Brian Forrester is a resident of Roswell, GA and is author of one of next week’s Bare Essentials plays, The Beast of Skitter Creek, a dark supernatural tale about the monster lurking within us.

What inspired you to write this play?
When I was in graduate school I got into a debate with a classmate who insisted that scary stories belong almost exclusively to prose or film/tv. I was convinced that I could tell a fun horror story on a live stage and took up the challenge. Later that winter, I was driving very late at night down a twisting mountain road through a snowstorm in West Virginia when a creepy-looking wooden sign emerged on the edge of my headlight beam. It simply said, “Skitter Creek” in hand-painted letters. That immediately seemed like a good start to me.

How did you get into writing plays?
When I was an undergraduate at Kennesaw State University I wanted to be a fiction writer. I tried to register for the Advanced Fiction course one semester, but it was full. On a whim, I took Intro to Playwriting instead. I absolutely fell in love with it and never looked back, founded a student theatre company, got an MFA at Carnegie Mellon, and I’m still plugging away at it.

Are you working on any new projects at the moment?
I’m working on a civil war drama about Roswell Mill, and I’m also working on a play about the dark lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

 The Beast of Skitter Creek will be read at the West End Performing Arts Center on Tuesday,  July 29 at 7:30pm.

Directed by Pam Joyce and featuring the reading talents of Aaron Gotlieb, Emmett Furrow, Christopher Sell, Henry Scott and Lindsay Ross.

All readings are free and open to the public, donations gladly accepted.