Interview: David Bunce of RED MAPLE at MIGHTY ACORN

David Bunce is a director, performer, and playwright who has written THE MIGHTY LAMBS, THE MIDDLE AGES, and the show that is going up in Houston soon, RED MAPLE. The production company Mighty Acorn is doing the play’s regional premiere at the MATCH from March 26th through April 4th. It has a great cast, including Tracy Ahern, Elizabeth Marshall Black, Craig Griffin, Seán Patrick Judge, and Skyler Sinclair. David will be in attendance for a matinee on March 28th, and the audience gets to ask him questions, but BROADWAY WORLD writer Brett Cullum got to him first to discuss the play and writing.   

Brett Cullum: So, tell me about RED MAPLE. What is it about?

David Bunce: It's basically about two couples who get together for dinner, and they're both fairly new empty nesters, and they both are not communicating well. They sort of drifted apart. Over the course of the evening, you find out that they don't know as much about each other as they think they do, even though they've been married for 25 years apiece. 

Brett Cullum: I may be able to relate to this, and it sounds like a lot of people just might.

David Bunce: Tracy Ahern got a hold of it because David Kenner, who is directing it, had done several shows up here in the Northeast, locally, and was actually staying with an actress who played the part that Tracy's playing, Karen. Somehow they got to talking about it, and Yvonne, who had played the part up here, suggested it to David, who read it and liked it, and he suggested it to Tracy, who read it, and I immediately got an email back [from Tracy Ahern] saying, “Boy, can I relate to this!”

Brett Cullum: Oh, no. Well, tell me, what inspired you to write it? I know you're a married man, David. Did something happen that we should know about? A really bad dinner party?

Davidbunce: Well, yeah, I'll be honest with you. I got the original idea almost ten years ago, when my wife and I were going through exactly the same thing. We were really struggling, our kids were gone, and we were looking at each other and kind of saying, not only “who are you,” but “do I know you anymore?” They call it a gray divorce if the couple is quite old. I guess, I don't know, but I think there's an awful lot of couples who end up struggling after the kids leave, and you're alone in the house together. You don't have all those things that kept you busy, and you didn't have to sit down and look at each other and say, “Okay, what now?” So that was the initial, and that's kind of serious. It took me a couple of years to see the whole thing as really pretty absurd.

Brett Cullum: Well, you’ve written a comedy. We're not talking about WHO’S AFRAID OF Virginia Woolf! It's funny, right?

David Bunce: The play is, hopefully, ridiculous, with very serious undertones. I mean, hopefully what you see is ridiculous, but it comes out of the seriousness of really wondering what the relationship is at this point.

Brett Cullum: Now, I notice that you act, as well. So, does that make a difference when a playwright is an actor, and you know, like, the other end of it?

David Bunce: I do for me. I can't really speak for everyone, but, you know, I will literally write a scene and then read it, playing both parts, or all the parts, or however many parts, to see how it, to see how it sounds in my ear, to see how it feels in my mouth. That's one of the processes I go through: actually act it out. So I do think it helps, in my case.

Brett Cullum: Now, you're coming down here on… March 28th, is that right?

David Bunce: Yeah, coming out on the 27th, and gonna be at the matinee show on the 28th. 

Brett Cullum: You're not from Houston. Where do you live and operate from?

David Bunce: Just outside of Albany, New York, in a suburb of Albany, New York, and I have never been to Texas. And I can't wait. I mean, I'm curious. I'm very curious.

Brett Cullum: Don’t be TOO curious. We’re hotter than Albany, probably have better barbecue and Tex-Mex, but our gray divorce rate is probably the same.  So tell me a little bit about how you started in the arts.

David Bunce: I was a real slug-a-muffin in high school. I didn't do much in high school, and I didn't even plan on going to college. So I got out of high school, and I worked construction for a year. I never did a play, never did anything to do with theater whatsoever in high school. I worked construction for a year; I hated it. I went to community college and hated it. I worked three more years in construction, and then, absolutely out of the blue, I just got the idea that I might enjoy acting. I mentioned it to my parents at the time, who knew someone in the community theater in the town I grew up in, which was in Connecticut. Joined a show. I was put in the chorus of PROMISES PROMISES, and knew nothing about anything at all. And the first dress rehearsal, I saw men putting on makeup, and I thought that was the weirdest thing I had ever seen in my life. I said, like, the men wear makeup, too?

So, after that, I went to school in Connecticut at a state school, and that's where I met my wife in the theater department. We moved to Manhattan for a couple of years, then went to Penn State for graduate work in directing. Her thing is directing. And then we ended up here [in Albany] because at the time, there was a state-financed, huge theater with a resident acting company of 15 actors. And employed, like, 60 people in the entire theater. An ex-professor of both of ours, who had moved to Albany, was working at this theater. So the theater offered me a job, and we moved here, and we've been here for 37 years. 

Brett Cullum: So, what made you think, okay, I'm gonna do playwriting?

David Bunce: You know, the first time I ever wrote, I wrote a one-act, when we were living in Manhattan. And I couldn't get arrested. I mean, I was auditioning for everything, and really not getting callbacks, and not really understanding how to try and make it as an actor. So to keep myself excited and creative, I wrote a one-act that was based on my time in construction. I found that I liked doing it, and then a couple of people read it and said, “Oh, gee. This is really good. Could I do it?” So, somebody did it at the community theater, and then they did it out at Penn State when we were there. That kind of got me started, and then I just kept doing it. Primarily as a hobby, because I initially started writing screenplays. Then went back to writing plays, Many, many years later. I found a love of language, the more I acted, to be honest, and theater is language.

RED MAPLE is amazing. How much of it is based on real life. Whether it's things I said to my wife, things my wife said to me, things my sister and brother-in-law said to each other, things people did, or who I knew. It's amazing how much of it is based on real life. And then, once you understand what you want to say, you begin to understand more and more about how you wanna say it. I tried writing like Pinter. I tried writing like other people. And eventually realized I had to write what I heard in my head. The way people talk to each other in my head is what I had to write.

Brett Cullum: What do you hope that audiences take away from RED MAPLE? When they walk out the door, what do you hope that they got?

David Bunce: I don't want to scare any husbands and wives out there, but what I hope is that people would walk out and have a conversation that they have not had. That would be good for them to have. That they may never have thought they needed until they see the play. These circumstances in the play are fairly absurd, and very specific to the play, but the heart of it is: what do you really need to say to each other? If you're holding secrets, what are the secrets?

Brett Cullum: Interesting. Well, I'm definitely there. It is March 26th through April 4th. It's only 11 performances at the MATCH. It's a stacked cast. It's an amazing group of actors from Houston. And sounds like you are going to make a lot of people think!