Next Generation: Tristan Taylor

We all know the superstition—that one particular “Scottish play” you’re not supposed to say in a theater. But for one local young playwright, this particular theatrical fear simply served as inspiration for his first full-length, fully produced work. And as a senior at University of Sioux Falls (USF), the future is bright for this fearless theatre artist.

Tristan Taylor might have gotten his start as a performer as early as kindergarten, acting out musical versions of Bible stories at his small, private, Lutheran School, but it was his entrance into the theatre world in high school that kicked off what would become his core interest in college.

Tristan Taylor

“Comedy is pretty much my wheelhouse,” Taylor said of his decision to focus his writing on a particular genre at the outset. “I’ve just always had a knack for it—I don’t really know why or where it came from. It’s something that’s been intrinsic about me for as long as I can remember. It just comes naturally. I enjoy seeing people’s joy they get from it.”

Though the senior’s first participation in USF’s theatre department was in the large-scale, dramatic musical Heaven to Heaven, followed by a role in the filmed play The Shakers of Mount Lebanon Will Hold a Peace Conference This Month during the pandemic, he was able to stretch some of his comedic skills as Gomez in the school’s production of The Addams Family this past fall.

“I think I just like making people laugh,” Taylor said. “I like to embody these characters I’m getting the opportunity to be. Being the lead was kind of a new experience for me. It was a very good last hurrah for me for my senior year, so it was very fun to be able to do that.”

It was this spring that Taylor’s own work took center stage, as his original play, McBethany, came to life as his senior project. The play follows a first-time director at a local theater who wants to do a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth due to its public-domain status, but soon finds out someone has claimed a copyright on the classic work. The director proceeds to adapt his own offbeat version of the play to evade the copyright.

“The original idea came to me after the winter break before I was going to do playwriting class here at USF,” he said. “One of my coworkers back home asked me, ‘What’s with the whole myth of saying Macbeth in a theater? Why can’t you say it?’ And I didn’t know.

“So I thought it’d be an interesting premise. The whole lynchpin of copyright came later. I needed something to add a little spice to the story.”

Though he’d had a chance to write two 10-minute plays in a classroom setting before McBethany, this was Taylor’s first full-length work, as well as his first time at the helm, funnily enough, serving as the show’s director.

“It was pretty daunting, to be honest,” he said. “Suddenly I’m in a leadership role that I’m not really used to, and now I have to direct all of my peers. It was interesting—the new dynamics I had to take on, to guide them through something that I wrote.”

Thankfully his efforts were met with a lot of praise, both from fellow students and from the public who attended the performances in February.

“There was a lot of positive feedback that just kind of blew me away,” Taylor said. “Someone said, ‘I just came to see a senior show, but that was an actual show!’”

The writing bug has certainly not left the fledgling playwright, who plans to next do some clean-up on McBethany before exploring publishing. But as far as his follow-up work, he’s leaving his options open.

“I opened up a document and wrote a line of dialogue for a new play, and that’s as far as I’ve gotten,” he said. “It’s best to just let the story flow naturally. I’ll always have an idea of a specific joke I want to play out somewhere in the middle of the show, but it’s easier to just let it go naturally. If it happens, great. If not, it wasn’t meant to be.”