A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
JASON TAMBORINI, PROLOGUE THEATRE’S ARTISTIC DIRECTOR &
EOIN CARNEY, PLAYWRIGHT OF THE BREHON
Jason Tamborini:
Hello, I am Jason Tamborini, Artistic Director of Prologue Theatre, and I am joined today by Eoin Carney, playwright of The Brehon or Brehon, we're going to get into that in a second, the first play in our FOREWORD, new works series workshops that will be presented in the months of April and May. So, welcome Eoin. Thank you so much for joining us.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah, it's great to be here.
Jason Tamborini:
So I guess the first question on this list is the pronunciation of the title. Which I didn't actually ask you about.
Eoin Carney:
Brehon, not Brehon.
Jason Tamborini:
Brehon, okay. Awesome. So I promise I won't go any further into that. So I guess let's start off by, tell us a little bit about yourself, other things you're working on currently and other things that you're doing recently or today?
Eoin Carney:
Okay. Well I'm from Ireland originally. Eoin is always tripping people up because it's a lot of vowels together. It's not technically my name, my name's Jonathan, but Eoin is the Irish version of that and in Irish class back in Ireland, you would have to use your Irish form of your name and I like it as a nickname. It's better than other shortened versions of Jonathan. So yeah, I've been in the states a long time, came here for grad school and had a career as a research scientist. So my background is physics, medical imaging, and I write plays obviously and the other thing I do is I have a satirical blog, Breaking Burgh, that's politics and Pittsburgh stuff. It's had a few snoops articles, so we've had a few big, big stories.
Jason Tamborini:
There you go. Very cool.
Eoin Carney:
And right now I am at the Popular Culture Association Conference in San Antonio. So I kind of sought this out because I went back to my local community college to do some technical theater courses because I was getting more interested in producing work and they had a certificate program so I was like, "I'll do that," it's something to throw in the resume. They made me do intro to theater stuff as part of it, write a paper on Shakespeare. So I was like, "Well I'm going to present this paper somewhere." So I found this organization, so that's where I am today in lovely San Antonio.
Jason Tamborini:
Have you already presented your paper or no?
Eoin Carney:
I did one yesterday and then I got one later today. It's going to be kind of fun because I kind of got fascinated with Insta Poetry, if you know what that is.
Jason Tamborini:
I don't, no.
Eoin Carney:
Well it's this whole movement of writing poems on Instagram and it's kind of looked down a bit, looked down on a bit by some established poets because a lot of them, Rupi Kaur is one, she's had a lot of commercial success if you go into Barnes & Noble you’ll find all these books and so I sort of started out with a mocking chapbook of Insta poems, but then I became kind of fascinated and it became a bit more meaningful so I sort of got stuck in. So I'm presenting my experience of writing all these Insta poems, and transitioning from a critic to a sort of devotee. So I'll be facing some angry poets today.
Jason Tamborini:
There could be worse things I suppose.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah, this is the easy gig.
Jason Tamborini:
Very cool, very cool. So I wanted to ask, do you have a particular writing routine or a particular writing philosophy that you kind of adhere to?
Eoin Carney:
No, I don't and I think that my technique is poor and by technique that's really a code word for discipline. I'm always impressed with these writers who get up at 6:00 AM and I kind of fear I hobble myself a bit by not having that. I do lots of other things, so I'm kind of prioritizing a bit more now and certainly finding you guys was part of a focused effort to start seeking out opportunities and finishing this draft of The Brehon was quite an effort because it's fairly long.
Jason Tamborini:
No, I understand that. I would also say though, everybody, but writers in particular, and we we're talking about that brings their own experiences into not only what they're writing but how they write it. So if you only ever knew the idea of, I have this strict regimen and schedule and I get up at this time and I force myself to write for this many hours, that's all you really know. Whereas, what you're describing is coming at playwriting in particular, but writing in general and poetry from a different starting point and from a different angle. So I think that in and of itself kind of almost becomes not a philosophy, so to speak, but a methodology of how you get to writing.
I think it's super cool that you come from a research science background. I think that, that probably plays into not only your writing style but also your method, how your daily non-routine so to speak.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah.
Jason Tamborini:
That's cool.
Eoin Carney:
Whatever works, that's a good philosophy.
Jason Tamborini:
And you know what, that's a thing, whatever works. I sometimes joke that I'm like well, do I have a plan, sure, but I also just kind of fly by the seat of my pants and it's a lot of the times when I'm working on things, it really is, I'm constantly evolving and adapting to what's happening. So it seems like it's slightly and in some ways similar to your kind of process. So let's talk a little bit about your play, about The Brehon. Can you talk about what was the inspiration for the play?
Eoin Carney:
I can and that's an easy one because it was actually very specific. I remember the moment when I thought I was going to write a play. I was in Dublin visiting family and I was seeing a play at The Peacock, which is the second stage to The Abbey Theater, so Ireland's most famous theater and I resolved to write a play right then as I watched the play I was seeing on that stage and that was a very specific play. This isn't sort of really directly related to it, but it was a play about two Irishmen and one was William Joyce who was Lord Haw-Haw, who was the German propagandist during World War II and then the equivalent of Tokyo Rose here, broadcasting in the language of the enemy. So he was a traitor, I think he was hanged and the other Irishman, and I forget his name, but he was from County Tipperary, he became the inspiration for Big Brother in George Orwell's, 1984.
He was Churchill's kind of... So I was just watching this play about these two figures and it was a very good play and I just thought, I got to write a play and I have my two prompts, Ireland and power. That's all I really took from it. It wasn't anything more than that and then I just had this image of a man and his son working. I didn't have a time or anything, just a sort of almost silhouette style, which probably inspired by the set design I was seeing at that moment and that's the opening scene and then once I stumbled upon, I was always interested in Brehon Law and the idea that there was this extinguished sort of completely different way of doing things because all the law we have now, at least in this part of the world, including here, is based on English, common law, Magna Carta, you know, all this, but there was another system and so then it kind of all fell into place.
Jason Tamborini:
Very cool, very cool. Yeah, the way you describe seeing the father and the son as kind of that inciting image, it's very Pinter- esque, like Harold Pinter talks about how most of his plays started out as him just seeing a specific image or a specific item or object or moment and he had no idea. He talked to some of those points. He had no idea what was happening or where it was leading to, but he had to write it and then that's the seed of most of his plays. I think it can become a very powerful thing for any writer to have such a strong image and then kind of play with it, see where it goes. I think that works for anybody. So I know that you've done... There's just mounds of research that's been done and you looked into all of these things, especially where you've described this as a historical play that is not a historical play kind of idea. From where you first conceived this idea, what, if anything has changed about the play or about your thoughts about the play since then?
Eoin Carney:
Well, I'm trying to think when that first show was. I think I looked it up a while ago, the one where I got the first idea, inkling, I'm guessing that was around about 2016, 2017. It was probably during the election, the Trump rise. So I was probably thinking a lot about that just because that's what was happening and I kind of have a bit of an obsession with Trump. I've got another Trump play that's actually about Trump, but I think he stands for a lot. He illuminates a lot. He's not in and of himself, he's just a bit of a buffoon in some ways but he also, he shines a light on everything else.
So obviously there was a thing about power and you know people not standing up to him or thinking everything will just never get too out of control, so that's kind of where I was a little bit but I sort of always had this idea that this is a bit bigger, this is a sort of struggle or the lack of a struggle that's happened over time and so what really changed was, well the Ukraine invasion that was almost uncanny just over a year ago.
Everyone was like, Putin had all the forces on the border and no one could imagine, there can't be a full scale war between these two countries. And right up until the last minute, even when they were broadcasting those weird sort of meetings of Putin with his distance from all his subordinates, no one actually believed it’s going to happen including Zelensky and now of course we're at a point where there's an awful lot of killing going on and a massive war that would've been unimaginable the night before it happened and everyone would've said, and everyone was saying, except for the US intelligence services actually that, "Well this is all a bluff. Yeah, he did that, but he won't do this," and so it kind of knocked me over that, that's the play and I mentioned before one of the key lines is when the wife says, "Plenty of things don't happen until they do," and that was Ukraine.
So it's just become more real in a really kind of horrifying way-
Jason Tamborini:
And it gives it weight.
Eoin Carney:
Right. That didn't discourage me from the point of, I mean obviously these things are terrible and I don't want them to happen, but it certainly didn't detract from the relevance of pursuing this play. It made my previous, where I was previously with it, seem rather trite because it's so much weightier and the Thom character who is obviously charismatic, embodies all of this, you think about Putin, not to harp on it, but it is the thing that's happening right now. Putin isn't someone you'd call charismatic, but he is certainly someone we are all a bit charmed by in previous years with his horse riding and his antics and the way he danced seemed to outlast and dance around everyone else. Everyone gave him some do and so Thom is kind of all of those rolled into one, but even more charismatic. So that's-
Jason Tamborini:
Okay. Excellent.
Eoin Carney:
I don't know if my thinking's changed, it was more a sort of bit blown away by it's like sort of ignorantly stumbled onto something that was actually more relevant than I knew.
Jason Tamborini:
And I find that, that happens a lot with theatre where the poignancy or the relevancy of a piece is very, sometimes very cyclical, where it was very poignant at this moment in time and it still made sense, it still reverberated through time and then something else happened and you went, oh man, wait, it's got a bit of an Arthur Miller-esque kind of vibe to it where it's a play about this, but it's really about this from this other time and they're all very similar. The idea of history repeating itself without actually repeating itself is ever present, really. Cool. So as we head into this workshop, I want to ask you, so as the playwright, as a playwright, what for you is the most valuable piece of jumping into a workshop with people?
Eoin Carney:
I mean, it's mainly seeing what you've got in trusted hands and expert hands. Cause so much, at least for me, where I am, is a lot of writers getting together and writers reading and bad readers reading and I am the first to admit, I go to a few writers groups and whenever they have me read one of their roles, I just feel guilt. It's like, I'm going to kill this for you, but it's not the script. So a good workshop isn't valuable because you know that you can just remove a sort of layer of doubt, where it's like, I hate to think this as someone, but is it really that bad or are they just not good at conveying something?
Jason Tamborini:
Yeah, no. Yeah. So you'd be putting it into trusted hands, hands that you trust will do the justice to the words so that you can focus on the words themselves and what they are relaying to an audience.
Eoin Carney:
So that's the first thing is that, and it requires a lot of effort from a lot of people, which I appreciate very much, to make that happen. So that alone is really invaluable because re-writing's hard.
Jason Tamborini:
You're not wrong. No, great.
Eoin Carney:
And I always talk about finding the gold you know, because it's not really true that, even if everyone's really good, it's still hard to find exactly what's wrong with something ,but every so often something just falls, you know, you find the gold. It's like the writing's working, everyone just sort of gets it and you're like, that's kind of a good block of my story. So that's always great to know that you have, because it's hard for me to know, because I've got the whole play in my head and I have my ideas of what's going to carry over, what doesn't need changed but I know I'll have that confirmed when I see it because it'll just be the thing that just really comes out, comes across really well. This is all kind of first pass stuff, but it's what I'm excited to do.
Jason Tamborini:
Well it might be first, as you say, first pass stuff, but also getting the chance to hear it, see it, feel it, take the time you need or want to tweak it to really make sure that, yes, it's first pass, but it's also almost at the same time final pass stuff, because like you said, you know it when you hear it. Like okay, yeah, that's it, that's right. Excellent.
So speaking of this play, we're heading into this workshop beginning next week. Do you have anything planned for after the workshop with this piece or are you moving into another workshop or a set of readings or anything or is this kind of like we're going to wait and see what happens when it happens? I know that you've got other things happening.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah, I don't have anything specific. I've got inquiries into a few of the Irish sort of new play development programs. I have my... Right after this, I have my Trump play is going to a few fringe festivals and I'm going to self-produce for the first time. So that's kind of what I'm jumping right into and this one, I do feel sort of a bigger weight on me to get it right, especially since it's got this new relevance and I've always agonized about the ending a bit. It raises a question that I'm not sure I have the answer I want to yet, or if there should be an answer. The answer being about the main character, I do kind of like these passive characters that just frustrate you by just failing to really, and this goes all the way up to the end of the last scene. You have a character that's passive and so I'm still sort of agonizing over, is that the message, is that it? Am I not finding this like... he hasn’t like, pulled up a sword and roar, I'm mad enough. I'm not sure what that...
Jason Tamborini:
I mean, it does at least reminiscent of the Hamlet esque character of, I can't... It's not that I can't make a decision, it's just that I don't know which decision to make, so I won't make a decision until I know.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah, I'm not sure if I just want everyone dying at the end.
Jason Tamborini:
Well, I mean, look, it is a direction to take it. Cool. Well, excellent. Typically with some interviews that we do, I try to end on a lighter note. So we have a couple of this or that questions, kind of rapid fire for you. Maybe you have a rational reason behind it and maybe you don't. Who knows?
I'll start off with robots or dinosaurs.
Eoin Carney:
Okay. That's easy because even though I was a scientist, dinosaurs, because nature is still far more interesting than what we produce.
Jason Tamborini:
There you go.
Trains or planes?
Eoin Carney:
European, so it's got to be trains.
Jason Tamborini:
I'm there with you, man.
Eoin Carney:
Not trains here. Some of them are a bit... Well, there aren't any, that's the problem.
Jason Tamborini:
I was able to travel by train in Europe for a bit and you're right, it is not the same thing. Not the same thing here.
Salsa or guacamole.
Eoin Carney:
Oh salsa. Well, a little bit of guacamole. Can't take too much. Yeah.
Jason Tamborini:
And then final question, time machine or magic wand?
Eoin Carney:
I would have to go with time machine. I'm fascinated there.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. Excellent. Well again, Eoin, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. As a reminder, The Brehon will begin its workshop process next week and we will have reading presentations on Friday the 21st and Saturday the 22nd of April. Looking forward to it and again, thank you.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah. Thank you very much.
Hello, I am Jason Tamborini, Artistic Director of Prologue Theatre, and I am joined today by Eoin Carney, playwright of The Brehon or Brehon, we're going to get into that in a second, the first play in our FOREWORD, new works series workshops that will be presented in the months of April and May. So, welcome Eoin. Thank you so much for joining us.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah, it's great to be here.
Jason Tamborini:
So I guess the first question on this list is the pronunciation of the title. Which I didn't actually ask you about.
Eoin Carney:
Brehon, not Brehon.
Jason Tamborini:
Brehon, okay. Awesome. So I promise I won't go any further into that. So I guess let's start off by, tell us a little bit about yourself, other things you're working on currently and other things that you're doing recently or today?
Eoin Carney:
Okay. Well I'm from Ireland originally. Eoin is always tripping people up because it's a lot of vowels together. It's not technically my name, my name's Jonathan, but Eoin is the Irish version of that and in Irish class back in Ireland, you would have to use your Irish form of your name and I like it as a nickname. It's better than other shortened versions of Jonathan. So yeah, I've been in the states a long time, came here for grad school and had a career as a research scientist. So my background is physics, medical imaging, and I write plays obviously and the other thing I do is I have a satirical blog, Breaking Burgh, that's politics and Pittsburgh stuff. It's had a few snoops articles, so we've had a few big, big stories.
Jason Tamborini:
There you go. Very cool.
Eoin Carney:
And right now I am at the Popular Culture Association Conference in San Antonio. So I kind of sought this out because I went back to my local community college to do some technical theater courses because I was getting more interested in producing work and they had a certificate program so I was like, "I'll do that," it's something to throw in the resume. They made me do intro to theater stuff as part of it, write a paper on Shakespeare. So I was like, "Well I'm going to present this paper somewhere." So I found this organization, so that's where I am today in lovely San Antonio.
Jason Tamborini:
Have you already presented your paper or no?
Eoin Carney:
I did one yesterday and then I got one later today. It's going to be kind of fun because I kind of got fascinated with Insta Poetry, if you know what that is.
Jason Tamborini:
I don't, no.
Eoin Carney:
Well it's this whole movement of writing poems on Instagram and it's kind of looked down a bit, looked down on a bit by some established poets because a lot of them, Rupi Kaur is one, she's had a lot of commercial success if you go into Barnes & Noble you’ll find all these books and so I sort of started out with a mocking chapbook of Insta poems, but then I became kind of fascinated and it became a bit more meaningful so I sort of got stuck in. So I'm presenting my experience of writing all these Insta poems, and transitioning from a critic to a sort of devotee. So I'll be facing some angry poets today.
Jason Tamborini:
There could be worse things I suppose.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah, this is the easy gig.
Jason Tamborini:
Very cool, very cool. So I wanted to ask, do you have a particular writing routine or a particular writing philosophy that you kind of adhere to?
Eoin Carney:
No, I don't and I think that my technique is poor and by technique that's really a code word for discipline. I'm always impressed with these writers who get up at 6:00 AM and I kind of fear I hobble myself a bit by not having that. I do lots of other things, so I'm kind of prioritizing a bit more now and certainly finding you guys was part of a focused effort to start seeking out opportunities and finishing this draft of The Brehon was quite an effort because it's fairly long.
Jason Tamborini:
No, I understand that. I would also say though, everybody, but writers in particular, and we we're talking about that brings their own experiences into not only what they're writing but how they write it. So if you only ever knew the idea of, I have this strict regimen and schedule and I get up at this time and I force myself to write for this many hours, that's all you really know. Whereas, what you're describing is coming at playwriting in particular, but writing in general and poetry from a different starting point and from a different angle. So I think that in and of itself kind of almost becomes not a philosophy, so to speak, but a methodology of how you get to writing.
I think it's super cool that you come from a research science background. I think that, that probably plays into not only your writing style but also your method, how your daily non-routine so to speak.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah.
Jason Tamborini:
That's cool.
Eoin Carney:
Whatever works, that's a good philosophy.
Jason Tamborini:
And you know what, that's a thing, whatever works. I sometimes joke that I'm like well, do I have a plan, sure, but I also just kind of fly by the seat of my pants and it's a lot of the times when I'm working on things, it really is, I'm constantly evolving and adapting to what's happening. So it seems like it's slightly and in some ways similar to your kind of process. So let's talk a little bit about your play, about The Brehon. Can you talk about what was the inspiration for the play?
Eoin Carney:
I can and that's an easy one because it was actually very specific. I remember the moment when I thought I was going to write a play. I was in Dublin visiting family and I was seeing a play at The Peacock, which is the second stage to The Abbey Theater, so Ireland's most famous theater and I resolved to write a play right then as I watched the play I was seeing on that stage and that was a very specific play. This isn't sort of really directly related to it, but it was a play about two Irishmen and one was William Joyce who was Lord Haw-Haw, who was the German propagandist during World War II and then the equivalent of Tokyo Rose here, broadcasting in the language of the enemy. So he was a traitor, I think he was hanged and the other Irishman, and I forget his name, but he was from County Tipperary, he became the inspiration for Big Brother in George Orwell's, 1984.
He was Churchill's kind of... So I was just watching this play about these two figures and it was a very good play and I just thought, I got to write a play and I have my two prompts, Ireland and power. That's all I really took from it. It wasn't anything more than that and then I just had this image of a man and his son working. I didn't have a time or anything, just a sort of almost silhouette style, which probably inspired by the set design I was seeing at that moment and that's the opening scene and then once I stumbled upon, I was always interested in Brehon Law and the idea that there was this extinguished sort of completely different way of doing things because all the law we have now, at least in this part of the world, including here, is based on English, common law, Magna Carta, you know, all this, but there was another system and so then it kind of all fell into place.
Jason Tamborini:
Very cool, very cool. Yeah, the way you describe seeing the father and the son as kind of that inciting image, it's very Pinter- esque, like Harold Pinter talks about how most of his plays started out as him just seeing a specific image or a specific item or object or moment and he had no idea. He talked to some of those points. He had no idea what was happening or where it was leading to, but he had to write it and then that's the seed of most of his plays. I think it can become a very powerful thing for any writer to have such a strong image and then kind of play with it, see where it goes. I think that works for anybody. So I know that you've done... There's just mounds of research that's been done and you looked into all of these things, especially where you've described this as a historical play that is not a historical play kind of idea. From where you first conceived this idea, what, if anything has changed about the play or about your thoughts about the play since then?
Eoin Carney:
Well, I'm trying to think when that first show was. I think I looked it up a while ago, the one where I got the first idea, inkling, I'm guessing that was around about 2016, 2017. It was probably during the election, the Trump rise. So I was probably thinking a lot about that just because that's what was happening and I kind of have a bit of an obsession with Trump. I've got another Trump play that's actually about Trump, but I think he stands for a lot. He illuminates a lot. He's not in and of himself, he's just a bit of a buffoon in some ways but he also, he shines a light on everything else.
So obviously there was a thing about power and you know people not standing up to him or thinking everything will just never get too out of control, so that's kind of where I was a little bit but I sort of always had this idea that this is a bit bigger, this is a sort of struggle or the lack of a struggle that's happened over time and so what really changed was, well the Ukraine invasion that was almost uncanny just over a year ago.
Everyone was like, Putin had all the forces on the border and no one could imagine, there can't be a full scale war between these two countries. And right up until the last minute, even when they were broadcasting those weird sort of meetings of Putin with his distance from all his subordinates, no one actually believed it’s going to happen including Zelensky and now of course we're at a point where there's an awful lot of killing going on and a massive war that would've been unimaginable the night before it happened and everyone would've said, and everyone was saying, except for the US intelligence services actually that, "Well this is all a bluff. Yeah, he did that, but he won't do this," and so it kind of knocked me over that, that's the play and I mentioned before one of the key lines is when the wife says, "Plenty of things don't happen until they do," and that was Ukraine.
So it's just become more real in a really kind of horrifying way-
Jason Tamborini:
And it gives it weight.
Eoin Carney:
Right. That didn't discourage me from the point of, I mean obviously these things are terrible and I don't want them to happen, but it certainly didn't detract from the relevance of pursuing this play. It made my previous, where I was previously with it, seem rather trite because it's so much weightier and the Thom character who is obviously charismatic, embodies all of this, you think about Putin, not to harp on it, but it is the thing that's happening right now. Putin isn't someone you'd call charismatic, but he is certainly someone we are all a bit charmed by in previous years with his horse riding and his antics and the way he danced seemed to outlast and dance around everyone else. Everyone gave him some do and so Thom is kind of all of those rolled into one, but even more charismatic. So that's-
Jason Tamborini:
Okay. Excellent.
Eoin Carney:
I don't know if my thinking's changed, it was more a sort of bit blown away by it's like sort of ignorantly stumbled onto something that was actually more relevant than I knew.
Jason Tamborini:
And I find that, that happens a lot with theatre where the poignancy or the relevancy of a piece is very, sometimes very cyclical, where it was very poignant at this moment in time and it still made sense, it still reverberated through time and then something else happened and you went, oh man, wait, it's got a bit of an Arthur Miller-esque kind of vibe to it where it's a play about this, but it's really about this from this other time and they're all very similar. The idea of history repeating itself without actually repeating itself is ever present, really. Cool. So as we head into this workshop, I want to ask you, so as the playwright, as a playwright, what for you is the most valuable piece of jumping into a workshop with people?
Eoin Carney:
I mean, it's mainly seeing what you've got in trusted hands and expert hands. Cause so much, at least for me, where I am, is a lot of writers getting together and writers reading and bad readers reading and I am the first to admit, I go to a few writers groups and whenever they have me read one of their roles, I just feel guilt. It's like, I'm going to kill this for you, but it's not the script. So a good workshop isn't valuable because you know that you can just remove a sort of layer of doubt, where it's like, I hate to think this as someone, but is it really that bad or are they just not good at conveying something?
Jason Tamborini:
Yeah, no. Yeah. So you'd be putting it into trusted hands, hands that you trust will do the justice to the words so that you can focus on the words themselves and what they are relaying to an audience.
Eoin Carney:
So that's the first thing is that, and it requires a lot of effort from a lot of people, which I appreciate very much, to make that happen. So that alone is really invaluable because re-writing's hard.
Jason Tamborini:
You're not wrong. No, great.
Eoin Carney:
And I always talk about finding the gold you know, because it's not really true that, even if everyone's really good, it's still hard to find exactly what's wrong with something ,but every so often something just falls, you know, you find the gold. It's like the writing's working, everyone just sort of gets it and you're like, that's kind of a good block of my story. So that's always great to know that you have, because it's hard for me to know, because I've got the whole play in my head and I have my ideas of what's going to carry over, what doesn't need changed but I know I'll have that confirmed when I see it because it'll just be the thing that just really comes out, comes across really well. This is all kind of first pass stuff, but it's what I'm excited to do.
Jason Tamborini:
Well it might be first, as you say, first pass stuff, but also getting the chance to hear it, see it, feel it, take the time you need or want to tweak it to really make sure that, yes, it's first pass, but it's also almost at the same time final pass stuff, because like you said, you know it when you hear it. Like okay, yeah, that's it, that's right. Excellent.
So speaking of this play, we're heading into this workshop beginning next week. Do you have anything planned for after the workshop with this piece or are you moving into another workshop or a set of readings or anything or is this kind of like we're going to wait and see what happens when it happens? I know that you've got other things happening.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah, I don't have anything specific. I've got inquiries into a few of the Irish sort of new play development programs. I have my... Right after this, I have my Trump play is going to a few fringe festivals and I'm going to self-produce for the first time. So that's kind of what I'm jumping right into and this one, I do feel sort of a bigger weight on me to get it right, especially since it's got this new relevance and I've always agonized about the ending a bit. It raises a question that I'm not sure I have the answer I want to yet, or if there should be an answer. The answer being about the main character, I do kind of like these passive characters that just frustrate you by just failing to really, and this goes all the way up to the end of the last scene. You have a character that's passive and so I'm still sort of agonizing over, is that the message, is that it? Am I not finding this like... he hasn’t like, pulled up a sword and roar, I'm mad enough. I'm not sure what that...
Jason Tamborini:
I mean, it does at least reminiscent of the Hamlet esque character of, I can't... It's not that I can't make a decision, it's just that I don't know which decision to make, so I won't make a decision until I know.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah, I'm not sure if I just want everyone dying at the end.
Jason Tamborini:
Well, I mean, look, it is a direction to take it. Cool. Well, excellent. Typically with some interviews that we do, I try to end on a lighter note. So we have a couple of this or that questions, kind of rapid fire for you. Maybe you have a rational reason behind it and maybe you don't. Who knows?
I'll start off with robots or dinosaurs.
Eoin Carney:
Okay. That's easy because even though I was a scientist, dinosaurs, because nature is still far more interesting than what we produce.
Jason Tamborini:
There you go.
Trains or planes?
Eoin Carney:
European, so it's got to be trains.
Jason Tamborini:
I'm there with you, man.
Eoin Carney:
Not trains here. Some of them are a bit... Well, there aren't any, that's the problem.
Jason Tamborini:
I was able to travel by train in Europe for a bit and you're right, it is not the same thing. Not the same thing here.
Salsa or guacamole.
Eoin Carney:
Oh salsa. Well, a little bit of guacamole. Can't take too much. Yeah.
Jason Tamborini:
And then final question, time machine or magic wand?
Eoin Carney:
I would have to go with time machine. I'm fascinated there.
Jason Tamborini:
Cool. Excellent. Well again, Eoin, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. As a reminder, The Brehon will begin its workshop process next week and we will have reading presentations on Friday the 21st and Saturday the 22nd of April. Looking forward to it and again, thank you.
Eoin Carney:
Yeah. Thank you very much.