Twinhead Theatre plans Atlanta takeover with Loaded Guns
I first fell for Twinhead Theatre, a company basing its performances on pure fun, satire, and obvious love of the craft, at The Fringe Festival and soon found myself following their path to find out and see more. Luckily for me, they returned to my life on Atlanta’s Beltline and reminded why this company deserves way more recognition for what they are doing.
Eli Banks, co-director/writer/actor for the company, shared his thoughts on the growth of their, well, growing group, the balance of the love and the money, and their now monthly endeavor Loaded Guns.
Q. Twinhead Theatre Company is one of those wonderful burgeoning Atlanta theatre groups that holds its stock in fun, inventive shows, yet bases it all in developed thought. Are there any concepts that you automatically know won’t fit your mold, or be able to be molded? And are there certain writers, contemporary or classic, that the group finds themselves drawn to perform?
A. Looking at our whole body of work, our shows are more consistent in style than structure. So rather than forcing a concept into a mold, we’re able to project our style onto a concept, no matter its shape or size. I think that after every show we’ve done, we’ve consistently been amazed that it worked. Generally our concepts are daunting, ambitious, and initially pretty vague. The challenge of a new concept – something different or more difficult than anything we’ve done yet – is definitely a driving force in launching whatever our next project may be. We’ve never developed an idea together that didn’t end up working – call it luck, fortune, or “talent” if you must. But we tend to settle on a concept without questioning whether or not we can do it. Then we force ourselves to find a way. We’ve had sleepless nights trying to find a way to pull off a gag, a special effect, or even just a good joke. We’ll work something until the night of the show itself if we have to before finally accepting that it won’t work, and either lose it or change it to fit our capabilities. But fortunately that hasn’t happened often.
We mangled at least half of Shakespeare’s works in Shake-n-Bake, put zombies in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and had a beautiful production of the dark familial dramedy Pterodactyls, by Nicky Silver, but typically we write our own shows. We’re not drawn towards anyone in particular, and the diversity of tastes within our group is a huge boon to our productions, in that inspiration is coming from everywhere.
Q. The group recently finished a performance, Professor Portabella’s Traveling Hospital of Hope, that traveled the Atlanta Beltline. It held the silliness and whimsy and still had a lot of history that it spanned as well. The show was saying something important beneath all the laughter. Is this something that the group strives for, and when in the production process do you have a full grasp on the entire concept of societal critique?
A. We never start a concept with social commentary in mind. Our first goal is selfish: we want to do a show that we think is funny or otherwise entertaining, and that we will have fun doing. It tends to spring from “I’ve always wanted to…” maybe solve a murder mystery, or debunk a medicine show, or start a cult, and the group begins tossing out ideas for what characters could exist in this world and what kind of fun things we could do on stage. But I think even in those early stages we all know the satire is coming. It sort of justifies our nonsense by becoming the thought line of the story. We could tell dumb jokes on stage all day, but it’s pointless without context. Our social commentary tends to start creeping in after the concept is developed, and sort of as the script is being written. We don’t necessarily do it intentionally, I think we just can’t escape it. Our cynical minds are just hardwired for satire. History has been an important part of our shows in the past. History is NUTS! What we’ve learned about historical accuracy, is that just getting up on stage and telling the truth as it happened in history brings about more shocking, hilarious, and disgusting humor than we could ever think of by ourselves. This was true for Portabella, just as it was for our American history show America: FTW, our virtually unaltered telling of classic fairy tales, F#@k, F#@k, Goose, and Christian Comic Chaos, our word-for-word staging of Jack Chic’s 1970’s hysterically bigoted Christian comic book series. The world is the most nonsensical place, and humanity is full of hysterically unbelievable characters. When that fact is a huge source of inspiration for your projects, you can’t escape the commentary that comes with it.
Q. The performances on the Beltline were free, and the group seems to strive for “cheep thrills” for the Atlanta community. How do you justify doing this all essentially for the love of it? And how does this translate into the future of the company as it grows?
A. It’s tough. And it gets tougher not being in our early 20’s anymore, where there were more expendable things we could ignore to focus on our shows instead. Now we’re being forced into making the decision of whether this is something fun we do on the side as a creative outlet, or something we’re building into a career. Not a single one of us gets paid a single dollar for our shows or our business matters (with the exception of Art On The Beltline, whose grant included a stipulation that all artists must receive a percentage of the funding). It will always be very important to us to keep our ticket prices low, and we justify doing it for free by having more fun working on these shows than we would sitting around watching tv or drinking our pain away (not that we don’t find time for both of those anyway). But some grants we’d love to be applying for require us to have at least one paid staff member, and we want to get to a point where we have paid writers and actors on staff as well. We’d love bigger budgets for our shows. We look forward to being able to afford the rentals on larger venues and to have the advertising budget to fill them. As the company has aged and many of us have shifted to the “career path” for Twinhead, these goals are motivating us to push hard towards a future where we can actually earn a living doing what we work so hard at.
Q. The use of multimedia seems to be a big focus of Twinhead. As a theatre lover myself, it is definitely something that I enjoy seeing used in innovative new ways. Besides seeing the company perform on the moon, a goal to be admired, where or what do you see the company utilizing next to keep bringing it to the next level?
A. Let me start by saying that I am, personally, firmly against Twinhead Theatre performing on the moon. If Man were meant to be in space, he’d have been born with RS-25 rocket engines on his feet. On the other hand, I do love cheese…
Anyway. Most of us grew up seeing more movies than theatre, I think. As we’re developing a script, we often realize that we’re thinking of it as a movie in our head, and then we’re faced with a whole new challenge of finding a way to make that work on stage. Adding a multimedia element just opens a lot of otherwise closed doors. When we can include a short sketch on video that becomes a part of our story on stage, what we can do is virtually limitless. We’ve done a web series, a feature length movie, and a few music videos now that have helped us reach a much wider audience outside of just Atlanta. We definitely have goals for more national recognition, and in this day and age, video seems the best way to get it. I think as we get our feet on the ground with our upcoming projects, we’ll get back to producing more regular video content and maybe another feature film in the future!
Q. Twinhead is putting their mark on the Atlanta sketch comedy scene. Can you tell us more about this new endeavor and where audiences can check out this monthly event?
A. This very month, we begin a monthly sketch comedy series called Loaded Guns! The first Loaded Guns was actually one of Twinhead’s very first shows back in 2003. It was a thematically loose self-written collection of skits that shocked and awed audiences downtown. Just a few years later we did Loaded Guns 2: A Loaded Guide to Parenting. When we decided to do another Loaded Guns, there was no concept, but the majority of the scripts that different pairs of people were writing just happened to be family-based in some way, generally featuring a parent and some kids. So the theme sort of found itself.
Then we made Loaded Guns: The Movie which was a 75-minute feature made up of about 13 mostly-unrelated sketches, which premiered to a sold out theater and had a re-release a few years later. Now we’ve decided that if we want to be more widely recognized and respected in this city, we’ve got to keep making noise until everyone has heard us. We’re completely insane for announcing a monthly self-written show before having a single word written, but deadlines tend to be one of our best motivators.
Our November show, Loaded Guns: Resurrection is already shaping up to be awesome, and I personally can’t wait to see how this long-term project develops. We’ll be performing in a different space every month. One night only!
The first is November 23 at 8 p.m. at The Big House at 368 Ponce de Leon Avenue, and every Loaded Guns will be $10. We are in touch with many different venues across the city about the next six months worth of shows, but have yet to lock down official dates. So keep up with Twinhead Theatre on Facebook to find out where and when it’s going down!
