Kyle Bass: Syracuse playwright finds his calling at last | syracuse.com

Kyle Bass, as a child, was laying the foundation for his future as playwright.

“I was kind of an observer in the family,” he says over a late-morning breakfast at Barbieri’s Italian Diner in Syracuse’s Little Italy.

When his aunts and uncles would visit, “I liked to be under the kitchen table just listening to the conversation. Not listening to substance so much, but for the flow, and the rhythm, and the warmth and the familiarity in their voices and how the exchange went. And how something funny would drop off, and there would be a silence and you would know now some sort of truth had been touched and then it would start again. Dialogue. So I used to love that.”

Bass uncoils memories of his childhood, revealing the origins of his love of words and language. A New York Foundation for the Arts 2010 grant is the latest reward for this early start.

Trim and muscular, Bass animatedly re-enacts some of his discoveries growing up in Frankfort in rural Herkimer County. He expresses delight and astonishment, raising and lowering his voice.

He knows his geek status is sealed when he confesses a favorite toy was a box of vocabulary flash cards. Bass also penned a book of his sayings and observations while in the third or fourth grade.

A gift from his mother, an Underwood 5 typewriter, changed everything. Bass describes it as “a black boulder of a thing” that he used initially to type his poems.

“And then I started writing these short stories. These short stories, these compulsive, single-spaced, agonizingly detailed stories. And then I would read them into a tape recorder. This is madness, right? A cassette tape. I would read them into the tape recorder and I would play them back,” he says, all the while marveling at his youthful exuberance.

“I’m still miles and miles away from writing for the stage, but I’m already doing it. I’m turning my fiction into kind of performance. I’m reading it into a tape recorder and playing it back. So, in a sense, the tape recorder becomes the theater, the stage.”

Bass’ path took several dramatic twists and turns from there. He drifted from writing, although he studied creative writing at the State University College at Fredonia and started but did not finish a master’s in fine art at American University.

But, it’s the events of October 2005 that are telling. Bass worked, unhappily, as a pharmaceutical salesman. He realized scattered around his desk were memos with scenes written on the backside. He would stretch his lunch hour to spend more time in the drama section of the Central Library in The Galleries of Syracuse.

One day Bass paid attention for the first time to a company bulletin board and the lonely button affixed to it. Bass remains astonished by the button’s message: “I’d rather be a wanderer all my life than cross the wrong threshold every day.”

That was it. Bass quit. “I never felt so heavy and light at the same time in all my life.”

Vividly, he recalls the moments after his departure. “I drive in my car wondering how I’m going to pay for it (mortgage), my tie fluttering out the window,” he says, re-enacting with quivering fingers the movement of his airborne tie. He laughs at the memory, then revisits the emotional impact of his decisive action five years ago.

He applied to Goddard College, where he studied playwriting and received a master’s in fine arts in 2006.

Now Bass, 48, is immersed in the world of theater, both as a playwright and as full-time dramaturg at Syracuse Stage.

He has enjoyed a longtime association with the Armory Square Playhouse, where his plays have had staged readings. Kitchen Theatre and Appleseed Productions also have produced his works.

Bass says themes run through his plays - father, s

via blog.syracuse.com