timothybraun.com

Welcome to my website

NOTE: The website is under construction with the aid of Tim Guthrie of Creighton University during the fall of 2008. The new site will have new writings, at least ten new plays, and dozen new essays, amigos, graphics, and just be more clean. The news site will also feature a new section on "site-specific" writing. Until then, enjoy what has been the website for the past 3 years.

True West was the gateway drug. I read this Sam Shepard play my Sophomore year in college, not because it was required, but because Penn State was boorishly hammering Minnesota and I was desperately avoiding my anthropology homework. When reading Shepard’s biography at the hilt of the text, I realized he was the same cat that played Chuck Yeager it in The Right Stuff, one of my favorite movies growing up. And I got Shepard’s play. I got it in spades. I understood in ways I never understood A Dolls House, or Oedipus Rex, or Hamlet, or any of the other plays I had to read in script analysis class. It was as if Shepard had written a twisted love letter, only to be viewed by yours truly. His words were big and rebellious, and his plays were complicated.

Before the curtain could fall on the Penn State romp, I was headed to my college library to check out anything that had the words Shepard on the spine. I read plays having giant snakes, cowgirls riding catfish, and space aliens torturing California cheerleaders. His plays reminded me of the way I felt about the world both then and now. They were violent, and silly, and sexual, and no one was evil in Shepard’s plays, but no one was innocent. I liked his plays so much, I found every book I could of his collaborators, most notably a small man named Joe Chaikin, who I would later meet in the lobby of Signature Theatre Company’s Peter Norton Space on 42nd Street before his untimely demise.

From there, it all went to Hell for me. Chaikin would make references to James Joyce in letters to Shepard, which lead me to Albert Camus, who some how directed me to Joseph Heller, who shifted my eyes towards fellow Hoosier Kurt Vonnegut. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas got on my reading list, and before I knew what hit me, I was failing anthropology.

I had always written essays, but I wrote my first play at the age of twenty. It was a bad stab at acting like Shepard. The play was produced, won a national award, and it all went to my head. I went to graduate school twice, took workshops with ever writer I could get my paws on, and acquired jobs at West Village bars and bookstores to be with likeminded people. I would talk with co-workers about Tom Robbins and Erik Ehn the way children talk about cotton candy.

My role as a writer has led me down many avenues. I've met "Suicide Girls", Roller Derby Queens, Japanese book makers, football legends, foul tempered chefs, golf course architects, political refugees, bone cutters, National Public Radio stars, glass blowers, a girl who makes kimonos from used tea bags, and a glutton of painters, puppeteers, poets, sculptors, writers, rodeo clowns, cowboys, cowgirls, and self-professed "mermaids." I've eaten alligators, flown planes, rode elephants, carved totem poles, served ice cream to rock stars, gotten lost in Ohio, been tattooed by an El Paso paramedic, arm wrestled an Irish dwarf in the Mexican mountains, hunted the Loch Ness Monster, and written a lot. And, I hope, I've got more to meet, do, and write about.

Words still do it for me. Sadly, I don’t care for theatre the way I did. If it weren’t for my amigos David Herskovits (Target Margin), David Levine (CiNE), and Alex Timbers (Les Fresres Corbusier) I would give up all hope for drama. Too many groups and artists are pedestrian and concerned with themselves. And I had become guilty of doing the same. The fun and liveliness of Sam Shepard’s theatre, the snakes, the girls, the energy was replaced with dismal clowns, pretending to be important, hoping someone will write a dissertation on them, just as I had when I was twenty. That kind of theatre and that kind thinking is little.

With this website, I wanted to return to what roped me into writing at the start, to return to the "Fountain of Youth" Proust wrote of. This site is about the places I have been, the pictures I have snapped, the people I have met, the things that I see, and the words I write. I hope you read the work the way I read Shepard’s plays almost fifteen years ago. I hope you get it in spades. A dramaturge once told me she enjoyed my writing because it was human, not humane. The work is uninhibited. You may want to keep that in mind. This new incarnation of the site features a link to my blog Federal Prisoner 30664. Writing should not be simple. It should be chewy and difficult to digest. Go ahead. Let this site be as big as you wish. No one is looking.

Oh, and I did just fine in anthropology. I had to take the class twice, but I did just fine.

Timothy Braun