The Accidental Board Member

Matthew Everett, board member here.

That is such a weird thing to type.

Honestly, I was just looking for a theater to maybe produce one of my plays.

And when Aaron Christopher arranged to meet me for lunch, I thought that's what we were talking about.

Imagine my surprise when it turned into a recruitment meeting.

Well, that's never a surprise I guess. All my friends with theaters are looking for another set of hands to help with the work.

But normally you recruit a board member because they have money or connections to people who have money.

Which I don't.

Rather than money, they were looking for a little sweat.

And in return, my plays get a regular home to be produced in the Twin Cities.

In the almost 19 years I've lived in this town, I've never had an artistic home for my plays to grow in. I know a lot of theaters and a lot of theater people, but my work was rarely a good fit for their various missions and the type of material they were looking to produce.

There was the Playwrights' Center for a while, but that was about development rather than production.

I've been fortunate to receive support from the Minnesota State Arts Board, but that got some workshops up, independent free-floating productions that I was lucky to get an audience to come and see.

Of course you have the Fringe, too, but that's dependent on the role of chance and ping pong balls, and if I wanted to do the producing, I was kind of on my own.

Then along comes this theater company whose work I quite like, and who is committed to new work by local artists as part of the mix of what they do. And they were looking for another local playwright to have generating work for them.

The upside to getting productions mostly out of town over the years is that there's a stash of plays that have never seen the light of day in the Twin Cities metro area that the Samurai can be working their way through, while I work on more new scripts.

Meantime, the first play out of the gate will be...

"Leave" - the gays in the military drama that peeked briefly into town for two performances at the Bryant Lake Bowl after a run on the University of Minnesota's Morris campus. We got a little attention, including a mention on John Townsend's Top 10 list for theater in 2008 in Lavender Magazine. I learned a lot from that production, and the Samurai are looking to possibly expand the play. The script also got tapped to be part of the Great Plains Theater Conference down in Omaha in late May/early June this year. So there's plenty of time and opportunity to tinker with the piece. Tentative production date - February 2011, to kick off the next season.

So, I should probably stop blogging and start, you know, writing...

But I'm the Thursday guy on the Samurai blog (I know, like I need another blogging outlet), so you'll be hearing more from me here.

This whole "part of a theater family" thing is new territory for me. Certainly hasn't been dull so far. More on that later...

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