Blogging Bloodworks: STIFF by Ryan Dowler

I’ve only taken out one personal ad in my life. It happened before I was old enough to drink.

“SWM (19) seeking Anne Frank type (18-30) who has slept on the airport floor. Must be willing to talk about Ralph Nader. Corduroy a plus.”

I had left the BFA Acting Program at Ole Miss to work at a McDonalds in Iowa and couldn’t afford to pay the fee to use the phone system the newspaper had set up to track personal ad responses.

The ad was terribly earnest but posing as tongue-in-cheek. I was coming out of a summer of deep, pathetic Anne Frank affection spent reading the diary and the Miep Gies book among others and I used to lie awake sure that we would have been soul mates, the way I guess some 15-year-old girls probably do.

As far as the note about sleeping on the airport floor – I was in love with the 20-somethings I would see sleeping on the airport floor in between flights to this or that romantic foreign country. I realize now that having given up a scholarship to work at a McDonalds, I probably would have hated these people who were actually probably like the only character from GIRLS that I can’t stand. The newspaper actually misprinted this part. The published ad requested someone who had “slipped” on the airport floor.

Anyway, it was the discovery of this hilarious old artifact in a box nearly a decade after the newspaper had printed it that inspired this play.

 STIFF 

by 

Ryan Dowler

Directed by RJ Tolan

Starring

Steven Boyer

Ryan Karels

Claire Siebers

 Diana Ruppe

EST / Youngblood - BLOODWORKS 2012 Reading Series

Wednesday, June 6, 2012, 7 PM

549 West 52nd Street, 2nd Floor
(between 10th & 11th Aves)

A bromance about dying that features neither sickness nor death.