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Matthew Freeman is a Brooklyn based playwright with a BFA from Emerson College. His plays include THE DEATH OF KING ARTHUR, REASONS FOR MOVING, THE GREAT ESCAPE, THE AMERICANS, THE WHITE SWALLOW, AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR, THE MOST WONDERFUL LOVE, WHEN IS A CLOCK, GLEE CLUB, THAT OLD SOFT SHOE and BRANDYWINE DISTILLERY FIRE. He served as Assistant Producer and Senior Writer for the live webcast from Times Square on New Year's Eve 2010-2012. As a freelance writer, he has contributed to Gamespy, Premiere, Complex Magazine, Maxim Online, and MTV Magazine. His plays have been published by Playscripts, Inc., New York Theatre Experience, and Samuel French.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Question for Today

What influences or works or artists do you combine to make up what you do?

Do you combine Dylan Thomas with Woody Guthrie?

Do you combine Beckett with South Park?

Do you combine Joseph Campbell with Quentin Tarantino?

David Mamet, for example, mixed Arthur Miller with Harold Pinter. I'd assume.

I think the answer to this question is fluid. Likely changing considering the play. When I was writing The Most Wonderful Love, I was trying to write Eugene Ionesco's version of You Can't Take It With You.

Things exist, and we combine them, like alchemists, to make new things.

What are your alchemical components? Who, or what, do you use to make what you make?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am currently combining installation art and theater - creating an art exhibit that just happens to have live perfomers (i know, long hours for actors, but it's very low impact); and also combining the oldest surviving medical manual - The Ishimpo (2600 BCE) with text from 17th Century Japanese Shunga calligraphy (erotic woodblock prints); the result should be a free-wheeling mash-up that's part anime, part comic book ritual, part puppet/mask play with tons of flesh and simulated sex. Spring Pictures of the Floating World is due out late June.

Freeman said...

That sounds fascinating. Keep us posted so we can make sure to let readers know where and when to find it.

Joshua James said...

I think a lot of what I do can be tied to THE BREAKFAST CLUB and ENTER THE DRAGON ... not all of it, but certainly a large part ... with a dash of Stephen King for spice.

RVCBard said...

The latest piece is a bit Creole.

E. Hunter Spreen said...

recipes featuring mayonnaise - done in cooking show format
interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo
upscale clothing store window as terrorist holding cell
Marie Antoinette's head
lists of objects being given away on free-cycle
spam mail letters
1 bicycle
1 dead deer

Like Happy Days (Beckett) meets Happy Days (70's sitcom) filtered through Brazil.