Young Playwrights Festival 2012 honored Playwright Roric Coletta, grade 3, Midtown Academy, Baltimore City for The Three Little Pluses and The Big Bad Minus.
Roric Coletta will be 10 years old next month. He’s a bright, polite, good looking 3rd grader who can articulate his ideas. He has a future based on those attributes alone.
I’d been thinking about how to conduct the interview. I didn’t want the fact that he’s a kid to come off as a gimmick. And I didn’t want to talk down to him. No worries. The interview had great energy, rhythm, and we even got into process, which I love. What’s not evident is how charming he is and that I had to stop and laugh (with joy) a couple of times, especially at the end when we started talking about music. Hearing the word Fugazi come out of a 9 year old’s mouth is, well…fun as hell. I’m laughing again now.
Peter: What does the name Roric mean?
Roric: Rory is the name of an Irish King.
Peter: Are you proud to have a unique name?
Roric: I am.
Peter: I hear you won a playwrighting award.
Roric: I did.
Peter: What was the name of the award?
Roric: It was a Center Stage award. It was a contest for kids.
Peter: What did they give you as the award?
Roric: It was a certificate.
Peter: Was there a ceremony?
Roric: At Center Stage on the main stage.
Peter: Who represented Center Stage at the ceremony?
Roric: Kwame (Kwei-Armah, Artistic Director). I got to go up onstage and shake his hand.
Peter: Excellent! How did you hear about the contest?
Roric: Miss Gallagher, our 3rd grade teacher, knew about it and said if we want to we could enter.
Peter: Had you written a play before that?
Roric: No, but I’d seen one.
(He’s currently in Yellow Sign Theater’s Dark Spell)
Peter: What is your play about?
Roric: Well, since we were doing fractured fairy tales I decided to do the story I had to do for school. I choose to do the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. And I love math, so I changed it to the Three Little Pluses and the Big Bad Minus.
Britt: I remember that one.
Peter: You read his play?
Britt: I did.
Peter: How’d you come across the play?
Britt: I was an evaluator.
Peter: What?
Britt: Isn’t that great?
Peter: Wonderful! Small world.
Peter: Roric, how many pages was your play?
Roric: Only 2 or 3.
Peter: Did you write it long hand or type it on the computer?
Roric: I wrote it then typed it.
Peter: Did you have the original text nearby, or did you remember it and write yours as you went along?
Roric: I remembered the story and just wrote mine.
Peter: What aspects were you thinking about as you were writing, plot or character?
Roric: I was thinking a lot about the plot and how I would introduce the characters, and really how the Big Bad Minus would blow the house down.
Peter: How did he do the first one? Which was made out of what?
Roric: It was made out of paper.
Peter: How did he get rid of that one?
Roric: He just subtracts it from the total of the pieces.
Peter: Oh.
Roric: He takes away the total.
Peter: Big Bad Minus, of course. What was the second one made of?
Roric: Pencils, but they weren’t stuck together.
Peter: How did he undo that one?
Roric: He just took down, took away the bottom one and then all the other ones came tumbling down.
Peter: Makes sense. And the third one?
Roric: Well he couldn’t do the third one because it was made out of staples all stuck together! So, he had to take out the staples one by one and they kept hurting him when he touched the sharp end of the staple. He eventually gave up.
Peter: You ever get stuck in the writing and have to walk away and think about it?
Roric: I did, many times.
Peter: How did you make it come back to you?
Roric: It came back to me after I stopped doing it for awhile and just relaxed.
Peter: Yeah?
Roric: And suddenly I’d just get this great flash of an idea, like, “Ooo, I think that would really work!”
Peter: Excellent. Can you remember what you were doing that made you relax?
Roric: Ummm, really just watching TV or playing a video game.
Peter: OK, yeah. I also do mindless things when I need an idea to develop. Run, mow the lawn or something.
Roric: Yeah. Do nothing. Be completely relaxed.
Peter: Exactly. Did you rewrite it? Make it better?
Roric: I went back over it. My original was only a page and a half. So then I went over it again and I rewrote it and added some things.
Peter: How did you know when it was done?
Roric: I knew when it was done when I couldn’t think of anything else to add over 3 or 4 days.
Peter: Have you heard anybody read it out loud for you?
Roric: Yeah. That was part of what I won. Actors from Center Stage came to my school and they read my play.
Peter: Were you happy with their interpretation?
Roric: Yes, I was.
Peter: You get to meet the actors?
Roric: After the performance.
Peter: How did this make you feel?
Roric: I felt really proud when I won. I didn’t think I would win. There were so many people who were competing. I was 1 out of, like, 350.
Peter: What do you think made your play stand out from the rest?
Roric: I used actual school academics in it. The other plays were just fiction. Mine was too, but theirs didn’t have anything to interlink with.
Peter: Was your approach deliberate, natural, or an accident?
Roric: I kind of did it naturally, but also kind of deliberate.
Peter: You write anything else since?
Roric: A book report for school.
Peter: Is that harder or easier?
Roric: Not sure, I haven’t started it.
Peter: What’s the book?
Roric: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Peter: Some people are good at math and others are good at arts. You seem to be good at both. Is math like art in any way?
Roric: Depends how you think of it.
Peter : What makes math like art to you?
Roric: Just how complicated it is. How simple it seems, but when you go behind everything it’s really complicated.
Peter: Making the complicated seem simple isn’t easy. You play music?
Roric: I play guitar.
Peter: How long you been playing?
Roric: 3 years.
Peter: What songs do you play?
Roric: I play a variety. I’m into punk rock music.
Peter: Name some artists you like to play.
Roric: I like to hear Fugazi, and I like to play the Ramones and the Clash. I play some David Bowie.
Peter: What’s your favorite Clash song?
Roric: Should I Stay or Should I Go.
Peter: And the Ramones?
Roric: Blitzkrieg Bop.
PAUSE
Peter: I have a guitar and drums. Wanna play?
Roric: Okay.
* * *
And so we did.
I want to thank Roric’s mom, Marceline White, for making time for the interview. Both of them had a show to do that evening and a neighborhood sponsored trick or treating thing that afternoon.
