Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

Peter, 6'6", was born a month late, off Geary St. in San Francisco, and grew up in Mill Valley (that's just north) After a generally positive experience in Montessori school early on, middle school was traumatic, and he still has a hard time forgiving some of the people who tormented him between 6th and 8th grades.

This trauma, in addition to (still) providing a vast quanity of material for writing, also propelled him to seek a creative outlet in which to vent his frustration. For Mr. Nachtrieb, this outlet was musical theater. Turns in Oliver, The Wizard of Oz (3 times, twice as tinman), Peter Pan, Bye Bye Birdie and, of course, Annie (he did not play Annie) followed, only providing more ammunition for his middle school tormenters.

High School at Marin Academy represented a turn for Mr. Nachtrieb: Greater social acceptance, and performing in plays without songs. Hitting the big time early, Mr Nachtrieb got some big parts freshman year, earning him cred within the alterna-hippy highschool he went to, and also earning him exposure to his first multiple beer experience at a cast party. Further years at Marin Academy (plus a tour to Russia with Peace Child) only intensified the love for theater, and expanded his horizons to writing and directing. A big shout out to teacher Phoebe Moyer, for being so frikkin amazing.

Mr. Nachtrieb then headed off to Brown University to deepen his love for theater, his love for biology, and to realize that he was gay. The gay part happened when, in a production of West Side Story where he played Riff, he realized that all the other Jets were gay. As their leader, perhaps he was too. In an unusually weak move, Mr. Nachtrieb decided to try bisexuality first, resulting only in a few awkward moments and immense confusion from his mother. After several years, Mr. Nachtrieb adjusted his Kinsey Scale.

In addition to acting, it was at Brown that Mr. Nachtrieb first developed the bug for playwriting (though the larva was planted early on by his rhymingly pun-brilliant father/lawyer/playwright). Inspired by such wonderful playwriting grad students such as Dennis Davis, Gina Gionfriddo and Madeline Olnek, Mr. Nachtrieb began penning his own work. The results included writing two solo shows in the incredible acting classes of Lowry Marshall, writing sketch comedy for Brown group Out of Bounds, and his first one act, Thread. During the same period, Mr. Nachtrieb interned for a Marine Biologist in Panama, watching fish spawn before dawn for 90 days straight in warm caribbean waters, and his hair bleached blond for a time. It is very possible that it was this trip where he acquired an amoeba which would then nestle in his liver for years causing him to become severely ill 1999-2000.

In 2002, Mr. Nachtrieb entered the SF State MFA Playwriting program, and earned his MFA in Creative Writing in 2005. His play, Colorado, made its debut at Arielle Tepper's Summer Play Festival in New York City, July 2004 and was just recently seen at South Coast Rep in 2006 as part of their newSCRipts readings series. His first full length play, Meaningless, has won multiple awards, received its world premiere at Chicago's Bailiwick Repertory Theatre August 2004, where it earned rave reviews. His one act, Multiplex, was produced at the Bruno's Island New Plays festival in San Francisco, and was part of SFSU's mainstage season in 2003. His short play, Self Help, won an Emerging Playwright Award from SF's Playground Theatre. As a writer/performer, he has created solo shows and often works with sketch comedy group, Killing My Lobster.

Mr. Nachtrieb is working on a new play, Hunter Gatherers (formerly Lamb and Jelly). It's early development was supported by a Tournesol Emerging Playwrights Residency at the Z Space. This summer, it was part of the 2005 Bay Area Playwright's Festival, and will be getting its World Premiere by Killing My Lobster in Summer 2006, directed by Tracy Ward. It is also supported by the New Works Fund, a grants program of Theatre Bay Area.

In addition, Mr. Nachtrieb dabbles in excercise, web design, visiting his parents in Marin, reading non-fiction, and scratching himself. He currently lives in the sunny Mission district of San Francisco with his wonderful more-than-a-boyfriend, Mark.

Interview with playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb (4/27/06)

(Questions about Hunter Gatherers)

Why this play?

The initial spark for Hunter Gatherers came out of a desire to investigate mortality. This soon expanded to explore the notion of human identity in our modern world, which I feel is a strange, symbiotic relationship between a cerebral participation in culture and community, coupled with our animalistic needs to maintain and care for our physical bodies, to eat, drink, die, and perhaps reproduce.

I feel this relationship personally when I sit in front of my computer with the desire to write and work on my next play. This laudable aspiration comes into competition with my other urge to sit in front of the computer and access a porn website. Depending on my vulnerability that day, one of these activities comes out on top. How does my inner artist and beast coexist? I'm not the only guy who endures this battle of wills, am I?

In the relatively comfortable life that I live, or in the lives of the four characters in the play, I think our biological identities are often submerged and unacknowledged, unless we get sick or hurt. Life for these four in a San Francisco loft apartment is not a daily struggle for survival, and yet there are still these fundamental instincts and behaviors that are a product of our evolution of our biology that always play a role. I wanted to write a play in this comfortable world, but turn up the volume a bit on the primal urges of these characters and see what kind of fun might happen.

From this initial trigger, I feel like the play has absorbed a number of other compelling themes. In some way, each character has brought his or her own set of themes and issues into the play.

In particular, I do feel like this is a also play about generation X and adulthood, and how uncomfortable so many of us feel in that "grown-up" role. The question about what to do with one's life is now being answered and reanswered and modified for years and years, perhaps indefinitely.

Tell us about how it evolved.

The play originally started as a completely different play entitled Pam's Great Battle with Death. This was triggered by just having been through a big scare with my father whose sore arm suddenly led him to collapse in the emergency room and be in the ICU for a couple of days. After the dust settled and he recovered, I felt the impulse write about death and mortality.

In this primitive version, the character Pam experienced a premonition early on that she's going to die. The characters of Richard, Tom, and Wendy emerged around her, as did about thirty or forty other characters as the story achieved an epic scale and included multiple deaths, a stern German narrator named Bernd, a Tiresius-like blind man with a talking dog, and Pam becoming exiled from town and into the woods by the end of act 1.

When the time came to take a stab at act 2, the narrator character was taking over with his own story (which I hope becomes it's own play, actually), bushes were starting to talk, and I felt that the play was getting a little out of hand. So, I took Pam, Richard, Wendy and Tom and stuck them in an apartment over one night and challenged myself in the first draft to write a play with the same epic and grand aspirations of the early version but contained to a single location, where I could play with the juxtaposition of grand action, primal desire, and modern living.

There was already a natural dynamic and tension between the four characters, and the play really began to grow through them and their needs. I was also reading Sociobiologist Edward Wilson's book On Human Nature which helped informed the impulses that subconsciously drive a great deal of the action. As I wrote I kept trying to surprise myself and push the boundaries and scope of the story, while keeping everything grounded in some sort of truth and logic.

The play really took shape in that nine month period that was also my last year of graduate school at San Francisco State. I was also supported by a Tournesol Emerging Playwrights residency at the Z Space studio which gave me a place to write without the distraction of being able to access the internet. Last Spring, Killing My Lobster approached me with an interest in developing the play and producing it in 2006, and I said yes! The script was then selected for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival where I was able to work extensively on the piece and made some great discoveries. In the past year I have tried to deepen and expand the four characters in the play and allow the themes of the piece to emerge and co-exist with the wild comedy.

What is the play's ideal audience?

Small children. Oh I kid. I hope that is play resonates with and appeals to a broad audience including regular theatergoers and non. It has always been desire to be part of generating live theater that compels and entertain audiences who perhaps watch a lot of independent films but do not regularly attend the theater. My ideal audience should also have a sense of humor and not be too snooty.

How does the play fit into your body of work as a playwright?

This play definitely shares tones and themes that emerge through much of my work: biology, sex, death, awkwardness, dirty secrets, middle school torment, and having people say mean or honest things that I would never dare say in my real life.

[this part comes from various grant applications]

I try to write plays that create a level of intimacy with an audience through visceral engagement: surprise, tension, emotion and, most prominently, laughter! I love to work within the genre of comedy because of its particular ability to engage and disarm an audience, not to mention my natural gravitation towards funny things. My work feels most powerful and successful when it is able to evoke guttural noises from viewers as they lean forward in their seat. With the engagement that comedy requires from an audience, I believe that ears become extra-sensitive, and thoughts can be subtly provoked.

Humor has always been an essential way for me to get at the truth of “stuff.” An exaggeration, a slight twist from reality, and/or modestly clever juxtaposition help expose the natural absurdities in the choices we all make as human beings. I also believe that the line between comedy and tragedy is Kleenex-thin, not to mention a challenging/exhilarating one to traverse as a writer. This intimacy and visceral engagement with an audience is what makes theater theater for me. It’s what makes me go see it, what makes me want to write it, and why I love it.

Why with Killing My Lobster?

They bought me a Lexus.
No they didn't.

Killing My Lobster has been an artistic hub for me ever since I moved back to San Francisco after college. Their artistic aesthetic and sensibility are definitely in tune with my own and I am thrilled to be their first full length play they have produced, an exciting and challenging leap for the company. Their spirit and ambition make me really excited to work with them on this project. I am still not entirely used to the fact that people want to produce my plays, and I am honored and humbled by the team's commitment. It has been a great, supportive place to work and develop this play.

(Questions about Peter)

Who or what first inspired you to write plays?

My father, a lawyer/tuba player/playwright, most decidedly planted the earliest seed as I watched school plays that my brother performed in and my Dad wrote. I think my Mother inspired the quirky, weird and dark germanesque humor within me, not to mention our family gatherings around the TV to watch Monty Python's Flying Circus. And my brother George who shares a simliar genetic propensity towards humor and weirdness has always been an inspiration.

I caught the theater bug through being an actor. Barry Mineah, the legendary music and drama teacher at Marin Country Day School inspired me very early on, being very impressed by his loud voice, energy, and 8th grade plays. In high school at Marin Academy Phoebe Moyer, then the theater teacher [not to mention a tremendous actress] really sealed my doom in wanting to pursue theater the rets of my life. At MA I had my first significant opportunities to act in challenging work, direct plays, and write my own material. Most of my work definitely lingered in that Pythonesque sketch comedy/theater of the absurd realm.

Brown University, where I majored in theatre, is where I wrote my first plays and where numerous professors and students were inspiring and encouraging (especially Professor Lowry Marshall who taught the solo performance class). The presence of the playwriting grad students who were then in Paula Vogel's playwriting program had a strong effect on me, and I would often act in their pieces, see their readings, and be taught in their classes. I think this is where I first became aware of the new play process. (Folks like Adam Bock, Nilo Cruz, Gina Ginofriddo, Bridgett Carpenter, and Madeline Olnek were all presenting work at the time I was there).

So, in summary, pretty much everyone I've come into contact with me has inspired me to write plays.

Also, while I know that I should attempt to also write for tv or film one of these days, the theater is my first and foremost love. Writing for the stage what I feel most inspired to do and I see myself doing it for a long time.

How does being gay inform your writing?

More sex in my plays!

I have never been compelled to write a specifcally "gay" play per se (ahem, other than the one I already wrote 5 years ago), and I definitely have no desire to contribute another script into the identity-play canon. I hope there is a universal appeal and resonance to my work that can't be conveniently tucked into a silo. There should be something for everyone to take from my play.

There is perhaps a "queer" perspective (which may just be my perspective that I am now blaming on an entire group of people) that wafts under my work, primarily the result of feeling like an outsider in mainstream society and perhaps having a different vantage point to look at the rules of our culture. Hunter Gatherers is a play about two married couples, and I suppose it's fun for me, as someone who can't technically get married to my partner (who I choose to call my more-than-a-boyfriend), to explore and poke fun at the institution that we as a gay community desperately crave.

Also, my process of coming-out and coming to terms with my own sexuality was a somewhat awkward and long process. There are aspects to many of my characters that reflect the issues and personal challenges I had on that journey.

I also feel like my plays often take an open-minded look at sexuality, as is particularly evident in Hunter Gatherers, where sex acts are occurring in hetero and homosexual ways, but the certifiable sexual identities of the characters, or how they identify themselves, are beside the point. It's interesting to look at the sexual behavior of these characters without labeling it.

Finally, being gay has definitely got me thinking about how to write a play that stars 6 to 8 attractive men in their early 20s.

How does being from Marin/San Francisco inform your writing?

My writing is very mellow and inspired by hot tubs as a result. I also include frequent references to redwood trees, Stinson Beach, and hilly topography.

I suppose I often write about my people: middle-class (and its varied tiers) college educated folks who grew up without too much day to day worry (or, at least as children, this worry was hidden from them).

I am proud to be a San Francisco, West Coast writer. I feel very much influenced by this city, it's history, it's people and issues, it's beauty and ugliness, and it's delicious delicious food. I like to write in cafes a lot, where music and conversation becomes helpful white noise for concentration. Unless, of course, the conversation is pretty juicy, in which case it will make it on to my page. While careerwise it seems a little harder to push into the theater world while not living in New York, the extra effort has been worth it, and I do feel like the place you live will always add a particular flavor to the type of work you write. Now that I've written this, watch me embarrasingly move to Brooklyn in 3 years. :)

Who do you aspire to be like and why? (professionally and/or personally)

Caryl Churchill & Edward Albee - After long, amazing careers, their work continues to evolve and feel fresh. I hope to always challenge myself to think differently and grow with every piece.

Tony Kushner - I wish I was as smart and insightful as we has, and I hope to be at the point in my career where my work in progress can be part of a major regional theatre season.

What is your guilty pleasure?

The internet, chocolate, small cars

What is your greatest pride? Greatest flaw? Greatest burden?

Pride: My playwriting career so far has made me proud
Flaw: Occasional short attention span, bursts of self-doubt, overcommitting
Burden: Money

What thing in your house could you not live without?

My boyfriend. (awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww)