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FeedQ&A: A wily wordsmith
Utah native Matthew Ivan Bennett penned the entire Plan-B Theatre season.
Matthew Ivan Bennett is a Utah playwright whose work fills Plan-B Theatre’s current season. The 30-year-old Taylorsville High School and
Southern Utah University grad adapted Frankenstein for the company’s annual radio play, tackled the thorny issue of Utah’s World War II Japanese internment camps in Block 8 and peels away the myth from the man in the Leonardo Di Vinci biography of sorts, Di Esperienza.
What inspired you to get into theater?
My first theater production was The Pied-Piper in fourth grade, and I played a kid who was led into the mountains and I think killed. In ninth grade, I was in a student government class that was canceled, so I was thrown into a drama class. I was pretty upset about it, actually. But then we did monologues, and I did MacBeth. And I played “Death” in Everyman. And by then, I was hooked. I began writing in high school, too. That’s when I did my first 10-minute play.
How did your relationship with Plan-B Theatre develop?
I was aware of them from growing up here in Salt Lake, and admired them. When I was in Chicago, I decided to send a play back to Jerry [Rapier, Plan-B’s producing director] in early 2004. He read it and said, “It’s pretty okay, but it’s not quite right for us.” Then I ended up moving back here and sent them another play, and it still wasn’t quite right. Then SLAM rolled around in early 2005, and Jerry asked if I had any 10-minute plays I could send. It was either the third or fourth sample I’d sent him, and he said, “Okay, you’re hired for SLAM.” So I did the 10-minute play festival, and we developed one of those into a full-length. The next year we developed one of my 10-minute plays. Then we almost immediately started brainstorming about Di Esperienza, the Leonardo play, and Block 8. So those have been on the back-burner for almost three years.
How did the idea of you writing an entire season come about? That’s got to be a big deal for a playwright, and kind of risky.
It was partly by accident. I’m the company’s resident playwright, and I started doing that two years ago. I was signed on to do the radio play for sure, so I knew I was doing Frankenstein. Di Esperienza, we’d been working on for a while, so it was this season for sure. Then all of the attention that the internment camps had been getting, we decided we had to get Block 8. It’s a risk for Plan-B and Jerry to put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. But I’m glad they did.
Plan-B Theatre’s production of Block 8 runs March 1 through March 8, and Di Esperienza runs April 3 through April 19. Visit planbtheatre.org for tickets and show schedules.
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