Episode 7 of Compulsive Love

Episode 7 of Compulsive Love is here!  Watch it and previous episodes on Koldcast or Blip or Daily Motion or Boomtrain or Youtube or JTS.

Embedded #7

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I Interview Playwrights Part 569: Myra Slotnick

Myra Slotnick

Hometown: Winthrop, MA.

Current Town: Provincetown, MA.

Q:  Tell me about The Weight of Water.

A:  The story takes place nine days after Hurricane Katrina, in the destroyed home of a woman by the name of Pearl Haynes, where two rescue workers try to remove her from the only home she has ever known for over forty years. As they come to realize, however, Pearl is the real force to be reckoned with here, and it just might end up being these two lost souls in need of rescuing. I wrote The Weight of Water as a very human impulse, to the visceral response that I had in seeing, witnessing, a class of people marginalizedand disregarded...or rather, discarded. I thought to myself, "this is the year 2005! What is happening here?! Why doesn't anybody go and help those poor people! They are dying!...dying. I could not reconcile what I saw happening, so I needed to express this in the only way I knew how. As it turns out, the characters had a thing or two to say about the story-line and tone of the play and, based on their many inadequacies, it is even pretty funny in places. Katrina is the backdrop of this play, but the story is quite character-driven, quite personal.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A: If I tell you, I'll have to kill you:) I tend not to talk about my current works in progress, as I feel it diffuses the creative energy around it. I will say that it is set in Provincetown, in 1953.

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 a very antisocial child who would rather hang out and play with a pack of wild neighborhood dogs, than humans.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  It would be impossible, living in Provincetown, to not feel beholden to, or influenced by, Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. Arthur Miller, also. But the truth of heroes, to me, lies in the actor. Nothing inspires me more than great acting and, I could not tell you how this is done, exactly...only that when I experience someone great, I know it...I am transported, I am changed...I now understand something that I, previously, did not. And change is what great theatre is all about.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  This is going to be a boring answer, but I love all kinds of theatre....musicals, plays, short one-acts, readings, improv. classics...you name it. If it is written well and executed well, there is almost no experience that theatre will allow that is not inspiring in some way.

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

A:  READ. Read lots of plays and books on the subject, also novels, poetry, anything you can get your hands on that inspires you. Write every day at the same time of day, no matter if it is even an hour, ...after a while, your subconscious will yearn for it and be ready. And pray. Pray that your characters tell you something that you don't already know. And let them write the play.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I prefer the three-pronged.


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I Interview Playwrights Part 568: Clare Barron

Clare Barron

Hometown: Wenatchee, WA

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about your Summerworks show.

A:  BABY SCREAMS MIRACLE is a play about a freak windstorm that blows down all the trees in a small town in eastern Washington state. I started writing the play for Clubbed Thumb’s Biennial Commission contest. We were supposed to incorporate all these different ingredients into a 10-page sample. I can’t remember everything but some of the ingredients that inspired this play were: the PBS documentary “Unforgettable Elephants,” Joan Baez’s “Tears of Rage,” the character of the Matriarch, a man in uniform, and body parts that don’t work right. I also wanted to write a play about religious people who use prayer to deal with their emotional/existential/relationship problems, so there’s a bunch of prayer in there too. I’m so excited to have Portia Krieger directing! And Maria Striar and Clubbed Thumb are gifts from God.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m acting in a piece about Mars and Russian cosmonauts and video games spearheaded by the awesome Ben Vershbow. I just got back from Beirut where I was working on an Arabic-English production of Maria Irene Fornes’ MUD with a theater company called Masrah Ensemble, and we’re looking for new homes for the production outside of Lebanon. Sometime between June 2nd and June 22nd I’ll be frantically writing a new full-length play and having a Bloodworks reading for Youngblood. I have no idea what it’ll be about but I think it might involve ballet…

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 was the last day of 7th grade, and a group of girls and I wanted to hold a mud wrestling competition to celebrate. We didn’t have any mud so we each whipped up a big batch of chocolate pudding and carted it over to Jennifer’s house in tupperwares and dumped it in this little kiddie swimming pool. I forgot my swimming suit and so I had to borrow one of Jennifer’s. Jennifer was athletic and golden brown and wore bikinis that were much higher cut than my sad, floral tankini so my pubic hair was tufting out all over the place. Everyone wrestled. It was super fun and I kept falling down and it was hot and the pudding was beginning to stink. A car circled past Jennifer’s yard once. Then it circled again and stopped. The man inside rolled down the window. "What is that?" he asked. I sauntered over to the car – covered head-to-toe in brown goo and so, so proud – and told him it was pudding. He looked at me and then he reached his arm out the car window and said, "Come closer. I wanna touch it." There was a moment and then we were all screaming and shrieking and the whole pack of 12 girls was sprinting down the middle of the road covered in brown goo. I remember pushing my way to the front of the pack and my legs felt so strong and the asphalt was so hot against the bottom of my feet and I was filled with total terror and total glee. Running away from Pudding Man was one of the shining moments of my adolescence. I don’t think I’d ever felt that powerful.

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

A:  More neighborhood and community theater! I think it’d be cool if neighborhoods and small towns did plays by local writers. I also think it’d be cool if people did theater just for fun like when kids put on shows for the neighbors but with grown-ups.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I’ve learned a ton from Deb Margolin, David Herskovits, and Annie Baker. I think they’re three of the most singular, daring and smart theater makers out there.

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

A:  Here’s some advice that’s helped me: write whatever you want, write from desire and don’t be afraid of writing stupid. Love yourself and show love to everyone else. Support other artists. Find people and read your work out loud. Find people you love to work with – this is the most important and meaningful thing.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A: Come to Summerworks! clubbedthumb.org

BABY SCREAMS MIRACLE
by Clare Barron
directed by Portia Krieger
May 24 - June 2

PHOEBE IN WINTER
by Jen Silverman
directed by Mike Donahue
June 7 - 16

LA BREA
by Gregory S. Moss
directed by Adam Greenfield
June 20 - 29

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Come to the Youngblood Brunch this Sunday! And come to Bloodworks this May & June! ensemblestudiotheatre.org
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And this Thursday I’ll be reading scenes from Syrian playwright Mohammad Al Attar’s recent play COULD YOU PLEASE LOOK INTO THE CAMERA? as part of Masrah Ensemble’s Doomed By Hope Theatre Series. It’s at The Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU at 5PM. masrahensemble.org

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Episode 6 of Compulsive Love

Episode 6 of Compulsive Love is here!  Watch it and previous episodes on Koldcast or Blip or Daily Motion or Boomtrain or Youtube or JTS.

Embedded #6:

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I Interview Playwrights Part 567: Jona Tarlin

Jona Tarlin

Hometown: Palo Alto, CA

Current Town: New York City

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A play called Black Dicks. It’s about a 15-year-old girl, Erin, who finds her dad’s very large collection of interracial cuckolding porn. She corners her neighbor, Vivienne, after ballet practice to get a second opinion on whether her father is racist. Vivienne suggests she create a fake boyfriend named Dante who plays on the basketball team and see what her father says.

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 5th grade my teacher asked a group of student volunteers to help write a play about the Revolutionary War. I don’t remember if we divvied up scenes from an outline or we just wrote whatever but I wrote a scene about a sewing circle gossiping while blood from the war splashed against the window behind them.

I have always had twisted sense of humor and a love of stage blood.

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

A:  Beyond lowering tickets prices and livable wages for artists, I would say no more plays that hinge on a large secret coming out. I think it’s lazy storytelling and ultimately much less satisfying than building solid characters that deal with circumstances in the present with the audience.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My first hero was Michael Litfin who directed and wrote most of the productions at the Palo Alto Children’s Theater. He cast me in my first play and was my introduction to theater. He showed me that playwrights were living breathing people and not just names on scripts.

The playwrights who are heroic to me are Tony Kushner, Edward Albee, Eric Overmyer, Gina Gianfriddo, Robert O’Hara, Sam Hunter, Annie Baker, and The Debate Society.

My writing is also influenced by the work of William Gibson, Penn and Teller, John Darnielle, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Verhoeven, Bill Waterson, Jim Henson, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I am excited by anything dark and funny with a distinct voice. Plays with rich characters struggling with extreme situations in a realistic fashion. Plays where a character can behave horribly and I will still love them.

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

A:  Celebrate when you finish a draft. You accomplished a huge, awesome thing and it’s easy to lose sight of that. After you celebrate, take some time away so the play is fresh again when you’re ready to start rewriting.

Work with the smartest actors you can. They’re gonna fight for their characters and force you to think about your play differently.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I have a reading of my play In Antarctica, Where It Is Very Warm coming up in May with Blowout Theater Company. You can find out more information about that and any of my other plays at jonatarlin.wordpress.com

 
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I Interview Playwrights Part 566: Jill Campbell

Jill Campbell

Hometown: Massapequa, NY

Current Town: Stuvesant Town, New York, NY

Q:  Tell me about your play at LaMaMa.

A:  It's about a mid career conceptual artist who is nominated for this huge grant, but there's a catch - she must create a new work in order to collect. When she's out celebrating with her best friend, ex-boyfriend and mentor, instead of being happy for her, they all seem to want a piece of her success which prompts her to question what success really means to her and to others. As she begins to work on her piece, these “friends” invade her process until she is totally stifled. She gets over this by a decision to put each of them in her work, turning the tables and flipping the play in on itself.

We're creating the actual art onstage with some cool designers and a video artist. I always imagined this as a collaborative piece and left a lot of room for my collaborators and director George Ferencz's magic. There's also an intense scene at MoMA that might get me banned from there and a hipster boy toy who creates beer bong video art. Nothing about this play is safe, so it is making me really nervous but hopefully in a good way.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I've been collaborating on a play called r u nobody 2 ? with playwrights Marya Cohn, Andrea Lepcio and Kim Merrill and directors Allyn Chandler and Elysa Marden for our theatre company, NewShoe. It's about teenage bullying. We workshopped it in the "room" at New Georges last year and after about 3 years of intense collaboration it's ready for production.

I'm also collaborating on a play with a scientist about Crystallography called Bernal's Picasso, and I'm editing a documentary I filmed in London about my playwriting mentor Bernard Kops.

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

A:  Everyone seems to make fun of Long Island, but Massapequa was a very theatrical place to grow up in. Gambino was on one side of the canal and Jerry Seinfeld's family was on the other, so as you were daydreaming about the scary mob shit going down behind the marble facades, Jerry's dad would drive by in an antique car (which I think he collected.) These sightings were the bees knees, because his dad was one of those warm hearted men who loved kids and life and got a kick out of us standing on the corner gawking at him in his eccentric car. Plus I came from a theatrical family, everyone sang show tunes and played piano and loved Streisand, and my favorite activity when I was a kid was to play "house," which I forced my friends to play with me. I was obsessed with rearranging furniture and dreaming up scenes where I was the bad teenager about to runaway. And then there was the beach club where everyone gossiped and they put on The King and I one summer; I was cast in the chorus and had the most exquisite costume, but I got an ear infection on opening night, and my mother sent me home, alone, screaming my head off (I was like 7). I cried and cried alone in my room not because I was scared, but because I was missing the party. My revenge came when I was 11, and I put on a striptease for some neighborhood boys while standing on a Cadillac in one of their garages, until someones dad caught us. Then there was Boces Performing Arts High School which saved me from some bullies at my high school which led to my BFA and theatre, theatre, theatre, until I got so sick of it all that I quit at 25 to become a New Jersey housewife. That lasted for 6 years until I wrote my first play Superbia ... and 15 years later I'm having my NYC debut at La MaMa, so it was all worth it!

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

A:  I would make it less conservative. We've seemed to make this crazy ass flip with TV where Tony Soprano is allowed to shove a woman against a wall in a bar and screw her from behind, but if we try to put that on stage (in a non-exploitative way) it's vulgar. It seems like some people are too afraid to offend their audiences or subscribers, which I think is an insult to the intelligence of those subscribers and audiences who would probably be open to being challenged by cutting edge theatre. I know there are lots of theaters that do do this, but I wish even more would. If what you're doing is authentic, people will want to see it. Which is why so much on HBO is so hot. Can we bring that back to the theatre?

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Ibsen, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, Shepard, Rapp, Guirgis, Shanley and Young Jean Lee.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Challenging, funny, intellectual,risk-taking work that lingers in my mind long after I've left the theater.

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

A:  When you think you're done, you're actually just beginning.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  www.chemistryoflove.net , May 2-19 at La MaMa also check out my website www.seagullink.com.




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Artistic Director Interviews

Peter Ellenstein
Hal Brooks
Chad Rabinovitz
Jim Simpson
Marty Stanberry
Russ Tutterow
Andrew Leynse
Mimi O'Donnell
Marc Masterson

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I Interview Artistic Directors Part 9: Peter Ellenstein

Peter Ellenstein

Hometown: Los Angeles, CA

Current Town: Independence, KS

Q:  Tell me about The William Inge Center For The Arts.

A:  The Inge Center was Founded in 1982, but had two previous, but similar, names. It sits on the Independence Community College campus in the small rural SE Kansas town of Independence. It was founded by Margaret Goheen, a close friend of William Inge’s with the intention of honoring some of America’s Great playwrights. Over the past 32 years nearly every major American Playwright has visited, from Arthur Miller and August Wilson to Neil Simon and Wendy Wasserstein. Since 2002 we have been hosting long-term playwright residencies in William Inge’s boyhood home (setting for “Picnic” and “Dark at the Top of the Stairs”). We’ve helped develop over 50 new plays and through the playwriting classes and at local rural high schools and at the college and through the 24-Hour Plays that we do each year, we’ve helped birth hundreds of short plays as well. In the summer of 2014 we’ll be helping, with many of the towns other organizations, create ASTRA, a unique multi-arts festival which will feature four plays in Rep, music events, visual arts, literary and everything in-between.

Q:  How do you choose playwrights for the programs?

A:  I’ve chosen them from recommendations, chance meetings, longstanding relationships and open submissions. We choose the playwright, not the play. The playwright chooses their own project and we help them, as best we can, with the resources we have, to take the next step in that project.


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

A:  My father was an actor, director and artistic director. My older brother is also an actor, director and artistic director. Sitting around my dinner table every night were theatre and film artists of all shapes and sizes: discussing, arguing, tearing apart and putting back together again every piece of theatre or film or TV that was recently seen. By the time I was 16 I had the equivalent of a PhD in theatre. And then I started doing it, which was where my real education began.

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

A:  I would have much longer rehearsal times, so that we could have a better chance to make real art, rather than just “getting it up”.

Q:  If you could change one thing about The Inge Center, what would it be?

A:  I wish we had the funding to host several more playwrights per year.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Good theatre. I am excited by all kinds of theatre when it is done exceptionally well. And bored to death by all types of theatre when it is done badly. I don’t particularly care for theatre that is hopeless or only points out problems that are obvious without shining new light on them. I want theatre to make me feel more alive in some way, not deadened or depressed.

Q:  What plays or playwrights are you excited about right now?

A:  Well, There are countless playwrights that excite me. At the moment we’re casting this year’s Otis Guernsey New Voices award-winner, Sam Hunter’s new play for a reading at the Inge Festival. I’m very excited about his work, as I see a distinct connection between his writing and Inge. Very few playwrights deal with empathy and forgiveness and both Inge and Sam do. I’m also always an advocate for my good friend Richard Hellesen’s work. I’ve directed him a lot, and I always learn new things. But There really are a great many wonderful playwrights out there these days.

Q:  What do you aspire to in your work?

A:  Having a real effect in some way with whatever I do. Either helping people become more sensitive or increasing their knowledge or allowing introspection or maybe just detoxing through laughter. I don’t care much for mindless entertainment that is just past-time. I strive to make the experience holy in some way, so that people feel that they’ve grown or changed or enhanced their life for having sat in the dark for a couple of hours.

Q:  What advice do you have for theater artists wishing to work at the Inge Center?

A:  Bring your own fresh produce.


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Episode 5 of Compulsive Love!!

5th episode of my web series Compulsive Love is here!  Watch it and previous episodes on Koldcast or Blip or Daily Motion or Boomtrain or Youtube or JTS.

Embedded #5:



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I Interview Playwrights Part 565: Kirsten Vangsness

Kirsten Vangsness

Hometown: Porterville & Pasadena CA

Current Town: Los Angeles, CA

Q: Congrats on the LA Weekly nomination. Tell me about the show you were nominated for.

A: I was Nom. for best play of the year for the play I wrote, Potential Space.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now, I am finishing up the season of CM (where I play Garcia, and I also help write her lines), and I working on a one person show I am doing at the Hollywood Fringe Festival and also rewrites on Potential Space which I will be re-mounting in the fall.

Q: How would you characterize the LA theater scene?

A: The L.A. theatre scene is a vibrant, quirky, wonderland. It's almost like a magical city within the city that you have to KNOW about to know it's there, folks sometimes think L.A. is a vat of TV Shows and people wanting on TMZ, but in reality there is this vibrant world of creatives making new content for the stage. Theatre is where the conversation starts, we are the great birth-er of dreams and ideas and often no credit goes to it. I am so honored to be part of it.

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 had a lisp that made it impossible to understand me sometimes and dyslexic so at school I had speech therapy for years and a reading class, it consisted of me having to talk endlessly to the speech pathologist and have her correct me and write letters and read things and learn the way other people saw things (the right way). I loved telling her stories, I loved to see her look pleased and I loved the paradigm shift my brain would make when I could understand how a word looked and was spelled the correct way-- that are so many ways that things look different to different people. I feel good when I can bend words and see people smile or understand a thing because of how I chose to say it.

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

A: MORE ATTENDANCE.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Scott McKinley. Helen Mirren. Teresa Rebeck. Eddie Izzard. The entire company of Theatre of NOTE.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I love a play cocktail of funny, absurd, & sexy with a good dash of high stakes.

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

A: WRITE. Just write. And Delight yourself, write what your soul longs to know and read and play in.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: Starring in Kill Me, Deadly the movie opening later this year written by Bill Robens

Mess written by me, at Theatre of NOTE during the fringe festival (don't have dates yet)

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