Published: Sunday,July 6, 2008 in The Greenville News

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Show page for The Uncurled Hand

David Johnston, left, as Zeke, and Leslie Smith as his wife, Gloria, star in "The Uncurled Hand" at Centre Stage. (HEIDI HEILBRUNN /The Greenville News)

By Ann Hicks
Arts Writer
ahicks@greenvillenews.com

OK. Here's the nitty-gritty straight from the storyteller:
As with most things he writes, the tale started out with a small germ of an idea and grew into something he didn't foresee, says Baltimore playwright Stephen Kilduff.

While he agrees that the part about a man turning his back on his past life is nothing new, it's how the playwright builds a new life for his characters and which upheavals he puts them through that become spellbinding for audiences.

For the setting of his play, "The Uncurled Hand," Kilduff chose New Mexico, a place, he says, that he and his wife love. The uncompromising desert is also beloved by Zeke, his protagonist, consumed by the idea of new beginnings in a remote place.

And how about complications to make the drama work?

Most of that "started piling up in the course of the writing," says Kilduff, who didn't really know that Zeke would become a Vietnam War-era draft resister, but once the characters began to emerge and started talking in his head, says Kilduff, they took over the story. At that point, what's a writer to do but listen?

"As the ideas come, you sort through them to see what works and what doesn't. Soon you've got what you're after.

In the case of Kilduff, a compelling play emerged that won the 2007 New Play Festival, earning a full production at Centre Stage -- South Carolina, where Kilduff's five-person drama makes its world premiere on July 10.

Middle-aged guys

"I know what it feels like to look around at this point in my life," says Kilduff, who turns 50 this year, "and wonder what's going to happen next and do I still have the time to do all the things I want to do. You know, those kinds of questions plague me all the time."

In the handful of plays he's penned, five to date, at some point, "middle-aged guy" characters face those same questions, he says.

Zeke of "The Uncurled Hand" certainly does. Married and the father of a young adult daughter, he fights to maintain the status quo, knowing all along the train to the future has sped away from the station and he's not on it.

Kilduff, a newcomer to playwriting, having started in 2004, does not want to miss the fast train to new stations -- theaters that welcome the plays he's crafted.

He has been a writer most of his life. Prior to playwriting, he wrote essays, reviews, op-ed pieces and columns, published primarily in Baltimore weekly papers.

But there came a time when the idea ink ran dry and he took a hiatus. Soon, the Muse was back, demanding a place at the writing table.

Kilduff, charged with renewed energy, hit upon the idea of writing in script form rather than prose.
He says he chose a pair of stories he had written and published 15 years earlier, and a third one he never completed, as potential movie material.

Trying for the movies

"That was kind of a revelatory thought," says Kilduff about his decision to try his hand at writing a movie script. He wrote five.

During that period, he took several trips to the West Coast to attend screenwriters conferences to pitch his movie ideas to film company agents and producers. After awhile, a couple of things happened, he says. He learned how to tell a story in script format. And, he realized he wasn't going to "make it" in the movie business.

But what really turned Kilduff toward writing for the stage was "a dramatic weekend in New York," he says. Trying to pitch yet another movie idea to East Coast buyers and being totally rejected, he decided to nurse his wounds by stopping by a bookstore.

There, he perused a "whole wall of plays." He ended up buying more than a dozen of them, and inspired, decided to write for the stage. Within a few months he had written one and kept on going.
"Clearly, stage plays are very different from screenplays," he says. "Movies communicate mostly through pictures, while stage plays do it through words."