Today we’d like to introduce you to Will Averill.
Hi Will, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I was born in Lawrence, Kansas in 1974. My parents were deeply involved in the theatre scene in Lawrence, Topeka, and Perry, Kansas. My mother is an actress and a (now retired) theatre teacher, and my father ran a melodrama theatre palyhouse at Lake Perry, as well as a children’s theatre company called Seem-To-Be-Players. Therefore theatre and the arts were an integral part of my life from an early age. I attended Lawrence schools including Woodlawn Elementary, Broken Arrow, Central Junior High School, and Lawrence High School. I discovered Stephen King in Junior High School, and decided I wanted to be a horror writer. My first published work was called “We Reuse Everything,” and it was published in Central Junior High School’s Inkspots magazine.
I continued to write and act through high school, and then attended the University of Kansas as a theatre major. There was no playwriting program at that time, so I did a minor in creative writing, and cobbled together a makeshift playwriting degree. While at K.U., I met my creative life partner, Jeremy Auman, and after a few years we started Card Table Theatre, in 1998. We started Card Table so that we could do the plays that we weren’t being cast in, and also focus on new and unpublished works from the MIdwest. We produced over 20 plays between 1998 and the mid 2000’s, including American Buffalo, the Victor Continental Comedy Show, Sh*tty Deal Puppet Theatre, and several one-act plays which were entered into the American College Theatre Festival. In 2000, a one-act play directed by Jeremy, which I starred in, a comic re-imagining of the Hugh Hefner origin story, went to the Kennedy Center.
In 2003, I moved to the United Kingdom, where I lived for eight years. I did theatre there, working with an ametuer company, as well as forming a company with some friends called Axis of Evil Productions. We also went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with Sh*tty Deal Puppet Theatre, getting the festival’s first ever ten-star review in the Scotsman. I was also, during this time, writing a lot of commission works for middle-school students, which are published through Playscripts, Inc.
Returning to the U.S. in 2011, I returned to K.U. and completed my degree, and became involved in social media marketing and non-profits. I started a Facebook page called F*ck You, I’m from Kansas (based on a poem by that title I had written while in England), and it quickly shot up to over 100,000 followers.
I also became involved in nonprofit work during this time, which I have very much enjoyed as it allows me the flexibility to continue my writing while doing something that feels fulfilling. I have continued to write, act, produce, and play in Lawrence and Kansas City, doing the KC Fringe in 2018, 2023, and 2025, and continuing to produce plays in Lawrence. This year, in 2025, I was excited to release my first poetry book, a reimagining of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, called Day After the Waste Land, where the poem takes place in Lawrence, Kansas, instead of post-war London. I am fortunate to have an amazing wife and creative parter in Jacqueline Grunau, we have a 10-going-on-67-year old named Ollie, and a big fluffy muppet dog named Daisy. In addition to writing, I love reading, talking sh*t on the internet, video games, and tabletop role playing games.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not always been smooth. I have faced the challenge that so many artists have of balancing the passion to create with the fact that our society doesn’t place a huge amount of value on the written word, and even less on the theatre. I had a screenplay in 2005 which was nearly produced in Iowa, however, the funding fell through the day before filming began and the whole project got scrapped. And while the ten-star review at the Fringe was amazing, it didn’t result in any further tours or representation, which was a little big frustrating.
I have always felt that despite these close calls, things have fallen into place this way for a reason, and that keeps me going when I’m having the feelings that us older artists invariably have, feeling like we’ve missed our moment, or if we were going to make it, we’d have made it by now.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I tend to enjoy playing multiple roles in the theatrical world – but while I love acting, directing, puppeteering, and creating, it’s really the playwriting that I shine at. I have a great ear for dialogue and comedy, and I love discovering character and sitautions through dialogue.
I feel that while Film is more lucrative and lasts forever, there is something more compelling about the theatre – the fact that no one performance will ever be exaclty like another, and that the energy between the audience and the actors makes each production unique.
All that being said, I’ve surprised myself with how proud I have been of my poetic reimagining of The Waste Land. I feel like it is an amazing collaboraito between illustrator, writer, and original poet that is a strong piece in it’s own right, as well as being an homage to the Modernist Classic.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I think the key is following the threads of multiple projects with curiosity, and seeing what combines the possiblity of being interesting to an audience while at the same time being something that drives my passion and curiosity. For example, I have been working on a Missouri trailer park tragedy in iambic pentameter (mostly) called King Dale, and it has been a blast, creating the challenge of joining modern themes and language with the elevated form of Shakespeare. It’s been a whole lot of fun living in and exploring that world.
I’m not a great artist when it comes to making money, because I”m far more likely to follow the things that I am passionate about, and those are generally more niche.
Contact Info:
- Website: sh*ttydeal.com
- Instagram: willaverill
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/will-averill-1
- Twitter: willaverill
