Denis O'Hare On AN ILIAD, THE GOOD BOOK & His Own Playwriting

By: Feb. 04, 2014
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Tony Award-winning Broadway and Hollywood notable Denis O'Hare opens up about his own creative process as a playwright and actor as part of a new interview in promotion of the Santa Monica bow of his recent performance piece AN ILIAD.

Discussing writing in general and his penchant for playwriting, O'Hare shares, "I've written since I was 12. I wrote poetry while I was a major at Northwest University. I've written three to four screenplays. I was happy to be busy being an actor. Now I get to satisfy a different sort of creative itch."

Furthermore, O'Hare says he already has another play in mind after finishing performing AN ILIAD: titled THE GOOD BOOK, based on no less than the Bible itself.

"The reason I want to do it is I'm an ex-Catholic atheist and am obsessed with religion. As an openly gay atheist man, I feel the bible has been used as a weapon against me. I want to understand where it comes from. The history is crazy: the archeology, sociology, linguistics, literary criticism. It's a rigorous endeavor," O'Hare relates.

On the topic of AN ILIAD, O'Hare says the writing was organic, revealing, "We stumbled on a method of improvising on-camera and transcribing that for the text. What is the story we can tell? We spent a lot of time arguing about the gods. Should we include them? What characters do we cut? That honing process took years, partly because we weren't doing it full time."

Check out the original article on the matter here.


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