Ben Firke: Writing is a form of covert biography
A conversation with the playwright
Welcome to Human Pursuits, the column that features need-to-know names and stories in media and other creative spaces. Today, a conversation with playwright Ben Firke.
If you had one shot or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted, would you capture it? Or let it slip?
I was thinking of this hypothetical, first posed by Eminem in his hit single “Lose Yourself”, as I read the script for RICH BEYOND OUR WILDEST DREAMS. I’m not entirely sure why. Eminem isn’t mentioned a single time. Nor is Detroit. Or hip-hop in general.
Maybe it’s because the play, written by Ben Firke, taps into that same sense of desperation. That feeling of “if this doesn’t go well, I’m fucked.” For some, that winner-take-all mentality is jet fuel, propelling their dreams into the stratosphere. For others, it’s a grease fire that threatens to burn down their life.
Centred on high-tech energy drink company founder Colby Bates as he delivers a crucial pitch to investors, RICH BEYOND OUR WILDEST DREAMS is an almost entirely one-man show that explores human desire and the meaning of freedom. While I haven’t actually seen it performed live, Ben’s script is quite funny, and the show is beginning to receive national attention.
It’s currently being shown at the Atlanta Fringe Festival. Tickets available HERE.
And so, we had much to discuss.
Our edited and condensed conversation touched on Ben’s writing process, his relationship to pasta, the value of art in a post-capitalist society, following certain scripts, drawing inspiration from your wife, and more.
ES: I want to talk to you about your serious art. But first, I need to ask: your Twitter user name is @pasta_ben. What's up with that?
BF: It’s a silly name that I came up with a long time ago. For a long time, my handle was @BenInBushwick, and then I came up with the name @PastaEnthusiast because I love pasta. People would post about pasta, and I would reply, “Looks great.”
ES: Laughs.
BF: People responded well to that, and so I decided to go by @pasta_ben. I’m really surprised that it’s the one that stuck. I’ll meet people and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s Pasta_Ben”. The crazy thing is that, while I really love pasta, it’s a comfort food for me, I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite food.
ES: And here I thought I was original. So you’re not necessarily making pasta by hand?
BF: No, people think I have this special connection to it. This ties back to theatre because, even as a playwright, I still get butterflies in my stomach before shows, and so pasta is kind of my go-to meal on show nights. I’ll have a box of pasta with salt and pepper, a bit of olive oil. Something light that can settle my stomach.
ES: I was going to ask you about the performance side of your multi-hyphenate life. Do you have any pre-show rituals when you’re acting?
BF: I don’t like to ingest a lot of caffeine before a show. I don’t want to be too wired. Beyond that, I don’t have many rituals… In my other play, I AM THE GOOSEKING, there’s a scene where a character’s mother – this kooky New England mom – does this prayer that she’s written. Sometimes I’ll say that before the first show as a good luck thing.
ES: What’s your writing process like? I’d love to hear how you develop these characters.
BF: I spend a lot of time figuring out what I want to write about. What is my special interest right now? What is something I can’t stop thinking about? Because whatever the answer, I need to stay interested in it indefinitely while I’m writing…
For RICH BEYOND OUR WILDEST DREAMS, I wanted to write a one-man show about somebody giving a presentation, or maybe a talk show. I had this vision where they break down over the course of their talk, and it’s happening in front of a captive audience. That idea then became “Oh, what if it happened in an investor pitch?” because I had been thinking about the tech world and the things I dislike about it, as many people are at the moment.
All writing is a form of covert autobiography... These stories are a way for me to grapple with things in my life, while keeping a few degrees of separation.
It was also sort of inspired by my wife Daisy [Alioto], who you know, and who is the CEO and co-founder of Dirt. A lot of her job is editorial, running the newsletter, and editing people’s work. But it also involves pitching investors. I listened to her investor pitch dozens of times. We lived in a loft, and I heard her deliver it over and over again. Daisy’s so much more competent than the character in my play, she’s in control of her emotions, she’s never had a break down, but I kept thinking about the idea of having to constantly prove yourself to an audience of people who have no qualifications other than that they have money and are authorized to invest it as they see it. No offense to the VCs, but having to see this brilliant creative person make her brilliance palatable for these capitalists seemed ripe for dramatic and comedic possibilities.
I was also playing around with the idea of where society is with drugs right now. Colby is pitching a beverage, and there’s a version of it that contains LSD, so that the drinker can microdose. I wanted to explore the way Silicon Valley has taken psychedelics and made them this weird business productivity tool, or creativity enhancer.
ES: It’s a way for them to optimize.
BF: Yeah. Silicon Valley's always had an obsession with LSD. There were guys at these corporations in the 50s taking acid before the hippies even got to it. Psychedelics are not something we have historically associated with business. What does taking mushrooms and seeing God have to do with making computer chips? On the surface, nothing… Which, I suppose, is my long-winded way of saying that my writing process involves figuring out what I’m obsessed with, how it connects, and where the story can go from there.
ES: From one wife guy to another, it’s cool that Daisy seems like such a muse for you.
BF: Absolutely. A lot of that is just by osmosis. Hearing her experiences. She was a muse for I AM THE GOOSEKING as well. That play is about a journalist who goes to New Hampshire to interview a young YouTube conspiracy theorist and his family for a story. The obvious inspiration there is that Daisy is a journalist, albeit not a boot-on-the-ground beat reporter, and the play builds off her experiences, and also explores how the contemporary internet is not a welcome place for women or girls who have strong opinions…
To some extent, all writing is a form of covert autobiography, but I also know audiences don’t want to see a play that’s just about my life. These stories are a way for me to grapple with things in my life, while keeping a few degrees of separation.
ES: It occurs to me that you’re almost putting yourself in Daisy’s shoes to create a scenario where someone like you, Ben, can let it play out.
BF: I’m a super impulsive person, and she’s not. So part of this was an exercise in imagining a less prepared individual, or someone who wasn’t sticking to the script. What would happen if you saw someone go from pleading for capital to calling prospective investors cowards?
It’s amazing how much of our lives are spent unconsciously following certain scripts, and how deviating from those scripts can lead to chaos. You see it in politics right now. Politicians and institution are throwing out their old playbooks, and that’s infiltrating other aspects of public life. We’re getting rid of norms. It’s extremely disturbing, but then there’s that clichéd desire of hoping that a disaster can lead to a new opportunity. If everything is crumbling, then what comes next? What could that look like? Could it lead to something better?
ES: You mentioned that you’re an impulsive person. How do you navigate that? I feel like society is less tolerant of impulsiveness these days. Perhaps unfairly.
BF: It’s a great question. As a staunch anti-capitalist, I think capitalism restrains the working class most obviously, but it also hurts the creative class and knowledge workers. White collar office workers.
The way art is discussed now, it feels like people are almost becoming unpaid publicists. They’re talking about Billboard chart positions and box office openings. And to some extent, who cares?
ES: Like journalists.
BF: Exactly. The thesis of the play is more or less that capitalism sucks because it takes traits like impulsiveness, which can be really helpful in the arts or other creative pursuits, and devalues them. In the case of Colby, he’s taking a square peg and ramming it into the round hole of the marketplace. Trying to prove these ideas can make millions, if not billions of dollars. I think that’s a screwed up thing about capitalism. You have people who produce stuff that’s not immediately commodifiable but could make the world a better place, and our society has essentially trained us to think the only worthwhile venture is the one that will eventually make money. Some of the best art only gets made because it also happens to be profitable. These people with a different way of seeing don’t get the appreciation they perhaps deserve, and it slowly drives them insane.
ES: Dude, I was literally just thinking about this in Paris. We saw Claude Monet’s Haystacks series. You wanna talk about impulsive? The man was painting haystacks every which way. Over and over again. It was completely impulsive. And on the surface, there’s no value to that, but I found it so moving, in part because I was left wondering “How the fuck was this man able to live?” My wife was like, “They were stuck trying to sell those paintings to make rent.”
BF: Yeah, they weren’t living the way that you’re thinking. Vincent Van Gogh famously had a pretty rough life… The way art is discussed now, it feels like people are almost becoming unpaid publicists. They’re talking about Billboard chart positions and box office openings. And to some extent, who cares? There’s a lot of great art that doesn’t find a mass audience and remains niche. That’s okay.
ES: Not everything needs to be a billion-dollar idea. You can extract different values from different things. It’s not always financial.
BF: As a teenager in the 2000s, I would go to shows at the American Legion or Knights of Columbus Hall. $10 admission and you’d see, like, seven bands and they all got paid shit. The point wasn’t necessarily to become a superstar or use that as a jumping off point. The point was to play really good shows for your friends, and maybe gain the respect of the local scene, which, you know, comes with its own problems. But there was never this sense that a band was bad because they weren’t blowing up on YouTube or TikTok. There was a sense of “This is small, but that’s okay. In fact, it’s kind of great.”
Ben Firke is a playwright and occasional performer. He lives in upstate New York.