Review Fix chats with playwright Susan I. Weinstein, who discusses her new production “The Wapshot Whatever,†which is set for its premiere at this year’s Midtown International Theatre Festival.
About The Wapshot Whatever:
THE WAPSHOT WHATEVER by Susan I. Weinstein, directed by Charlie Kanev. The Wapshot Whatever—When a Rogue meets an Off-Shore Server, sparks fly within a power strip. WARNING: Fractured I.T. lingo. (Avant Garde) Performance Schedule: Wed 3/16, 6:00pm; Fri 3/18, 6:00pm; Sun 3/20, 3:30pm
Review Fix: What was the inspiration for this project?
Susan I. Weinstein: The Internet, where I spend exhaustive hours on a computer. I started to write dialogue that became the thoughts of the Rogue.
Review Fix: What’s your creative process like?
Weinstein: This play was spontaneous, like poetry. Pent up emotion became a world-weary character then his foil, the lovely server. I went back and shaped the dialogue, visualized the characters and their world inside a computer system. Action developed from their drives for power and union.
Review Fix: What makes this different or special?
Weinstein: It’s an alternative reality, inside our own, that’s a mystery. Yet the emotional logic is humanoid. Like us but qualitatively different.
Review Fix: What did you learn about yourself through this process?
Weinstein: That when I outline and draft plays with specific objectives, they often don’t have the emotion of felt spontaneous work. Naturalism is a less natural form for me than language or “lingo plays.” Found language shaped so form doesn’t necessarily follow content allows another kind of understanding.
Review Fix: How does it feel to be a part of something like this?
Weinstein: I like older forms of theater, circular plays with elliptical language. It is a lot of fun to see this realized. Plays like this are rarely performed.
Review Fix: What are your ultimate goals for this production and for the future?
Weinstein: I would like this short play to be a known curtain-raiser, like The Bald Soprano was once. It would be fun if scripts were full of felt metaphors that were unexplained, even, at first, incomprehensible. I’d like to see the mystery of language teased out by audiences, like we scrutinize visual art for meaning. I have a longer script I am interested in having produced. WAPSHOT is a flag for theater without naturalism. There’s enough TV.
Review Fix: What do you think your audiences will enjoy the most?
Weinstein: Audiences will most like the surprise of an alien world that is yet strangely familiar. People record how pets act when owners are not around. This is a glimpse of what your programs get up to, when the user is away.
Review Fix: What’s next?
Weinstein: Next for us, after finalizing cast, is making visual the  electronic characters. How they work is a counterpoint to a fractured, made up IT language of love and power.
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