Interview with Pablo Muñoz-Evers, writer of Tales of Darkness!
The Baron's Men's Halloween fundraiser show, Tales of Darkness, is part Elizabethan play, part new work, and all scary fun. We recently sat down with Resident Artist Pablo Muñoz-Evers to talk about his process of writing the new script that ties the whole story together.
TBM: This is your first time writing for TBM, but you’ve been involved before, right? For how long and what else have you done?
PM: I was first cast in a TBM show in the spring of 2020. It was The Merry Wives of Windsor, and it got canceled soon after due to COVID. When we came back, I auditioned again, and I performed in The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet. I’d been a fan of TBM since I saw their 2016 production of Richard III, and I’d been on the lookout for an opportunity to audition for a while.
This script includes scenes from extant plays. How was your approach to writing this different than a wholly original script?
It was tricky! I think my biggest struggle was trying to make the scenes by other playwrights fit the narrative arc of my story without making the story feel repetitive. Some of these pre-existing scenes are similar to each other thematically, and, in the story, most of them are basically tactics that Hooded Figure uses to persuade Justine, so I had to try to make it so that Hooded Figure wasn’t simply repeating the same tactics multiple times.
Starting with pre-existing scenes that someone else wrote and then trying to tie them together with an original story of my own was a challenge that was new to me.
I also tried to follow certain Elizabethan playwriting conventions, such as writing in verse and writing exposition in a different way than we’re used to in most contemporary plays. This was an experiment and an interesting challenge for me – it was very different from how I usually write. I also tried to make the vernacular I used have an old-timey (though not fully Elizabethan) feel, which I had never attempted before.
How did you find these scenes, and how did you choose which scenes to include?
Jackie (our director) had a list of Elizabethan scenes that TBM had used previously in Medieval Macabre, a show TBM put on years ago. Jackie, Renee (assistant director), and I sat down one day and picked our favorite ones, and we also tried to think of other interesting, spooky scenes from Elizabethan plays that we could think of. We mostly picked from the ones Jackie already had on her list. Stephanie Crugnola, fellow TBMer and founder of Walking Shadow Shakespeare Project, gave me the scene from The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley (the scene with the husband who suspects his wife of betraying him).
Are there any good scenes you had to leave out?
No. It was challenging to think of spooky Elizabethan scenes that might be a good fit, honestly.
Where else can we see your plays?
You can search for my name on newplayexchange.org – I have some of my plays on there. A full-length play I wrote called There’s No Sand on the Moon got selected for Jarrott Production’s Opening Act Initiative 2024/2025, so there will be a workshop production of that sometime soon. You may have seen a production of a 10-minute play I wrote called Dreams if you went to ScriptWorks’ Out of Ink Festival at Hyde Park Theatre in 2023 (it was the one at the end with the tuna sandwich transformation machine). You can also follow me on Instagram: @pamunev.
ABOUT PABLO: Pablo Muñoz-Evers (he/him) is a Colombian-born playwright and actor. Some of his other plays include Dreams (B. Iden Payne Award-nominated, selected and produced as part of ScriptWorks’ Out of Ink 2023) and There’s No Sand on the Moon (selected for Jarrott Production's Opening Act Initiative 2024, finalist for Boise Contemporary Theater's 2024 BIPOC Festival). As an actor, Pablo’s most recent roles with The Baron’s Men include Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet in Hamlet. He has also recently acted in productions with Austin Shakespeare, Walking Shadow Shakespeare Project, and others. Pablo is also a high school English teacher, he loves magical realism and anything dreamy and weird, and he strives to be, like his dog, Lulo, a very good boy.
