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When Michael McGovern’s short play Preparing Banquo was a finalist at the Red Bull Theater, he became inspired to reconsider the ten minute form, a form he’d never taken seriously (despite having attended Carnegie Mellon University at the same time as the “king” of the ten minute play, Mark Harvey Levine.) This unexpected recognition also re-ignited his passion for new classical theater that explores themes large enough to contain a heightened language and sensibility, something he’d always been drawn to. He wondered if he could put this together with his love of cabaret, a series of which he’d produced a few years ago in a small studio in Bloomfield.

A graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s M.F.A. Playwriting program back in the days of David Ball, Arthur Giron and Frank Gagliano, McGovern had been self-producing “before it was in fashion.” He wrote mostly comedies early on, but then a self-described “dark period” led him to writing gothic poetry and “jazz-like riffs” on Edgar Allan Poe. He discovered that while a theater might like one of these at Halloween, regional theaters were “not looking for new and exciting” version’s of Poe’s The Telltale Heart (or The Raven, or The Fall of the House of Usher) though McGovern was compelled to write them. So in 2001 he created the Edgar Allan Poe Theater producing one adaptation and one original title a season, like his Brides of Dracula, about which one terrified critic remarked, “It’s one thing to watch horror on film, it’s another when an actor a few feet from you suddenly bares his fangs.” McGovern thought he was on to something.

We’re the “Zombie Capital of the World,” home to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Martin. It seemed like a no brainer. But what he learned was that Pittsburghers “who love horror don’t go to the theater, and theater goers don’t love horror.” He couldn’t figure out how to bring the two together. When it started to affect his personal finances, he folded the company.

McGovern began performing in a monthly cabaret he produced with Laura Hodge each one themed, like Psycho A Go-Go, or the very popular Beat Cabaret comprised of scenes, music, spoken word and comedy. The monthly schedule began to wear him down, so McGovern took a break again until last May, when he revived Beat Cabaret in Modern Formations Art Gallery (a popular venue for small theater companies in Garfield) It was so artistically satisfying that McGovern decided to do it again on April 27, this time a “riff on Shakespeare” with music and comedy as before but ending with his ten minute play, Preparing Banquo, in which Banquo is coached how to seek his revenge on Macbeth from Hamlet’s father, Anne Boleyn, and other infamous Shakespearean ghosts.

McGovern recently partnered with Yvonne Hudson as Artistic Associate and dramaturg of Poet’s Corner to create what he calls “true reader’s theater,” doing staged readings of new classical plays like his Ireland’s Shakespeare, McGovern’s take on Henry William Ireland’s forgery of Shakespeare and adaptations of classical titles, like Masque of the Red Death, The Island of Dr. Moreau. “Face it,” he says, “no one’s going to produce these with the number of characters they have,” but a readers theater can create a new appreciation for this kind of work and McGovern believes he can “satisfy both sides of his psyche” (the dark and the classical.)

If you’d like to find out more about either the Beat Cabaret or Poet’s Corner contact Michael McGovern at michaelplays@comcast.net.

tryan@dramatistsguild.com