Noir Interviews

Just about the time that the idea of doing a stage noir first burrowed itself into my head, I was lunching with (the excellent critic and one of Stolen Chair's good friends) Leonard Jacobs. I asked him if he had any idea how we could distinguish our film noir for the stage from every other film noir for the stage that seems to be opening on NYC stages every day. He didn't think it would be that serious an issue for us, and just advised me to make it very clear in our press release why we had taken on the material.

Well, I could not have prophesied a year more filled with film noir. In addition to 4 FringeNYC noirs, and an American Living Room noir, there have been radio plays, podcasts, and the two productions at 59E59 bookending Kill Me's run--I won't even mention the ways that film, tv, and even videogames became noir-saturated this year as well.

Rather than look upon these other voices as competition, Stolen Chair has decided that the best way to even further articulate for ourselves how Kill Me Like You Mean It differs from each of these other projects, is to interview the creators of these pieces here on the blog and find out what drew them to film noir and how they're processing the genre in their own work.

So, we've already got interviews lined up with Trav SD (Cold Fire, a noir radioplay that was at Joe's Pub a few months back), Ian W. Hill (World Gone Wrong, a 2-part noir epic that montages texts from nearly every noir film with quotes from Bush, Rumsfeld, et al), and Sheryl Kaller (Adrift in Macao, a noir-parody musical created in collaboration with Christopher Durang). Those will all happen before the New Year.

I'll be sending out some more interview invitations to a few other noir-inspired directors and playwrights in the next few days...and I'll post when anything else starts to take shape.