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Jun 28, 2011

I Interview Playwrights Part 364: Mia McCullough



Mia McCullough


Hometown: I was born in Washington Heights in NYC, but mostly grew up in the Hamlet of Hawthorne, NY which is about 11 miles north of the the Bronx. People drive through it, but no one really knows it's there.

Current Town: I've lived in Evanston, IL since 1988. If it had hills it would be perfect.

Q:  What are you working on now?
 
A:  I've been writing and rewriting screenplays all year. I've got one ready to go out the door, and the second one is almost ready. I studied screenwriting and playwriting in college, and opportunities on stage in my 20s led me to forsake screenwriting for a long time. It's good to get back to it. I was feeling a bit burned out on playwriting. I have a play that I started last summer that I think I'm about ready to get back to now. The first draft is half-way...maybe two-thirds done. I've also recently started dabbling in stand-up comedy, which has been a blast. Stretches different muscles, allows me to get back on stage.


Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
 
A:  Hmm. Well. I used to want to be a veterinarian. From the time I was 5 until I was 15, I was pretty dead-set on it. I volunteered at an environmental center for 7 years, I did an internship at the Bronx Zoo, I worked at a vet's office for a summer. The thing about working with animals, there's a lot of death. Short life spans and all that. And sometimes you have to kill the animals you work with, either to end their suffering or to feed them to another animal. I guess it's made me very unsentimental. I have very little patience for sentimental, sappy entertainment; for being emotionally manipulated by film or theatre. I resent soundtracks that tell me what I'm supposed to be feeling. Which is not to say that I'm cold or I don't want to feel things. I'd rather present a truth to the audience and let them have their own emotions about it.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
 
 
A:  I would call for a moratorium on Shakespeare productions and teaching of Shakespeare in schools.
First, Shakespeare is the most produced playwright in the nation. I counted one year, (and I didn't count the theatres with Shakespeare Festival in the name), and there were 136 productions of Shakespeare plays. The next most produced playwright was Sarah Ruhl at 23 productions. The man has been dead for almost 400 years. He's not the most relevant voice, but he is the most heard. It's ridiculous. It smacks of idolatry. And theatre people get very upset with me when I talk about this, because he's their Jesus. I'm attacking the core of why many, many people embraced theatre in the first place. But what they're not seeing or not acknowledging is how many people Shakespeare turns away. Because that population doesn't enter their orbit.


I think force-feeding high school students Shakespeare has done more to kill the American public's interest in going to theatre than anything else. Especially with the influx of immigrants in this country, who struggle with modern English, much less Shakespearian English. The plays are inaccessible. If students read more plays about people who looked and talked like them --- and those plays are out there --- they would feel like theatre includes them and they might be more interested in taking part in it, being part of what makes it thrive.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Today I found out that Lydia Diamond's play Stick Fly is going to Broadway, so today she's my hero. I admire a lot of writers who came before me, but my heroes are the people who slog along with me, especially the network of Chicago playwrights who support each other and help each other up the rungs of this ridiculous profession. I live in a very generous community, and even when people move away we still claim them as our own, and cheer them on. I'm proud to be a part of that.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I love intimate little plays that give me a view into a world I would not otherwise see, like I'm looking through a peep-hole. When I go to a play I want it to teach me something, hold me captivated from start to finish, and allow me to feel...something. That's my perfect evening of theatre. If I can get two out of three, I'm still pretty happy, but I'm always hoping for all three.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Submit your work everywhere. Don't send it one place and wait to hear back.
Don't keep rewriting the same play over and over. You learn much more by writing the next piece.
It's a craft, and it takes a long time to get good at any craft. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of practice.
Challenge yourself.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My play IMPENETRABLE just received an honorable mention in this year's Jane Chambers Competition. And I've got a couple things in the works, but nothing I'm at liberty to talk about.

Jun 22, 2011

I Interview Playwrights Part 363: Ellen McLaughlin


Ellen McLaughlin

Hometown:
I was born in Boston, MA, then spent a few years in California where my father was at Stanford, but grew up mostly in DC, where my father taught at American University.

Current Town:
Rinde and I (Rinde Eckert is my husband) have been living in Nyack, NY since 1995, it amazes me to realize. It's 18 miles up the Hudson from Manhattan and filled to the brim with theater folks.

Q:  Tell me about Ajax in Iraq.

A:  The short answer is that the piece was an outgrowth of my residence in 2008 at ART in Cambridge, MA and my collaboration with the 2009 class of graduate actors there.

I wanted to create a work that addressed the American solider's experience in Iraq at the time and ended up pairing the kind of material the class was generating (much of it about what female soldiers were encountering) with an adaptation of Sophocles' AJAX. When Gus approached me about having Flux produce it, I decided I'd update the play and make some rewrites for their production. The Flux production is somewhat revised from the original script and I'm currently working to put together a final version for publication by Playscripts Inc., which has done most of my Greek adaptations.

I enclose here a statement I wrote for a magazine interview back in 2009 that gives the full history of the piece as it was prepared for the ART production:

In the spring of 2006, the Institute at ART approached me to ask if I would write a grant proposal to TCG for the playwright in residence grant and I proposed writing something with and for the students that addressed the war in Iraq, even if it was only indirectly. It just seemed impossible not to address the war as we moved into yet another year of it and there was no end in sight. The residency was a sixteen month residency, three months of which, at a minimum, I would spend in Cambridge. I based the proposal on what I understood of Caryl Churchill's collaborations with the Joint Stock Company. I wanted to collaborate with the graduate acting students not just as actors but as fellow artists. This was partly a function of the material, which I needed their help with. I told them that it seemed to me that the current war is their war rather than my war in the sense that my generation is essentially sending their generation to war. I talked about the Vietnam War as being the war that had formed my political sensibility as this war would form theirs. Since their relationship to the war is so much more immediate than mine, I wanted to know what they had to say about it and what it meant to them and I would work with the material they generated.

I asked them to prepare a series of presentations for me and Scott Zigler, the director of the project. Over the course of several weeks, they were asked to bring in two solo pieces. The first was to be a theatrical treatment of some primary source material, research they’d done themselves, depending on what their interests were. The second was to be based on interviews they’d conducted. The pieces did not need to be about the Iraq war specifically, but they should concern war as a general subject. The research pieces ranged from theatrical presentations on Rumi, Blackwater hearings, and comfort women in the Korean War, to Civil War letters and computer war games the army uses as recruitment tools. The interviews ranged from conversations the students had their grandparents in which stories were sometimes related for the first time, to homeless Vietnam veterans interviewed on the street as well as returning soldiers, often relatives. One particularly moving interview was conducted with a sister-in-law, the wife of a Marine who was then coping with her husband being absent on his fourth tour of duty in Iraq.

During the next round of my residency, we paired the students off and asked them to collaborate with each other to make new pieces based on new research they undertook together. The pieces they brought in as a result of these collaborations ranged widely and used all kinds of theatrical techniques, video, dance and art installation. After seeing this round of presentations, we asked the group to pursue certain issues further and recombined them in larger collaborations. We also gave them the opportunity to follow their own interests and make pieces together in any combinations they found effective. We subsequently saw, among other collaborations, some large dance pieces, surprisingly complete, one of which ended in a Maori war dance, wonderfully executed by the whole company, which I later incorporated into the final play.

During the months I was away from the students, I did my own research and pursued some of my own lines of thinking, including a study of the psychological toll the war has taken on returning Iraq veterans. I hit on the idea of using Sophocles’ Ajax as a structural basis for the piece. It’s a play I’d never studied closely or attempted to adapt, but always thought a chilling analysis of a kind of military trauma.

Ultimately, I went off and wrote the play. It finally took the form of a direct response to the material the students had brought in, addressing their issues but never quoting directly from their work. It is also an adaptation of the Sophocles text, using that ancient play as a means to reflect on and augment the contemporary story.

This was one of the hardest things I've ever done as a playwright, just because there were so many different people's needs to consider and honor and because the material itself was so disturbing and thorny. But it is also, I have to say, one of the most rewarding things I've ever done and I will always be grateful to the original cast at to Scott Zigler for leading me to make something so different from anything I could have made without them.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  In August, I'll be going into rehearsals for an Off Broadway production of my play Septimus and Clarissa, which is an adaptation of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. it was written in collaboration with Rachel Dickstein and her NY-based company, Ripe Time, and will be performed at Baruch in September.
I've also been working for several years now (with long interruptions) with the composer Peter Foley on a music/theater piece, working title Inconnu, about an incident that took place in France between the wars.

Q:  What could a playwriting student expect in your class?

A:  They can expect to be asked to write a lot. They average about seven pages a week, often more, and will ultimately write a play at the end of the semester. It's a lot of work, but I do think one has to write to write. There's just no other way to get a sense of the form than to keep taking a whack at it. I also get them to read many, many plays. I bring in a huge box of my own library of plays, over a hundred, every week, and spread them out on the table and they can pick whichever they want to read, but they read at least two a week. Another of my beliefs being that you have to read to write and it's a tricky form--the more you see the vast variety of ways it can be successfully manipulated, the better.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  I was taken to see King Lear at Arena Stage in D.C. when I was quite little, maybe ten or even younger. I had never seen anything so terrifying and beautiful, nor perhaps have I since. I don't think I'll ever get over the blinding of Gloucester--that's one of the worst things that's ever happened to me--and when Robert Proskey, who was playing him, came out for the curtain call ripping the bloody bandage from his eyes as he ran into the light, I nearly fainted with relief. But I also remember the woman who played Cordelia, the straight stalk of her body in the light, the courage of her refusal to pander to her father's insane vanity, "Nothing, my lord", the silence after that, the shock of that statement hanging in the air. I remember identifying that moment as being something I wanted to live inside of and understanding it to be at the essence of the theater: a person standing on the stage, speaking the truth. I later played the part and never took for granted the great good fortune I had in being able to do something I had known all my life I'd wanted to do.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I'd make it free. It appalls me that the theater, which seems to me to be the most essential and probably the oldest of the performing arts, something we have been doing for each other since we've been performing at all, is now the least accessible, since it is impossible for even the people who want to see it to afford going. Theaters should be open to everyone who wants to come in the doors. Just after 9/11, I was performing down at LaMaMa in a production of The Bacchae with a theater company called Beloved Monsters--a tough and disturbing play for tough and disturbing times. We had not known, of course, when we started rehearsals just how terribly appropriate that play would be for the times we were living through when we finally performed it. It was during those hard days when the rubble was still hot and that acrid smoke was still something you smelled everywhere downtown. People were still so jumpy and tender and in need of company, particularly at night, when they'd often wander into the theater, looking for community and find themselves in the audience, almost by accident. What we found was that by the end of that ancient play, which is about the catastrophic death of a city and an incident that cannot be assimilated, cannot be made sense of but which must be mourned, the audience was weeping as one, weeping for those they never knew who had died just a few blocks south of us. It was phenomenal, such a privilege to do--one of those things I'll always be grateful for, that I had the theater to go to during those nights. It made me feel that I was part of the long heritage of human beings who'd been using the medium to try to make sense of our condition, either by attending theater or making theater down the centuries. This is a medium that should be available to everyone always, a means of comfort and a way of understanding ourselves.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  So many, so many... I was given Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to read when I was about 12 by an amazingly perceptive school librarian. I remember sitting in the window seat of the library and reading this text in the sunlight (I can still remember the font.) I don't think I'd ever seen a play script remotely like it-- I was astonished by the freshness of the dialogue, the way it sounded like very particular people talking, the daring of the ideas, the vividness of it. I started taking it around the library, looking for friends to read it with because it needed, I knew, to be read aloud to be understood. I remember that I couldn't believe it was possible to do that, write with that kind of accuracy, humor and power. Meeting Albee in the last few years when doing Claire in A Delicate Balance (a dream part for me if ever there was one) has been one of the great thrills of my life (if a trifle terrifying.) Caryl Churchill's work has had a tremendous effect on me--seeing Top Girls at the Public when I was just out of college blew my mind, and Mad Forest at New York Theater Workshop was very important to me. There is such an originality to the theatrical imagination at work there, such intelligence and clarity of voice, it continues to inspire me. And of course there are the obvious greats--Chekhov, Williams, and so forth--if you're lucky enough to see great productions. I worked as an apprentice scene painter at Arena Stage when I was in high school in DC and helped paint the rock for Ming Cho Lee's set for Waiting for Godot and as a consequence got to see the invited dress--I'd never even read the play so it was all a revelation to me. I don't remember the director but it was a marvelous, funny and beautiful production--Max Wright playing Vladimir was heart-breaking, one of the great clowns but also (and this is so often the case) one of the great classical actors I've ever seen. I still remember my amazement at the fact of that play, that, as someone said, "nothing happens, twice," yet the whole of human existence is somehow evoked in its tragedy and absurdity. I walked out of the theater that night and thought, this is what I will give my life to.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I suppose I'm drawn to the Greeks because I love taking on the big stuff. I do find I get bored when nothing is risked. I suppose that kind of theater is just a product of people's fear of failure, which is virtually inevitable when you try to do anything worth doing. But why not take on the hardest things? There are worse things than failing--usually having to do with making nice, forgettable baubles that will never matter to anyone--what's the point of that? Why not put it all on the line? All that's at stake is the size of your soul.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Make a mess. Go for broke. Read everything you can, see everything you can, steal from the best, figure out how they did it and do it your way. Hang with people who are inspiring to you, who do things better than you do, hang with people who can teach you stuff. And be ambitious, for god's sake. (See above.)

Q:  Plugs, please:

A: Ajax in Iraq, just a few more performances at this point. Septimus and Clarissa in the fall (Ripe Time). Thanks for the soap box.

Jun 21, 2011

I Interview Playwrights Part 362: Tom Jacobson



Tom Jacobson

Hometown: Oklahoma City

Current Town: Los Angeles

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Just finished a poltergeist incest musical and will next tackle the second play in The Vesuvius Trilogy. I finished the first in February--it's about a Roman family that puts on a fake Greek play in their private theatre on August 24, 79 AD. The second is Clytemnestra, the fake play they put on. And the third will be about the American archeologists who find the family 2000 years later.

Q:  How many plays have you written?

A:  50 full lengths.

Q:  What is your process like?

A:  10 page outline, many drafts, review by a playwrights group and smart director friends.

Q:  Do you work on more than one play at a time?

A:  I can be researching one play while writing dialogue for another, but I couldn't be at the same stage of two plays simultaneously.

Q:  How would you characterize the LA theater scene?

A:  Very vibrant, best kept secret. More plays than anywhere, thanks to the largest acting pool in the world and the 99 Seat Theatre Plan that allows the best Equity actors to appear in tiny venues for almost no money (with the notion that they'll get attention that leads to paid work in TV and film, which actually works sometimes).

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  In high school we spent three months deceiving our classmates with fake devil worship at an abandoned farm outside of town: stage blood, giant candles, pentagrams, machetes, burned bones, notes signed in blood, cow skulls, creepy blue lights, black hoods, stolen cars, etc. We finally had to quit when other kids in our school scared themselves so badly they drove away without looking and had a bad wreck. No one was hurt (they were just drunk) but when we arrived to check out our handiwork we saw ambulances and police cars. The driver of one of those cars only found out it was fake last summer at our 30-year high school reunion.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Create a strong link between regional and Off Broadway theatres and the 99 Seat Theatres of Los Angeles. The intimate theatres here could be a fantastic spawning grown for plays that could quickly move to larger venues across the country. It's inexpensive to put on a play in a small theatre here, but the quality is extremely high (most of the time). If plays could be launched nationally or internationally here, that would be ideal. The audiences are smart, daring, and younger than in large regional theatres. The plays are being done here already. If only we could find the missing link.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Most of them are writers: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, Wilde, Miller, Churchill, Kushner.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Good, complicated storytelling that grabs me emotionally and makes me think. I like narrative and get impatient with unstructured images and characters that don't engage me. I like seeing something I've never seen before. I love to laugh and cry in the theatre--if I do either to the point of embarrassment, I'm a happy theatre-goer.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Sleep with everyone. Or at least have lots of friendships with actors, directors, designers and other playwights. Actually, it's probably best not to sleep with them. But fall in love with them, definitely. Those are the people who will get your work on stage and make sure it's great. They will literally get you productions. And once you've found great collaborators, nurture those relationships--nothing will serve you and your plays better.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I've had terrific reviews for the following shows in Los Angeles in the last 10 years, but little luck getting productions elsewhere. Because they've already been done by wonderful actors working with terrific directors, they're pretty polished scripts. It would be fabulous if a regional theatre would pick one of them up!

Bunbury (3 women, 3 men; 1 set) When he discovers he is only a fictitious character in The Importance of Being Earnest, Bunbury joins forces with Rosaline, Romeo’s never-seen obsession from Romeo and Juliet. Together, they win back their loves and change the world by changing classic literature. Winner of a Ticketholder Award and Garland Award for Best New Play, Critic’s Choice in the Los Angeles Times.

The Friendly Hour (5 women) Based on the actual minutes of a women’s club formed in rural South Dakota in 1934, this poignant comedy charts 70 years of personal and national history, from skinning skunks and julebukking in the 30s to restoring native prairie in the new millennium. Soon to be a short film entitled Prairie Sonata.

House of the Rising Son (4 men) When Trent brings Felix home to New Orleans to meet his father and homophobic grandfather, the family’s demons come slithering into the light. Watchful ghosts, sinister hustlers, and a myriad of parasites lead Felix on a Southern Gothic journey to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Critic's Choice in the Los Angeles Times.

The Orange Grove (4 women, 5 men) A small Lutheran choir in its death-throes provides the backdrop for this Chekhovian warning of the impending doom of mainline Protestantism in America . Laughter through tears with nice lemon bars. Critic’s Choice in the Los Angeles Times.

Ouroboros (2 women, 3 men) Two American couples get caught in a chronological palindrome on a trip to Italy . Stigmata, alchemy, adultery and St. Catherine of Siena ’s severed head plague a nun and a minister in this circular love story that is a comedy if performed forward and a tragedy if performed backward. Winner of Best New Play and Production of the Year LA Weekly Awards.

Sperm adapted from Jacques Miroir’s 18th-century play (2 women, 5 men) Pulled from the stomach of a whale, an American whaler is bleached blind and becomes a modern Tiresias in the court of Louis XVI. He seduces Marie Antoinette and sets the king on a path to destroy France and ultimately humankind. A tragicomedy in rhymed couplets. Critic’s Choice in the Los Angeles Times.

Tainted Blood (3 women, 5 men) Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle use logic and religion to fend off a seductive vampire in this fang-in-cheek comedy/thriller. Pick of the Week in the LA Weekly, and winner of seven Valley Theatre League Awards.

The Twentieth-Century Way (2 men) is the true story of two actors who hired themselves out to the Long Beach Police Department in 1914 to entrap "social vagrants" in public restrooms. Thirty-one men were arrested, and the ensuing scandal led to an ordinance against "oral sodomy" in California. Nominated for five Ovation Awards, a GLAAD Award and four LA Drama Critics Circle Awards, winner of Outstanding Production of a Play (New York International Fringe Festival), and a 2010 Agnes Moorehead Award (Top Ten Live Performances, Gay City News).

And then I have 25 plays not yet produced--world premieres available! The most recently written are:

The Rosy Fingers of Dawn (2 women, 3 men) Not even the eruption of Mount Vesuvius can stop an inventive and theatrical Roman family from putting on their production of a lost Greek classic, Menander's Clytemnestra. The show must go on!

The Journeys of Yuzu adapted from the ancient Pali manuscript (1 woman, 5 men) A young assassin seeks clues to his origin and discovers a secret that changes the world. Pure evil pursues impure good in this irreverent verse drama about the ultimate action hero.

Los York (3 men) UCLA or NYU? Seduction and betrayal or self-sacrificing love? Otis is stuck between two coasts and his two gay uncles, in the middle of an America living in terror. Choosing a grad school was never this hard.

The Lock of the Five Keys (2 men) An American professor pursuing a lost letter by E.M. Forster disappears in India, provoking a manhunt across three millennia in a play within a play within a play within a play within a play.

Tom's website

Jun 18, 2011

tomorrow

CLOWN BAR
by Adam Szymkowicz
directed by Kip Fagan

Lyrics by Adam Szymkowicz and Adam Overett
Music by Adam Overett

with Alex Anfanger, Brett Aresco, Stephen Bel Davies, Sam Breslin Wright, Jamie Effros, Jessy Hodges, Beth Hoyt, Jessica Pohly, Dominic Spillane, and Steve Stout

Long ago Happy left the Clown Bar and the organized clown crime world to work for the good guys.  Now his junkie brother Timmy has been murdered, and Happy returns to his old life to ask a few questions.  Can he go home again without getting sucked into the seedy clown underbelly of vice and violence?  And will he survive the gun toting clowns who used to be his friends? Or Blinky, the lady clown he left behind?

ONE NIGHT ONLY: Sunday, June 19 at 7 p.m.
Seventh Street Small Stage
at Jimmy’s No. 43
43 East 7th Street (between 2nd/3rd Aves)
6 to Astor Place, R/W to 8th Street, F to 2nd Avenue
Seating extremely limited – for reservations and information please call 212.946.5198

Jun 9, 2011

I Interview Playwrights Part 361: Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro



Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Hometown: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Current Town: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Q: Tell me about your play next season with the Huntington Theatre.

A: I have lived in Harvard Square for 46 years and been a playwright for 30 years so it was time to write a Cambridge comedy about friends on the cusp of old age. In Before I Leave You, Emily’s cozy world threatens to fall apart: her husband Koji suddenly embraces his Asian roots as his theater career takes off; her best friend Jeremy has a mysterious illness and stops work on his novel; her son leaves home to live with a grocery checkout girl; and her girlfriend Trish has her eyes on Koji. Longtime friendships morph and crumble in the blink of an eye.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: For the last year I have been researching and writing the first draft of Mammal Heat, my golem/robot play. The four characters are Golp, a humanoid with feelings (and with all of Google poured into his head); Maggie, the scientist who created him; Maggie’s 8-year-old daughter, Abigail, who plays with him; and Maggie’s embittered 59-year-old mother, who teaches him about the facts of life. Mammal Heat is a domestic robot play with a window, via TV, to the war raging on the other side of the world.

Q: Tell me about the Huntington Playwright Fellows Program.

A: I am very happy being a Huntington Fellow. Playwrights often feel like itinerant peddlers as they wander from theater to theater, displaying their wares. It’s extremely nice to have a professional roof over your head, especially one that invites its HPFs to all its performances (as well as opening night parties), and makes you eligible for a reading at the end of your tenure. There’s a forty-year age span in our small group and an exciting range of styles and subject matter. Our bi-weekly discussions, under the sharp and genial direction of Lisa Timmel and Charles Haugland, are lively, helpful, and fun. It’s surprising that I enjoy the TPFs so much, being the sort that usually works slowly over time (and also the sort that tends to overanalyze my critics), but I find “the rose, the thorn, the bud” approach to the TPF discussions very nurturing. Most of my writing life I’ve felt like a part-timer; now at 72 I’m finally working full-time.

Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A: As an Asian American woman playwright, I would like the audience to park its assumptions at the theater door. I realize that’s impossible - I admit I tend to be excited by and supersensitive to Asian American plays because it’s like seeing something done by my family. But as a playwright I tend to write what I feel like writing; I don’t let someone else dictate the terms. I believe if you write on what moves you, everything you are will go into your play. One more thing - I think my Asian American characters should be judged like any of my other characters, not just as representatives of a group, but on their own terms.

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: Keep a journal, write two hours a day, read hundreds of plays, go to a play a week, get to know your local playwrights and rush to see their plays, when you have writer’s block distract yourself with a 10-minute play and submit it to the innumerable festivals in your favorite cities all over the country, have close friends (other than yourself) that you study and know inside out. Never give up, never despair – after three decades of doing what you love most, the Huntington might give you a call.

Jun 8, 2011

I Interview Playwrights Part 360: Hannah Moscovitch


Hannah Moscovitch

Hometown:
Ottawa, Canada

Current Town:
Toronto, Canada

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m in Banff, working on a play commissioned by the Banff Centre called We are at War about the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. It’s based on interviews with three veterans who did tours in Panjwaii, one military psychiatrist who runs a PTSD clinic in Ottawa, and two journalists who were embedded with our troops.

Q:  How would you characterize Canadian theater?

A:  I spend most of my time in Toronto and theatre culture varies a lot across the country (we only have one tenth the population of the States but we’re so spread out that different aesthetics develop regionally). Okay but I’d say Canadian plays tend to explore ambiguity, complexity of human experience, and subtle shades of meaning. And our sense of humor is relatively self-deprecating and ironic. It comes from knowing we’re an icy outpost and not at the centre of things. And to be honest a lot of the plays that get done in Canada are made in England or the States. Canadian theatre culture is young. Almost all of the great Canadian playwrights are alive.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  It’s common knowledge in my family that I’m terrified of spiders. It’s true that when I was a little girl I was terrified of spiders. Now I’m not scared of them but somehow it’s become so much a part of my identity within my family and it’s so expected of me that I’ll lose my shit when I see a spider that I pretend to be frightened of spiders. I scream and run out of the room over spiders even though I’m not at all afraid.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  The ticket prices.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My first heroes were the Canadians playwrights: Judith Thompson, John Mighton, Daniel MacIvor, George F. Walker, David French, Claudia Dey, Morwyn Brebner, Michael Healey, Adam Pettle, Wajdi Mouawad, Michel Tremblay, Michel Marc Bouchard, Robert LePage...

At the moment I’m reading a lot of Edward Bond. It’s blowing my mind.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I don’t have a kind, I don’t think. I’m pretty fervent about believing that you don’t have to suppress one theatrical style to promote another. I get excited about verbatim, experimental performance, language-based plays, story-based plays, image and spectacle based plays, musicals. I like whatever’s beautiful and intelligent. I like what’s good.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Produce your own work, find colleagues you want to collaborate with over and over again, and develop relationships with theatre companies who will produce your plays. The best case scenario is to develop a primary relationship with one artistic director who will produce all your plays (and take risks with you). Either that or built your own theatre company and tour your own work.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  East of Berlin and The Russian Play are being produced by Signal Ensemble in Chicago in October.

Little One is being premiered by Theatre Crisis at Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto in August.

The Children’s Republic is being premiered by Tarragon Theatre (where I’m in residence) in Toronto in November.

Jun 6, 2011

upcoming and right now

1.  I have a play in 300 Vaginas at Blue Coyote.  It's a really good night.  Go if you can.  now playing.

2.  Then, after that, a Production of Clown Bar with Rising Phoenix Rep
Directed by Kip Fagan
Seventh Street Small Stage at Jimmy’s No. 43  NYC
June 19.  7pm  (Free performance, one night only see website for details)

3.  Then a reading of my really new play The Artist at the Chance in CA in the OC July 20.  (I'm the resident playwright at the Chance Theater this year.  Did I tell you that?)

4.  A production of Nerve in LA in July.  (production # 11 of that play) Everything I've heard so far about the planned production sounds exciting.  I'll let you know details when they can be revealed.

5.  In August, Elsewhere will be done at Theatre Conspiracy in Fort Meyers, FL.

6.  In October, I will have 3 productions of three different plays in two different cities.  Rehearsing those will be tricky.  I'll let you know more soon.

7.  And there are at least 7 other planned productions I know of in '11 and '12 so far.

Jun 2, 2011

I Interview Playwrights Part 359: Alessandro King



Alessandro King

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about the play you have coming up with Trustus.

A:  Swing ’39 is an imagined story about a group of girls from 1939 Harlem who win a competition to meet the King of Swing, Benny Goodman. The play is about the relationships that spring up between the Italian Harlem residents and the members of the Goodman organization, including one girl who becomes romantically involved with Benny himself.

I’d characterize the play as a character-driven ensemble piece, initially inspired by the works of Chekhov and Terence Rattigan, two greats I was reading a lot of when I wrote the first draft three years ago.

Swing ‘39 was originally done at Sarah Lawrence College, a production in which I actually played Benny. This August you can catch it at the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s part of the Trustus Playwrights Festival, one of the oldest play festivals in the country. I am extremely honored and excited about this wonderful opportunity.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’ve been developing my new play, Tabor, at INTAR, where I’m a member of The Pound, the new emerging artists lab there. I will most likely have a reading up some time this summer.

I’m rewriting a one-act of mine, North Island, that I hope to pair with another short piece with similar themes. And I am in the middle of research for my long-term major project, a play about Al Smith, my favorite New York figure.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  I used to collect Carl Barks comic books, and I started before I could even read. I used to cut them up and make collages out of them. I still have my big journal with each page devoted to a different character – Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Gladstone Gander. Each page is filled not just with pictures of the featured character, but images that represent what the character is “about.” So the Donald page, for example, also has pictures of bad stuff happening to Gladstone, his arch-nemesis.

I think this shows that even before I could comprehend narrative and plot, I had a very strong interest in character. I understood that personalities were being expressed and contrasted, and that each character had an ineffable yet specific essence.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I think there are playwrights on this blog who are more eloquent when it comes to this question. But I will say that the affordability of ticket prices gets my vote for the top dilemma. If we could magically remedy that, I think many of the other problems would be helped.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I am who I am thanks to a crack team of teachers and professors: Bill Williams and Michael Gilbert of Trinity School, and Stuart Spencer, Amlin Gray and Christine Farrell of Sarah Lawrence College.

My favorite playwrights are Shakespeare, Chekhov, Terence Rattigan, Lanford Wilson and Kenneth Lonergan. They love their characters. Lonergan and Annie Baker are the two contemporary writers on my must-see list.

I read Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms a year ago and it is my new favorite play. It makes me smile just to think of it.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like to leave the theater thinking about the characters. If I leave thinking about the writer or the director – how capable they are, how smart they are – that’s good, but it’s better if I don’t realize they’re there at all. As a writer I try to be invisible.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Well I am definitely just starting out myself, so I feel a little bashful about this one. But I will say this: I got the Trustus production by submitting to everything I was eligible for in the Dramatists Sourcebook. And I have a file cabinet with dozens of rejection letters. So, if at first…

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Swing ’39 goes into previews at Trustus on August 10th, with an opening night of August 12th:

http://www.trustus.org/show.php?show_id=6

Come down before the fifteenth and we’ll grab a drink!

My zany improv show, Listen, Kid!, currently plays at the Magnet Theater in New York:

http://magnettheater.com/viewshow.php?showid=36829

If you have children, you simply must take them to a Monster Literature show:

http://www.monsterliterature.com/

And if you’re planning on visiting the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer, you’d be crazy to miss the reading of Sarah Hammond’s beautiful House on Stilts on July 8th.

Thanks for checking out my interview! If you’d like to read one of my plays, shoot me an e-mail at AlessandroMKing at gmail dot com.