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[0:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello and welcome to the Drama Book Show.

[0:20] David Rigano: My name is David Rigano.

[0:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And this is episode five of season two.

[0:26] David Rigano: And we are here today to talk about a good friend of the store and ours, Duncan Pflaster.

[0:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I love Duncan Pflaster.

[0:35] David Rigano: Everybody knows that.

[0:37] Mark-Eugene Garcia: You've done quite a few.

[0:39] David Rigano: A few of his plays.

[0:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: A few of his plays. I love handing out Duncan's work and telling actors about being in his plays because Duncan is the one person that I don't have to read it.

[0:51] David Rigano: If he says, "I want you to do this show," I say, "Okay," because I know it's gonna be good.

[0:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I know that he's gonna write something really fun to do, and I trust him.

[1:03] David Rigano: And anyone, like you go into other, especially when it's like playwrights where it's a brand new play, often you're like, "Hey, let me read that before I commit to it."

[1:10] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And actors do that for me, and it's fine. Like I want the person who's in it to be like a hundred percent behind it and to believe they can do it and have those discussions.

[1:19] David Rigano: And I have done that before with Duncan, but it got to the point where I was like, "Oh no, I know your work and know what you say, and I'm in no matter what."

[1:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And he's just wonderful.

[1:29] David Rigano: And the play of his that you were in that I think is his most famous play, and the irony of it not being included tonight because it cannot be published, is bananas.

[1:44] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And not lost on anyone who knows the play is The Underpants Godot.

[1:48] David Rigano: The Underpants Godot is one of the best plays I have ever seen or done.

[1:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It is my favorite play I've ever performed in. I saw it happen at a festival and fell in love with the show and was so sad that I had seen it on its final night because I wanted to take everybody I knew to see it as an audience member.

[2:07] David Rigano: What it had to say about theater, about censorship, about adaptation, just about everything that we hold near and dear to our heart as theater artists is so profound and it's goddamn funny.

[2:18] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I loved all of it. And then a year would go by and he would tell me it's coming back, and I was just like, "Perfect. I'm gonna bring people to see this. I'm so excited to see it again."

[2:27] David Rigano: And he goes, "Oh, one of our lead actors can't do it. Would you be interested?"

[2:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And actually, like I knew I wanted to, but I didn't say yes for like a week because I was going through my own anxiety issues where I had decided I don't think I'm gonna do this anymore.

[2:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I really wanted to do this play, and it meant so much, but I still was sitting in this fear of actually performing again.

[2:50] David Rigano: And during that week, I did Encore.

[2:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And realized that it was all during that time because I almost didn't do Encore because of the anxiety.

[2:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But during that week I did Encore and had this profound experience of going back in time and realizing why I do what I do and why I want to perform.

[3:08] David Rigano: And for those of you who are not aware, is an ABC Disney show that Mark did with his close personal friend Chris, and Mark went back to his old high school to do his high school production of Into the Woods again.

[3:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, again, 20 years later. This time on TV.

[3:29] David Rigano: So as a matter of like all the anxiety I had was like you can't have it if you're doing a reality show.

[3:34] David Rigano: There's cameras on you at all times. There is no safe space.

[3:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so you learn to deal with that.

[3:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But that experience led me to remember and celebrate why I love theater and why I love doing theater, and from the airport on the way home I messaged Duncan and said, "Yeah, I'm in. I'm doing this."

[3:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And immediately we jumped into rehearsals, and to suddenly be in the play that had been my favorite play to see and suddenly be doing it was so profound and so wonderful, and I love it.

[3:39] David Rigano: But the show is about a performance of Waiting for Godot where the director has decided to put two men in their underwear as our leads, but because it doesn't say that in the text, someone from the Beckett estate comes to challenge it, which leads to these topics of what is theater, who are we, why do we do what we do, because the Beckett estate is strict about how its shows are done.

[3:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And the reason the show can't be published is because the Beckett estate is very strict about how its shows are done because it utilizes some of the text, and the Beckett estate has said no.

[4:46] David Rigano: And it's so sad because it celebrates Beckett and it celebrates Waiting for Godot and it just celebrates theater.

[4:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's brilliant, and for that one it was one of the few things we're talking about that's not in the Drama Bookshop, but go on New Play Exchange and read it.

[4:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: There are some amazing monologues. That's something Duncan does very well, amongst the many things he does very well, is he writes hilarious, personal, and wonderful monologues.

[5:13] David Rigano: And the three plays that he does have published, which we talked about, and we did do, you'll hear it in the interview.

[5:19] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We talked a little bit about Underpants Godot as well, but we talked about Harmony Hall, A Touch of Cinema, and Fourteen Hundred and Sixty Sketches of Your Left Hand.

[5:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Fourteen Hundred and Sixty Sketches of Your Left Hand, I saw.

[5:33] David Rigano: And I also read. That's one of the wonderful things about being friends with Duncan is sometimes he'll send me things to read.

[5:38] David Rigano: Yes.

[5:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I read that before it was done, and I fell in love with it then.

[5:43] David Rigano: And then so to see it done after imagining what it must be like was really incredible because it's a really touching show, and it has amazing monologues in it as well.

[5:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And so it's one that I often recommend to people when people come in looking for monologues.

[5:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: It's like this is the show. There is so much in here to play with, and just really great work.

[6:05] David Rigano: And I think I read A Touch of Cinema, which was his first published play.

[6:10] David Rigano: I think I read that one like the day we got it.

[6:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes, because I was like Duncan's first play, and I didn't know the play, and it is like it's funny, and it's compelling and intriguing.

[6:25] David Rigano: You kind of don't know what's happening next or who's telling the truth.

[6:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yes.

[6:30] David Rigano: We could go on and on and on.

[6:31] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We should probably let Duncan.

[6:33] David Rigano: Oh, definitely.

[6:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But it's interesting also with this, is that I'm so used to working with him on a lot of like rompy fun shows that I'll forget how well he writes serious, and then I'll see something serious of his and just be completely blown away.

[6:48] David Rigano: And so it's just, oh, it's a pleasure to let you guys listen to what Duncan's about to say about his work.

[6:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So let's dive right in.

[6:57] David Rigano: Yes.

[6:57] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hi, everybody.

[7:00] David Rigano: So hi Duncan.

[7:02] Duncan Pflaster: So you wrote, among many others, these three plays that have been published through Next Stage Press.

[7:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I wanted to just start off talking about what got you started in writing and specifically in writing plays.

[7:16] Duncan Pflaster: Well, I studied as an actor and was intending to do that.

[7:19] Duncan Pflaster: And after a while I realized that plays I wanted to be in didn't really exist yet, and I was gonna be happy to be the one to write them.

[7:26] Duncan Pflaster: But it all started when I was doing, I was working a lot at a theater in South Florida called Florida Playwright Theater, that we were all drinking one night after a show, and somebody said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we did Alice in Wonderland?"

[7:38] Duncan Pflaster: But we sat in a drag club, and I said, "I will write that stuff."

[7:41] Duncan Pflaster: And a year later I brought it to the theater, and they were like, "Sure, we can put this on as a late night show."

[7:46] Duncan Pflaster: And then the mainstage show got cancelled, and it got done as a mainstage show for a month or so.

[7:50] Duncan Pflaster: And ever since then, I've written on the show.

[7:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Alright, great.

[7:55] Duncan Pflaster: So basically, like most great art, it started with a drunken idea and turned into a career.

[8:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So these three plays are very different from each other.

[8:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I want to start with A Touch of Cinema, since that's the first one that was published, and I want to talk a little bit about what that process was.

[8:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I want you to talk a little bit about the play, but also just about getting it published and getting starting this relationship with Next Stage Press.

[8:24] Duncan Pflaster: Next Stage Press now has an open submission policy where you can just go to their website and say, "Hello, I have plays. Do you want to do them?"

[8:31] Duncan Pflaster: But at the time, you need to be recommended by another playwright who had already been published by them, and my friend Mark Ballenstern is sort of there you are.

[8:39] Duncan Pflaster: Recommend me.

[8:40] Duncan Pflaster: And A Touch of Cinema had six characters in one set and was probably the easiest for people to maybe produce.

[8:46] Duncan Pflaster: And so that was the Purple Air Symptom, and they published it.

[8:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: With A Touch of Cinema, where did that one come from?

[8:53] Duncan Pflaster: I was very inspired by Jafar Panahi, who is an Iranian filmmaker who got put under house arrest for making films that were considered seditious, and made a film in his home and smuggled it out of the country in a zip drive in a cake.

[9:09] Duncan Pflaster: It's actually true.

[9:10] Duncan Pflaster: He's made several more films from his own home since then and keeps going to film festivals somehow, and he's a big inspiration.

[9:17] Duncan Pflaster: So I guess I defictionalized the idea of doing that, and that's what the play's about.

[9:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And one thing, because you specify in the script that this takes place somewhere that is not America.

[9:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But it does feel very American.

[9:36] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah, there were many trumpy things happening while I was writing it.

[9:40] Duncan Pflaster: The play is set in a country that is much more sadistically dystopian than America was at the time.

[9:47] Duncan Pflaster: Just like a couple more steps if they're going to be able to do that.

[9:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, had things.

[9:51] Duncan Pflaster: And so yeah, I said it in a fictional country, never find out the name of it.

[9:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[9:58] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then Harmony Hall.

[10:00] Duncan Pflaster: What was the inspiration for that one?

[10:01] Duncan Pflaster: There's this movie called Boom, which is an adaptation of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams from 1969.

[10:10] Duncan Pflaster: It stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton without Mike Leigh to pull the back.

[10:17] Duncan Pflaster: It is a can't be very silly movie.

[10:20] Duncan Pflaster: She is far too young to be playing the dying old woman.

[10:23] Duncan Pflaster: He's far too old to be playing the Hajjung Man who shows up on her island.

[10:27] Duncan Pflaster: It's delightful.

[10:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And um, yeah, I mean it when you said Taylor and Burton, I definitely imagined that you meant them in the opposite role than what you...

[10:43] Duncan Pflaster: It's recently been released on Blu-ray, thanks to a certain film director who was a bonfire trash collector, which is great.

[10:51] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh.

[10:52] Duncan Pflaster: So you can go and watch it anytime you like the house.

[10:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And what about that story?

[10:58] Duncan Pflaster: How much... I'll backtrack a little bit.

[11:00] Duncan Pflaster: How much of that story has the religious aspect?

[11:05] Duncan Pflaster: Harmony Hall takes place... So let's, uh, also I'm gonna open this up to everyone.

[11:10] Duncan Pflaster: Who is here because you have seen and or participated in a Duncan Pflaster play?

[11:17] Audience: (various responses)

[11:18] Duncan Pflaster: Okay.

[11:18] Duncan Pflaster: Who here has seen, read or participated in A Touch of Cinema?

[11:28] Duncan Pflaster: And who here has seen, read or participated in Harmony Hall?

[11:28] Duncan Pflaster: And who here has seen, read or participated in Fourteen Hundred and Sixty Sketches of Your Left Hand?

[11:28] Duncan Pflaster: Okay, great.

[11:33] Duncan Pflaster: I didn't know if I was gonna turn and summarize something that the entire place would be like.

[11:38] Duncan Pflaster: So in Harmony Hall, you have a young man shipwrecked, washes up on this island in this chapel with a monk who has not seen anybody for how long?

[11:53] Audience: (various responses)

[11:53] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah.

[11:55] Duncan Pflaster: Were the religious themes already there, or was that your choice to add?

[11:57] Duncan Pflaster: That was my choice to add.

[11:59] Duncan Pflaster: They're not in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, but I realized it was my midlife crisis play where I was wondering why I was doing anything.

[12:06] Duncan Pflaster: Why am I writing theater? What am I doing with my life?

[12:09] Duncan Pflaster: And I think a lot of that is there in the character's crisis of faith.

[12:13] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[12:14] Duncan Pflaster: Great, and then Fourteen Hundred and Sixty Sketches of Your Left Hand.

[12:19] Duncan Pflaster: I was very inspired by Paul Belgain and, uh, I'm blanking on his name. Yeah, I was just reading it, and I read Van Gogh. Yeah, Van Gogh. Alright. The two of them together, a painting, and Van Gogh getting freaked out and cutting off his ear. Van Gogh had a specific kind of temporal lobe epilepsy that the main character in my play has as well. And it's, uh, I always thought there was like a whole erotic thing between Gargan and Van Gogh, but, uh, I don't know. So I wrote what I thought that would be like, set in more of a modern era. And then I mentioned that I wanted to bring up one of your most—we talked about it, everyone had their aha in your intro—one of your most popular plays, which has starred a Drama Bookshop manager in the past. And not only is it not published, but it cannot be published.

[13:24] Duncan Pflaster: The Undertan's Godot is about a production of Waiting for Godot, where the director wants to cast two hot men in their underwear instead of old men, and then someone from the back of the stage shows up to tell them that they're not allowed to do that unless they justify their artistic choices to her at dress rehearsal. And I had used a couple of excerpts from the actual text of Waiting for Godot in the play, and when another—not Next Stage Press, a different publishing company—asked if I wanted to maybe have that published, we had to reach out to the Beckett estate, and they said absolutely not to including any text from Waiting for Godot in the piece, as short as it was. And I suggested alternatives. Hey, maybe just use the first page. Yeah, what if you did base, they say pages X through Z of this edition of that could have been a possibility, but the publishing company did not want to continue with it after that point.

[14:20] Duncan Pflaster: And of course, the Beckett estate is infamously litigious about what they allow, which is what your play itself was about. Exactly. Yeah. I think I sent them a copy of it, and I hope they read it, but I think it comes down very strongly on Beckett's side. But who knows? I would think they would be happy to have it out there, but apparently not. So it's just gonna have to keep getting produced. I think there is absolutely like a fair use option for that to be used that way as a production email.

[15:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Do we have any questions? I'm gonna open it up to our gathered audience. We'll have a little bit of a salon. Anyone have any questions for—yes?

[15:08] Audience: Which of your plays are you proudest of?

[15:11] Duncan Pflaster: Oh gosh. There's so many, but, uh, I think the most recent play that I'm proudest of was Nothing But Thunder, my, uh, take on Danielsis Going to Be Underworld that I did a couple of years ago. That's the one that's like foremost in my head right now. I think it really synthesizes a lot of what I do involves verse, and I think the Darius feared ridiculous theater company, which I'm a huge fan of, and I liked it a lot.

[15:36] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Anyone else? Any questions?

[15:39] Audience: Yeah. I actually didn't know that story about the estate of Beckett's estate, yeah. But how was in my mind, like keeping his legacy alive, especially the younger generations who may not even know about him, would be a great asset. It's like with Andy Warhol's estate, white heroes equally litigious about like any of his movies coming out, but by the time they make consent to that, nobody will really care or may not care. But how was your interactions with them? Was it hostile? Was it cordial? Was it very direct?

[16:10] Duncan Pflaster: Once I got through to the Beckett estate, because like I found like an email that we actually handle other parts of the Beckett thing, but not actually the plays, like just the books. So if you want to like—and finding somebody, putting out the right people—and then after a couple weeks, they were like, no. Thank you, Mike. No.

[16:31] Duncan Pflaster: And what they are famously litigious about is making sure that productions specifically of Godot, because that's the one that everyone wants to do, do not go too far. You can't do Godot on Mars. You can't do—making sure that people really stick to what's on the page and nothing more. Yeah, there was a very famous production of Endgame, I think, in the 90s, that they wanted to set it in a bombed-out subway tunnel instead of just a bare room. And the fact that it was still alive then and attempted to see you, and only managed to get the right to include a statement of his disapproval in the program.

[17:12] Duncan Pflaster: Which is great, we can find that online and read it. Again, they won't allow women to play characters in Waiting for Godot because they don't have prostates, and one of them has prostate trouble.

[17:32] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, there you have it. I'm curious, did you reach out to them in terms of the publishing and did they issue us? Because the play can still be produced, right?

[17:41] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, yeah, the play can still be produced, of course. They haven't put the kylash on that, but it was just the actual publishing of any text from Waiting for Godot that they objected to.

[17:54] Audience: Yeah, and then we'll go over here. What have you got to be the most challenges in your career?

[17:59] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, just I guess the most challenging things have been getting people to, uh, notice me. I've been writing plays for several years now, and I produce a lot of my own work. Some of my plays have been done in other places, but I would like more people to do my plays. That's it. And we're putting that out there into podcast world. DuncanPflaster.com.

[18:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: TV's plays. And your question over here?

[18:28] Audience: Why do you slum it?

[18:29] Duncan Pflaster: With people like me.

[18:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's why I love, uh, having you involved. But talk to me a little bit about like why you want to do small-time indie stuff sometimes. You just want to like make some stuff over a weekend with weirdos you probably have never met before. What's the value?

[18:50] Duncan Pflaster: Oh well, I think it's good to keep my writing muscles in touch because I'm very lazy. I know I've written many plays, but I am such a slacker. I—and it's good to have something display to write. Probably works for Living Radio is the producer of that, and that's a thing where they give us Wednesday, we have to write a 10-minute play inspired by a current news item, and then it goes up on Monday. So we have a short time to get it together, rehearse it over the weekend.

[19:20] Duncan Pflaster: So the people here have been part of this, and then, uh, so it's like it's a great exercise to do that, and the people I get to meet are great. It's a networking thing. And a fantastic actress doing Living Radio who was just in a reading that I did. We were like, We should use Livy, she's great.

[19:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And yeah, so I love working with people, they love making theater.

[19:44] Duncan Pflaster: So what gets you excited?

[19:46] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And I absolutely feel you on the laziness to sit down and write. There's always like fun to brag about how many plays you've completed, not so much to compare it to how many you've started. What gets you jazzed to write?

[19:58] Duncan Pflaster: Usually when I'm pissed off about something, like the Jafar Panaki thing, I was like, somebody should do something. And yeah, that several of my plays came out of Trump being elected. Just mentally one of the Masera Palin's announcements of being a potential vice president led to my vampire play, Suckers. So it's get inspiration all over the place, thank God, because yeah.

[20:23] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So what then is your process? Like, like what—and I know that it's not always like I have my—this is the routine, but what generally is your process from inspiration to figuring out what story you want to tell to sitting down and writing?

[20:39] Duncan Pflaster: My process has changed a lot. They say there are people who plot and people who go by their seats of the pants, and I am sometimes in between bludders and pants. I started out to pantzer most of the, uh, earlier, just like put two people in a room and see what they have to say to each other, and that often is what I want to talk about, and, uh, get another person, see what they have to say, and then some plays just come organically out of that while it's Sean, who's also a playwright in addition to being the guy from Princess Bride.

[21:07] Duncan Pflaster: So when he writes plays, if he were a visual artist, it would be like coming into a room, putting a dot on a canvas, and then coming back the next day, putting another dot, and then coming back the next day, putting another dot, and then saying, Ha, that kind of looks like an elephant. I think I'll make this a picture of an elephant. And that's how a lot of my early plays started out. I had an idea that I would wander through, but then I started to actually plot things out and get more into Robert McKee's story and how stories work.

[21:36] Duncan Pflaster: I think the Discworld question, thank you. He has a lot of stuff about story within these books, and how once you get caught up in a story, you know how it's supposed to go. And a lot of my stuff is taking traditional tropes and spinning them around. I play The Empress of Sex is about—was inspired by, I should say, three pieces about people giving up on love and just studying. It was like Princess Ida by Gilbert and Sullivan, A Triumph of Love by Bob Beau, and there's another Shakespeare where there's four guys who do that.

[22:12] Duncan Pflaster: And so I saw all of those within span of time, and I was like, huh, what would it be if somebody gave up on love but decided to just only have sex? And so it's set in ancient precepts about a woman who sets herself up on an island and says there's no love allowed, only sex, and then people start longing about left and right. And it's a—that's a fun piece. I'd love to see that done again.

[22:31] Duncan Pflaster: That was—it's a huge test. So if you're looking for a huge test where a lot of people get naked, that's a good news for you.

[22:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So, yeah, so going back to that what you're saying about like how you've grown as a writer. Was there any, since you mentioned earlier that you started out as an actor, and then it was like, oh, wouldn't it be fun if we did this? Sure, I'll write it. What was the process of you going from an actor who, yeah, I'll write that idea to I'm a writer?

[23:01] Duncan Pflaster: I guess after I'd written three plays or so that one of them was—I moved to New York after my third play had been done, and then that I placed that up here at the producer's flow. And I just started telling people I was a writer.

[23:18] Duncan Pflaster: You wouldn't say what you are, that's what you are. Yeah, and to clarify, and especially if we have any younger listeners, any—I hate the term aspiring writer, I say remove the term aspiring from your vocabulary. If you write, you're a writer. That's—but I meant more from the your like formal, this is what I want to do, this is where I want to focus my energy. I have had many day jobs in my life and I'll continue to work nine to five, and I decided one of them had to go.

[23:45] Duncan Pflaster: And so like I decided to be a writer because it's easier when we have a day job is to go over and write. And, uh, put the acting aside, I still act every once in a while when somebody asks me, and if I especially if I don't have to learn any lines, I can do something on book for a reading. My friends have developed a lot of work that I've been like a part of just in the initial reading or workshop stages. And it's fun, I don't have to scratch that itch every now and again.

[24:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah. Awesome. Anyone else?

[24:13] Audience: Uh yes.

[24:14] Audience: First out.

[24:15] Audience: So there's that.

[24:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Excellent. Knowing how successful you've been at the Roman Bookshop being sold out, when can we expect your next one to be published?

[24:23] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, I don't know. Well, I have no official lands that have anything published yet. Hopefully Next Stage perhaps we'll, uh, pick something up. I sent them a couple of things. They generally do one play of mine a year so far, so there might be another one coming next year. Fourteen Hundred and Sixty Sketches just came out this year.

[24:39] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, we will see.

[24:40] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[24:41] Duncan Pflaster: Do we go for a serum and fast forward to shape and dance?

[24:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Dogs and cats?

[24:48] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah, the dogs and cats thing is like racist and offensive, and I'm trying to start too much attention to that.

[24:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But there is uh um like a parody about it, and they're using that to make it.

[24:59] Duncan Pflaster: I hear you're what you're saying, you're right, but they're making it too, because I thought it was offensive when I watched all the money that they're making from this through donating it to the Springfield Animal.

[25:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[25:12] Duncan Pflaster: So that is a good thing.

[25:14] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we have yeah.

[25:15] Duncan Pflaster: Have you ever had writer's block? And if so, specifically thinking, Oh, I have this great idea, I want to write this play. I have to write this play, and then you don't know where it goes. How do you work through a block like that?

[25:26] Duncan Pflaster: Lots of bath, lots of snacks. I don't know. There was a piece that I've been dilly-dallying on finishing for a couple years now, and the Yale awards.

[25:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh yeah, the University Press.

[25:46] Duncan Pflaster: Deadlines are great for that.

[25:47] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Deadlines are fantastic.

[25:49] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah, so like I wrote I finished up like they should be final zeme of the plans and finish them with an hour left before the midnight deadline. Who knows? That gets done next year, we'll see.

[25:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, so yeah, deadlines, people making me do shit. That's another good thing about the living radio is I have to make something. And uh yeah, I don't have a choice at that point.

[26:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Going back to your three publications, uh, what's the process when, for example, Next Stage Press comes to you and says we want to publish this, then what?

[26:20] Duncan Pflaster: Someone could purchase one of the scripts and then decide they want to do it, and then you can contact Next Stage Press and they will handle the royalties.

[26:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Even before that.

[26:28] Duncan Pflaster: Even before that. Between them saying, Hey, I want to do 1400 and it appearing on our shelves. What's what do you have to do in between there?

[26:42] Duncan Pflaster: So I had to change every line bit by bit. Some of it is just like copy and paste and make everybody's name bold, but then you have to check that the name when it shows up in the line doesn't. But yeah, it's relatively simple, just time consuming. And then yeah, I just send that, I email it to them in the format that they need, and then they print it.

[27:02] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Have you ever gotten to a place where you know where they say, We'd like to we'd like to publish this? And you go, Oh, I'm gonna make some rewrites actually before it.

[27:13] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah, just like minorities where I was like, oh, that line never got fixed during production or it didn't get fixed during production, and it wasn't in its in the text, and then I will make that tweet for when it goes out live to people.

[27:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Sure, great. Anyone else here?

[27:27] Audience: All assembled.

[27:29] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah.

[27:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I'm gonna see this the wrong way. How do you know from your own writing in your writing when a play is bad?

[27:41] Duncan Pflaster: Oh well, clearly I don't.

[27:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: That's not true.

[27:51] Duncan Pflaster: No, I no, I think I'm I'm pretty discerning and I can be like, this part doesn't work. I generally, when I'm writing, I have readings of it. I have a playwright group, many of whom are here tonight. Thank you for coming. And we do readings of the 10 to 15 pages or whatever every week or so.

[28:07] Duncan Pflaster: And so within that, I can get an ear for what it sounds like out loud, and then make any changes before I go on to the next piece. And then once I finish it, I will get actors together in a room and read it out loud and hear it, and then go make more changes and do that until somebody does it.

[28:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So for other writers out there, what is the best advice that you have for taking critique during a reading?

[28:34] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, leave in yourself. Or a lot of people who don't know a lot of things. But often if someone has something they feel strongly about, and even if you don't agree with them, there's usually a reason, and you can probably figure out what the real reason is that makes sense to you.

[28:52] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[28:54] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah.

[28:54] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, no, I agree with that. I have a very similar thing. I tell people, people are gonna come up to you and say, you should do this, and you're like, no. But there's a root of something that wasn't working if they had something to complain about.

[29:10] Duncan Pflaster: If they dared.

[29:12] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, if something is not clear to someone, then clearly I need to go back and fix that. Often it will be someone saying, I don't think this works, and there's other ways to fix it, and the people who think they know how to fix it are usually wrong.

[29:26] Duncan Pflaster: Agreed. Anyone else?

[29:32] Audience: Hey, hello. I've known you for 17 years, and you're always writing. And I just find that so impressive, admirable. And are you taught playwriting to a group of young up and coming wannabe playwright, or I mean because that's a whole other Yeah, I am not taught playwrighting, but I have thoughts.

[29:54] Duncan Pflaster: If anybody wants to hire me. But what are your thoughts? What's it what if you were gonna distill for a listening podcast audience? What are some of your main thoughts that you would want to pass on?

[30:08] Duncan Pflaster: I think that plotting and dancing are both very applicable ways to make art, whether you're planning it out or just like figuring out as you go, those are can both create good work. And there's no right way to write a play. People will tell you that you have to have something plotted out, but I've written plays that are based on the months of the year. I've plays that take place one scene every day for two weeks. That's the plot, that's the structure.

[30:36] Duncan Pflaster: La Ronde is one of my favorite plays, which if you know what is about someone who sleeps with someone, and the next scene that person sleeps with someone else who likes it with someone else and they sleep up someone else, and just goes around into the last person sleeps with the first person. And it's just a big circle. Which is originally supposed to be about the spread of syphilis in Vienna, but has come to be in most of its adaptations to be about intimacy and what we reveal in scenes when we're alone with someone, which is very Michael John McCussa's musical based on it called Glow Again. My favorite Michael John McCusan musical.

[31:07] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[31:07] Duncan Pflaster: The movie version of that is really cool too.

[31:09] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[31:09] Duncan Pflaster: The The Blue Room by David Hare is another adaptation of that, where the thing is it's two actors who are playing all the roles. So it's just like somebody switching from CBC.

[31:20] Duncan Pflaster: So I wrote my own piece based on that structure, but adding a third person into each one. So it's mathematically in a way that probably only makes sense to me. People are showing up in different scenes, alternating throughout.

[31:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: When you're conceiving a new piece, what do you look for in terms of whether you think you're gonna move forward plotting or move forward pancing?

[31:45] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, yeah. Which I love these two terms as verbs, and I will steal them to move forward.

[31:52] Duncan Pflaster: I can invent those. Those are other people's words. But I guess if I'm plotting, I already know what the story should be, or I'm ripping off somebody else's story. And if I'm pantsing it, I don't, it's just I usually it's if I know really good actors, then I like to write something for these people, and let's put them in a room together and imagine what these actors will do and have them bounce off each other and see what happens. And yeah, so I'm a very structural playwright. I'm very much, I might not know what's gonna happen, but I'm gonna know the structure of how it's gonna happen before I sit down.

[32:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: How does structure come into play when you are plotting out, or if you decide not to?

[32:36] Duncan Pflaster: Well, the gaming has a thing where he says get to the end and then go back and rewrite to make it look like you, which you were doing all along. And that's sort of it. It's going back, oh that looks like an elephant. Yeah, so yeah, just uh see where it goes and figure that out and then reel it. And I don't like AI, but chat GPT is very good for this sort of thing where you get a random synopsis, it will break it down into story beats. Anything you do can like pretty much be broken down into a story, which we I studied in high school as well, like breaking down a story into rising action, falling action. Eventually it all comes out pretty much the same. You can figure it out that way. But yeah, it's I don't know. Sorry, it just happens to happen.

[33:25] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Any other questions?

[33:27] Audience: Yes. What is the biggest challenge you've had to overcome in creating a play?

[33:33] Duncan Pflaster: Not even getting it to the stage. Writing and buying. I tend to be very reserved in my personal life. And when characters seem to get upset and act irrationally, that's something that I don't intuitively go to myself. So I think that's it, trying to write those kind of characters.

[33:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: How do you overcome that?

[33:56] Duncan Pflaster: Go crazy a little bit.

[33:59] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Is there ever a bit of getting to live vicariously through a character who does something that you would absolutely never do?

[34:08] Duncan Pflaster: Oh yeah, sure. I think a lot of theater and like movies as well, sometimes there are things where there are people doing absolutely terrible things that we want to be like. We want to this tool. My friend Lenny Schwartz, who's another playwright based out of Rhode Island has this piece called The Social Avenger, where uh a guy like goes around writing social wrongs like people on their cell phone, not the way what to order at the Brevista line and just things like that, and just knocking the phone out of their hand and just pay attention! Uh it's a funny piece, and uh it's yeah, that's absolutely stuff that I'm sure we all wish in the real social world we could do. And as I mentioned earlier, I have acted in my life, and I always like to think of myself as an actor in the roles that I write and what I would love to do on stage.

[35:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So also when you get an idea, since you have written for the screen as well. What when you're conceiving of an idea, what makes you think this should be on stage versus this should be on screen?

[35:13] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, on stage there's a lot of considerations how many actors are going to be in a thing, how many set changes there will be, and in film that can be a lot freer. You can have somebody come in for just one scene, and you don't have to pay them to be there for the whole play. But the Hills of California on Broadway now, like 18 freaking people on stage. I love Maximalist theater. The whole set spins. It's gigantic. It's very long. Three hours long. People tell me my plays are too long. It's like it's nearly three hours. There's an intermission and a pause. Between the second and third X, you stand up to two minutes, you sit back down, and you there's the next. I enjoyed it a lot.

[35:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah. In your process you're writing, do you write have music on when you write shifting pretty silent?

[36:06] Duncan Pflaster: Outside and inside, all of you love. I like music. I like a lot of instrumental stuff. I have a Spotify playlist that is all classical jazz songs in other languages that I don't understand. There's a jazz ukulele French combo called uh Michelle Napin, which is great because they just sing it in French and it's the popular jazzy stuff.

[36:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, that's all kinds of stuff. Do you ever change it up based on the subject matter?

[36:36] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah, there's a couple. Yeah, I'm writing a piece that's inspired by goth club music from the 80s right now as a ghost story, so I've been listening to a lot of that. If I ever finish that, who knows? That's been on the back burner for a while. But who knows?

[37:09] Duncan Pflaster: What's something that you could say at least about these three that you could say is also the Pflaster touch? What's the thing that unifies them? Listen, I know. I know. I try to have a game or clear characters in all my plays. I think there's only one of my full-length plays that does not have a gay character in it. I do write very long monologues, several of which are published in this very building. You can find them a lot in the Smith and Krauss Best Monologue of the Year and Apologies, including one of the 1460 sketches of your left hand, which is very popular with guys who are like 18 to 20. Before it was published, I would get emails like once a month saying, "Hey, I want to do this monologue, and my teacher says I have to read the whole play, but I can't find it anywhere." And I would email it to them, but now they can pay for it.

[38:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I have another question.

[38:08] Duncan Pflaster: Yes.

[38:08] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I'm just curious, who are your influences? Playwrights or screenwriters, directors. I'm just very curious where your voice is, your voice, but who inspired you?

[38:18] Duncan Pflaster: I'm a huge fan of Tom Stoppard. I read his recent biography, and a lot of the time I was like, "Oh yeah, that's me." I understand that impulse. The late Charles Ludlam was a big inspiration. Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, there's a bunch of great playwrights out there.

[38:35] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah. I know that you're a huge fan of pop culture in general, and you go see a lot of movies and watch a lot of other plays too. When you look, when you watch a movie or a play, do you feel that you are looking at it through the lens of a writer?

[38:49] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, absolutely.

[38:50] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So you do you have a hard time like just going there and being like, "Okay, I'm not gonna analyze this, I'm not gonna look at it through what I would have done differently or that kind of thing?"

[38:59] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah, a lot of my plays have been baked because I saw something awful and I was like, "How would I make this better?" And yeah, so that's yeah. And I can't turn off my intellectual brain when I'm watching other people's arts, which is a shame that I also enjoy seeing the puzzle of it. And when like a movie or something actually surprised me, I'm like, "Oh, I didn't see that coming. You got me!" But that's always very impressive to me.

[39:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Can you share an example of something you didn't like that you turned into something that you felt was better?

[39:33] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, "Triumph of Love." "Triumph of Love," the musical adaptation of "Le Menteur." It's not good except for one great song. But that inspired me thinking about how I would switch it up and if I were to write this, how I would change it.

[39:49] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah. How do you see the audience as a whole when you are writing?

[39:56] Duncan Pflaster: As my fans. I see them throwing roses. Oh yeah, I don't know. I think the ideal audience, I forget who said this, but somebody said the ideal audience is somebody who gets all your jokes and understands your references and laughs at all the right places. So hopefully that.

[40:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Obviously, part of indie theater frequently is directing your own work. Do you first off, do you consider yourself a director when it doesn't, when it wouldn't come to your own work?

[40:37] Duncan Pflaster: Yes, I think some Shakespeare, some other stuff here and there. I think I'm workmanlike as a director to make things happen. But I have directed a lot of my own work, and often if there's something that I don't have like a vision or how it should look, I work with other directors.

[40:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So do you typically know when you sit down to write, this is gonna be something that I'm gonna want to direct, or that I probably will end up directing? And do you write differently if you know you're gonna direct versus if you are pretty sure you're gonna hand it off to someone else?

[41:13] Duncan Pflaster: No, I don't really think about that when I'm writing it.

[41:15] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Uh-huh. So then how often do you direct your own stuff out of necessity versus out of an artistic vision?

[41:26] Duncan Pflaster: I think collaboration is very helpful and good. So somebody else who isn't me directing is very good, as they can have a different eye or take on the script. That was my answer to the question.

[41:43] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Um do how often do you direct out of necessity versus out of the artistic vision that you have for the play?

[41:53] Duncan Pflaster: About half the time, I think I do it out of simplicity. More than anything else. It's just easier sometimes to just do everything. Only very occasionally has it been that I want my artistic vision to be that strong that I make sure that I have my finger in every second of the play.

[42:16] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Awesome. We have yeah, we have time for a few more. Anyone else have it?

[42:22] Audience: Yes.

[42:22] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And then we're gonna come over here. Name names or instances, but just along those lines of handing over your work to a director. Have you had moments where a director has just gone off the rails with what you thought the play should be? And how did you respond? How did you deal with that?

[42:39] Duncan Pflaster: Yes. You can avoid that. There was one production where the director and I didn't really see eye to eye. I think it came out as a really great production. But at a certain point, they wanted to cut the prologue or the epilogue of the piece. And there were other things that were like, "Can we just change this?" And I'm like, "No, there's a reason why this is here." There were moments of me saying, "Could we have this other underscoring? Because this song is ruining what's happening in this scene." So yeah, there have been a couple of times. There are some directors that I love working with, like Lisa Shriver, who I've worked with a lot, and also in living radio shows. And I think she really gets my work and understands me. We have good communication. There's a bunch of great people I've worked with, and I'm always looking for new people to work with as directors.

[43:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Do you have a lot of unfinished pieces?

[43:28] Duncan Pflaster: And we do.

[43:30] Mark-Eugene Garcia: When do you know to go back to them?

[43:32] Duncan Pflaster: I have so many unfinished pieces. It's just when it pops up in my head that it's time to put another dot on the elephant pictures. Sometimes in the shower I'll just start thinking about whatever happened with that play that we should go back to doing that. Some of the characters say to each other, "What about this thing?" And then I'll go back and finish it. Sometimes I wrote a sequel to "Twelfth Night" called "Mambolito's Revenge." I wrote the first 10 pages of it, and then left it for seven years, and then came back and wrote the rest of it in a couple of months. It usually takes me a year to write a full-length play, but sometimes they take seven years, and sometimes they take two months.

[44:10] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And is there obviously you can never know? Do you have anything that you would absolutely consider abandoned? You'd say, "Oh, I'm probably never gonna touch that again," or are they all up for whatever happens?

[44:25] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah, there's a couple. There's one I wrote that was a ghost story that specifically had references from a decade previously, which now would be like two decades, and it would have to be set in that original time period that it was written in, and that was a long time ago now, and it wasn't very good to begin with, so I'm probably not doing it. I wrote one of my first musicals that I tried to write was a J adaptation of "The Light," which I found out I couldn't get permission for that, and I was like, "Fuck it," but that's a good learning experience.

[44:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah.

[44:56] Duncan Pflaster: And who knows? When does it go out of copyright?

[45:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Oh, I think it was 1945.

[45:03] Duncan Pflaster: Okay, so we got what, 20 years on that one?

[45:05] Mark-Eugene Garcia: All right, so we'll see that in 20 years.

[45:08] Duncan Pflaster: I literally I've got a piece this weekend that literally is a 20-year-old piece, practically, that it's similar to what you're saying. I wrote a scene and then really thought it was abandoned until I had this thing come up, and they were like, "This is the theme," and I went, "Oh, you know what? If I take that thing and I add this thing that in 2007, I would not have known that the COVID pandemic was gonna..."

[45:31] Duncan Pflaster: Oh, I can, yeah, who knows 20 years from now what's gonna pop up out of the old trunk. But not to rather than talk about what you have and have stopped working on, what are you working on? What is next for you?

[45:47] Duncan Pflaster: I have some readings coming up. The "Mabel" show is gonna have a reading in England in December at the Shakespeare Center in London. Touch them and then have a reading with Lafayette Salon in January, and then just write Grant.

[46:01] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Anything that you're writing that you can tell us about?

[46:04] Duncan Pflaster: I don't like to talk about it too much because I feel it takes away the urge to actually write it if I can tell you what it's about and then you can say I'm clever, and then I don't have to actually write.

[46:17] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So you said that was uh I've got it right here. That was DuncanPflaster.com is where we can keep up with you to see what whatever is about to come out of that crazy little mind of yours.

[46:29] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I am gonna ask you all to help me once more in thanking Duncan Pflaster for being the... I just love him.

[46:45] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I cannot explain how much I love him. And the way that he talks about his plays, his process, what he likes about theater, what he likes about writing, and his style and just how he gets it done. And he's another one that like when I was first delving into playwriting, I sent him my work. I'm like, "Okay, I'm thinking of doing this," because I at that point had just written musicals. I'm like, "I want to write plays and read this." And the feedback he gave me was great, and the support. That's something that I feel like he's gone to see everything I've ever written, which is really wonderful. It's not something that's easy to do in New York City.

[47:24] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah.

[47:24] Mark-Eugene Garcia: He's just... I haven't even seen everything you've ever written.

[47:27] Duncan Pflaster: No, and you've written some of the stuff with me.

[47:28] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Yeah, that's true.

[47:32] Duncan Pflaster: Yes, that is true.

[47:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But no, it's just we saw it in Chicago.

[47:37] Duncan Pflaster: That's true.

[47:38] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Haven't made it out to some of the international productions.

[47:41] Duncan Pflaster: No, we haven't.

[47:42] Mark-Eugene Garcia: But no, he is just so incredibly supportive, and it's really nice to see someone whose heart is as big as his brain. That's... and I mean that in a good way.

[47:54] Duncan Pflaster: No one has a small brain or heart condition.

[47:56] Mark-Eugene Garcia: I mean that in a really good way. He's the nicest person and one of the smartest and funniest people I know. I'm glad you got a chance to hear about his work. And now you have a chance to come get his work.

[48:05] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah.

[48:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Um, and we're gonna continue on our playwriting journey.

[48:10] Duncan Pflaster: Yes, absolutely.

[48:11] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And Duncan's actually gonna come back for this next one. Duncan came back for "The Playwrights Toolbox" by Justin Maxwell, edited by Justin Maxwell. Because it is a toolbox that has so many wonderful playwrights in it, and so many wonderful exercises and activities for playwrights.

[48:31] Duncan Pflaster: Yeah, and so we're excited for you to delve into that.

[48:34] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So remember to follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast. Remember to subscribe to the Drama Bookshop on Eventbrite so that you will know when we add live in-person events to our calendar. And remember that all of our books except for the "Underpants" cadeau can be found here at the Drama Bookshop. And so can we, and we will see you at the bookshop.