Matthew Ivan Bennett has been a Resident Playwright of Plan-B Theatre Company since 2007, where he has premiered several stage plays and ten radio plays, including an adaptation of Frankenstein, the dystopian-thriller Stand, and full-lengths such as A\Version of Events, Eric(a)—which won Best Drama at the United Solo Theatre Festival in New York—and Mesa Verde. In 2015 and 2016, he was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival for his screenplays The Memory Thief and Finger on the Button (co-written with Mark David Matthews). His play Let Down Your Hair was a 2016 finalist at the Eugene O’Neill National Theatre Conference. Art & Class was a semi-finalist in 2019. His comedy A Night with the Family was at the Omaha Community Playhouse and Pygmalion in Salt Lake City in 2013. His writing frequently centers on Utah, as with Block 8, his play about the Japanese-American internment at Topaz. Matt also serves as Assistant Business Manager at PioneerTheatre Company, as part-time Literary Manager for The Constructivists in Milwaukee, and is a member of the Dramatists’ Guild. His poetry has been published by the Western Humanities Review and Sugar House Review. Matt was born and raised in Taylorsville, Utah and currently resides in Midvale
Works
This Fisherman Forefather
The Fisherman Forefather
when he was twelve, wanted to fly away from Wales. Not sail, because at 12 he was sick with gray wave infinity & the arbitrary fists of Celtic skies Even dreams were rubbed with cod, so the missionaries' work was easy: any place without water would be Zion, any place a Welsh boy wasn't doomed to a rope net. So a pitching steamer ship was stomached across the Atlantic; a cramped, rocking train car to Omaha. The rest of the way he walked. August, September, October, he walked toward a choir of sage, memorizing the Locrian rumor of serenity. He scuffed through Salt Lake, by the sleeping Timpanogos, past dead volcanoes & white slivered topaz. Connah's Quay became a wind-tossed nightmare, & if utopia didn't draw any closer, its feeling swarmed inside him like crickets.
Published in Western Humanities Review.
I Descended From Utopians
Descended From Utopians
early on I knew this, swinging my knobby legs on a blond pew, eating Cheerios as my mother sang about pioneers. At five years old the details were organ chords bouncing off cinder-block chapel walls. Our ancestors fled barefoot from torches. Bespectacled men didn't like them. They walked here, to an inland salt sea. They wizened on a diet of biscuits. They sawed granite from the Earth's spine & built temples. Streets were double wide; bonnets grinned at top hats; each was baptized in beet sugar. And then, an hourglass cracked. Streets ran black as sackcloth & Gentiles came like hail, punching the desert until utopia sank.
Published in Sugar House Review.
"The Mormons are the only utopia that ever worked."
The Mormons are the only utopia that ever worked
– Peter Drucker, Deseret News, January 13, 2010
On a pew in 1983 I believed this, but now the imagined bonnets are slow to smile.Years converted me from organ strains into sympathy for wife number seven who stares over cracked wheat, eyes full of Goshute wilderness.She rides West, expecting snowmelt to bleach Temple clothes—but the chill only taunts. Bites down to bone with its questions.Yet Seven lasts the interrogation, & spring water calls the woman upward, to uncorseted yellow pine, where she gulps down the crystal syllable of "No."Once inside her, the sound rips Masonic stitching from her underwear. Gold-plated dreams fall through the holes.(published in Sugar House Review)
Bibliography
- Self-Sabotage,161 One-Minute Monologues from Literature, Smith & Kraus
- Lavender & Exile, Plays from Behind the Zion Curtain, Oxide Books/Juniper Press
- Di Esperienza, More Plays from Behind the Zion Curtain, Oxide Books/Juniper Press
- Block 8, More Plays from Behind the Zion Curtain,Oxide Books/Juniper Press
- Mesa Verde, Even More Plays from Behind the Zion Curtain, Smashwords andAmazon
- Terms of Use, New Plays IV, Smashwords and Amazon
- Radio Hour Episode 14: Grimm, New Plays VI, Smashwords and Amazon
- A\Version of Events, New Plays VI, Smashwords and Amazon
- Radio Hour Episode 11: Yuletide, Season 2016/17, Smashwords
- Radio Hour Episode 12: Stand, Season 2017/18, Smashwords
- Different=Amazing, Leicester Bay Theatricals
- A\Version of Events, Steele Spring Stage Rights
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