Dan Smith
Dwayne Yancey
First person Q and A with Dwayne Yancey By Dan Smith Dwayne Yancey on his other “career” and the state of local live theater in the time of COVID-19 When and why did you become interested in writing for the theater? How did you initially go about it? What is the continued appeal? I was one of the geeks who was involved in theatre in high school. I’m sure I was no good as an actor, but it was fun. At JMU, I took a playwriting class as an elective. It was co-taught by Roger Hall and Ralph Cohen [who] later went on to co-found the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton. I also hung out with some theatre people, one of whom is now my wife - Trina is now executive artistic director at Attic Productions so she’s the real theater person in the family. I didn’t really
58
t AUGUST 2020 / vbFRONT.com
think about writing plays until 1998. At the time, my daughter was nine. I took her to see a youth show at Attic and thought to myself ‘I could do that.’ So, I did. I called up the memory banks from that one class at JMU and started writing plays. I tell people it was my mid-life crisis— some guys buy fancy sports cars or acquire mistresses. I started writing plays. I was blessed – or cursed – with some early success. I naively started sending scripts and queries off to places. One of those one-acts got produced and then published - HAMLET ON SPRING BREAK, a one-act. So, at that point I was hooked. I like the idea
