An Interview with UTNT Playwright Briandaniel Oglesby author of Or, "The One with the Dogs"
If the lines of your comfort zone were drawn in the sand would you venture out and explore the unknown? That is exactly what Briandaniel Oglesby is doing in his new play "Or, The One With the Dogs." We got to talk with Briandaniel about his new and, as he calls it, untested play...
Note: The interview includes mature content.
UTNT: Why did you choose to work on this particular play for UTNT?
(Steven) Dietz thought I should.
I builtOr,“The One with the Dogs” specifically to fill the container that is UTNT. I wanted to write a play for undergraduates. I didn’t want to have to rely on community actors to fill the roles; in my time here, I’ve gotten so much from the undergrads that I wanted to write a play for them, with acting challenges that would (I hope) crack them open and spill a few guts. So the characters are in that liminal age-space between being, as J.M. Barrie said, “heartless and innocent” as children are, and the hardness of adulthood. They are too young to be the grown ups they need to be, but old enough to have shit to deal with.
This play is right for UTNT because it makes me uncomfortable. My pen name is “Briandaniel.” It’s the “Briandaniel” play for UTNT because it’s an untested draft, because it’s called Or,“The One with the Dogs,” because characters say heinous things that people like you and me spend our entire lives trying to scrub from this earth, because a boy licks a boy, and all of this makes me uncomfortable to instigate at UT. I squirm and giggle and chuckle and want to hide under the seats and bite my knuckles bloody. Draw a line in the dirt between comfortable and uncomfortable, and on one side you live most of your boring, daily life, and on the other, well, things happen, real things. You learn there. You are actually alive there.
UTNT: Tell us a little bit of the backstory to your play. What inspired it? When did you start developing it?
I’m a recycler of myself. I wrote a ten-minute play a year ago that involved characters eating a dead dog (inspired, now that I think about it, by stories by my friends Mariah Young and Goldberry Long, and a different story I’d written), and I wanted to wander into the same territory. So – dogs. Third Street, a queer play for middle-schoolers I wrote for the Cohen New Works Festival, shares some of the themes, and I wanted to see what happens in an adult version. I also carved up my short story titled Fairmont Park about a Lost Boy living in a car who is swallowed by the dark things that follow my community.
With Or,“The One with the Dogs,” I’m returning to Orchard County, a fictionalized swatch of land I gerrymandered out of a handful of counties in Northern California. I set most of my writing there, both my fiction and my plays. It’s not my hometown, but it imagines what would happen if this area hadn’t battled the bloating of suburban sprawl. Or,“The One with the Dogs” is set on the fringes, on a farm that’s watching suburbia creep toward it.
Then there are the pieces of my life, not just my writing, that I’m recycling and repurposing. For ten years, I did theatre in a barn in the fields of Yolo County, and it’s beautiful, the sunsets and stars, and awful, as almost every animal I knew out there died a horrible death. There’s a fellow with whom I have a strange relationship, and whose love of Peter Pan permeates the story (for me, Or,“The One with the Dogs” also imagines what happens if Wendy doesn’t follow Peter). There are ways that this play is about my dead cockatiels. There are more ways than I intended that this play is about my relationship with my brother.
When did I start writing it? Well, I wrote the first draft in the last couple weeks of August after banging my head against the wall for an entire summer failing to write anything.
UTNT: What are your favorite parts of the UTNT process?
I like my team. Jeremy (Cudd, the director) and I have long discussions – we are both talkers – and I got the cast I wanted, and I can’t wait to work with them.
I’m a big fan of DIY within an established framework. If you completely self-produce, you end up burning energy and time inventing the production process itself. Specialization and organization is not a bad thing. But I also love that with self-production YOU MAKE THE THINGS YOU WANT TO SEE IN THIS WORLD. You don’t stand around complaining about people not doing the theatre you want them to. I love getting my hands dirty building things – if I’m lucky, I’ll get to use my chop saw for UTNT. I’m excited that I get to make something, not just do something. So I like that UTNT lives in both the worlds of self-production and it’s housed within a larger system.
UTNT: The Department of Theatre and Dance places a huge emphasis on exploring and developing new work, what makes UTNT different from the rest of the season/curriculum?
This being a research university, UT’s mission is to expand our knowledge base, and theatrical experimentation is the way we do research, much like cutting open anesthetized rats is the way my friend in neurobiology does research. I expect a department at a research university to make more new things than anywhere else, to let regional and community theatres reproduce the canon. In the years I’ve been here, we’ve seen traditional versions of The Cherry Orchard, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Dial “M” for Murder in the mainstage season, so I don’t think it’s accurate to describe UT as having a ‘huge emphasis’ on new work, when the Department also spends a great many resources resurrecting things by dead people or reproducing the hits from five to fifty years ago. That said, sometimes it seems like UTNT and the Cohen New Works Festival are in response to the traditional regional/community theatre approaches to season planning, and are thus fulfilling the university’s mission, and this is where I get most excited. We’re in the ‘Laboratory Theatre’ for a reason – UTNT is how we graduate students conduct our lab work, our experiments – it’s where we cut open the skulls of rats and try to figure out how they work.
UTNT: Do you have any plans for your play after UTNT wraps up?
I have hopes. Not plans. You can’t plan to win the lottery unless it’s rigged or plan to get married by 29 if you’re single. You can only hope. And I do – hope. I hope to see it produced sometime. I hope that it will be beautiful and terrible. I hope that it will feel whole, or at least that no one will mind the broken parts.
In the meantime, I want to treat my enhanced reading at UTNT as the event itself. Who knows if it will live on, so let’s make the reading the best we can.
March 1 at 2:00 p.m.
March 8 at 11:00 a.m.
Lab Theatre
The presentation of Or, “The One with the Dogs” is FREE. Tickets will be distributed beginning one hour prior to curtain at the Lab Theatre Box Office.
This play contains mature content.
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