20 People to Watch - Topher Payne: The playwright
The year is open for Atlanta’s king of queer theater, which might be the most ambitious thing he’s done yet
This time of year, Topher Payne’s calendar is usually bursting with planned projects for the upcoming months. Since about 2005, Payne has been one of Atlanta’s busiest and most productive theater artists with a constant and often overlapping stream of acting roles, writing gigs, directing projects, drag performances, film work, and world premiere plays. But 2014 may be the year to keep an eye on Payne because, as yet, he has virtually nothing planned. He’s even put his weekly column for Georgia Voice on hold.
“It was my idea so I have no one to blame but myself,” he says about facing the prospect of a 2014 datebook that’s basically blank. “I’m taking 2014 as a year of reboot. Since my work started to garner some degree of attention, I haven’t stopped working at any point and just made myself available to opportunities as they arise. I was really intrigued by the possibility of what would happen if I did that.”
An opportunity that may be of special interest to Payne if it arises in the new year is the potential to chase down productions of his shows in other cities. In early 2013, Payne was preparing for the world premiere of his play Angry Fags at Atlanta’s 7 Stages when the Source Festival in Washington, D.C., called to let him know that they wanted to put on his show Perfect Arrangement. They asked if he could come up and participate in preparing the production. “I had to choose my baby, and I chose to stay with Angry Fags because at that point, that script needed more attention,” he says. It was a huge career moment — the first production of his work in a major market outside Atlanta — and he had to miss it.
The play in D.C. was a hit, earning an extended run and glowing coverage in the Washington Post and Washington City Paper. Although Payne has inarguably made his mark in Atlanta over the years, he’d long wondered if his work could ever be successful in other cities. Here was proof. “The stories that I’m telling here can and should be heard elsewhere,” he says. “It’s encouraging.” Especially gratifying was the fact that Source had picked up a script that three Atlanta theaters had turned down.
But even a year without prior commitments for Payne will still have some milestones. The year starts with the world premiere of his new show The Only Light in Reno at Georgia Ensemble Theatre in Roswell on Jan. 9. Based on real events, the play focuses on the night that circumstance brought together Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Libby Holman, and Paula Strasberg in one hotel room in Reno during a power outage. “The five of them ride out the night having the must fucked-up slumber party you could ever imagine,” Payne says.
Payne is also working on his first screenplay, a spec project he’s kept on the back burner for years, which he refers to simply as his “gay race-relations horror movie.” “I taught myself how to write plays,” he says. “Now I’m just teaching myself how to write movies.”
And that’s it. The unstructured time could conceivably take any shape and result in any number of projects, in any number of disciplines, perhaps even anywhere in the country. Whatever ends up happening, Payne won’t be sitting still. And whatever he ends up creating, we’ll want to be watching.
“Let’s all watch together, shall we?” says Payne. “Because I don’t have a clue what’s going to happen. It’s pretty terrifying.”