Meet Finegan Kruckemeyer

‘At Sea, Staring Up’ playwright and all round nice guy

1. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR LOVE?

Not to subvert the question too much, but it really is what love has done for me. Meeting Essie gave me a newfound sense of purpose, made the great times better, and the quiet ones okay. She moved to an island so we could live together, and she accepted my hand in marriage when i offered it three months after we started dating. What I have done for love is loved her back, unconditionally, and always realised how lucky I am.

2. HOW DID YOU BECOME A PLAYWRIGHT?

I tried other things in the arts, like acting, teaching and stand-up, which I enjoyed, but just didn’t feel the same affinity for. Generous mentors and friends in Adelaide schooled me in theatre as a teenager, and I remember writing my first (incredibly awful) plays during frees at high school. In a couple of devised works, I was invited to write some dialogue for characters I was playing, and in doing so learnt the fundamental truth (as much from failure as success) that the validity of anything written for theatre only proves itself once spoken. At 20, an artistic director friend gave me my first paid commission, and things have rolled along nicely ever since.

3. IF YOU COULD HAVE ONE SUPER POWER WHAT WOULD IT BE & WHY?

I think to move through space as I saw fit, so that a clicking of fingers could send me from my home in Hobart to Norwegian fjords or Argentinean waterfalls or Irish hillsides. That’s all playwrighting is really - the lamer version of that geographical jumping. To do so for real would rock my world. 

4. WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE ‘AT SEA, STARING UP’?

A lovely commission from Suellen: the invitation to sit in a Cairns rehearsal room and meet five wonderful actors and people; the challenge to create characters that were not of them, but that would be good matches for them; the liberation of a global setting (see previous answer); the redemptive power of love; the sense of play I feel when writing; the permission of a character’s world unfolding and mapping out its own journey in front of you.

5. HOW DO YOU THINK PEOPLE WILL FEEL WHEN THEY SEE THIS PRODUCTION?

I really don’t wish to prescribe this, even with a hypothetical answer. The most enjoyable moments of theatre I’ve seen are those that sneak up on me, that offer me only a comfy chair and a clear line of sight to begin with, and then slowly present me with more and more - so that at first I’m merely taking in, then I begin making correlations, next I begin caring, and finally I invest, forgetting that I’m in a theatre altogether. It’s a rare thing and of course cannot be guaranteed - but I feel you’ll have a better chance of achieving at least the first bit if I keep schtum.

JUTE Theatre Company's 'At Sea, Staring Up' by Finegan Kruckemeyer 

9 - 24 March 2012 // Tickets $18 - $30 // Onsale at www.jute.com.au // 

Finegan Kruckemeyer ('At Sea, Staring Up' Playwright) with wife Essie Kruckemeyer