Playwright Dan O'Brien Strangely Solemn

Author: Chase Kvasnak

Dan O'Brien, Tennessee Williams Fellow in Playwriting and Middlebury alumnus, spoke at the Center for the Arts. "How to Almost Starve on Purpose," the title of O'Brien's speech, explored the relationship of the writer and the real world in an autobiographical essay.
O'Brien majored in theater and English, with a focus on acting, directing and creative writing. His senior project, "The Last Supper Restoration," won the National Student Playwriting Award and the AIDS/Vogue Initiative Award through the American College Theatre Festival, and was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. O'Brien teaches at the University of the South as part of his fellowship.
O'Brien expressed that his desire to write began when he was young. His earliest memories of writing are in the third and fourth grade when every day he was made to write a story. The young author was published in Crickets for a piece praising his mother's ability to play video games. At the College, O'Brien began acting and writing with the encouragement of numerous professors in both the English and theater departments. From Middlebury, O'Brien studied in Ireland. Reflecting on the experience, he said, "I don't know what I would be as a writer without Ireland. It was about getting outside your identity as a citizen, student of Middlebury, a kid from Scarsborough, New York."
O'Brien's demeanor conveyed a sense of true self-pleasure to talk about his own melancholy nature and the importance and necessity of this trait as well as being alone as part of being an 'artist'. O'Brien also made another point, this one candid, about writers tendency toward self-obsession giving an example of himself to illustrate this. However, when O'Brien's talk managed to abandon this cliché of the artist, he made valid observations about the art world that suggested realization only from experience.
His speech began with a letter he received, criticizing his plays for, among other things, their melancholy nature (O'Brien remembers The Middlebury Campus criticizing him when he was a student, asking, "Why can't Mr. O'Brien be more like Shakespeare?"). The author of the letter, and one of O'Briens fellow Tennesseans since he moved to the state after his graduation, stated his wish that O'Brien never join the "real world" of writing due to his inexplicable sadness and deviation from the style of playwriting masters.
Building off this idea, O'Brien relayed his own experiences as an artist expressing both the equation "money equals time equals writing" and the daunting "shoulds": "I should get a 9 to 5 job, should be teaching full time, should be saving money, should be writing a novel and I should be helping people."
With this, O'Brien questioned the essence of writing and its purpose. He thus concluded, "Writers are outside of society, outside the real world, and society needs people outside. Maybe writers hide from the real world, but look at what they notice."
Quite unfortunately, Starr Library contains none of O'Brien's works, including "The Last Supper Restoration."