Being a longtime member of Dad’s Garage Theater Company, improviser Jon Carr has gotten used to making it up on the spot, both at Dad’s and with the troupe Dark Side of the Room.
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But Carr is moving into the realm of scripts and stage directions. His first play is called “Black Nerd” and he’s putting it onstage for the first time in a staged reading.
“I was home-schooled by travelling Christian clowns,” Carr said of his upbringing. “I was always the weird kid [in my family] that ‘talked too white.’ But then going to DragonCon with all my nerdy friends, I was always the black kid. I would never quite fit in in whatever group of people that I was spending time with. Getting used to that and embracing that is kind of my journey.”
“Black Nerd” is slated to get a full production at Dad’s Garage Theatre Company in summer 2018, but Stage Door Players’ New Work Wednesdays series is presenting the show as a reading on Dec. 6.
“So many of the plays done in Atlanta are wonderful but we bring in so many from New York and so many from outside,” Carr said. “So this is an opportunity to cultivate our own playwrights here in Atlanta.”
While the show is intended as a comedy for Dad’s, Carr says the show covers a lot of dramatic ground, including his first experience with police harassment. Because of this, he has sought out the assistance of director Tiffany Porter, a regular with the Atlanta Shakespeare Company and a founding producer of the Weird Sisters Theatre Project.
And while treading the lines between comedy and drama and between improv and scripted storytelling don’t seem to phase the first-time playwright, Carr admits that writing autobiographically has been an unexpected challenge.
“A lot of this is based on my life and you have that moment where you’re like ‘oh man, this needs a point!’” he laughs. “Having to have that moment of really focusing in and saying ‘what have I learned through my life experiences?’ That has been challenging and rewarding and wonderful and scary all at the same time.”
The staged reading of “Black Nerd” at Stage Door Players in Dunwoody takes place Dec. 6 at 7 p.m. Admission is free.
