Meet Bay Area-based Writer Matt Werner

MATT WERNER is a playwright, journalist, and screenplay writer. His latest project, Burning Man: The Musical is now streaming on Broadway On Demand.

Matt’s writing website: http://mattswriting.com/

CATHOLIC ARTIST CONNECTION: What first brought you to NYC and where are you from?

MATT WERNER: I‘ve worked from the Google office in New York City on and off since 2011, and I fell in love with the city on those business trips. I specifically loved meeting so many interesting people in the publishing, writing, and theater worlds.

Based on those experiences, I transferred from Google’s California headquarters to the NYC office, and I lived full-time in Manhattan from 2015 to 2020. I moved back to California at the end of 2020 during the pandemic to be closer to family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This past decade of living/working/interacting with the creative community in NYC has helped me achieve things beyond what I ever expected, and I’m grateful for the creative partnership and support I found while living in NY. I specifically like the “can-do” attitude of many New Yorkers. A friend summarized it best when he said that in LA people talk about doing things, and in NY people just do the things, and talk later once they’re done.

How do understand your vocation as a Catholic artist? Do you call yourself a Catholic artist?

I identify as a Catholic artist. I attended 14 years of Catholic school growing up. You either fall in line with what’s being taught, or you rebel. I found comfort and solace in the Catholic faith, and I identify with the more liberal / progressive side of the Church. I volunteered at the Catholic Worker in Berkeley, California, attended protests alongside priests and nuns, and was brought up in an Oscar Romero / Liberation Theology tradition in the church.

However, I did train at more conservative institutions, such as Boston College for my freshman year of undergrad and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland for grad school.

I have deep, long-lasting friendships with people representing all sides of the Church, from bishops, monks, Opus Dei members, to fringe “hippie Catholics” advocating for women priests and priests to get married, to even some considered church radicals in the mold of Fr. John Dear.

How can the Church be more welcoming to artists?

One joke I have is that the Church should bring back indulgences and give the funds raised to nonprofits in the church (Catholic Relief Services, etc), and also to provide patronage to Catholic artists. That way the wealthy can reduce their sin and struggling artists can get funded. It’s a win-win :)

More seriously, one way the Church can be more welcoming of artists is to support us early in our careers, such as connecting Catholic artists to each other (which is what the Catholic Artist Connection is doing). But I think we need a massive PR campaign to make being Catholic cool again. 

I feel that we’ve gotten so much bad press over scandals including Catholic priest abuse & cover-up, Vatican Bank, Tuam mother and baby home, etc.—and I’m glad that light is being shined onto those dark stories—however, many of my non-Catholic friends think we’re still doing the Latin Mass and nuns are hitting kids with rulers. We need to acknowledge the wrongs in our past and move forward, and one way to process these events and grieve is through art.

Some of my friends outside the Church associate being Catholic with being medieval, that the Church hasn’t kept up with the times. They don’t know about the vibrant young adult groups and Catholic Underground concerts and happy hours and think I’m just hanging out with old church ladies :)

It’s not that we need to go so far as “Buddy Christ” in the film Dogma and cheapen the Sacraments, but we can make being Catholic cool again and we should empower celebrity Catholics like Stephen Colbert and Lady Gaga to keep sharing what being Catholic means to them.

Many of my friends from California and NY have left Catholicism, and become lapsed Catholics or joined rapidly growing Protestant churches like Hillsong. We’re losing some of our creative talent and the mindshare of younger religious people if we don’t actively engage and empower the Millennial and Gen Z Catholics.

I’m a Catholic who attends Burning Man. They’re not mutually exclusive. The term “catholic” means universal, and we should be everywhere, sharing how the Church, scripture, and our faith has made us better people.

And finally, I’d love to see the Archdiocese of New York and other major diocese in the US better connect Catholic artists and provide us with scholarships, grants, and renew the Catholic Church’s long history of patronage of world-class artists. 

St. Paul the Apostle, NYC

Where in NYC do you regularly find spiritual fulfillment?

For the last 5 years I was a member of St. Paul the Apostle church at W59th and 9th Ave, across from Fordham. It’s in an easy-to-reach location 1 block from the 59th Street–Columbus Circle station.

What I loved about that church is its young adult group called Apostolist. Also, the 5pm Young Adult Mass has one of the best choirs in the city (right up there with St. Malachy's and Saint Patrick's Cathedral). The choir draws from the Juilliard School nearby and Broadway & Off-Broadway talent, making it exceptional.

The Paulist Fathers who run the church are informed, open-minded, and very supportive of transplants in NY. They’re patrons of the arts through Paulist Press, co-sponsoring Broadway's Future Songbook Series at Lincoln Center, and producing the Busted Halo podcast. I highly recommend Catholics new to NYC check out St. Paul’s.

I really enjoyed attending their young adult retreats which typically happen in the spring and fall, where I could meet with other Catholics in their 20s and 30s and discuss life issues in a small group and also have time for prayer, confession, and Adoration. I made some really close friends on these retreats, and we’ve supported each other through good times and bad.

Describe a recent day in which you were most completely living out your vocation as an artist. What happened, and what brought you the most joy?

Saturday, September 4th was the culmination of the Burning Man gathering in Nevada. It typically draws 75,000 people to the desert, and they light a wooden man on fire at the end (I know it sounds pagan). This year the gathering was virtual, and my film Burning Man: The Musical was shown to thousands of “Burners” on the global livestream they had on Sept 4th. We received an overwhelmingly positive response, and it was a fitting way to complete this project I’ve been working on for 6 years.

With the composer Gene Back, we created this electronic dance music (EDM) musical, and we were very happy to receive such a warm response. People were commenting on the livestream how much they got the references, how they were laughing so hard, and how they wanted to show this film to their Burning Man camp. Overall, it was a successful event, but it wasn’t easy getting there.

In 2020 we were planning an in-person production of the satirical musical comedy in San Francisco, but the pandemic shut down those plans as every theater in the country closed its doors. The composer and I were like, “Well, Ok. This show is never going to get produced.” But during difficult times, you have to be flexible. And we found producers through Streaming Musicals who saw potential in our musical comedy set at a desert festival, and with NYC-based producers Danny Marin and Tyler MIlliron, we shot a low-budget film version of the musical with 10 actors on a soundstage in Upstate NY.

It was stressful making a film during the pandemic, but I was so relieved when we wrapped the shoot with no one getting sick, and everyone abiding by SAG’s Covid guidelines. We then had 3 months of post-production where the audio folks mixed and mastered the cast album and the video editor put all the final touches on the film. And I’m really happy we were able to meet the August 27th deadline, and have the film out in time for Burning Man, and then have thousands from the Burning Man community watch it Sept 4th.

I know the question is about what brought me joy, but I would say my overwhelming feeling on Sept 4th was relief. I’m just happy that we made the film and released it on Broadway On Demand and Streaming Musicals, because there were so many things that could’ve gone wrong along the way, and I’m just grateful for the grace of God guiding us in this journey and having a successful release.

But seriously, how do you make a living as an artist in NYC?

I have worked full-time as a technical writer at Google since March 2010. I’ve used some of my corporate stock grants to give to causes I believe in, such as my local church, charities, and friends going on missionary trips. I’ve also used this “Google money” to help fund creative work that my friends and I are producing.

Creating new art often comes down to the money, and I’ve been fortunate to have a reliable source of income from Google, and also connections to capital working in Silicon Valley provides. But it can be a struggle to balance the demands of a fulltime job as a writer, and then go home on nights & weekends and continue to write my personal projects.

What’s next for you creatively?

My last work was a serious stage drama called Agnus, which I co-wrote with Ise Lyfe. It debuted Off-Broadway at Theatre Row in 2018, and it’s a futuristic crime drama about the prison industrial complex. My current project Burning Man: The Musical is a satirical musical comedy about the collision of techies and hippies in the desert. It’s been a palate cleanser and a light, fun piece to work on because my next writing project is quite dark.

Children of the Night (working title) is my next play, which is set at a Catholic high school in San Francisco around 9/11/2001. It deals with the Catholic priest abuse scandal in the pre-”Spotlight” era. I felt like I couldn’t go from my serious play in 2018 directly into another very serious play, and I’m grateful for the opportunity collaborating with the composer Gene Back on “Burning Man: The Musical,” and that we made it into a film!

However, my next project is near and dear to my heart, but one that is difficult to grapple with because of the subject matter. I’ve been inspired by other works about the Church, such as Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Sister Calling My Name, All Our Children, Spotlight, and Doubt, and I’m excited to get this new play out there hopefully in 2022 or 2023.