INTERVIEW: Michael McKeever’s new play explores what it means to be suddenly single
Image courtesy of Penguin Rep Theatre / Provided by press team with permission.
Acclaimed playwright Michael McKeever has crafted a new show called Mr. Parker, about a gay, middle-aged man who is suddenly single and wondering how to process the world around him. The show is currently receiving its New York premiere at the Penguin Rep Theatre in Stony Point.
McKeever is a prolific writer, having penned 30 plays, including the hugely successful Daniel’s Husband, After and Clark Gable Slept Here. He is based in South Florida, but he has made a connection with Penguin Rep and its artistic director, Joe Brancato.
“I love working with Joe and Penguin, so when the opportunity arose, it was like, oh, absolutely, I’m there,” McKeever said in a recent phone interview.
The origins of the playwright’s connection to this intimate space in Stony Point go back to when McKeever was still working on Daniel’s Husband, a play that ran at Penguin Rep and also off-Broadway in New York City.
“There was a production of the play down here in South Florida,” he remembers. “In fact, the production was so successful in its original world premiere that they brought it back almost a year later at another venue, at another theater, and one of the patrons who saw it was a patron at Penguin Rep. And she called Joe that night and said, ‘You must see this show. You must read this play.’ So Joe called my agent and read Daniel’s Husband and loved it and called me and said, ‘We’re very interested in doing it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d be thrilled.’ I knew Penguin Rep by reputation before, and so I was thrilled.”
CRAFTING MR. PARKER
McKeever said Mr. Parker has been an idea percolating in the back of his mind for quite some time. He wrote the piece because he noticed the world was changing so quickly around him. He didn’t understand how people related anymore, and he thought it would be interesting to consider a 50-year-old man who now finds himself single and having to face this technologically advanced world alone.
“I thought how interesting it would be for someone in their 50s to find themselves suddenly single today,” McKeever said. “What would that mean? And how would they react to it? As a gay man in my 50s who is happily married I said, ‘Well, what would happen if I was in that situation?’ So I started thinking about it, and over the course of a couple years, I had a couple different paths that I was thinking about taking. And the original concept for the play was going to be the morning after a one-night stand between a 50-year-old man and a 28-year-old pickup, but there just wasn’t enough places to go there. There wasn’t enough story to be told once you got the initial jolt over the generation gap; there just wasn’t enough there.”
McKeever eventually shifted gears and kept thinking about this central character of Mr. Parker. He thought, and he thought, all the while working on other plays and keeping Mr. Parker in the back of his mind. It would take some time before he put pen to paper.
“I think about plays for a long time, but then when I write the first draft, I tend to write very quickly,” he said. “And so this first draft was written in probably about two months, and over the course of getting its world premiere production, it got developed more and developed more. Even with this production now, it’s been developed some more.”
EXPLORING GAY RELATIONSHIPS
The New York theater scene has had a number of plays with gay central characters, but many of them feature younger men and women facing the struggles of coming out or historic characters facing the uphill battle for LGBT rights during the Gay Rights Movement. McKeever’s play is different in that it looks deeper at gay relationships in 2019 and what happens when a decade-long romance falls apart.
“That’s one of the reasons why I did it because so much of theater that focuses on gay relationships tend to happen with young, attractive men or women,” the playwright said. “A) Because that sells tickets, and B) I don’t want to say it’s easier, but that’s a common place to go. So, like I said, I wanted to explore what happens when someone at a certain age finds themselves suddenly single. … [This] was interesting and fun to look at the different ways and how much everything has changed, from dating to communication to simple appliances, simple things.”
For this production of Mr. Parker, McKeever came up from South Florida for the first week of rehearsals and was also present for opening night. In between he would stay in contact with Brancato and offer up any rewrites.
“If there’s anything that really doesn’t make sense, we can explore that together, and then I do a lot of rewriting that first week and a lot of exploring that first week,” he said. “Usually every night or every other night, there’s a request for some kind of rewrite. There’s a lot of phone conversations that go on, and then I go up for the open.”
Now having had his third play at Penguin Rep, he can confidently say that he loves this intimate space, located approximately one hour from the lights of Midtown Manhattan.
“To me, they’re the best of both worlds,” McKeever said. “They have this very intimate regional theater feel, but at the same time the quality of the work there is completely on par with the work that you find in the city.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Mr. Parker, written by Michael McKeever, plays through Oct. 6 at Penguin Rep Theatre in Stony Point, New York. Click here for more information and tickets.
