Eli Kent tells Renee Liang how he started creating and performing in his bedroom long before The Intricate Art of Actually Caring, using action figures to ‘play out epic stories’ as a child.

"And I turned my sister’s Sylvanian Family animals into a savage warrior tribe by drawing war paint on them with felt tips."

Eli’s latest creation, Thinning, is part of the upcoming Young and Hungry Festival.

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We all love to hate them.  Those people who are not only young, but hip and talented and good-looking to boot.  And especially, we hate them when they win awards we’ve secretly coveted (not that we’ve done anything to get there). And we hate them even more when they turn out to be really great people whose passion for telling stories has driven their whole careers so far.

Not that I hate Eli Kent. I couldn’t, not when I’ve watched him in his play The Intricate Art of Actually Caring and recognised aspects of myself (I, too am a James K Baxter nerd). And he’s also a poet.  Eli’s just finished a popular season of this play in Auckland, and returns this month with another play, Thinning, as part of Young and Hungry 2010. 

From what I’ve seen of his work so far, Eli’s is an important voice in the cultural landscape of New Zealand – eloquently showing us that Kiwi youth aren’t only  obsessed with smoking, alcohol and easy sex (although these things also make it into his plays).  Other things are important – a sense of connection to family, a curiosity about the past.  I spoke to him about writing, acting in his own plays and a Viking ship in Taupo.

Renee: How did you start writing?

Eli: I feel like I’ve always been writing. Or at least always making.

Right from when I used to play with my action figures. I used to play out these epic stories in my bedroom. They’d go on for hours cos I could never find a way to finish them. Batman and The Biker Mice From Mars were usually the good guys. And I turned my sister’s Sylvanian Family animals into a savage warrior tribe by drawing war paint on them with felt tips.

And that story telling aspect continued up until now. I always liked English in school but I never did what I was supposed to be doing. I always wrote what I wanted to write so I never got good marks. But I never got in trouble because I think the teachers appreciated the stories.
Except this one time when I got suspended for writing a book report on a non-existent book titled The Raping of The Donkeys.

Renee: How did you start acting?

Eli: I think I was seven. My friend Uther was doing a drama class and my mum and dad thought it might be good for me. Somewhere to channel all the weird hyper energy I was spewing out into the world I guess.
Never looked back. Ha.

Renee: What's your writing "space" like? Do you have any strange rituals?

Eli: Generally when I have “the bug”……and the idea’s there……and I’m excited and have been stewing on it for a while, I can write anywhere, anytime. All I need is a scrap of paper and a jagged chunk of charcoal and I’ll get something down.

But I can go months without getting said “bug” so I usually resort to a caffeinated drink or two and some peace and quiet. But I do tend to write in bursts so time management has never been something I’m good at. I find it hard to push it if I just don’t have it in me.

The best thing I can do I’ve found is to live a lot and not think about writing. Then go away from town, read heaps, and spend large amounts of time by myself, utterly, utterly bored to death.

The ideas come flooding in then.

Renee: Where do you get your ideas from?

Eli: Terry Pratchett writes about ideas as physical entities. I’ve always liked that. They’re floating through space and if you happen to be in the right place at the right time then BLAM.

I like it because I’ve never felt like I could take credit for my ideas.

Everything that comes after the idea, the filtering of what’s a good idea from what’s a bad one, the improvement and eventual realization of the good ones, that’s what writing is I reckon.

Renee: How much of "you" do you put into your writing - and what's the favourite character you've written so far?

Eli: That’s a hard one, you know, because there are different types of “me”.

There’s the me in The Intricate Art of Actually Caring and Thinning which is a really concrete me in that the characters speak lines that I have thought or even said. Things that come directly from my world, my friends and have been filtered and edited into a story. The two characters in Intricate Art are me, aspects of me, mixed with friends/people I’ve known. In Thinning less so but there are a couple of characters who are probably 70% me.

But then there’s Bedlam, a show about a mental institute in the 1700s, where none of the characters are me at all and they’re so far removed from anything in my world. But the over all questions and themes feel a hundred percent me.

So “lots” is the answer. Lots of me. Though, and this leads into the next half of the question, I seem to be the most proud about characters who are the furthest from me.

Favourite characters. I’ve whittled the list down to two. Left out Thinning because it hasn’t opened yet.

Winston: Winston the Clown from Rubber Turkey. He had a problem with his reflexes which meant he couldn’t do slapstick without flinching uncontrollably. In the end he underwent a procedure in order to get the laughs which left him more or less brain dead.

Something about his need for love (in the form of laughter) and the lengths he went to get it really stuck with me. And the way the actor, my friend Olly Cox played him was just beautiful. He dyed his already frizzy hair and beard red and we dressed him up in a Motorhead singlet and covered him in bandaids and bandages. He had this great mix of cocaine snorting menace mixed with gentle vulnerability.

Mr. Crooke: Crooke’s the head surgeon in Bedlam. He’s a war veteran, drug addict and sociopathic rapist. He comes from the discovery that there was once a director of Bedlam asylum called Crooke, mixed with research into the barber surgeons. The first ever British surgeons were barbers who became surgeons in war time, hence the red and white barber poles (bone and blood).

He’s kind of a representation of desensitization within institutions like the army or POW camps. He’s an asshole through and through but he has unnerving moments of tenderness. And he’s haunted relentlessly by his demons. Which is why he numbs himself by drinking anesthetic.

I was proud of how human he became in the end. Not sympathetic neccesarily. But human. Which is also testament to the talents of Emmet Skilton who played him. And to my pal Robin Kerr who directed and will continue to direct the show.

Renee: You've staged The Intricate Art of Actually Caring in many spaces, from your own bedroom to a cavernous art gallery. What's your favourite theatre space and why?

Eli: The first. The bedroom. Hands down. It was great performing it to such small, intimate audiences.
And the way we played with the room and turned what was such a concrete, real place into something quite surreal, as the sky turned from blue to black outside was just a magic experience for me.

And we really didn’t expect it to get the reception it got back then so every night was a new buzz.

Renee: How did you get the idea for Thinning?

Eli: I went apple thinning with my friends in between sixth and seventh form.

Nothing realy happened. The work was boring and there were very few dramas. But it always struck me as a great setting. And such a New Zealand setting as well.

I shelved it though because I couldn’t find a reason to write it. I guess I didn’t know what the central story really was exactly.

Then the Young and Hungry deadline was coming around and I remembered it. I realized that it suited the festival perfectly and that it was a story I would probably never write otherwise.

So I sent in a rough outline and got the commission.
The first draft I hated. But I worked at it and found the kernel of it, what I really wanted to write about, and over time the characters all grew to life and their stories made themselves clear.

Renee: How much of it is real life disguised as fiction?

Eli: Very little of what happened on my apple thinning trip made it into the play in the end.

But looking at it now I can recognize very clearly at least one person I know in every character. Some of them are more obvious than others. One of my friends went to the army and that’s in there. Although beyond that him and the character aren’t too similar.

It’s funny going to the rehearsals and I’ll see an actor say a line or do something which is exactly like someone I used to know in school and I’ll go “Oh my god I’ve written them into a play without realizing”.
It’s great.

Renee: Do you approach writing for young people any differently to writing for a regular theatre audience?

Eli: I am young. I think. So no.
I tend not to think about who I’m writing a play for actually.
Probably because I’m generally writing it for myself.
I just try to be true to the characters and the world.
In Thinning they’re all teenagers so they talk like teenagers. Or my version of teenagers at least. I wanted them all to be pretty articulate and intelligent because that’s what I remember my friends being.

In teen movies teenagers are always either cool and talking about sex and drugs or nerds talking about movies and books.

But in real life there’s such a huge middle ground that never gets addressed. Me and my friends would talk for ages quite eloquently about life and books and stuff, then get drunk and fart on each others faces.

Renee: What's the best possible reaction an audience could have to your work?
 
Eli: Discussion is always the best compliment.
If someone cares enough about your work to ask questions, to dissect it, that’s the biggest possible high.
Because you want the world you’ve created to live and breathe. When someone tells you their interpretation of what you’ve written, when they let you in on that, they give life to the idea.

You see your world alive in their minds and it………oh it wastes me. I love it.

Renee: Tell us about the TV series you're writing.

Eli: It’s called Black Confetti.
It’s about a group of four slackers who start selling an altered, pitch black form of ecstasy and invite a fictionalized and surreal criminal underground into their lives.

It’s about growing up really. Quarter-life-crisis stuff. The death of the party. I can’t say too much more.
Breaking Bad meets The Mighty Boosh. I dunno.

 
Renee: What are your influences?  Your heroes?

Eli: After highschool I got into The Beats (typical).
Then American crime fiction.
Then Steinbeck.

But really whatever floated my way.
At the moment I love Dave Eggars. And Martin McDonagh who wrote In Bruges. His plays are amazing.
I dunno though really I just try to soak up whatever I can.
I like British comedy TV. American crime T.V. British crime T.V. American comedy T.V.
I like everything actually.
I tried to pass myself off as some guy who was really into violent films once and my girlfriend called me out on it.
I like everything.

Renee: What new projects are you working on?

Eli: I just had an idea for a comedy series, kind of in the vein of that lame Supernatural show, except funny.
So you’d have these two be-scarfed dudes in a sweet old car driving around New Zealand solving paranormal/extraterestrial mysteries, battling the occult, that sort of thing.
They’d show up in a different town each episode and there’d be a monster of the week.
It’d reference Scooby Doo, X-Files, Buffy, all that stuff. But in a New Zealand context.
And the main guys would be like throwbacks to the drunken hippy poets of sixties and seventies NZ.
Sam Hunt and Baxter battling the paranormal in a sweet SWEET car.
I might even call them Hunt and Baxter I’ve just decided.

One of the episodes involves a Viking ship that mysteriously appears out of the mists of Lake Taupo and pillages fancy resorts, razing them to the ground and kidnapping the trophy wives of rich property developers before disappearing once again into the mists from whence they came.

If anyone reads this and then steals my idea I won’t sue them. I will hunt them down and slowly tear their life to pieces.