Artist of the Week	Jon Elston by Tom Waters

Why you should know who he is: Jon’s got a list of awards and credits longer than his collection of loud ties: Artie Awards for Best New Play (2005) for Private Viewing, Best New Play Award (2004) for Interrogation Room, Best New Play Award (2003) and Source Theatre National Literary Prize (2003) for Project and he also won Best Senior Screenplay as well as Best Junior Screenplay for Charlie Bowles and the short film Meant To Be, respectively. In 1999, he wrote and directed the film Lemkin’s Last $ale, which premiered at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center. On October 21, lightning will (in all likelihood) strike a fifth time with Jon’s newest play, Peddler’s Bones, a Halloween tale about “ghosts and murders.”

Age: 28

Hometown: Clarence

Schooling: Bachelor Of Science From Ithaca College with a Major in Film Production and a Minor in Screen Writing

Day job: Assistant Manager for Flix Theaters in Depew

Creative job: Literary Manager and Resident Playwright for the theater company Road Less Travelled Productions

Favorite guilty pleasure: “The late, lamented Montana Mills Mud Bar. May you rest in peace.”

Jon Elston

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

What are the limitations or advantages of theater over film? (laughs) “Theater is less expensive and more affordable than film. Therefore it’s easier to mount theatrical productions, at least on a local level. I won’t lie to you and say....it’s hard to make ends meet. No matter how you cut it, life is hard, we need money, and it’s tooth and nail! We’re looking for charitable angels who will financially foster us into a nationally recognized major producer of theater.”

Where is your Achilles heel in writing realistic dialogue? “Realism is in the eye of the beholder, and I do not speak like a normal human being. So I attempt to keep a keen ear for how real people speak, but being some form of warped alien hybrid, I myself...know nothing about human communication personally. I’m just trying to pick up from others as I go along.”

Do you feel that, like Woody Allen, you’re writing the same story with a better spin or, like Hitchcock, a different story with a better twist every time? “Different story with a better twist. My producer (Scott Behrend) keeps me honest and keeps me working on a wide variety of different material. Every play has been different. I haven’t had the opportunity or the option to get too comfortable and repeat myself. I remember Scott Behrend, he was in Lemkin. He was Lemkin, and of the five plays that I’ve written in the last three years, four of them do feature a character who is prominently a thinly disguised Jon Elston. Only one of the plays has no Elston figure, which is Interrogation Room starring John Buscaglia, the head waiter of Desiderios who coincidentally won the Artie for his performance in Interrogation Room.”

Are you a firm believer in ‘a new, living theater of and about the common man’? “I...believe it exists, but I am not personally working toward it. I’m interested in the uncommon man. The perverse, the depraved, the freakish and the utterly unique. I have very little interest in the common.

Who (in your opinion) was the last original playwright? A gentleman named Nicky Silver who, very early in the ’80s, began to blend sharp, farcical satires with dark, intense examinations of human pathology, sexual dysfunction, perversion and very dirty, scary taboo subject matter. He wasn’t necessarily the first but he was very much a frontier breaker. Dark, Cronenbergian yet funny theater. Not my favorite playwright but certainly one of the last, truly original voices.”

What, if anything, can be done to revitalize downtown Buffalo’s cultural environment? “Politically, Western New York and local government need to get behind their few inherent natural resources, one of which is the theater community. Buffalo’s theater community is one of the most vibrant, exciting, and quickly developing in the entire country. Local theater is often overlooked in the grand scheme of politics. It’s one of the few things we have that’s specific and peculiar to this area that we do so well. I wish rather than viciously slashing support to the arts in Buffalo that Western New York considers that maybe it needs to profile their town as a center for the arts over other commercial venues.”

Were you Max Fisher growing up? “I was Max Fisher, I am Max Fisher, and I am still every day chiseling my Rushmore.”