Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Greg Pizzino. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Greg thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your career and how did you resolve those issues?
We were one rehearsal in on the first musical I wrote, “Benestopheles: The Last Days of Ghoulita Graves,” when the COVID shutdown hit. We had such a stellar cast and production team and there was already a commitment to full production for the following theatre season. When the company I do most of my work with, Neighborhood Theatre Group came back from lockdown, nobody was sure what theatre was going to look like. We initially went to work on smaller, more stripped down pieces that were less of a cost risk if we had to cancel production due to another shut down. In the interim, my writing partner on the project moved on and it got put on the back burner indefinitely. But, at the same time, we were experimenting with new ways to present theatre. A one act I wrote during lockdown inspired by Milicent Patrick and the creation of “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” was selected as a virtual production by NTG and has since been turned into an audio drama by New York’s Soundscape Theater. We produced our first short film featuring a returning NTG character, Annie Ypsi, who features in our all ages shows. “Benestopheles” still sits waiting in the wings, but the work goes on undeterred. I’ve already started the groundwork for another musical based around the 1855 Toronto clown riot and talked to a possible songwriting partner for the project.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m an author of primarily short fiction (under the pen name Thomas Gregory), a stage performer, and playwright as well as the technical director for Ypsilanti Michigan’s Neighborhood Theatre Group. I’ve been telling stories for as long as I can remember, easily back to the childhood playing with action figures days. To date I’ve had several one act plays, audio dramas and devised pieces produced by multiple theater companies. My first full length play, “Lee’s Grand Tiki” was performed as a workshop production in 2023 and will receive a full production in May of 2024. My prose work has appeared in anthologies including the “Fairytales Punk’d” series, The Queen of Clocks and Other Steampunk Tales, and the UK produced “Harvey Duckman Presents.”
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
I’m pretty much on a constant pivot. Theater isn’t what I thought I’d be doing until I did it. I originally went to school thinking I’d enter the film industry and when I did, I quickly discovered that it wasn’t for me. I hated the feeling of never knowing where that next paycheck was going to come from. So I ended up with a day job (which I still have) and wasn’t doing a lot creatively for a while. I didn’t take another shot at paid creative work until my now wife dared me to write something for an anthology that she was submitting a story to. We both got accepted and I’ve had other short fiction published since then. I ended up falling into the theater scene when I transferred locations at my day job. Two of my coworkers had just started a new theater company, Neighborhood Theatre Group, and they found out that I had a background in the arts and liked to sing. They already knew that it’s pretty much Halloween at my house all year round and invited me to audition for a Halloween cabaret show that they were producing, “Black Cat Cabaret.” That eventually evolved into me writing several plays for them and becoming the company’s technical director as well as performing (and now co-devising) in every Black Cat show since then.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I love connecting with a cast and an audience. Since I’ve worked in so many different artistic mediums I get to see it from a variety of different perspectives. Book publishing is sort of a static medium. Once the work is out there, its out there and in the reader’s hands. The author has very little interaction afterwards in most cases. The same is true with film. It’s down on celluloid. It’s concrete. But with theater, every performance is just a little different. The work can be reinterpreted every time another theater company or another director and cast produce it. Even the energy of a different audience on the same production can have an effect. I’ve learned so much from how an actor interprets my work and how an audience reacts to it to improve what I do and tell a better story.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://bookshop.org/shop/Thomasgregory
- Instagram: @gregpizzino
- Other: NTGYpsi.org – Neighborhood Theatre Group