Interview with Jeffery Corrick

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               My connection to Jeffery Corrick goes back 20 years, when I was a frequent audience member of his company, Wings Theatre, down at the end of Christopher Street in NYC - so I was delighted to learn that Jeffery was here in Nashville to direct his musical version of The Three Musketeers for the Larry Keeton Theatre. Kudos to the Keeton Theatre's producer, Jane Schnelle and artistic director, Kate Adams Johnson, for bringing Jeffery to Nashville! This is an awesome opportunity for Nashville actors to work with an artist whose contribution to the American theatre seems to be just beginning.

I asked Jeffery to tell us something about himself, and here is what he had to say:

Tell us about your own evolution as an artist.

In retrospect, what fascinated me early on about theatre was the way a whole alternate world was created on stage.  For two or three hours you could be transported to Edwardian Siam or Camelot -- the deck of the Titanic or the Salem Witch Trials.  And you didn't have to imagine it like reading a book or see it in flickering black and white on the TV.  This was real -- it was happening with real people right there in front of you.  And if it was done well, you believed in that world, and it WAS reality to you..Well, early on, I knew I wanted to create those other worlds.  It's a little like playing God.  So of course, almost from the first, I knew I wanted to be the DIRECTOR.  Unfortunately, aside from a few class plays, few theatres will hire a 9 year-old director, but by 12, I was directing summer melodramas in a little theatre my folks had constructed for me in the basement.  At 15, the community theatre let me direct my first show there.  At 17 I went off to college in southern California and graduated with a major in directing.

After college, I returned to Kansas and started a touring theatre company.  We played over 300 performances a year, mostly one-night-stands across sixteen midwestern states for 7 years.  Kind of exhausting, definitely crazy, but great experience.  Touring the Bible belt though, had its limitations.  Godspell, I Do! I Do!, Children's theatre... all perfectly fine stuff, but my interests tended to a considerably wider range of material.  I was definitely looking to move into something a bit more edgy.  In 1981, we received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for an annual new plays contest culminating in a summer "Festival of New Plays" with playwrights in residence, workshops, guest lecturers... the whole nine yards.  A Broadway playwright and members of his NY company came to Kansas for the next 3 summers to work with the festival.  And I was finding my niche.  I REALLY got off on working with new material.  I especially got off on the freedom.  Suddenly, in this venue, there were no restrictions on content or style.  Artistic freedom was a kind of heady thing.  I closed the touring company, pulled up stakes, and moved to New York.

I opened Wings Theatre in NYC in the fall of 1986, as a theatre committed to producing only new works by American playwrights.  In many ways, this was, and continues to be, a great joy.  I still love working with new material.  However it didn't take long to realize that total artistic freedom rarely exists in the real world.  There are budgets, audience preferences, critics, grants, crazy actors, crazier playwrights, unions...  Reality bites.  And the reality was that being Artistic Director of a non-profit, off-off Broadway theatre in New York City doesn't leave much time to do anything artistic.  Fundraising, grant writing, cleaning bathrooms, putting out fires (metaphoric and real), all the nitty-gritty of keeping the place running meant I was lucky to scrape out the time to direct one show a year.  This hadn't been the plan.

I'll spare you the details, but rather by accident, I got roped into writing part of a play.  Then, by necessity, I threw it into a Wings season as a panic, last-minute replacement.  And to my enormous surprise, I really got off on the whole process.  I had never had any desire to write, or had an inkling I'd be any good at it.  But the writing had been fun, almost easy.  And the audiences seemed to be having a great time.  Wow!  I was doing something artistic again for a change, and something I could do at 4am if necessary.  But best of all, as the playwright, I was REALLY creating that alternate world that had originally drawn me into all this madness.  It was my own vision, my own world, my own fantasy that was coming to life on that stage.  Extremely powerful stuff for someone with as many strange, twisted and wondrous visions floating about as I.

I wrote and produced a play a year for the next 13 years.  Every one is not a gem, but I've taken care to learn from each one and have gotten considerably better at it since those first few.  Especially, I've learned to take risks, to go places that scare me, to write what I want/need to write even when I'm sure it's going to be universally hated.  Thank the good Lord, so far, the more terrified I've been to put something before an audience, the more they've liked it.  I guess it's called being 'honest' in your writing or something -- but damn, it's scary.

What inspired you to write this musical version of The Three Musketeers?

I had always adored the novel as a kid, and had read it over and over.  I had also adored big, lavish, period musicals.  The novel is high-melodrama.  It seemed natural for an adaptation, and I'd hated the way the various film versions had butchered the original material.  Also, I like pushing myself in new directions.  I'd never written a big, mainstream, legit muscial, and I guess I wanted to see if I could do it.

Based on your brief experience here, how is Nashville looking as a theatre town?