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N 1991, THEZETTElMAIER fAMIlyMovEdfrom Indiana to Chelsea, Mich. That same year, a Chelsea-born-and-bred movie star walked through the celluloid, past the auditorium and onto the streets of his hometown to create the Purple Rose Theatre Company. If Jeff Daniels had stayed in Hollywood, Joseph Zettelmaier, then 16, might not be perhaps the most prolific playwright in Michigan today.

Zettelmaier—now 37 and twice the winner of the Edg-erton Foundation New American Play Award, a three-time nominee for the American Theatre Critics Award for best new play and the author of more than 20 produced plays—took full advantage of the Purple Rose’s proximity in those early days. After studying acting at Shorter University in Georgia, he came home to apprentice at the local theatre—just when Lanford Wilson had arrived there to develop The Book of Days.

“Lanford didn’t drive, so I had to chauffeur him around a lot. He was a nonstop font of stories,” says Zettelmaier. Once, the seasoned playwright had trouble with a line and threw it out to the group. “He said to us, ‘Anyone who can give me a better line gets $20.’ We all tried, and one of the understudies gave him what he wanted.” Zettelmaier recalls with awe the massive number of changes Wilson made on his play: “He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, and he was merciless with his own work.”

But it was Daniels’s encouragement that made the most difference to young Zettelmaier. Apprentices often took part in dark-night performances, acting, directing and sometimes writing original pieces. Zettelmaier had never written a play, but he gave it a shot. “Jeff came up to me and said, ‘Give me 100 pages.’ I had an interest in playwriting, but it was Jeff’s interest in my interest that got me started.”

If it was Purple Rose that pointed the young actor in a

new direction, it was the Performance Network Theatre of Ann Arbor, Mich., that helped him arrive. Artistic director David Wolber had taken part in a reading of one of Zettelmaier’s first plays at Purple Rose, and executive director Carla Milarch met the budding writer when they were both in Purple Rose’s actor/director lab. Before long, the three were collaborating at PNT and in other spaces. Wolber appeared in an early Zettelmaier work, Science Friction, about an alien abduction. Then, with their new theatre company, Chimera, the trio produced his script Fever Dreams, about a lonely woman who opts to stay in a fevered condition to remain with the lover she imagines while out of her head.

When Milarch and Wolber were invited to take the helm of PNT, the promotion meant they could produce their col-league’s work on a bigger budget for a wider audience. “They were the ones who took chances on my early work and who gave me my first full Equity production,” says Zettelmaier, who also has acted and directed at PNT.

Milarch points out that Zettelmaier’s early works often featured supernatural occurrences, something she and Wolber challenged the playwright to forgo. The Stillness Between Breaths, about a woman overtaken by hysterical blindness after her father’s death, and Language Lessons, about the relationship between a Russian ballerina and a retired American diplomat, were among the plays that resulted. In short order, PNT made Zettelmaier an associate artist and an ambassador to the National New Play Network.

Milarch loves Zettelmaier’s use of language and says he creates elegant structures—plays that are “in synch with themselves.” For his part, Zettelmaier says he hates “hyper-clever dialogue, where the characters all sound like the same person.” His plays are infused with an idosyncratic sense of

Zettelmaier: “If I wrote what I know, my plays would be boring.”

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JoSEPHZETTElMAIERNever the same

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the playwright has becomea Michigan mainstay

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humor. “If you want to make the audience cry, make them love the characters,” he advises. “And if you want them to love the characters, make them laugh.” But Zettelmaier doesn’t shy from darker emotions, even his own. A death at the end of Language Lessons, for example, left him in shambles. “I was a wreck when I wrote it, for days, even though I wrote the play knowing he was going to have to die,” the writer says, tearing up as he speaks. “A great local actor, Will Young, once referred to me as a ‘Method playwright.’ I like to work alone and put myself into the emotional states of characters I’m writing. It makes the dialogue natural.”

By all accounts, Zettelmaier is something of a loner. He bought his first cell phone only months ago. Although he enjoys clowning with collaborators at rehearsals, which he usually attends, he has fantasies of buying back the farm his family owned when he was little. He is surrounded by so many imaginary people, he says, that he turns on a fan at night because white noise helps him sleep.

Although he tries to find a path to characters in himself, play ideas come from everywhere—except his own experience. “I know nothing about Russian ballerinas. I wrote a play about astrophysics. If I wrote what I know, my plays would be very boring. Write what moves you, and learn what you need to know,” he advises the students he teaches at Eastern Michigan University.

Zettelmaier usually begins with a basic idea, outlines it and researches when needed. “Occasionally I will hear a story that is so fascinating to me, I’ll know there’s a play here somewhere. I just have to figure out what it is.” When he read about a Wyoming governor who had shoes made from a murderer’s skin,

for example, that served as the springboard for Dead Man’s Shoes, a co-production that just left Williamston Theatre (near Lansing, Mich.) to open at PNT, where it runs March 8–April 8.

Shoes follows the journey of outlaw Injun Bill Picote on his quest to avenge his friend’s mutilation; he is accompanied by his former jailmate, who is searching for his mother

and sister. Zettelmaier says he wrote the play with actors Drew Parker and Aral Gribble in mind. Parker, who shares musical interests with Zettelmaier, says Shoes is set in “Johnny Cash’s West”—the two admired the stories the singer told in his songs, his sense of style and the type of man he represented. “Like most of the men in Cash’s songs, Injun Bill battles between the demons and angels inside him and in the end finds resolution and peace with himself,” Parker says.

“Joe’s characters are all redeemable, likeable, even though some are darker and some violent. It’s very clear that Joe loves these people,” says Wolber.

Shoes moves through at least a dozen locations, provoking one spectator at an early reading to suggest the play was clearly meant to be a movie and was impossible to stage. Undaunted, Wolber directed the play theatrically, staging it as traveling players might have back in the days of the Wild West. Music and a painted scroll help make transitions.

JoSEPHZETTElMAIERBEgANlIfE on the verge of death. He was a four-pound,

MARCH12AMERICANTHEATRE 43

Terry heck and Aphrodite Nikolovski in Language Lessons at the Performance Network Theatre.

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GUESTDESIGNERS

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four-ounce preemie, and doctors spotted tumors in his thin back. The diagnosis was a cancer that strikes newborns and often goes undiagnosed until too late, but his surgeries were successful. “I’ve been living on borrowed time,” says the playwright, who writes every day while maintaining a full-time day job doing data entry. His rule—he doesn’t call it a goal—is to finish two plays a year, and he’s accomplished that for the past seven years. He took a week to complete The Scullery Maid, a play about a young woman who learns a life-altering secret from her past. Some plays germinate for years.

Another rule: “Never write the same play twice. If you’re not challenging your-self, you’re not challenging your audience, either. There’s a basic theme I write about a lot—redemption—but that’s a broad theme, so there are different ways to approach it—different genres, periods, styles. Everything I write, I have to find something in it I’ve never tried before, or I get bored with it.”

His colleagues agree that working with Zettelmaier is never boring. Actor Gribble says if they joke around in rehearsal, he may find his jokes in revised scenes the next day.

“He lets actors help craft characters,” he says. Zettelmaier says that while rehearsing the PNT/Williamston 2009 co-production of It Came from Mars, a farce that unravels as characters respond to Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio show, the actors came up with some of his favorite lines. “They were messing around with scenes and would land on something so great,” he enthuses.

Janine Woods Thoma, former techni-cal director at PNT, says Zettelmaier solves design problems with rewrites, too. Language Lessons was to end with a reveal—a fireplace would open and a scene would occur in the bedroom behind it. “We wanted a tender moment, not an awkward one,” says Thoma, “and we couldn’t come up with an elegant way to move that fireplace.” Zettelmaier changed

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Jacob hodgson in It Came from Mars, a 2010 PNT/Williamston Theatre co-production.

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the timing of the ballerina’s monologue so it could occur without the scene change. “And he didn’t feel it was a sacrifice, but a welcome improvement to the show.”

“Joe loves getting into the whole pro-duction,” confims Shannon Ferrante, who has acted in and directed several Zettelmaier plays at PNT and at Planet Ant Theatre in Hamtramk, Mich. “He’s an accomplished fight choreographer and sometimes jumps in to help with that. A handsome actor needed to look more grotesque [in his play Dr. Seward’s Dracula], so Joe created warts. He often does things at his own expense.”

Williamston artistic director Tony Caselli, who was literary manager at Purple Rose when Zettelmaier apprenticed, enjoys reading scripts Zettelmaier sends him for feedback. Caselli, who directed Mars, finds him a great collaborator, open to suggestions. “We wanted a small warm human comedy to plug into the season,” says Caselli, who commissioned And the Creek Don’t Rise as soon as Zettelmaier started talking about it. “He gave me two scenes, and I said, ‘Great, this feels right, go write it.’”

Zettelmaier has become such a household name in Michigan that he shares a special category at PNT with the theatre’s other associated playwright, Kim Carney—doing their work, says A.D. Wolber, is no longer risky. That means PNT can include them in a season and still have a slot for a newer playwright. At Williamston, Zettelmaier is one of two playwrights the company has committed to producing regularly (the other is Annie Martin). And Zettelmaier has also begun to be noticed outside the state as well.

All Childish Things is his most widely produced work, with a solid Michigan launch: Planet Ant did the first production in 2005, followed by productions at the now-defunct Boars-head Theater in Lansing, Mich., at Eastern Michigan University and again at Planet Ant. The play (which has expanded into a trilogy) about Star Wars–obsessed friends who plan a caper that tests their friendship, saw its first out-of-state production last year when Den-nis Frymire, artistic director of the Hubris Theatre, directed it in Chicago. Zettelmaier’s work has also been staged at Otterbein College in Ohio and at National New Play Network festivals in Florida and California.

Today, the erstwhile actor only per-forms occasionally, “to remind myself what I’m asking people to do in my plays.” This spring, he will appear as the romantic lead in an original musical that artistic direc-tor Tony Caselli will direct at William-

ston, his first performance in a new play. Zettelmaier wonders if actors hate get-

ting last-minute script changes as much as he loves revising. Gribble, for one, is sanguine about the challenge; he recently received a batch of new lines for Dead Man’s Shoes, but figures it’s all part of the fun. “A play is always a living, breathing piece of art,” he reflects, “but these script changes make it even more so, and that’s really exciting for me! I expect the script to continue to change as we go through previews and get feedback from the real focus—the audience.”

Michigan-basedjournalistdavi

Napoleonisatheatrecolumnistfor

the Faster Times,aregularcontributor

toLive Designandtheauthorof

Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures

of an American Theater(IowaState

UniversityPress,1991).

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Aral Gribble, left, and Drew Parker in Dead Man’s Shoes at Williamston Theatre; the co-production transfers this month to PNT.

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