Escanaba

continued

place. When Da Moonlight premiered at the Purple Rose in 1996, it seemed a kind of north woods Dumb and Dumber (Daniels' 1994 movie with Jim Carrey). And perhaps it was. Daniels' playwriting career was in its infancy then, but now that he's got a substantial body of work behind him, it's easier to see that Daniels' acting challenges one year have become his playwriting fodder the next. See, for instance, how the 2005 film The Squid and the Whale got him thinking about the intellectual community, resulting in his Guest Artist, produced at the Purple Rose in 2006.

Since introducing the Soady clan, Daniels has brought many scripts to the Rose (there's nothing like owning the theater when you're an aspiring playwright!), but he seems most at home and most genuinely himself in the big, mythic, romantic, pre-industrial American landscape. Of all the plays he's written, these larger-than-life Paul Bunyanesque tales are the plays that seem to flow most easily.