Moonlighting as a man of the theater

Around the time many of us are finishing dinner and switching on the TV for the evening, Kurt McGinnis Brown is settling down to his second job. He’s at it nearly every night and on the weekends, even after full days of editing and other communications work for the university.

But unlike most people who hold down two jobs, Brown doesn’t moonlight for the money. In fact, he estimates his second gig brings in only about a penny an hour. What drives him instead is the desire to write plays — something that, for him, takes discipline.

“I know a lot of writers who try to write just on inspiration, but there’s just no way I can do that,” says Brown, who is communications director for the Land Tenure Center (LTC)  in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and senior editor with the Basis Research Program on Poverty, Inequality and Development. “Somehow I’ve managed to get (play writing) into my schedule, so that if I don’t do it, it’s like I’m playing hooky from work.”

His routine is to write at home every weekday evening save one (he currently takes off Thursday for a pilates class), and from late morning to early afternoon on Saturdays and Sundays. On some days, he admits to being so beat that he does little more than stare at the computer. But on most days, he puts in at least an hour and a half of writing.

That dedication is starting to pay off. Theaters in Akron, Ohio, Chicago and Los Angeles have now produced Brown’s plays, as have the University Theatre and Mercury Players Theatre here in Madison. Another piece is currently under development at the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre. And in January, Brown traveled to New York to attend a staged reading of his work as part of another development process.

Not bad for a part-time playwright, and yet Brown insists he’s not looking for the limelight either. For one, he says that seeing his plays performed on stage can be a “little dicey.”

“It depends how well they do it,” he laughs. “Sometimes it’s dreadful, and sometimes it’s a great joy.”

Moreover, by the time one of his works is produced, Brown has usually moved about three plays beyond it. “There’s no real connection to it at that point,” he says. “I often can’t even remember what the play was about or who the characters were.”

Brown has been working on plays since 2004, but his involvement in creative writing goes back much further. After earning an MFA in the late 1980s and teaching briefly in Colorado and Iowa, he came to Madison in 1994, landed his communications job with the LTC, and set up his home writing schedule.

For a decade he stuck to fiction — the form in which he’d been trained — eventually publishing a dozen short stories in national journals and completing two novels. But the second novel took five years to finish, and when Brown finally gave it to a playwright friend to critique in the fall of 2004, he was burned out.

“I was thinking, ‘I don’t know if I can do this again,’” he recalls. “And then my friend said the magic words: ‘Write plays, they’re easier.’ A lot of playwrights would be incensed to hear that, but plays are easier in terms of time. Right afterward I started a play, and I haven’t worked on fiction since.”

In works such as “Not the Artist,” “Mostly Sunny Early Then Clouds, Rain,” and “Recovering the Real Me,” Brown has consistently explored deep issues, including the nature of celebrity in our society, aging and death, and the emotional tangle of relationships and family. Recent works have focused on characters whose lives have ended in some way, forcing them to rethink their direction and start anew. They include an alcoholic ex-baseball player permanently sidelined by an arm injury, and a scholar who has utterly lost her enthusiasm for her subject.

The weighty themes don’t mean his plays are laborious to watch, however. Brown always injects a lot of humor into the grave circumstances he portrays, and his gift for writing funny dialogue and creating memorable characters keeps the action moving, says Talish Barrow, a UW-Madison theater graduate student who has directed two staged readings of Brown’s work.

Brown also knows how to convey his ideas though the interactions of his characters and their relationships, Barrow adds, allowing the audience to catch the deeper meaning without “hitting them over the head.”

“That’s very hard to do,” says the director, who hopes to continue collaborating with Brown after he finishes his MFA this semester. “It takes a skilled hand to get at some larger ideas while still making an interesting story where you care about the characters.”

So as this kind of recognition for his talent grows, is he ever tempted to give up his day job? Not in the slightest, says Brown. The intellectual satisfaction that comes from being immersed in social science at the university seems somehow to fuel his passion and energy for working on things “close to his heart” at home. He also finds endless fodder for his characters and plots in the situations he observes during normal, daily life.

But most of all, working a regular job protects him from his own nature, which he says is “basically lazy.”

“If I were home all day working, I don’t think I would get that much more done. I think I would probably just fritter away my time and start developing neuroses,” he says with a laugh.

All joking aside, his words are a good reminder to anyone with similar creative ambitions about how precious time is — and how easy it is to waste with thoughts of “some day, some day.”

“As the Creedance Clearwater Revival song goes ‘someday never comes,’” says Brown. “I think if you want to do creative stuff you have to do it every day, establish a schedule. And treat it like a job.”