"The main thing as you will notice in my stories is the TIME… there are no such things as computers or cellphones..."
Author Q&A: we catch up with R. Bruce Connelly, Harvey regular and Sesame Street actor (Barkley!)...
R. Bruce Connelly is a professional actor, director and Muppet performer who lives in New York City. He is a Harvey Duckman regular, having taken us through eight stories (so far) in his Bike Cycle series. These will soon be appearing in a book of their own.
His Harvey story for the Pirate Special, ‘Terror of the Seas’ was adapted for the Kansas City Actors Theatre to be presented on the radio and won Best Radio Program by the Foundation for the Alliance for Community Radio.
The play can be heard at:
https://kkfi.org/program-episodes/the-terror-of-the-seas-by-r-bruce-connelly/
and you can read the story here:
We catch up with Bruce after a busy summer, acting in upcoming Sesame Street shows with Barkley whilst also stage managing an off-Broadway show.
Q: Miss Seidenstricker is rather awesome… she has to be based on someone real! Can you tell us who?
A: Miss Seidenstricker was a substitute teacher when I was in 6th grade. She looked exactly like Miss Wormwood from ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ and smelled of mothballs and old paper from an attic. She was probably born around 1890 and still wore her yellowish white hair in a Gibson Girl style. She had the lace-up English boots and that blue dress with the white polka-dots on it that came below the knee. And she HIT me one day for having one knee up on a chair, yelling, "That's for SITTING on, not KNEELING on."
Obviously she made an impression on me… she did have a very heavy hand… and a few decades ago I wrote that first sentence of the story. I didn't continue it until Gillie asked me if I had a Pirate Story. I said, "I have a Pirate SENTENCE," but then sat down in the heat of a NY July to write the rest of the story.
Q: As a professional actor and director, what was it like being on the WRITER side of the table during the production of the radio play?
A: This is a great question, as first I had to turn the story into an audio tale. The listener wouldn't have the benefit of the narrative and some of my favourite jokes were narrated by me. I was able to turn some of them into dialogue, and then got the idea of having an Old Salt as narrator… you know, one of those characters always hanging around the docks in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ or ‘Moby Dick’ or ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’. He could tell the tale and get the important narrative lines in.
The radio play was to assist the Kansas City Actors' Theatre to keep active during the pandemic and it was recorded on Zoom. As you may know, there is a bit of delay with Zoom and the scenes where all the pirates are bellowing and misbehaving didn't have the effect I expected because no one was in the same room, but I was really pleased to see all these actors throwing themselves into their roles. We all want to play pirates, I think, but how many pirate plays ARE there? (I can think of two.) They really had a great time.
After we finished the Zoom taping, I was contacted a couple of days later, two days before the airing on radio saying the script came out a little short and could I come up with another three minutes of dialogue? The story had been told, I felt; anything else would just be padding. I went to sleep that night and wrote a sea shanty as an epilogue with the sailors complaining in it about Miss Seidenstricker. I woke up, typed it up, sent it off and that was added to the end.
It filled the time perfectly, but again was recorded in Zoom, so I will await the day Harvey goes to a Netflix series and maybe then I will get the full roistering volume I'd like to hear.
Q: As Barkley, you act in a physically demanding costume… last year, you coached (via Zoom) a bunch of English school children in how to act with puppets for their production of Little Shop of Horrors… your input was amazing and meant so much to the students… why is it important to you to work with school students on theatre and acting projects?
A: Well, that was just someone asking for help and me being glad to do so. But I will tell you about one student in a play I adapted from ‘Through the Looking Glass’ for an elementary school I have often directed at. Many students each year would be new to me… I directed 4th through 6th graders, (9-11 years old), in plays I adapted from books they should be reading, keeping the dialogue in the voice of the authors, not watering it down as many children's plays here are.
The children then step UP to the literature and also learn different voices of expressing themselves and are very pleased when a difficult line of dialogue gets them a good laugh!
This one boy from the 4th Grade I gave the poem ‘You are old, Father William’ to recite with two other students acting out the Father and the Son. His teacher came up to me in shock afterwards, telling me that boy was so shy, he couldn't even stand before the class to read his book report, "and here he is reciting 'Father William' in front of the entire school!"
That probably best explains the fun in working with kids, seeing them develop the confidence they may not have had before.
Another boy who muttered his Elven lines in ‘The Hobbit’ in fourth grade, so quiet and shy you couldn't hear what the Elves were planning, after three years of plays became Friar Tuck in a summer play, eventually portraying Jeeves (!!!) in my adaptation of ‘Joy in the Morning’ by the time he was in college with the complete confidence and diction that man requires.
Q: One of our favourite stories of yours in the original Harveys was the spider… was that based on a real theatre?
A: No. But a real spider.
Q: Your bike cycle is one of the more complicated on-going storylines in Harvey… what was the inspiration (the bike is real, yes?) and how are you managing to keep track of the timelines?
A: You will see the inspirations in each story, I think. The bike is my bike, the Dawes 5-speed I bought in Kensington in London, and in each story something actually happened to me that then set me thinking along the ‘What If?’ line of thought.
In ‘The Scarecrow’, the night, the moon, the field, the pedalling home after the wedding, all real, and turning that corner so that the shadows of the trees blackened the road and covered the potholes and downed branches showed me that riding without a light isn't very safe. The accident actually happened, but at another time.
In ‘The Dog’ there IS that strangely quiet back road I came upon one afternoon that had no bird or bug song and instantly gave me a headache. THAT is where, well, YOU know. Buddy's story? The bike did suddenly downshift as I was riding up a steep hill and a Winnebago did back out and almost take me out, so when I say a lot of these stories are real? They are. Except for the parts that aren't.
Timelines? Oy. Yes... it's a bit like what Gillie goes through with the Thieves' Guild. Notebooks! Pieces of scrap paper tucked into corners of my desk. It has gotten more complicated now one we find out that You Know Who met You Know Who When he Met Her and How will he Meet Her again. (Aren't I good… no spoilers?) And this next story where he has to… somehow and then!! But WILL he? Or Not? And IF not… Oh, good grief. So… timelines. Documentation.
The main thing as you will notice in my stories is the TIME… there are no such things as computers or cellphones. You want a number, you look it up. Want a phone on the road? Walk to a restaurant that has a phone booth. (For those of you who don't know what those things are, they look just like the Tardis from the outside.) (They're just exactly the same size inside as they are outside. No bunk beds.)
Q: We first met at New York Comic Con way back in 2015… how do you think cons have changed in the years since the Covid-19 lockdowns shut down all events?
A: I remember the very instant as you summoned up the courage to talk to me about your books and I thought I would buy the first one and you said, "What will I do with the other three?"
Besides the Cons requesting masking, many didn't mask up and our Con was a major contributor to spreading the illness that first year they had it. On top of that, we had a writer's strike last year so the actors either weren't working or were not allowed to speak about movies or TV shows. The con was really lacklustre last year… no panels of interest, no excitement about this new movie coming out, everything was Funko, Funko, Funko.
I spent a lot of time in Artists' Alley with friends from past years or making new ones, talking about the amazing artwork they were all creating. And we had a fun Muppet panel. I have great hopes for this year.
Q: Aside from PIE, what do you look forward to most in your visits on this side of the pond?
A: Going to Yorkshire and having people ask me if I'm ‘alright’.
Q: What short story ideas are you working on for future Harveys, and which basket excites you the most?
A: Which ‘Basket’? Is that another Yorkshire expression? Miss Seidenstricker is definitely on the move, headin’ toward England when… well…
And the ‘Cops, FTD’ story has continued after Riley climbed… well, in case someone hasn't read it, I won't say…
And of course, after that last episode of the Bike Cycle, we've left Jeff in the garage and Griffen in the yard and the urgency of the TIMELINE and the Bike has been… so, there are things to look into there, and didn't Jeff leave something incriminating on the wrought-iron fence? Oh, what a mess.
Q: What advice would you give anyone starting out on their writing, publishing, acting or directing adventures?
A: I just gave some today to a lady at Trader Joe's. Go to the Con and talk to people. Everyone there wants to share what they do and every once in a while you may meet someone who is interested in what YOU do!
Read a fab interview with Bruce here:
Ryan Roe
