Urban Legend: Gay playwright explores evolution of friendships in ‘A Future Perfect’
Ken Urban, a past Huntington Theatre Fellow, Harvard instructor and still an indie musician, remembers the moment his play A Future Perfect first took root.
Urban and his boyfriend (also an instructor at Harvard) hosted a gathering at their Kendall Square apartment for two of Urban’s (straight male) bandmates and their wives. When both women refused drinks, it became apparent that each couple was pregnant. Urban recalls thinking ‘it’s the end of the band; it’s the end of nights like this.’
“People have kids, their lives change, their values change,” he says. “For a lot of us who grew up in the ‘90s, liking indie music deepened the friendship. It meant a shared sense of values, a kind of politics. Life choices inevitably create risks and challenges that friendships can’t overcome.”
Urban, 40, says he normally takes months, even years to write his plays but this one came fast and furious; he quickly had a first draft in weeks and then a reading in New York City. “I could tell I was onto something after the reading,” he says. “It resonated in an intense way,” particularly with audiences in their 30s and 40s. Urban is an indie musician—his band Occurrence plays electronic music and their new album D E C K S was released in 2014—so it’s no surprise that the relationship between band mates and music figures prominently into the plot.
He’d tapped into the zeitgeist of ‘90s hipsters who suddenly find themselves or their friends transforming into their own parents in the story of Claire and Max, a young New York City couple whose values put to the test when best friends Alex and Elena announce they are having a baby.
Speakeasy Stage Co. is presenting the world premiere of A Future Perfect now through February 7 at the Roberts Theater in the Calderwood Pavillion of the Boston Center for the Arts. The play stars Marianna Bassham, Chelsea Diehl, Brian Hastert, Uatchet Jin Juch and Nael Nacer. M. Bevin O’Gara, an early champion of the play, directs.
Urban, who now lives in New York after seven years in Cambridge, says he’s looking forward to attending the Speakeasy production and doing talkbacks after select performances. He’s happy that the prolific O’Gara is directing, since she worked on A Future Perfect dating back to the 2013 workshop and remains “emotionally connected to the play,” says Urban. “We got along famously. She’s a terrific director and she’s very good with actors.” He credits O’Gara with passing his play on to Speakeasy artistic director Paul Daignault after Speakeasy announced it would be staging world premieres this season. Urban and O’Gara workshopped A Future Perfect with the cast last September to hone the dynamics of the ensemble so that they’d be convincing as longtime friends.
This marks the first time that one of Urban’s plays will be staged in Boston. He’ll experience another first in May when his drama Sense of an Ending, about the Rwandan genocide, opens at the 503 in London. The play, which Urban worked on for 10 years, also has deep connections to Boston: while Urban was a fellow at the Huntington, Sense of an Ending won of the L. Arnold Weissberger Playwriting Award for Best New American Play. It was developed at the Huntington Theater and at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.
Besides plays and music, Urban wrote the feature film adaptation of his play The Happy Sad, directed by Rodney Evans, premiered at Frameline and OutFest in 2013. The film screened at twenty film festivals both in the US and internationally, with theatrical releases in New York and Los Angeles. The film is available on iTunes, Netflix and DVD. He also wrote a short film I Am A Big Ball of Sadness (And I Want to Throw Myself from Your Roof), which screened as part of the Manhattan Short Film Festival in over 200 venues across six continents, and was awarded the Bronze Award by the audience. [x]
