Titles galore in Finegan's wake
With more than 70 commissioned plays to his name, it should be no surprise that Finegan Kruckemeyer would have several in production at any one time.
Take next month for example. The prolific 33-year-old Tasmanian has This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing opening in Austin, Texas; The Boy at the Edge of Everything is on stage in Boston; and The Tragical Life of Cheeseboy heads to Bergen, Norway, after a season at the Dublin Theatre Festival.
As that lists suggests, his impressive output of plays is exceeded only by the length of their titles. This quirky record is reinforced by Those Who Fall in Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon the Ocean Floor, which has its world premiere next month at the Blue Room Theatre, which is claiming the title as a record in the venue's history.
"Quantity, not quality, that's my modus operandi with lots of words," Kruckemeyer laughs over the phone from Hobart. "It's been a busy couple of years."
Perth theatre-makers Jo Morris, Renee Newman-Storen and Mark Storen have scored a coup by premiering this play after previous collaborations with Kruckemeyer. Morris performed in a Barking Gecko production of This Girl Laughs in 2012.
"I was very impressed with her as an actor and as a lovely person to work with which is invariably how new projects start," Kruckemeyer says. "You form connections with a particular colleague and think 'Why don't we do another project together?'"
He also spent a fortnight in Albany as mentor on a new script by emerging playwright Liz Newell at Southern Edge Arts, where Mark Storen was artistic director.
"Suddenly a triangle was formed."
Renowned as a writer of children's theatre with a fantastical, allegorical bent, Kruckemeyer is best known in Perth through This Girl Laughs and the 2010 Perth Festival show, The Tragical Life of Cheeseboy. He combines a Teutonic discipline with an Irish gift for wordplay and storytelling (the legacy of a German dad and Irish mum, perhaps) that has led to many commissions and several awards, including the inaugural $160,000 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and an Australian Writers Guild Award for best children's play.
Kruckemeyer was born in Ireland but moved to Adelaide with his parents in 1989 when he was eight. He joined a youth theatre company the following year and as an adult he taught drama with marginalised young people in juvenile detention centres and regional areas.
Morris says she jumped at the opportunity to produce a Kruckemeyer work for adult audiences. "Finegan's stories encapsulate everything I love about theatre and all its potential for magic and heart, hilarity and imagination," she says.
Directed by Adam Mitchell, Those Who Fall in Love is an ode to the volatility and multi-dimensional nature of emergent love, Kruckemeyer says. The play transcends time, moving from a Cold War Russian Submarine, to a Parisian street, to an Appalachian snow field and an Australian restaurant as Morris, Newman-Storen and Ben Mortley portray 12 characters whose lives are intertwined by fate.
"It's a story about love and time and the way they affect each other," Kruckemeyer says. "It looks at one state - that of trying to control love and time, and another - that of succumbing to them both. So do we navigate, or do we float? Do we master our days, or do we let them steer us?"
Those Who Fall In Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon The Ocean Floor is at the Blue Room Theatre from November 11-29.
