Introduce Yourself : Keith Curran by Keith Curran

Irish, freakishly tall, gay, divorced writer. An ex-Actor, I am a writer of primarily plays and screenplays. Recently, I was voted a Lifetime Member by Writer’s Guild. —— As a Screenwriter, I have been hired by, worked with, or sold to Paramount, Sony, Columbia, Fox, Warner’s, Universal, HBO, Showtime, Imagine, Amblin, Lionsgate, The BBC and New Line Cinema,  as well as the production companies formed by Oliver Stone, Nikole Kidman, Reece Witherspoon, Mel Gibson and Brad Pitt. Screenplays include; ‘Thank You For Smoking” (HBO/Icon), “Bearding Lester Perry” (Jason Reitman), “American Playboy” (Hef biopic), “The Quality Of Life Report” (Nicole Kidman), “ Doctor America” (Oliver Stone), ‘Tension Park” (turnaround) “Trump Unauthorized” (ABC TV) “Sold!” (HBO), “Fit Model” (pending) and two new specs; “Church Of The Sole Survivor” (horrr) and “BCI” (Brain Computer Interface, Sci Fi). I enjoyed a self-imposed (medically necessary) sabbatical for four years, living in my beach cottage on Cape Cod (where I grew up), running my own personal Writer’s Retreat. I recovered medically and wrote the four projects mentioned above. Preproduction should start soon on “Bearding…” as there is a star attached who has a “limited window”. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Follows are biographical details of my earlier years as an opera singing student at I.U. as well as my careers as an actor and playwright. Read, ONLY should you be interested…. As an actor, professionally anyway, I began when I was nineteen years old and had just dropped out of college (I.U. Bloomington, where I’d been an Opera/Vocal Performance major and my Vocal Performance Professor was the legendary Met diva Eileen Farrell — listen to her astonishing “Tristan and Isolde” — who was an equally astonishing and accomplished jazz and pop singer, putting out five superlative jazz records. When we met there were sixty two years between us, but we instantly “clicked”. The eighth thing Eileen Farrell said to me was; “You don’t like opera, do you?”. I admitted I didn’t. “Fuck it”, she said, “Literally. Whether it’s opera or jazz, singing is fucking, so fuck it. But, it’s very important, whether you like it missionary or up the ass, that you learn how to do it correctly, without hurting yourself or others. Learn to control the beast without it becoming less of one. Craft is not an imposition on spontaneity, it is a guaranty of spontaneity’s quality. Craft is based o instinct, passion, inherent ability and science. Moving the unintentional to the intentional. And, vice versa. Your ability need not be defined, or be victim to, outside forces. The  environment in which you are about to exercise your capabilities (health, climate, frequency), need not even TOUCH “what you can do”. Because, you have taken your highly unusual natural ability and CRAFTED it into an intentional and reliable commodity. Your craft is consistency made effortless. It will, unfortunately takes years of grueling, soul shattering work. You will have to self-surgically switch the sides of your arms. Then teaching your left arm to do what your right arm used to do. You will put your cock or vagina where your nose used to be, but with no one noticing. 

You must deform yourself physically in order to free yourself emotionally and intellectually. To become capable of doing that which you must, “surgery” is a necessity. You must become a freak, not of nature, but of your own choosing. To make yourself capable of accomplishing what your passion, your existence, tells you you must, you have to, just as all singers, dancers, instrumentalists, gymnasts, divers, athletes, must deform themselves. To do what almost no one else on Earth can do, you must at first be capable of eventually doing it. You must, when young, already be doing it. A natural, pure, clearly otherly-talented,. “Gifted”. A “natural”. You can just “do” that thing that you want and like to do. Sing. Balance. Dance. Dribble. Throw. Leap.  You must at first be the result of a biological “perfect storm”. Waves Of DNA, whales of genes, swells of hormones.Only THIS seed and THIS egg, coming together, are capable of seeding, then surviving, the perfect storm of their themness. Something that is so outside the natural becomes naturalness itself —when crafted.

Of equal importance to craft is sustainability, as discussed above. But, NONE OF THIS IS POSSIBLE without “natural talent”, whatever THAT is, and a passion to DO that approaches the maniacal. 

,Another thing I frequently relive about Eileen is that, as a legendary opera singer now in her eighties, she could, as she put it, “sing blue” better than anyone I have ever witnessed. Singing blue is, as she obviously said quite often, is sex. “Fuck a song, yes, occasionally, but how much better to make love? After catching sight of, making contact, experiencing interaction, falling in love during an elaborate seduction. Sex is creation is self-creation is sex.

) —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— SO… I moved to New York, after dropping out of college after two years, at the age of nineteen to be a song and dance man. I appeared in leading or supporting roles in three Broadway productions and four Off B’way, as well as in numerous B’way tours. “Noises Off”. “Annie”. “Les Mis” (which was, at the time, the “Law And Order” of musicals). “On The Twentieth Century”. “Mayor: The Musical” (not to be confused with “Mayor: The Surgical Procedure”). “Beyond Therapy” (written by one of my two inspirations, Christopher Durang). “Burn This” (written by my other inspiration and eventual mentor, Lanford Wilson). As a writer (after loosing the Actor’s Calling), all five of my full length plays thus far has been produced Off B’way, either by a non-profit (Circle Rep, Naked Angels, Manhattan Theater Club) or commercially, and has been published, most in multiple languages. I was a playwright member of Circle Rep where, at age 19, I saw the play that changed my life, “The Fifth Of July”. In 1989, I was chosen as one of three playwrights to participate in their three week summer development program. The actors Cotter Smith, Kathy Bates, and Giancarlo Esposito were “assigned” to my play, “Dalton’s Back”. Whee! Life redefining. Kathy took my play to Circle Rep, my ultimate birthplace as a writer who, after only a year of both thrilling and torturous “development”, I was transformed ¥into a “playwright” who’d yet to write a particularly gripping online dating profile. “Dalton’s Back” was presented as part of Circle Repertory’s 1990 season. That same year my play, “Sidekick”, won the Actor’s Theater Of Louisville’s One Act Play Contest. The next year, 1992, Circle produced my second, and vastly superior play, “Walking The Dead” (which I can no longer Google due to that wonderful, if unfortunately-for-me named, TV series, “The Walking Dead”).. “Walking The Dead” is taught in multi-University courses, alongside Kushner’s “Angels In America” and Vogel’s “Baltimore Waltz” as, “The first major American play to have, at it’s core, a transgendered character.” I did not write that sentence. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-—- (Best if you just read the first part about my continuing life as a screenwriter. I think COVID brought out in me a distinct loneliness that can express itself sometimes, when presented with an opportunity, in the sharing of far too much inappropriate, sometimes irritating detail). ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— ONWARD!