Cruising my religion
Scribe Keith Bunin takes on faith at Next Theatre
Time
Out Chicago
September 13-19, 2007 Issue No. 133
“Thirty-three is your Jesus year,” playwright Keith Bunin tells us, explaining the age he was when he started to write The Busy World Is Hushed. His play about a tough-minded, scholarly clergywoman with a gay son, making its Chicago premiere this week at Next Theatre, is a spiritual interrogation that Bunin chalks up to early-thirties religious apprehensiveness.
The product of a half-Jewish father, a strictly raised Catholic mother and Quaker education, Bunin, now 36, was already a religious polyglot when he sat down to write. But as his friends started raising children, he found himself drawn to the dilemma of indoctrinating kids into a particular faith (or not). “You can’t teach morality in a vacuum,” Bunin says. “You need those metaphors that come from storytelling.”
The well respected playwright, whose works include The Credeaux Canvas, resides in Brooklyn Heights, where he’s able to keep himself gainfully employed with stage and screen projects. But unlike the many playwrights you’ll meet who roll their eyes or chuckle self-deprecatingly at the mention of financially necessary Hollywood assignments, Bunin seems relatively sunny.
“The nice thing about writing for television and film is that it gives me space between plays,” Bunin says. The distance between stage scripts may also be what keeps him from repeating himself. The Credeaux Canvas, his first New York production, looked at tree young East Villagers attempting to pull off an art forgery. His follow-up was a phantasmagorical bit of mythic fantasy called The World Over. As he turned his eye next to the challenges of avoiding religious hypocrisy, one can’t say that he’s stuck in a rut.
It’s helpful, Bunin notes, to lead a life that isn’t disproportionately influenced by theater and its malcontents. “I’d say about 40 percent of my friends are in theatre,” Bunin says. “That’s one of the nice things about living in New York rather then L.A. This isn’t a factory town. You meet people here who aren’t in the business.”
With a master’s degree in English education, rather than the playwriting M.F.A. so many of his peers have sought, Bunin also finds himself working outside the matrix of contemporary American playwriting. “You don’t need to write three plays in year,” he says. “the luxury of not having to produce that amount of work is that it allows you to focus on your individual voice. Not to be self-aggrandizing, but the question a writer should be asking himself is, What is it that only I can say?” – CP
Bunin has his say in The Busy World Is Hushed, which is now playing.