Writer’s Spotlight: David Veatch

 

            David Veatch grew up in central Iowa in a small town called Mitchellville, He did plays through his homeschool co-op, and and says that’s where he caught the bug. He got to direct a play his senior year of high school when he decided he was going to do theater. He said, “I did my first play through my church with one line when I was five years old.” When he was nine, he went to his school's play and decided, “I'm going to write a play,”.

            Veatch said, “The first play I ever wrote was about a bunch of astronauts who sent their boyfriends up to space, and then they blew up the rocket ship because they were mad at them. So I had really heavy things on my mind as a kid, clearly.”

            “I was always creating and thinking up stories, and just writing things in like a Google doc or a Word doc, but then I came to school at Bob Jones and was like, ‘I'm going to learn to write and really dive in.’”

            His freshman year of college, he wrote his first serious play and had a cold read for his friends. “That was a really big moment for me as a writer where I was like, ‘okay, I love doing this and kind of creating, even if it's within a university setting.’”

            Veatch’s first fully realized production was a play for his thesis in 2021, called Operation Turkey Lurkey. He was supposed to have a play done the year before, but we all know what happened in 2020.

            Veatch also talked about a play he had in his MFA program. one of my classmates runs a theater. She was like, ‘I want to produce this at this winter festival we're going to,’ and then that won that festival. I didn't know it was a contest until after the fact. She was like, ‘oh, yeah, we won.’ I was like, ‘won what?’ So now we're taking that play to SCTC, which I'm really excited about.”

            The play is called 20-Something Teenager. It's about a married couple in a kind of dystopian, not-so-far-away future who want to have a kid. Veatch said that “It was really well-received because it was really funny. It has a good heart about found family, and family doesn't have to look like just a mother, father, and a child that they create. It can be a person who needs a home.”

            Veatch said that the play has been very well-received and impactful. The people who have been in the play have all reached out to him saying, “Thank you for writing something so sweet but also so funny, in a time when we're all kind of in a very polarized world of one side versus the other.”

            Veatch struggles with dyslexia which has made things a little bit more difficult. He says that a good spellcheck and a good editor are two necessities when he’s writing. Another struggle for Veatch has been coming from a background that isn’t interested in the arts and doesn’t foster creativity. He says that it’s common for Bob Jones University students to come from that background and to have to work to overcome that lack of education and opportunity they’ve had for however many years.

            One of Veatch’s favorite projects so far was a recent production called What's Haunting You. “It's a little ghost story and the team was amazing. All of them worked really hard. It was my favorite process thus far because I didn't have to do anything. I wrote the play. I got to be the playwright. I got to make edits to the play, but then I didn't have to do any of the producing.”

            Current projects that he’s working on include the thesis for his MFA, a television pilot about a boy band and a workshop of a solo show. He said, “Part of my writing process is to really use my writing as a philosophical check-in in a lot of ways, whether that's religiously or just my philosophy of life. I like to ask the questions in my plays that I am grappling with. I like to write things that make me a little uncomfortable, because they kind of expose this part of me. My solo show is kind of a deconstruction and reconstruction of Christianity in my own life.”

            One of the things that he always looks for in writing is “where’s the voice of the person writing it and are they being truthful?” Veatch challenges himself to write scripts that get to the heart he really wants to explore and think about, even if it’s with a comedic frame.

            He says that writing has changed his relationship with himself in a lot of ways. He doesn’t consider himself a funny person but has incorporated humor into his work because it receives the best response from audiences. It’s also helped him figure out what he likes and dislikes. As well as what he can and can’t write.

            His advice for aspiring playwrights is to read plays and not just old plays. You often have to read Shakespeare and other old plays in classes and those are important, but you should be reading new plays, because reading plays that are current and contemporary helps you see where you want to fit.