February 10, 2009 Arts » Performing Arts

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The AmerWrecka dream 

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And it's possible that AmerWrecka might have an afterlife after the production in Charlotte?

I guess we're going to New York is the story. David Kirkpatrick, who's a really dear friend of mine, is on the East Coast now. He's opening a studio called Plymouth Rock Studios, which is going to be the largest film studio on the East Coast. He used to be the president of Paramount Pictures and Touchstone. He's coming down, and he's actually seen the show in L.A. But we've sort of revamped it, and he's going to sort of help me put it together as far as the New York run, and I'd love to do it off-Broadway. We have our eye on a few theaters. But if we end up not doing a run off-Broadway, what we're going to do for sure is the Fringe Festival in August.

The New York Fringe Festival.

Yeah, which I think would be really fun. The only un-fun part is that it's in August. If you know anything about New York, August is like dying and going to hell.

Yeah, I'd much rather be in Scotland.

There you go. I'd rather do it off-Broadway in April than the Fringe in August, but hopefully we'd get a theater with air-conditioning.

So you conceived AmerWrecka for a fringe Festival like Edinburgh, where you have to set up and strike down in a hurry?

It was written as a Festival play, so it's really bare bones, which is great. It's an easy touring show and really not expensive. The thing that I'm adamant about now is, if we do tour, that all the actors get paid in a big way. Since the set and the rest of it isn't that expensive, the budget can go to the actors, which I'm all about, being an actor and starving for years.

It's a badge of honor, I suppose.

I vowed, when I would produce theater, that perhaps someone would get paid, even if it wasn't me.

So after conceiving AmerWrecka for a Fringe Festival, has it been fleshed out for the Charlotte production?

Yeah, it's a different play. It was originally written after Bush got re-elected. And the short version of the story is I was so flipped out about that. I thought, "How can this guy get re-elected?! This is insanity." I applied for a job in New Zealand at Unitech, which is a university in Auckland, and they actually wanted me to fly down there to interview for the job to be the head of the Film and TV Department at the University. Then I thought, "Oh my God, there's a possibility I may be living in New Zealand!" Here I was, I had two kids, and I was a single dad -- and I thought, what am I doing? Should I go to New Zealand?

And I thought, "Well, maybe I'll just stay here and write a play."

So I decided to write a play called AmerWrecka, and when we decided to put it up, I thought, "Let's go to a place where it can be seen." I had done the Edinburgh Festival as an actor 25 years before, so that was kind of cool to go back. In fact, the Festival paper did a big article about me working as an actor in a show, because we won a Fringe First Award when that played.

But anyway, I wrote it because I wanted to bring it to an international audience and say that not all Americans are Bush supporters or supporters of what's going on globally. So the play was originally just about us going over there and saying, "Hey guys, there are a few Americans over here that didn't vote for Bush!" The truth of the matter -- and I hope you see the play -- is that it's not an anti-Bush play, really. It's more about what happened to the fervor of the '60s.

The whole idea behind the play really is what happened to the passionate youth of the '60s who decided to drop out and stand up for something they believed in? It's funny, because I was having dinner with some friends of mine, and their daughter was going to school at Berkeley. She had come back right after the election, and I said to her, "So what is everybody at Berkeley thinking about Bush being reelected?" And she said to me, "Well, there's nothing we can do about it."

And I thought if students from BERKELEY are saying there's nothing we can do about it, our country is in definite trouble. So the play is about the four Kent State kids who got killed: they go up to heaven, they're given an assignment to come back, present day, and wake up four contemporaries and lead them to revolution. And all the music is '60s music.

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