An Interview With Playwright Joshua Conkel
By Ken Greller
Amongst a certain crop of young, largely New York City-based playwrights Joshua Conkel— whose play MilkMilkLemonade runs now through February 5th at Single Carrot Theatre— is like The Breakfast Club’s John Bender: The consummate outsider, standing in the back of the room with one foot on the wall, fingerless leather gloves to match his beat up jacket, smoking Cowboy Killers and calling “bullshit” on all he sees before him.
In reality, Conkel is a bit more cleaned up than Judd Nelson’s immortal 1985 creation. He quit smoking three years ago (part of what sparked the writing of MilkMilkLemonade) and is a bit more delicately coiffed. Nonetheless, there is a kind of grunginess to Conkel’s aesthetic, both personally and professionally, that screams Baltimore. Mind you, he’d never been to Charm City until his visit last weekend for the SCT production. He did, however, once pay over $200 to have a copy of then-out-of-print Pink Flamingos shipped to his home in Seattle from a video store in Philadelphia.
He describes his own plays as “dark, kitschy, political, unpretentious and stripped down so that they’re almost dadaist.” It’s surprising that it’s taken so long for his work to hit Baltimore, but completely unsurprising that his charming, heart-breaking and mind-boggling MilkMilkLemonade would be embraced by the company at Single Carrot Theatre, in a stellar-yet-small production directed by Nathan Cooper.
The play follows Emory (Aldo Pantoja) a gay 11-year-old growing up on a chicken farm just outside of Mall Town, USA and his only companions: the confused, aggressive frenemy Elliot (Giti Jabaily, in some of her finest and most ambitious work with SCT,) Linda, a chicken infatuated with stand-up comedy (Jessica Murphy Garret) and his homophobic, god-fearing Nana (Elliot Rauh) The play sounds, and oftentimes is, totally ridiculousness, but out of that ridiculousness emerges an intense, shocking, disturbing seriousness about the truths of growing up queer in unsafe spaces. “I like to test audiences, push them, test they’re taste, people get too comfortable in the theatre.” asserts Conkel.
Since the play was first produced in New York by The Management (Conkel’s own theatre company, which put the show up for a 9-show run at a 35-seat house) it has seen productions at small companies like Single Carrot all over the country, with this most recent Baltimore premiere marking its 23rd venture out. Perhaps this is because the play, as Conkel describes it, “is like a cartoon.” A cartoon upon which a multitude of experience can be projected and reckoned with. It struck me in watching Single Carrot’s MilkMilkLemonade that the event was so genuinely, although not directly in the text, about the preoccupation that a group of Marylanders–the Carrots–couldn’t possibly help but have about the state they call home. In the story of Emory’s search for autonomy and fabulosity and Elliot’s search for peace and clarity we can see and feel the reverberations of stories about working class families, squalor-centric artist communities, even the little gay kids growing up in desolate suburbs with no outlet for self expression all over Baltimore. It’s a story that so lends itself to cultiness– it’s a play about searching for solacw that any audience member would have a hard time not finding solace in.
Despite the wildfire success of MilkMilkLemonade, Conkel complains of little further recognition in New York, where his work has yet to see another major production. MilkMilkLemonade scored him an agent and got him a book deal with MacMillian (keep your eyes peeled for a graphic novel adaptation of Josh’s play The Chalk Boy) and he’s currently participating in Soho Rep’s prestigious Writer/Director Lab as well as adapting his series of fashion-satire short plays “The House of Von Macrame” into a musical for The Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn. Even with a busy theatre schedule, the appeal Hollywood attention is not lost on him. He’s taking a slew of TV meetings. Conkel, who does not have a drivers license, told me he was in the process of taking Driver’s Ed (only about 15 years late) “so that I can move to LA.” Conkel laughed, but immediately seemed to read on my face utter horror at the prospect of him giving up on writing plays. “No, no,” he said sincerely and reassuringly “My hope is that if I’m a really successful TV writer I can just do whatever I want in theatre.”
Which is not to say that he’s not already doing whatever he wants– and as the dangerous commodity that he is, perhaps it’s not totally shocking that the queer, outrageous plays of Joshua Conkel gain traction with small companies with a penchant for risks like Single Carrot, but have a harder time surfacing on bigger stages in bigger cities like New York. Conkel is nothing if not relentless, and the Baltimore theatre community is lucky to have local artists diving into his work– hopefully the mass of fringe appeal will tip off the mainstream.
