Kim Ruyle was a multi-degreed management consultant whose three decades of work had taken him to 49 states and 45 countries when he submitted his play Kalispell to a playwriting competition in Florida, where he was living in 2017.
It won, receiving a staged production the following summer.
“I was hooked,” Ruyle said, during a phone conversation from his current home in Fond du Lac, where he is directing the World Premiere Wisconsin production of his play A Crooked French Affair. Staged by the venerable Fond du Lac Community Theatre – now in its 65th season – it opens on March 23.
“There is such a thrill in seeing what you wrote come to life on stage,” Ruyle continued
During the five years following that 2018 Florida production, Ruyle would make a pandemic-driven move to Fond du Lac, where he could be within driving range of four of his ten children and, as he made a point of noting to me, within 90 minutes of 30 theaters.
And he would write five more full-length plays, including A Crooked French Affair, in which the Pity Falls Community Playhouse is staging a play titled – you guessed it – A Crooked French Affair.
As Ruyle’s play begins, the Pity Falls Playhouse Board of Directors has just lost all the scripts from a playwriting competition in which the winner had been promised a full production. Enter Pericles Bubba Gupta – a local junior high English teacher going by Perry – who comes to the rescue with a script of his own.
Perry describes his A Crooked French Affair as “refined.” As “a period piece.” And as “a high concept drama.”
It’s none of the three. But it’s good enough for the desperate Board, which decrees Perry the competition winner – and taps Perry to direct – without even reading his script.
Featuring a love triangle in the court of Louis XV as well as Louis’ jilted queen Marie, Perry’s play reveals less about 18th-century France than Perry’s own four-actor cast: a narcissistic diva devoted to method acting, an affable late-shift cop who can’t remember his lines, a bossy Board member whose husband is having an affair with Perry’s wife, and Perry himself.
A train wreck doesn’t just seem probable. It feels inevitable.
From Page to Stage
The opposite is true for Ruyle, who wrote his play in just two months, after which he did table reads in Fond du Lac and Baraboo. Fond du Lac Community Theatre immediately wanted to do it.
“They took a chance on me, even though I’m new to them and Fond du Lac and am a relatively new playwright” a grateful Ruyle said. “They’re not ordinarily in the business of issuing content warnings, as they will with my play to note that it’s for mature audiences. This isn’t the sort of play they usually stage.”
Nor is Ruyle someone who ordinarily directs; A Crooked French Affair marks his directorial debut with a fully staged play. He hadn’t expected to helm this production, but he isn’t sorry he’s doing so; like Perry, he’s always wanted to direct, and his overwhelmingly positive experience with the current cast has done nothing to change his mind.
“My stage manager and cast are carrying me rather than the other way around,” Ruyle said. “They confirm every day that theater is the most collaborative art form.” Perry learns much the same thing in the course of directing his play.
Ruyle readily admits he’s no exception to the general rule applicable to writers. “There’s a bit of us in all of our characters,” he told me. And as is also true of Perry, who admits that he writes to better understand the world and himself, one of the reasons Ruyle wrote this play is to “show the journey and transformation of a writer” who, like Ruyle, is an emerging playwright.
Most important, collaborating with other artists on a new project like A Crooked French Affair – whether we’re speaking of Ruyle’s play or Perry’s play within that play – yields unexpected insights into who we are and how the world works, much as it does for audiences experiencing the resulting production.
“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental,” Arthur Miller said in a 1984 interview from which Ruyle quotes for the first epigraph to his play. “It’s so much like life.”
Or as Madame Pompadour says to her would-be lover in Ruyle’s play, “you speak of the future, Monsieur, but nothing in this life is certain.”
Yes, as Ruyle says, A Crooked French Affair could be described as “silly, in a Mel Brooks Spaceballs kind of way.” “I primarily wrote it,” he told me, “to entertain.”
But Ruyle also admits hoping that light as it is, A Crooked French Affair provokes “discussion” as well as “laughter.”
Perry and his crew may seem hapless and hopeless. But as they march crookedly on toward opening night, we’re reminded that life as well as the show must go on. Even when – to quote another epigraph Ruyle invokes, this time from Tom Stoppard – theater and life both present as “a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.”
A Crooked French Affair opens on March 23 and runs through March 26 at the Goodrich Little Theatre, 72 W 9th Street, Fond du Lac. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/a-crooked-french-affair-2/.
