{"id":20688,"date":"2013-05-01T23:53:06","date_gmt":"2013-05-02T05:53:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=20688"},"modified":"2020-02-15T10:11:01","modified_gmt":"2020-02-15T16:11:01","slug":"david-kranes-dramaturgy-of-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/david-kranes-dramaturgy-of-space\/","title":{"rendered":"David Kranes: Dramaturgy of Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

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David Kranes will tell you he\u2019s driven. Since his arrival in Utah from his home in New England in 1967, he has taught students at the University of Utah Creative Writing Program, directed the Sundance Playwright\u2019s Lab, written 7 novels and now, with his recently released\u00a0The Legend\u2019s Daughter\u00a0<\/em>(Torrey House Press) three volumes of short stories along with dozens of plays. He\u2019s even starred in Salt Lake City\u2019s first independent feature (Down in the Valley,\u00a0<\/em>1977).<\/p>\n

Even at age 75, during a recent interview in his Salt Lake home which he shares with his wife Carol and a Hungarian pooli named \u201cMack,\u201d he appeared far from retired, or retiring. He has two other novels in the works (3 others he\u2019s just \u201cre-discovered,\u201d going through his papers). And then there\u2019s that little casino thing on the side. \u201cCasinos are filled with compressed drama,\u201d he says, sitting comfortably in his Ron Molen-designed home of cedar wood and sunken sitting rooms and occasionally distracted by Mack\u2019s wriggling antics. Kranes is an inveterate card counter at blackjack himself, and has been asked at least twice by casino management to \u201cmove along now\u201d from tables where his take was getting a little too much and a little too consistent. A leading expert on new directions in casino design, Kranes is a columnist for\u00a0Casino Executive<\/em>\u00a0Magazine and has consulted with the likes of Rainforest Caf\u00e9 and Circus Circus.<\/p>\n

In the last five years gambling consultants are less in demand. But as with virtually everything Kranes does from the right side of his brain, his experience with gaming seems to feed into his enduring tales of Western landscape and its people. In his Vegas serio-comedy\u00a01102, 1103,\u00a0<\/em>staged by the Salt Lake Acting Company in 1989, the set is side-by-side hotel rooms, while in his fiction, space \u2014 especially the wilds of Idaho, as in his latest collection \u2014 propels his characters psychically. Shot through much of his oeuvre is Kranes\u2019 perpetual grappling with what the French culturalist Jean Baudrillard referred to as America\u2019s astral plane of \u201chyperreality.\u201d Indeed, Kranes\u2019 creative work, spanning opera libretto, dance, plays, film and fiction seems to vibrate out in the western landscape between, to quote Baudrillard, the \u201cpompous Mormon symmetry\u201d of Salt Lake streets and Las Vegas, \u201cthe great whore across the desert.\u201d In between and far beyond lies a host of characters deftly drawn by, according to Knopf fiction editor Gordon Lish, a \u201cpoet of dread, an American who knows America precisely as every American knows it, but never says.\u201d In\u00a0The Legend\u2019s Daughter,<\/em>\u00a0Idaho becomes home to the broken \u2014 from a kayaking method actor to fly fishermen, and from a rebellious high school teacher to the founder of the \u201cChurch of Idaho.\u201d Here they find their way out of solitude and into newly configured lives.<\/p>\n

Despite his high level of production over the years, one could argue that the six-banger engine for Kranes is not the number of his stagings, screenings and publications but the artistic process. A fixture for over thirty years at the UofU, he guided the likes of Ron Carlson, Pam Huston and Jeff Metcalf and became a second-stage mentor for others, including Rolf Yngve, who appears to be successfully merging a 35-year career in the U.S. Navy with literary fiction.<\/p>\n

In Act III (or is it now Act IV?) for Kranes, he also found a home for 14 years as Artistic Director of the Sundance Playwrights Lab. With David Chambers, Kranes was able to shape a program that included notables such as Don Dellilo, Donald Marguiles and Jim Lehrer, incubating a variety of Pulitzer- and Tony award-winnings plays, including Tony Kushner\u2019s \u201cGay Fantasia,\u201d\u00a0Angels in America,<\/em>\u00a0and the epic\u00a0The Kentucky Cycle.<\/em><\/p>\n

The temperature in the room rises when Kranes talks about how collaborations, at Sundance and elsewhere, fire his imagination. \u201cThe more ways you can impact [the work] and, just let the pieces float around in the solution\u2026the more possibility that it will reconfigure in powerful ways,\u201d he says of play scripts. As lab director he would often convene \u201cresource artists\u201d with playwrights, protected in the mountains from market forces. On one occasion Repertory Dance Theatre-affiliated choreographer\/costumer Marina Harris showed up to work with Phillip Gotanda on his\u00a0The Wash,<\/em>\u00a0about a Japanese couple who even after separating maintain their traditional roles, including her doing his laundry. \u201cFor ten minutes Marina did a sheet dance, a solo, just [repetitively] folding sheets. It blew Phillip\u2019s mind. Something clicked watching such a simple action [of a] traditional wife folding laundry. The choreography and the spoken word came together. It\u2019s wonderful when your horizons get opened up like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe it\u2019s not the destination,\u201d concedes Kranes, referring to process over finished product. He just barely got his own website up this year and, at one point, parked a novel manuscript,\u00a0Making the Ghost Dance,<\/em>\u00a0with a local publisher for ten years before they called him with an offer to publish it. Kranes, while prolific, isn\u2019t exactly a rock star in the world of letters, prompting Jon Jory, founder of the Humana New Play Festival to quip that Kranes \u201cis without a doubt the best American playwright you haven’t read yet.\u201d The same might be said of his prose.<\/p>\n

Winner of the Pushcart Prize for short fiction, Kranes isn\u2019t necessarily gunning for fame. When his novel\u00a0The National Tree<\/em>\u00a0got scooped up by the Hallmark Channel, he seemed almost bewildered by the attention, perhaps reminiscent of when he first arrived in Utah, crossed the Salt Flats in a surreal blizzard only to find himself in the Stateline Hotel & Casino. But what is distinctly Kranes is how he responds to such a phenomenon: he starts to read architects, ecologists, theologians, phenomenologists like Gaston Bachelard writing about space.<\/p>\n

At the end of our interview, Kranes rises out of his chair with some trouble (his health has recently hit a rough patch, though he assures me he\u2019s on the mend) to show me around. Mack, with his dark threaded cords from head to tail, making it difficult to know which end is which, pads along after us. Out back pine trees, more horizontal than vertical, stretch across the deck and into the spacious, terraced yard. Above us the mountain rises sharply. I am reminded of Kranes\u2019 play,\u00a0Winter of the Deer,<\/em>\u00a0in which a Salt Lake home on the bench of the Wasatch Range is invaded by hungry, disoriented deer during the winter. In fact the numerous bird feeders he and Carol have, he explains, are pointless during the cold months because of the deer.<\/p>\n

When I mention this play, Kranes pauses. \u201cThat\u2019s one project I wish I had done another draft on,\u201d he says, explaining the downside of being so driven, \u201ctrying without success to bring all those [disparate] pieces in.\u201d He quotes his storyteller\/singer friend Bill Harley: You can\u2019t tell a story until it\u2019s over. \u201cThe first 15 years after I arrived in Utah, I wrote all about the East Coast. David in the East was over. There were stories to be told\u2026.That story about the deer isn\u2019t over, yet,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Always in process.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

David Kranes’\u00a0The Legend’s Daughter<\/em>, a collection of fast-paced stories set in contemporary Idaho, is published by\u00a0Torrey House Press<\/a>\u00a0and comes out May 7. The author will read from and sign the book at\u00a0King’s English<\/a>\u00a0on Saturday, May 11at 4 pm.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  David Kranes will tell you he\u2019s driven. Since his arrival in Utah from his home in New England in 1967, he has taught students at the University of Utah Creative Writing Program, directed the Sundance Playwright\u2019s Lab, written 7 novels and now, with his recently released\u00a0The Legend\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":834,"featured_media":20738,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3033,35],"tags":[1408],"class_list":["post-20688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-author-profile","category-literary-arts","tag-david-kranes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/emailkranes.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-31 09:11:52","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20688"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50147,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20688\/revisions\/50147"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}