Another Roadside Distraction

by Robert Nott
The Santa Fe New Mexican June 9, 2006
© 2005 The Santa Fe New Mexican, Inc.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.

“I feel like I’m the captain of the ship, but my ship can’t sail without all these other people—the director, the actors, the designers—involved. I love the group dynamic of theater, writing for good actors who supply a voice to the voices in my head.”

Only in Texas could people make money offering products with a pitch like “Buy one, get five free!”

But they do—selling fireworks at roadside stands. And many of the stands are attached to a mobile home, trailer or RV, where the salespeople live. Playwright Amy Lanasa’s Buy One, Get Five Free is set in one of these trailers on Fourth of July weekend.

The play gets a staged reading at 2 and 7 pm Saturday, June 10, as part of the Garson Theatre Company’s staged-reading series this month. The readings began June 3 with Mark Medoff’s RV (Recogito Vercordia) and continue after this weekend with Israel Horovitz’s The Secret of Mme. Bonnard’s Bath June 17 and Michael McKeever’s Suite Surrender June 24.

Tom Salzman, chairman of the College of Santa Fe’s Performing Arts Department and producer of the Garson Theatre Company, organized the series to provide a venue where playwrights could showcase and rework their plays. Each work is rehearsed for three days, and the readings—which take place at the Weckesser Studio Theatre at the college’s Greer Garson Theatre Center—are followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience.

Lanasa’s play concerns a family of agreeable screwballs who do things most families don't do. One drives a bulldozer over parked cars, another jumps out of an airplane without pulling the rip cord on his parachute, and another enters hundreds of mail-order contests hoping to win a trip to Hawaii—even though she is agoraphobic and has no intention of leaving the trailer. This wonderfully preposterous romantic comedy suggests the work of someone who is the secret love child of Sam Shepard and Beth Henley, two established playwrights known for puncturing Western/Southern customs with a heavy dose of black comedy.

Speaking by phone from her home in Tallahassee, Fla., where she’s completing a master’s degree in fine arts (with an emphasis on screenwriting and playwriting) at Florida State University, Lanasa said the play was inspired by a road trip she took from Oklahoma to Texas a few years back. “I saw those signs, ‘Buy One, Get Five Free,’ everywhere I went,” she recalled. “I knew there was something there, and I tried to buy fireworks everywhere we stopped and to meet those people.

“It's a fascinating life; there are schoolteachers who do this over the summer to make money and high-school kids who do it to raise money for food drives. Some people make enough money selling fireworks twice a year and do nothing else the rest of the year. That's really where the play started. I knew the title, and I knew the kind of people who worked those stands.”

Lanasa entered theater as an actress. She studied at the University of Oklahoma, where Medoff taught playwriting, and stage-managed one of Medoff’s plays under director Steve Wallace.

Lanasa said Wallace “tricked” her into taking Medoff’s playwriting class: by the end of that semester she had changed her focus from acting to playwriting. Wallace is directing this staged reading of Buy One, Get Five Free.

Lanasa’s first play, Drive-In America, was written under Medoff’s tutelage and produced at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival in 2001. Since then, Lanasa has penned four full-length plays, three of which have been produced. Two years ago, a considerably different version of Buy One, Get Five Free was given a staged reading at FSU, but Lanasa said she’s completely reworked the second act since.

The playwright is learning how to write screenplays but said she prefers creating for the stage. “With a film you write something, you sell it, and it's over,” she said. “But you own a play forever.

“I feel like I'm the captain of the ship, but my ship can’t sail without all these other people—the director, the actors, the designers—involved. I love the group dynamic of theater, writing for good actors who supply a voice to the voices in my head.”

Lanasa likes the reading’s compact rehearsal schedule and hopes it leads her to a better script. “It's really my time to fix the play,” she said.

Her other hope is that the audience laughs and falls in love with the characters she’s created. “I've spent so much time with them,” she said. “They are all based on these wonderful people I’ve run into. I always start, as a writer, with character. So when I meet someone interesting or someone who has a bizarre story, that really stays with me. I like skewed reality. That’s really the place from which I write.’

Details: Staged reading of Amy Lanasa’s Buy One, Get Five Free 2 and 7 pm, Saturday, June 10 Weckesser Studio Theatre, Greer Garson Theatre Center, College of Santa Fe campus, 1600 St. Michael's Drive $10;
473-6511