Kitchen Conversation: A Chat With Orion Ross

Judith Rossner once said that "every asshole in the world wants to write." But how many of those who want to be writers--ass-holes or not--actually succeed?

Orion Ross, author and director of Zora's Kitchen agreed to speak with The Crimson about writing his first play.

Ross said he wrote Zora's Kitchen during time off from Harvard, building on his experiences in film and commercial productions in Los Angeles.

Away from the high pressure world of the Ivy League, he finally had some free time to write. He worked with a producer, who then hired him to write a screenplay. Ross said that this job "was actually a real luxury, getting paid to write for somebody."

As far as Harvard goes, Ross does not see how Harvard has really helped him in his fiction writing. "I took English Car, which was quite a good class, [but] on the other hand I got away with doing very little." Before the class he approached writing in a "dillitantish" way, only dabbling with it in his spare time.

Ross became interested in writing and producing theater through acting. "I got to be a pretty troublesome actor. I always had what I thought were better ideas and was always trying to tell everyone what to do," he said. He added that it was more that just the "power thing." He was more interested in the idea of "making this machine [a play] and setting it running and let it go."

Zora's Kitchen is Ross's first full-length play, having previously done only adaptions of plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream. He described this particular adaptation as very close to the original text, except that he and a friend cut it and arranged it with stage directions. This process, he said, prompted him to write the original script for Zora's Kitchen.

Ross assumed the role and vision of a producer when he began to write the play. When writing he tried to "imagine what the character would say in a certain situation and act it out." He said this process was more helpful than what "they" tell you to do which is to "make little police files on each of your characters" complete with their "relevant family history, quirks and traits."

When Ross finished the script and read it he said he thought it was "kind of funny and that people were going to laugh" but he was not sure. His task, however, was to make "this wacky world called Zora's Kitchen," a place where "everything everybody does makes sense."

He described his last written version of the play as more of a working draft than a finished product. From the written form, he worked with the actors to eliminate parts of the script where the characters seemed to be "doing the things they were doing just as functions of the plot."

As far as advice to other writer, he said only that the Loeb Experimental Theater is "the best place on campus, period, to do a play," and he would encourage everyone to try to do a play there. All one has to do is to submit a proposal and an application to the Harvard-Radcliffe Drama Club.

Not everyone can be professional writers, but everyone can experiment. And Orion Ross's success proves that one does not have to devote a lifetime to writing in order to produce respectable work.