weeks and I finished it six months later in two more weeks. The main character and her experience really popped for me, probably because of the emotional connection I have to her.
- What do you hope to discover, improve, or change in your play during the festival process?
The play is at different times fantasy, a film and a dream. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all three, so I want to make sure I clarify all of that. Also, I want to keep working on the end. It’s always that way though, isn’t it? Either the end or the beginning needs more work.
- After the 2010 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, what’s next for you?
A week after BAPF I’m going up to Northern Minnesota to the Tofte Lake Center to create a new show with a group of collaborators. We received a grant from the Jerome foundation to create a new theater piece based on the real-life story of the kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa. It’s going to be a fantastic process building a play from the very beginning with everyone in the room – director (Jeremy Wilhelm), two writers and three of the best actors in the Twin Cities.
And this coming season, my play Little Eyes will be produced in a Workhaus Collective production at the Guthrie Theater’s Dowling Studio. We’ve assembled a great cast of actors some of whom have been workshopping the play at the Playwrights’ Center for a couple of years now, so that’s very exciting.
- Desert Island Top Five Plays, go!
Hamlet, Uncle Vanya, American Notes, Godot, Aunt Dan and Lemon.
For more information on Cory Hinkle and the play, and to see a Festival Calendar of Events, please visit our website: www.playwrightsfoundation.org
The 2010 Bay Area Playwrights Festival takes place JULY 23 – AUGUST 1, 2010 at the Thick House in Potrero Hill, SF.
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