I Interview Playwrights Part 232: Sam Marks

Sam Marks

Hometown: Manhattan, NYC

Current Town: Brooklyn NYC

Q:  Tell me about the Old Masters going up at Steppenwolf's First Look Repertory of New Work.

A:  I’m really excited about Old Masters at Steppenwolf. I’m very lucky to be working with the director, Daniel Aukin. I’m really looking forward seeing the other plays in the series. And, most importantly I’m thrilled and honored that Steppenwolf—a theater that I have long admired and followed-- is producing the play as part of First Look.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just finished a new play that I wrote as part of the p73 writers group. I’m developing two TV series and working on a short film and a feature length adaptation.

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

A:  My parents met as actors so I spent a lot of time backstage as a child both with them (no babysitters) and also because I appeared in some plays they did (I was on Broadway at age 5, BAM at age 8). Backstage is one of my favorite places in the world (the light, the jokes, the actors) and being there is probably one of the reasons I got (back) into the theater. My entry point to playwriting (like a lot of us) was acting. One of the reasons I started writing was that I remember being on stage in a new play and thinking “I could write something like this”. And so I did. But now I really, really miss backstage.

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

A:  I’m not sure how I would change this, but the fact that so few people make their living (let alone get benefits) from writing plays is a huge problem.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I learned a tremendous amount from Paula Vogel, Erin Wilson, and the other writers I met at Brown’s Graduate program. I’m continually impressed by many of the incredibly talented and imaginative playwrights in NYC. I love Chekhov, Churchill and Pinter. But in terms of theatrical influence, I have—for better or worse-- a slightly Oedipal relationship with David Mamet. (Not that I want to sleep with Rebecca Pigeon but, rather, that I am a devotee of much of his writing and often, simultaneously, want to kill him.)

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Bert States says that “the theater is the place where the ear sees” so I think every time I go to theater and hear (see) something new, it’s actually very exciting. Even if the play isn’t “great” there is an undeniable pleasure in hearing a play hit your ear in a way that is actually unfamiliar and surprising and doesn’t sound like anything you’ve ever heard before. It’s kind of like as a kid, the first time you hear Public Enemy, Led Zeppelin, Nas, The Pixies. It’s electric.

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

A:  It’s never easy. Don’t try to cheat.
Stick with the people who show you respect and with whom you share a sensibility.
No matter how small the job or task, treat it like it matters or else don’t do it.
There are many, many roads to Rome.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I want to plug Babel Theater Company, P73 and Partial Comfort Productions. They are vital to American Theater and the careers of people like me. You should all go see everything they do.

I Interview Playwrights Part 231: Stacy Davidowitz

Stacy Davidowitz 
Hometown: Merrick, Long Island, NY

Current Town: Morningside Heights, NYC

Q:  Tell me about PINK!:

A:  PINK! is the story of five 12-year old girls and the interpersonal relationships that bind them. It plays out in real-time over the course of an hour and a half while they are alone in their bunk at sleep-away camp. A dark, dark comedy, PINK! presents 12 year-old girls in a way you’ve probably never seen them-- as themselves, unsupervised and unleashed. Take note: animals in their natural habitat can be extremely dangerous.

Originally a ten-minute play, PINK! was first produced at Tufts University, later announced a finalist at The Tank Theater’s SLAM playwriting competition, and then produced at Manhattan Repertory Theatre. Its full-length version, produced by Down Payment Productions at the WorkShop Theater (www.pinktheplay.com), was a finalist for the Lark Play Development Center’s Playwrights Week 2009, and received seven NY Innovative Theatre Nominations, including Outstanding Full Length Script.

I was incredibly fortunate to have worked with such ridiculously talented artists on every aspect of the production. Directed by the brilliant, brilliant Brian Smith and acted by the most outstanding ensemble-- Kaela Crawford, Julia Giolzetti, Caitlin Mehner, Alison Scaramella, & Stephanie Strohm – I really had it good. Real good.

PINK! will be published by Broadway Play Publishing at the end of the summer / early fall. I also adapted the script for film, and as a screenplay, PINK! is currently being optioned as an independent feature film.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  As far as playwriting goes, I’m working on a variety of projects:
1. Attempting to secure the rights to adapt my favorite novel into a rock musical.
2. Putting the final touches on my children’s musical, Hank & Gretchen: A Modern Re-telling of Hansel & Gretel; or Because Candy is That Good, collaborating with composer Mark T. Evans, as well as Rag n’ Bone Theatre Company.
3. Working on my screenplay, Lady & the Vamp, for a Columbia MFA student short film being produced by Yves Bouzaglo at the end of the summer.
4. Writing showcase scenes for MFA / BFA programs around the country.
5. Diving into my next full-length play, THE RUBBER ROOM.
6. Developing a short one-woman play with my puppet, Swaby.

And outside of writing:
Currently coordinating and running a day camp. They are giving me a week at the end of August to develop and direct an Adventure Camp. I have 75 k-6th grade kids enrolled. Goal: make it the best camp ever. Go.

I also just graduated from Columbia University with a MFA in Acting. So, acting. Just finished a reading of Daniella Shoshan’s exciting new play, YES WE CAN, at Atlantic Theater Company. And singing. Love to sing. And running obsessively through Central Park. Or to New Jersey. Love to run.

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

A:  When I was 11 years-old, I was at sleep-away camp (are you sensing a theme?) and decided, per usual, I was going to stay back in the bunk that night while all the other girls were socializing with the boys so that I could write. At this point, I was walking the line between popular and being the weird kid. When my friends got back to the bunk, I shared with them my very long poem that described, in unnecessary, bloody detail, the murder of a camper by a counselor in the middle of the night. I think after that I was the weird kid.

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

A:  More risk-taking, cheaper tickets.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I wrote my first play immediately after being introduced to Sarah Kane’s work. Her writing is beautifully sick, full of humor and wit, with layers upon layers of crazy shit. She goes there.

Lorca, Chekhov, Brecht.

Tracy Letts, Sarah Ruhl, Sheila Callaghan, Polly Stenham.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  If I am emotionally invested, and I mean choked-up, heart-pounding, tears-rolling, ear-to-ear smiling, involuntarily-mumbling-praises-under-my-breath-like-my-disruptive-yet-fantastic-grandma invested, I know it’s a good show.

Also, if I laugh a lot. If I laugh a little, it’s probably not too special; I’m a laugher.

A really, really good musical.
Anything with children.

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

A:  This is the advice I remind myself to take, because I too am just starting out:
-Try to sleep but not if it interferes with writing.
-Submit, submit, submit.
-Collaborate with talented friends if you’ve got em. Embrace their feedback.
-Explore: rejuvenate yourself by seeing, reading, breathing new works.
-Make time that doesn’t exist.

I Interview Playwrights Part 230: Molly Rice

Molly Rice

Hometown: Born in Houston, TX, but Austin is home.

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about the Saints Tour and Futurity the Musical.

A:  SAINTS TOUR means a lot to me. I wrote the play in 2009 for Ray Rizzo's live arts exchange MOTHERLODGE (a great festival, www.motherlodge.com), to take place in Louisville, KY. The play was a bus tour, led by a "Tour Guide" character who uncovers the secret saints of a local area. I wrote it using Google Maps Street View, never having been to Louisville, and Ray connected me to local musicians willing to be planted around the city for audiences to discover. Actress Emily Hyberger (a Louisville native), director/ writer/ actor Marc Bovino, and I went down and put the thing together in a week. And it was just magical. We had local sax player Mauriece echoing through the Salvation Army's cavernous 1950's gymnasium, and Louisville singer/ songwriter Tyrone Cotton singing about time in a graveyard, showered by white cherry blossoms, and so many other magical Louisville moments. We enlisted the Center of Hope Soup Kitchen, where the tour ended and we all ate a meal together. It was Community Theater, in the deepest sense of the word. I wrote it to be redesign-able for production in different communities, each time using a local actor and musicians, local sites, and a local community service organization-- so this Spring director Rachel Chavkin and I tested its flexibility in the West Village as a walking tour, with Taylor Mac as the Tour Guide and 20 participating artists and musicians (!!!). Totally different-- the Village itself was a character-- but totally interesting to see its translation. I plan to do it in as many cities as I can. The play is a story, but also a sort of frame to showcase these rich little pockets of culture out there that we sometimes lose sight of in New York. And as a writer, the sites just unfold into stories in the most exciting way.


FUTURITY is a beautiful example of a contemporary music/ theater hybrid. It was conceived and developed by the Lisps, a strange, smart Brooklyn band who I'd never heard of. I went and saw a presentation of FUTURITY at Joe's Pub in Spring 2009 because somebody sent me an email about it and it sounded cool, and I was like, this is fascinating-- there is something special here. I was touched by the way it balanced intellectual ideas with the emotional force of music. I felt like its book might need some development and that I might be a good match, so I connected with them and joined the team. The story is about a Civil War soldier and his imaginary relationship with mathemetician/ Lord Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace, which is fascinating enough, but at root the play's about the way science and art talk to each other, push each other forward, from one era to the next. I'm thrilled to be working on it.

I love working on strange music/ theater hybrids like these two. I was into music from early on--singer/ songwriter out of high school, went to Austin for college and promptly quit to play in bands. Music and story cleave to each other in my brain-- they're never fully separate strands of narrative. Even straight plays feel like compositions, and songs and compositions have a shape that feels like story. I'm interested in trying to 'braid' them in new ways, and with these two projects I'm still working it out.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  Right now I'm writing a new play about lying. It's a commission from the Tisch Grad Acting program, an ensemble piece for 9 grad actors who are aMAzing. It's an awesome challenge to write a narrative that makes room for the full range of 9 skilled actors like those guys. I'm also working on a final draft of my musical CANARY (with Ray Rizzo and Rachel Chavkin), and Rachel, composer Stephanie Johnstone and I are developing a new piece about James Agee and Walker Evans based on Agee's book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

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

A:  My family used to watch the Carol Burnett show when I was very little. When I was 3 or 4 my dad asked me why I liked it so much, and I said, "The song and the story." That pretty much sums it up for me.

After my dad died, I found that written on the back of an envelope in his files. That probably explains something about who I am as a person. I'm not sure what.

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

A:  It would be interesting to see New York Theater become a little less insular, get more curious about work in other places. Coming out of Austin in the 90's and early 2000's, where 1 out of 4 shows produced were new plays, I knew when I got here that New York did not represent American theater-- New York theater is local, too. There are innovative conversations going on between locally-grown theater and the communities that grow it, and the have a lot to teach us about what American live art really is.

I also wish we could all chill a little. Yes, there is no money. Yes, theater is not the primary performance genre out there today. Yes, audiences are small. But change is constant. Limitations and resources change throughout the course of history, and we are just a page in that history. We can work to change the limitations and resources. But in the meantime, this is our page. We need to keep the focus on making great things; that's what we're here to do. There's always a way to make them. The rest is more likely to come if we focus on that.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Well I LOVE Ruth Margraff's work-- talk about song and story. I think her brain is a national treasure. Sam Shepard was an artistic father figure. Freddy Mercury is my patron saint. My favorite play is the Bacchae.

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

A:  Let's see...A big turning point came when I stopped asking people to do my work and started doing it, in one form or another. People began to support it, once they could envision it. And that shift really changed the experience of being a theater artist from frustrating to liberating.

When I find people I love to work with, I stick with them. As Paula Vogel says, we rise together.

I find ways to situationally, financially, and personally stabilize my life because we work in a rocky, unpredictable field.

I try to be a good person and to find the good seed in others. I don't work with someone if I can't find it.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The Tisch show opens in December; Saints Tour will happen again next Spring in New York; and look for a showcase workshop production of CANARY in February 2011! And thank you, Adam, for your interviews!

I Interview Playwrights Part 229: Julia Pascal

photograph by Habie Schwarz

Julia Pascal

Hometown: I was born and brought up in Manchester and Blackpool in the north of England but at 14 I moved to London where I have lived ever since.

Current Town: London

Q:  Tell me about Dybbuk.

A:
The Dybbuk.
History

PASCAL THEATRE COMPANY’s innovative take on THE DYBBUK was supported by the British Council on a tour to Poland in l993. (Tim Butchard was the British Council supporting Officer), It went to Bialystok and Radom and was extremely well-received.


The production has been seen in France, Germany, Sweden and Belgium as well as enjoying a British tour. It has received rave press and is now invited to be part of the first theatre festival at the Manhattan theatre The Theater for the New City in August 2010.

We would like to have British Council support and can offer educational workshops around the production,

The play was written and directed by NESTA Dream Time Fellow Julia Pascal.

It was choreographed and designed by Thomas Kampe.

The production which has five performers, uses text, movement and music in a homage to a culture that was annihilated by the Nazis. It is a major work of English theatre which has been part of Pascal’s creation of an English Jewish body of work seen in the l990s and 2000s and published by Oberon Books.


The Dybbuk.

Synopsis


A British woman goes to Germany today and finds it full of wandering souls or dybbuks.


She imagines a ghetto in 1942 where five Jews are assembled for deportation. One of them remembers the story of The Dybbuk . She makes the others re-enact fragments of this famous legend. This work poses the question about why we keep on telling our stories even on the eve of destruction.


The play premiered at the New End Theatre in 1992. It toured in the UK and in continental Europe over a decade and is invited to the Theater for the New City in August 2010 for its professional US premiere.

Q: What else are you up to?

A: I have just written a new play about a London woman who goes to the Brooklyn Bridge to jump off it and another about Mossad. I need to get them read and produced now.

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 brought up by my Romanian grandparents in Manchester. They brought with them an atmosphere of many cultures and spoke several languages. Although I was born in England, I never felt 'English' and this alienation made me always an observer. I was never a religious Jew and embraced atheism at twelve. My Jewishness made me connect to other outsiders. I became fascinated by the lost souls that vanished in Hitler's Europe and learned of the Holocaust as a young child. This had a profound effect on my writing.

I was also a balletomane and dance has had a strong effect on my writing and the way I see work expressed.

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

A: Give women equality.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Bertold Brecht, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Joan Littlewood, Hilde Holger.  Kantor and Grotowski are also major influences.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Work that is Poor Theatre and rich in ideas.

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

A: Write what you know and then go much deeper. Talk to people especially people with extraordinary lives. Listen to your grandparents and get them to talk about their own.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: THE DYBBUK by Julia Pascal. US premiere at Theater for The New City, 155 First Avenue (10th Street. East Village. August 10-25 2010. Telephone 212 254 1109. www.dreamupfstival.org www.pascal-theatre.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 228: Yussef El Guindi

Yussef El Guindi

Hometowns: Cairo and London

Current Town: Seattle

Q: Tell me about the play you're working on at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival:

A: It’s called THREE WOLVES AND A LAMB. A comedy about the Palestinian and Israeli imbroglio/ conflict. The subject matter just screamed comedy to me. So I just followed those initial screams and ended up with this play. We’ll see if I’ve managed to morph it all into laughter or not. It’s a prickly subject that lends itself to the extremes of both painful comedy and high drama.

Q: What else are you up to?

A: I’m workshopping another play in August at the Icicle Creek Theatre Festival in association with ACT in Seattle. The play is called PILGRIMS MUSA AND SHERI IN THE NEW WORLD. It explores the emotional havoc that attends those who leave one country to try and make a home in another country....The baggage that one unavoidably lugs around in one’s travels, as well as the stuff you’re forced to leave behind. And how the absence of those things left behind often accrues an emotional weight of its own. A weird number is done on your psyche when you the find the familiar touchstones of your home country absent from your daily life. That is of course both thrilling and exciting, as well as overwhelming, and even terrifying at times. Sometimes, an emotional free-fall takes place, where nothing familiar remains for you to hold onto in times of crises. Truly, one becomes a stranger in a strange land; and one simply can’t create memories and comfort zones fast enough to break this fall.

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

A: Continuing from the previous response: writing (as well as acting) was what I did to create those comfort zones, that sense of home, after emigrating with my family at a young age. I think the constant in my life has been this continuos uprooting, and traveling. Not just from different cities, and countries, but also from one language to another, from one cultural mindset to a completely different one, etc. What has shaped me as a writer and individual has been this need to adapt, to put aside what one knew in order to survive and thrive in whatever new country I was in.

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

A: I was in a theater lobby not too long ago and heard a mother tell her son, who was acting up a tad, that he should behave himself as he was in the theater now. I groaned when I heard this, feeling that we’d surely lost a future audience member. I wish theater wasn’t perceived as being so stiff, stuffy, and inaccessible; or done for a small group of cultural elitists....Of course it would also help if the theater pieces themselves weren’t sometimes stiff, stuffy and inaccessible. It would also help if discussions about theater were woven into the cultural conversation more often. I find it a little depressing when I can’t find American Theater magazine in stores that seem to display every other kind of magazine imaginable. Surely they can find a corner on their endless racks for a magazine that covers the interests and activities of a whole lot of people!

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: I admire those who manage to stay in the game despite long periods of seemingly wandering in the wilderness. Basically anyone who keeps at it, in spite of the obstacles, the disappointments, etc. People who take all that crap in stride and still manage to produce good work. (And who are able to get over themselves and move on when the work misfires or isn’t what they hoped it would be. Theater artists who are able to see those dips and disappointments as part of the ride.)

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that doesn’t bore me. I don’t mean to sound flippant. I like theater that grabs my attention and doesn’t let go. Theater that, while being developed, knows an audience will be in attendance at some point. Yes, this can lead to pandering crap. But I am little put off by plays that simply don’t care about their audience. This may very naturally lead to people not showing up. And nothing is more depressing in theater than seeing so many empty seats.

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

A:  In spite of what is said - that writing can’t be taught - theater is a craft you can learn. The medium has its own demands and requirements. (Note the many successful novelists who couldn’t make the transition to writing for theater.) And so whether you learn that craft on your own by watching/ reading a lot of plays, or you attend playwriting courses, I would advise paying close attention to what makes this particular mode of expression tick. Nobody can teach you, or give you your voice, yes, but the medium in which you choose to express it can be learnt.

I Interview Playwrights Part 227: Meg Gibson

Meg Gibson

Hometown, Current Town:

Born in Bridgeton, New Jersey-really South Jersey as we say, down by the Delaware Bay and the reason why they call it the Garden State. I ran around in the asparagus and tomato fields until I was eight. My father is third generation inventor so there was always a lot of creativity going on.

I do remember the parents going to NYC to see plays and how wildly excited they were by what they'd seen. When I was old enough to be taken to the city it was like being in a comic book. It loomed over everything. I spent some time in PA then vamoosed to Utah for college and skiing. I started acting there and then came to NYC for conservatory training. Pretty much been here ever since. I am a settler as E. B. White would say. I've made this my home. NYC- it's tough, it's expensive, it's home.

Q: Tell me about Seven Seven Seven.

A: The play is Tatata. It means the suchness of the moment.

It's a riff on making music, being sisters, having parents that are rock and roll and movie stars from the 1960's, what it is to be second generation to that history, how do they carve out their own careers, keeping their own work real in this culture of fame and product.

All that in ten minutes. I liked the challenge of the form and the sight specific setting of Jimmy's. Jimmy's is an old speak easy- I can always sense the history of burlesque or vaudeville or whatever went on in that back room with this little stage and little bathroom. Doing a theatre piece about young musicians fit with all that.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I'm currently shaping on the next writing project. It's a short B and W film. That's all I can say for the moment.

Just finished directing the regional premiere of Too Much Memory, the adapted Antigone I wrote with Keith Reddin that Rising Phoenix Rep produced in the Fringe Festival of 2008. I also directed this wildly funny new play called Charm. It's a surreal comedy of manners about Margaret Fuller and her buddies, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. It's the antithesis of masterpiece theatre. I loved creating it with a very game cast and design team and old friends in Utah at Salt Lake Acting Company. The play is having some regional productions and I'm working hard to get it done here in NYC.

I'm also in a few episodes of AMC's, Rubicon. I play the widow to the mentor who accidently? mysteriously? was killed.

It's taken me a few years, but I'm finally starting to juggle the three gigs- writing, directing and acting.

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

A: Childhood influence to make theatre. I taught myself to read by the age of 4. I don't know which came first- the imagination or reading and seeing it all as I read. It's a 3D movie in my mind's eye- full of texture, smell, sounds. Same with plays. I imagine the production as I read. So, reading gave me the path to making this work. I also can't help but want to play- play with creating work, developing it with actors, or being the actor that brings a story to life. What better edge is there?

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

A: I wish Theatre were better funded. If we didn't need names to draw in box office and critics, if the work just stood on it's own, produced as pure artistic pursuit- that would be a real plus for our culture.

I enjoy the anonymity in work. How great is it to go to BAM or our Fringe Festival and not know any of the creators or performers? Jus going, being this blank slate and taking in what these producers have chosen to present.

Every culture has it's names. I did enjoy Denzel Washington in Fences. Glad he took the time to come do it. He was consummate. But,that will always be a part of our choice. And as a producer, I recognize the need to do that. But we need to look at which piece can be done without the big names. Some work is better without the focus on a star.

More theatre with consummate artists, enthusiastically funded, that's what I'd like to change.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Theatre heros: Ariane Mnoushkine, Bernie Gerstein, Joe Papp, Simon McBurney, Thomas Ostermeir, LIsa Kron, Les Waters, Irene Worth, Jennifer Tipton, Annie Baker.


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

A: The only advice I have is find your own form, make your demons work for you.