After playing the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, what will Jeff King '06 do for an encore?
By Matt Jennings
The stunt would have landed Jeff King '06 in jail just about anywhere else in the world.
Wearing a fluorescent industrial-yellow T-shirt and brandishing a meat cleaver, the 21-year-old playwright chased friend and actor John Stokvis '05—clad only in boxer shorts, with "fresh meat" written in Magic Marker across his chest—through the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, in a slow-motion sequence that seemed to be yanked from an exceptionally dark Bugs Bunny cartoon. Yet the "chase," a 40-minute, inch-by-inch affair down the city's Royal Mile, drew bewildered stares, laughter, and applause, but not a hint of a siren or blue-and-white lights. Far from being criminal, the ploy was another brilliant idea hatched by the young man behind How to Lock Up, Talk Down, and Get Things Done, King's one-act play that debuted last August at the infamous Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
"At the Fringe, it's all about being noticed, driving audiences to your play," King says of his marketing escapades, which also included duct-taping practically naked actors from his theatre troupe to utility poles along the Mile and showering outdoors in the rain.
More than 1,700 plays compete for attention at the Fringe Festival, an event that swells the population of Edinburgh from 300,000 to more than one million during the month of August, and King was intent on making a splash in his debut. The stunts seemed to work. At a festival where the average audience size is four people, How to Lock Up averaged more than 25 a show and filled nearly 70 seats for one performance. Yet to attribute the show's success to savvy marketing alone would grossly shortchange the play. Word travels fast at the Fringe, and if King's play had been a dog, the marketing force of Madison Avenue couldn't have put fannies in the seats for a month's run.
Hailed by the The Scotsman, Scotland's national newspaper, as "amusing and blackly surreal," How to Lock Up features a man who picks up dates at funerals, an excitable female realtor with cannibalistic tendencies, a man who hears voices in his head, his sex-starved wife, an antique trunk, and a meat cleaver.
"It was unlike any other theatre production I had ever performed," says Stokvis, who played the schizophrenic man. "Right away, when I first read it, I thought, this is going to be different." He chuckles. "I had no idea how different it would be."
Jeff King looks the way you'd expect a young playwright to look. He wears glasses and has tousled hair that seems to be tousled just right. Hoop earrings dangle from each ear, and since returning from a month-long internship with a production company in Los Angeles, he's allowed a Vermont-respectable beard to fill in. On a chilly day in February, he's wearing a T-shirt under a pinstriped suit jacket, cargo pants with a long pocket chain, and red, white, and blue bowling shoes.
While eating a buffalo chicken wrap in the Grille, King riffs on his theatrical influences (Samuel Beckett, Michael Frayn), the topic of his first full-length screenplay (a romantic comedy about a paparazzo with a crush on Sandra Bullock), and why he refuses to use outlines in his work ("I believe in my characters, and I don't want to presuppose the ending. What if a character doesn't want it to end that way?").
King is a geography major, which only helps his career aspirations, he believes. "Everything I've done in geography is writing and reading intensive," he says. "I've learned how to evaluate information and communicate well. If you apply that to storytelling, it's the same thing: How do you say something concisely and intelligently?"
One of seven interns working for a Hollywood production company in January, King was the only one who wasn't a film major. "Yeah," he laughs, "they [the other interns] couldn't believe it. But I found that being able to look at projects analytically really made a big difference."
King was studying in Spain last spring when he learned that How to Lock Down had been accepted at the Fringe Festival. After receiving the news, he was immediately on the phone to Middlebury, enlisting the help of his girlfriend, Courtney Matson '06, and Stokvis to assemble a cast and director. The company, whimsically named Loose Elephant Theater, had just six months to raise $11,000 and less than six weeks to rehearse the play once the crew was able to assemble in June.
"Looking back on it, I can't believe we pulled it off," Stokvis says. "But Jeff's personality—this dark, funny personality infused with a can-do spirit—rubbed off on everyone and got us through it.
"There were so many things that could have derailed us," he continues. "We had to replace a cast member in June; the trunk—the one prop we couldn't do without—was shipped to Moscow and didn't arrive in Edinburgh until the day of our dress rehearsal. It never fazed Jeff. It probably should have, but it didn't."
There's a scene in How to Lock Up in which the funeral cad is locked in the antique trunk (by the realtor who plans on carving him up with the cleaver) and is trying to get the schizophrenic guy to let him out. They're the only two in the room, but there's one major problem: the schizophrenic thinks that the voice emanating from the trunk isn't coming from the trunk at all; he believes it's in his head.
"The entire play is so tightly written ... it's strangely logical, it's funny, the plot is constantly advanced," Stokvis says. "And in this scene, the comedic tension is heightened to such a great degree. The beauty of the farce is how close Jeff comes to breaking the individual assumptions—the assumption of my character who thinks the voice is in his head; the assumption of the guy in the trunk who thinks the guy on the outside can't find him. Jeff's so good at getting that extra laugh."
Since his experience in Scotland, King says he no longer "writes for fun," which is a fairly heavy statement coming from a college junior. He explains it this way: "Everything I write, I want to see it through. That's not to say I expect every play to be produced or every screenplay shot. I understand there is a lot of rejection involved, but I no longer want to write just to write. There has to be an objective, a mission."
He's working on another screenplay, one that's "more me," he says. It's about four guys who work as mascots at Disney World, and it's far darker than the romantic comedy vehicle for Sandra Bullock. Think Tarantino, rather than Bridget Jones.
"Jeff definitely has a dark sense of humor, a dark way of viewing the world," Stokvis says. "But it's a dark optimism, which is somewhat unusual. Jeff imagines these crazy situations, but in the end there is a ring of truth and a sense that everything works out.