Texas State playwright wins real award with absurdist comedy

By Geoff West
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, May 25, 2009

John Boulanger was in the fifth row when it happened. An older gentleman, dressed up for a Saturday night of theater, was near the stage, too. But his words seemed to echo around the Kennedy Center.

"No!," he said.

A character on stage had just dropped a baby — a doll — and the theatergoer was none too pleased. Boulanger, who wrote the play, listened in horror. "No!," he said again. And again. And again. Five times in all. "No, no, no, no, no!"

"The first 'no' I heard, I said 'Oh no, I wish he'd be quiet — I'm trying to watch my play,' " says Boulanger, whose "House of Several Stories" was capping off this year's Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival last month in Washington, D.C. — and having a rocky start apparently.

But as off-putting as the comment was, it gave Boulanger an opportunity to reflect.

"I'm glad that he did that. You should be able to voice yourself," says Boulanger, a graduate student in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas State University who just won the National Student Playwriting Award. "If it moves you to say something, then apparently it's doing something great."

The festival committee had judged 56 theater productions from colleges and universities in eight regions across the country and four were chosen — including Boulanger's — for an all-expenses-paid invite to Washington to showcase their works at the 41st annual gathering — April 14-18 — in D.C.

For his win, Boulanger received a membership to the Dramatist Guild of America, an option with Samuel French publishing, a fellowship at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute Theatre Lab and a cash prize of $2,500.

"House of Several Stories" was developed last minute, he says, as the final project in his "Advanced Playwriting" class at Texas State. Initially, he planned to write "Durang is Dead," a farce about a revival of '80s playwright Chris Durang; Boulanger wanted a go-ahead from the Durang people to use the author's name and likeness. He called Durang's agent but never heard back — which was only the second problem.

"I had the entire story mapped out in my head, but I could not get the characters to speak to me or through me," he says. The script was due in a few weeks. "Then things began to shift."

He was sitting on his patio with his laptop, preparing to write the opening dialogue of "Durang is Dead," when his mind wandered. His eyes drifted to a large window that opened to his living room — and to a woman who didn't exist.

"I had a sudden image of my mother's head poking through the blinds and then her coming away from the window, with the window blinds still attached around her," he says.

That night Boulanger sketched out the two main characters in "House of Several Stories" — Sue (the mother) and Bastian (the son).

"I did not have a story line or a conflict or a reason to start a new script," he says, which is what he prefers. Rather than squeezing characters into a predetermined theme or concept, he explores their personalities with dialogue.

"After a few pages of dialogue, I am able to discover the 'people' of my plays and consequently their stories," he says.

Three weeks later, his absurdist comedy about a dysfunctional family reuniting for Thanksgiving dinner was finished — all 142 pages of it ("luckily in time to fulfill the classroom assignment").

He called it "a wacky comedy"—though theater director Isaac Byrnes, who later directed Boulanger's script in a workshop, calls it something different: "I'm not entirely sure that ('House of Several Stories') is a comedy as much as it is a hilarious tragedy," he wrote to the young playwright in an e-mail.

Boulanger wasn't sure either. "It was unlike anything I had previously written," he says. "I began to see puzzles appear then solved within the text; however, the more I solved, the more puzzles that appeared."

Edits and re-writes followed during the next year — as did public performances. The Texas State Theatre Department picked up "House of Several Stories" last spring for its 2008-2009 season, where it premiered the following October on a three-day run at the Blue Theater in Austin. The play had an immediate effect.

"After each show, audiences would linger in the parking lot discussing interpretations," Boulanger says. "Sometimes I would just get long, disconcerting looks from people. But I knew the show had hit them in a way that they did not soon forget."

From theater parking lots to the lobby inside the Kennedy Performing Arts Center, the play has fascinated and confused audiences as much as it has the writer, as well as helped jump-start a career for the talented new playwright from Texas State.

"The first day we got there, they said 'Look to your left. Look to your right,' " says Boulanger, who was standing with 19 other students from around the country. "This is the next generation of theater."

"This, I feel, has created my own unique voice (in the theater world)," he says. "Or at least I hope."

Boulanger returned home for the last week of school and gave the commencement speech to graduates of the Fine Arts Department on May 18. He'll use the rest of the summer processing the whirlwind.

Eventually, he'd like to enroll in a master of fine arts program and teach at a university. As for the man at the Kennedy Center, he didn't leave at intermission as he could have. Instead, as the curtain closed and the lights went on, he did like everyone else — stood and gave a standing ovation.