Writer Milo Cramer Braids Experiences into New Comedy, Business Ideas.
In the opening scene of Business Ideas, Patty, a 20-something-year-old coffee shop server, is having what appears to be a difficult and uncomfortable exchange with a customer.
It is early morning, about 7 am or so. The customer is not quite sure what they want, and Patty is trying their best to be both engaging and patient with the customer.
The coffee shop and Patty’s exchanges with several unique customers provide a backdrop for a mother’s effort to spend quality time with her daughter, while at the same time coming up with the next big business endeavor.
And this, for the most part, is what is at the heart of this year’s Alliance/Kendeda Competition winner. In its 21st year, the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition solicits plays from the leading MFA graduate programs in the country. The winner receives a one-of-a-kind full production as part of the Alliance Theatre regular season.
Written by Milo Cramer, an MFA graduate of UC San Diego, Business Ideas is directed by Theatrical Outfit’s Artistic Director Matt Torney and is having its premiere here at the Alliance from November 16 through December 15, 2024.
“This show [tries to address] how confusing it is to live in America, be a worker and a consumer; be in a family and in businesses and an employee,” Cramer said. “I don’t have words for, when you think about it, how confusing and overwhelming [it is] to think about [the challenges] of all of that.”
Very rarely are most of us aware of societal issues like the global supply chain when going to a store, said Cramer, or how any of the things we acquire make it to us. Going to the grocery store for most of us is the most mundane thing we will do without considering there is much more to it.
“[We have] a cursory engagement with a worker who’s a whole person. We only ever see a little fraction of who they are or their life,” he said. “To me it is so alienating and sad and spooky, but so normal.”
The cash register, he said, is a cultural fault line and, in the play, a site of intense confrontation.
“It’s a meeting place where, even though it’s a very, very mild one, shoppers and workers encounter each other,” he said. “And they can be very charged and horrible, and also very taken for granted.”
The story is inspired by a combination of life experiences that triggered thoughts and questions for him, but he never really had the opportunity to get any clear and fulfilling answers. The show, he said, attempts to discuss the dichotomies and contradictions of life.
“I worked at this café for six years. I was incredibly sad there, and I wanted to talk about it,” he said, adding that doing an entire play on someone working at a café seemed both very dumb and cliché for him. “My mom went to business school, but she never started a business even though she would dream of it often.”
In his family, which he describes as “kind of whimsical,” they would come up with business ideas, but they never made any of them happen.
“That was hard for me as a child, sometimes, to understand how precarious or not we were, or how serious or not that activity was,” he said. “And so, in the play they’re constantly trying to come up with business ideas, and they’re all bad.”
He wanted to say something about those experiences by braiding them together – describing the business scenarios as a “kind of pie in the sky” situation with the many customer service interactions that are icky and dehumanizing.
“But also, so rote and routine,” he said. “A complicated mirror in a mirror. I was looking for embodied, relatable ways to talk about the brutal inequities in our society and landed on customer service interactions and the cruelty of hope [that comes with] dreaming of business ideas…always being at the precipice, but nothing ever changes.”
For Cramer, being selected as this year’s Alliance/Kendeda winner is, to put it bluntly, “effing wonderful. As someone who is friends with several playwrights, they all have dreams of being produced. Being able to bring such a personal piece to Atlanta is fulfilling and humbling.”
“It never happens. You know? I have applied to so many things that, for some, you just get used to getting rejected. It is like playing a slot machine, hoping that this time you will win,” he said. “This win is amazing. It is so amazing. [What the Alliance is doing through the Alliance/Kendeda competition] provides a lot of great support for new writers and voices. That is important. So, I feel incredibly grateful.”
Living in Connecticut, Cramer said he and his family would drive into New York to see plays when he was about 12 years old. It was a special time, he said.
“I remember seeing some shows and realizing that all the movies I loved were not artworks, not in the same way live theater is,” he said. “I remember at one point realizing that [the movies I loved were] synthetic toys. That does not mean I stopped loving them, you know what I mean? Live theater was a different experience, a different artwork that had like a real intention behind it and respects the audience.”
That time was such an important experience in his life. Now that he has gotten to this point in his career, he hopes audiences can have a similar experience like when he was 12 years old. He hopes they are moved and introspective; stimulated and engaged.
There is one other hope he has. “I hope the play is funny. Simple as that.”
Milo Cramer is a writer and performer. Works include SCHOOL PICTURES ("best theater of 2023... absolutely wonderful" – New York Magazine), a one-person opera about the broken New York City school system, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons and was featured on NPR’s This American Life, and CUTE ACTIVIST (“a brilliant match of material and theater… a fable for our times” – The New York Times), a fabulist satire of social media, at The Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn. With New Saloon Theater Company, Milo spent 5 years devising and touring MINOR CHARACTER: SIX TRANSLATIONS OF UNCLE VANYA AT THE SAME TIME, a kaleidoscopic riff on Chekhov’s greatest hit, ultimately seen at The Public Theater’s Under The Radar Festival in 2019 (“delightful… a spring-green forum on youth’s discontents” – The Village Voice).
Milo is overjoyed to be doing BUSINESS IDEAS here at the Alliance, where it won the 2024 Kendeda Award. The play was previously developed by Clubbed Thumb in New York and Cygnet Theater in San Diego. Milo is a MacDowell Fellow, a recent graduate of Naomi Iizuka’s MFA playwriting program at UC San Diego, a grateful middle child, and an Aries. Milo is currently writing a musical about three old-fashioned sailors who are trying hard to have a meaningful life in their last 24 hours onshore before they’re shipped to die in an offstage war, but the Big Problem is these sailors Never Do Anything Right because they’re Just Too Silly.
Business Ideas runs on the Hertz Stage November 16 through December 15, 2024 – learn more.
