Content area
Full Text
Robert Askins is a playwright who grew up in Cyprus, TX, which is located northwest of Houston. He attended Baylor University and received a BA in both Theatre Performance and Professional Writing. He has been extremely active with the Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) and has resided in New York for the last nine years. During that time, he has, as he states, "been writing play after play [and] a couple of them got produced and one of them people really seemed to enjoy..." The latter refers to Hand of God, which, after being produced off-Broadway at MCC Theater, is appearing on Broadway at the Booth Theatre and opens on 7 April 2015. Hand to God, which the NY Times has called "scorchingly funny," has received a number of awards, including the 2014 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Play for Steve Boyer's performance and the 2014 Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best New Play. As if a Broadway-bound play was not enough, MCC Theater is also producing the premiere of Askins's new play Permission.
The following is a portion of an interview conducted by Michael J. Meindl on 28 May 2014. (The full video interview can be accessed on Ecumenica's website: www. ecumenicajournal.org).
Michael J Mendl: Can you talk about your experience with the church growing up?
Robert Askins: I'm not going to say [I had] an arc similar to other people. When I was young I was very involved with the church choir. I was a tiny little soloist and really enjoyed a lot of things about that. I think [...] the Lutheran service at that time was fairly dry. The liturgy was always fascinating. The sermons were rather dull. The church wasn't [Evangelical Lutheran Church], it was Missouri Synod and there wasn't a lot of life in the services. The music was the one place that the sort of energy that's possible in the service crept in. [...] Whenever the kids would start to sing their faces would just light up. My grandmother had a cross stitch in the hallway that said, "God respects me when I work, but He loves me when I sing." That was something that wasn't just a phrase it was really something that I...