Im a bit embarrassed posting this. Seems way too much like Im tooting my own horn. But, I was just recently interviewed for the PLAYWRIGHTS FORUM bi-monthly Newsletter which was just published today. Heres that interview: SPOTLIGHT ON.... RON WOOD by Jane Ross You might say that playwright Ron Wood found his calling at the bottom of the sea: as a member of a nuclear missile submarine crew submerged on 72-day patrols. At the halfway point of each patrol, the crew celebrated with a halfway night. Among his other official duties, Ron was in charge of these bawdy, underwater galas, and he wrote some silly sketches performed by the entire crew. In one of his short skits, however, he wrote a more dramatic piece. After the performance a young torpedo man approached him to say, Lieutenant Wood, that play you wrote actually brought tears to my eyes. After that moment, Ron says, I was hooked. Successes followed. After the Navy he studied playwriting at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York City before moving to DC where he studied at the Playwrights Theatre School, led by Harry Bagdasian and Ernie Joselovitz. With their guidance he wrote his first full-length play Four Men From Annapolis. The play premiered at the 1986 Source Theatre Festival and then was produced at the Touchstone Theatre in Arlington, VA the following year. That same year, the Touchstone production was awarded a Helen Hayes Award Nomination for Best New Play of 1987. Membership in the Playwrights Forum followed. At this time he wrote a dark comedy Members, a play about a halfway house for eunuchs set in a small Oklahoma town in the late sixties. Members was given a staged reading as part of the 1989 Source Theatre Festival. There it received a nomination for Best New Play. In his continuing quest to know more about playwrighting, he applied to Carnegie Mellons Universitys MFA program. Leaving his day job he moved his entire life, including his cat Ash, to Pittsburgh. In these two years, he was immersed in theater. Exhilarated. I was no longer a naval engineer who secretly wrote plays on the side, he says, I was a full-fledged playwright. The experience at Carnegie included acting in two productions: in the play Salome and in the Bruce Willis film STRIKING DISTANCE. But once back in DC and the routine of his defense consulting job, inexplicably his creative life stopped. He claimed to himself that he was working on a big play. He actually did think and dream about one. But in all cold seriousness , he recalls, he knew was not going to write the play. Years passed with no plays, and in 2004 he experienced a sea change so profound and tragic that it would forever alter his view of the world and who he is as an artist. One September night, his distraught father called him from Texas with a garbled message which became terribly clear: The driver of an 18-wheeler, 80,000 pound truck had fallen asleep, crossed the median strip and collided head-on with his sisters SUV. Instantly killed was his sister (32), his mother (70), and his three nephews (4, 2, and 6 weeks). Five others in another car were killed. The truck driver was the only survivor. He remembers the pain and darkness in the years following as unimaginable. However, he survived. In the aftermath, he began to write again. He renewed his ties with the Playwrights Forum and Ernie and Allison (I had come full circle back to the Forum where I began). Recently he completed his newest play Mr. Carver And Me which will have a reading on May 12. What then has changed for this playwright owing to his life events? Not his style, he thinks. He still writes dramas with lots of humor. One thing has though: his awareness of how fragile life is. As a true playwright, he says it best: I see death everywhere. I see death as always waiting just around the corner. Not ominously, with fangs and claws but just quietly waiting, wearing a comfortable suit, maybe seated at an outdoor bistro table reading the newspaper. And when its your time and you turn that final corner, Death graciously puts down his tea, stands up (checking himself to make sure his fly is zipped), then gently takes your hand...and leads you off toward immortality.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 23:48:14 +0000
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