Born and raised in Chelsea, MI, Jeff Daniels is a midwestern boy. And he still lives there. Since founding the Purple Rose Theatre in 1991 Daniels’s contributions to that local performance arts scene have been unmatched. He has written more than a dozen plays that have been produced at the Purple Rose and he pulled up the curtain for two new short plays in the theatre’s Spring Comedy Festival.
Whose idea was it to do this festival?
Guy Sanville (the longtime Artistic Director of the Purple Rose).
Have you done a festival like this before at the Rose?
We did it several years ago. We love comedy and it’s a chance for us, guys like me and David McGregor and Carey Crim, who have written full-length plays and had them produced, to write short stories vs. novels. You still have to have a beginning, middle and an end in ten minutes or fifteen minutes, but it’s a little different than ninety minutes.
It also allows chances for the up-and-coming playwrights. It’s a little less daunting to write something ten or fifteen minutes long than to be saddled with a full length. It’s a way to kind of help them, as well as allow some of us who have written [before], to do something a little different. And I think the audience enjoys it because we tell them right off the bat, “It’s comedy. We’re here to entertain you, in a kind of literate way.” It’s a wonderful exercise, to be honest, as a writer.
Let’s talk about one of your new plays for this festival, Anatomy of an Argument.
Based on recent events. [Laughter] I’ve been married to the same woman for almost 32 years.
All right, so you know. [Laughter]
The script I saw had the names of some of the actors at the Purple Rose, rather than names of characters. When you were writing Anatomy of an Argument, did you have those actors in mind?
Well, they’re the cast. This is a little different. Guy (Sanville) came to me and said, “We’re putting together the Comedy Festival and here’s the cast.” And I said, “OK, well what do you want?”
And The Guitar Lesson kind of came up, it’s a two hander (for two actors) and then what he said was, “I don’t have one for all six actors” and so I just looked at the cast list and kicked it around for a couple of days and then one thing led to another, (laughs).
In the meantime I’d gotten into a pretty good one in my own marriage and so I said, “Oh, there it is, there’s the play.”
Right.
I wouldn’t say it’s tailored to them as actors. It was more just assigning. It’s an instructional seminar for the audience; there are only really two people up there. There’s a man and a woman.
It’s a little bit like I used to do in high school, also what we called Interpretive Reading at Central Michigan, where two of us would just do whole sections of a book as a performance piece. It’s a little bit like that. You know Tom says, Rusty says, Brian says, but it’s all the same guy basically.
Guitar Lesson [the second play Daniels wrote for the Comedy Festival] is tailored for the young student who is superficial as hell and decides she’s got the blues, and the older guitar teacher, who really wishes he were doing something else with his life. I tailored that for Tom Whalen and for Lauren Knox [two of the actors in the festival cast].
Purple Rose Theatre Spring Comedy Festival’s “Lovers, Liars and Lunatics,” runs through
Saturday, May 24. 734-433-7782. https://purplerosetheatre.org
