The Broadway Bound Theater Festival (background here) is running through Sept. 1 at the Powerhouse Theatre in Waveny, presented by the Town Players of New Canaan.
We put some questions to Tom Mullen, a contributing playwright whose work, “Flags,” opens at 7 p.m. Thursday and runs through Sunday (tickets here).
Here’s our exchange.
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New Canaanite: Give our readers some of your own background. When did you start playwrighting?
Perhaps the oldest working member of the Cambridge Footlights, Tom Mullen, at his graduation ceremony in April with his wife, Annie.
Tom Mullen: After 30-plus years as a newspaperman, I happened to find the obituary I wrote on myself as a journalism student at Marquette in 1981. It read that I had given up the trade at 35 and become a playwright. As I was nearing my 59th birthday I decided I’d better get cracking so I started taking courses and rented a place in the East Village with the intent to dive into the theater scene there in NYC.
But COVID had other ideas but I eventually found a six-month cycle of online courses at University of Cambridge where a couple of professors encouraged me to apply for their Masters program, which I thought a ridiculous idea but I happened to be reading a John Cleese book at the time and thought, “if they accept me (which they won’t) I could get involved in Footlights which gave birth to Monty Python.”
So I did apply and they did accept me.
That was three years ago and I saw many of my pieces performed at Cambridge and the Broadway Bound Festival is showing my final project for my Masters, “Flags.”
Here’s the description of your play, Flags, on the Town Players of New Canaan website: “Chaos reigns near the end of the War in the Pacific so Gabriel sheds his wings to lead a band of Marines at Okinawa, thinking America to be the last, best hope for humanity. But when the platoon realizes the flag-raising at Iwo Jima was a publicity stunt designed to sell war bonds, they begin to question the righteousness of their cause. The women they’ve left behind cope with an uncertain future as their homeland teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. With their able-bodied men fighting overseas, the women’s lives and their dreams are in limbo.” Where did the idea for your play originate?
“Flags” is the culmination of an itch that I’ve been scratching since my cousin came back from Vietnam with a Purple Heart, which, Father Zenzen explained to my third grade classmates, made him a hero.
This announcement came on the heels of that morning’s mass and a pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
So Flags is about the power of symbolism and tribalism and about the inherent conflict between theism and humanism. It’s designed as a comedic thrill-ride about three men and three women brought together near the end of World War Two which, naturally, pulls them apart.
There’s also an arc angel, Gabriel, who sheds his wings to fight for what he believes to be humanity’s last hope: America.
What has this experience been like for you, seeing your written words come to life on stage? How are you feeling about the premiere?
Rick Sayers and Lenore Skomal, the organizers of this festival, have designed a sort of bootcamp to mold playwrights into producers, a Herculean task but a noble aspiration.
They brought us seven finalists together in April to help us fine-tune our plays. We all then set about a final (hah – there is no such thing!) rewrite for performance here at the festival.
What else, if anything, would you like to tell our readers about yourself, your play or the festival?
These seven plays share little in common other than they are all under 90 minutes and are all incredibly enjoyable and made more so by the actors, technicians and directors who have dedicated the better part of this summer to bringing these works to life.