I Interview Playwrights Part 104: Nick Jones

Nick Jones

Hometown: Anchorage, Alaska

Current Town: Brooklyn, New York

Q:  Your rock pirate puppet musical Jollyship the Whiz-Bang just had another run at the Public.  How was that? 

A:  It went great, but it was intense. We never even got to run through the show in the space. We loaded in the day of, did a cue to cue, and then they let in several hundred important people.  But we knew it was going to be like that, and I think we were all mentally prepared. I watched the Tyson documentary a few nights before and I took great inspiration from that.  I didn't have sex that morning, then worked myself into a frenzy before the show, and went out there prepared to bite ears off! 

Q:  Are there any other performances of it coming up or of your band?

A:  There continue to be interested parties in JOLLYSHIP, but as usual, it's a matter of financing that will determine where we go next.  I don't think we'll play out as just a band anymore. After our Ars Nova run, we did a few shows just as a band, and I felt like people were disappointed, because they wanted the whole extraganza. Fair enough... We'll only do the full version of the show from now on, if we're able.  We're trying to get over to Europe this summer. 

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I have a commission from Center Theater Group for a new musical called HOMUNCULUS, which is a fake German folktale about an innkeeper who makes a little man from the notes of an alchemist who dies in this lodge.  Everybody is incredibly awful to the little man; they make him fight chickens and sneak into ladies' homes to spy on them, and then he grows up with serious...issues. I've just started writing it, but I'm imagining it like Pinnochio, as told by Bukowski or Kroetz. Dave Malloy is doing the music and Sam Gold is directing.

Q:  You're at Juilliard right now.  Who are the other playwrights there at the moment?

A:  My esteemed colleagues include: Fernanda Coppel, Fia Alvarez, Greg Keller, Andrea Ciannavei, Joshua Allen, Molly Smith Metzler and Jon Caren. We all go sledding together every Sunday.  They're all great writers. 

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

A:  Okay well I grew up in Alaska, and when I moved to New York I realized I wasn't nearly Alaskan enough.  I mean, people seemed interested in my being from such an exotic place, but I didn't have very many experiences climbing mountains and fighting bears and whatnot.  I hadn't even seen very much of the state. So when I went home for the summer, I decided I wanted to stock up on Alaskan experiences.  This ended up meaning taking a bus to Fairbanks by myself, then hitchhiking to a random mountain I found on a map in the Park and Game office.  I had wanted to go with friends, but couldn't find any who didn't have to work, or who weren't more interested in hanging out in Anchorage smoking pot.  The first 3 guys who picked me up asked me to show them my gun before getting in the car.  I didn't have one.  They did, every single one.  They all wanted to show me their guns.  One of them even stopped the car in the middle of nowhere so he could shoot off a few rounds.  He told me it would be "short and sweet" so I assumed there was a chance I was about to be murdered, but he only sprayed a bunch of bullets into the trees, with a machine gun, and I was grateful, because that was actually pretty exciting.  I can't remember his name, but he said he was in Vietnam, and that he ate porcupines.  Anyhow, eventually I went so far north that I couldn't really hitchhike anymore, because there were no cars passing, which is when I realized how stupid my whole idea had been.  The Vietnam guy let me off at some kind of trailhead, and I pitched my tent for the night, planning to hike in the next morning.  It doesn't get dark in the summer in Alaska, so I spent most of the night staring at the silhouettes of 2 million mosquitos trying to stick me through the walls of the tent.  And the sound of them!  My god, it was deafening!  In the morning, I walked about 100 yards and then freaked out. I ran back to the road where the Vietnam guy was waiting in his truck to take me back to Fairbanks (he must have had a good read on me).

So, I think that was supposed to be my rite of passage into manhood, and I failed it.  So now I remain eternally youthful, immature, and fancy free.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Right now I'm trying to see as much as possible of the Under the Radar shows, and I'm having a great time.   I loved "L'Effet de Serge" and "Once and For All We're Going to Tell You Who We Are... (the thing with the Belgian teenagers).  Both of these shows are really smart without being pretentious.  They are humble, and they express joy, in a way you can only really appreciate as a live experience. I try to see all kinds of things, but I try to get recommendations first, before seeing things with pretentious sounding titles.  I'm a little scared of titles with parentheses and slashes in them. I think seeing a bad play is about the worst bad art experience you can have, because you're stuck in it, and in most cases, you paid a lot to be there, too. Seeing bad self-indulgent experimental theater is a whole another level of awful - its total torture.  But anything that I leave feeling it could have gone on longer...I think is brilliant.  And I saw "Gatz" in Portland which was at least 6 hours long, and that was one of the most amazing things ever.

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

A:  Do a lot of different things, work in a lot of different fields.  Don't just write; act, and direct and play the ukulele. All those things reinforce each other, and they get you out in the world where real things actually happen (off the laptop, out of your head).  Most importantly, don't just wait around for someone to do your play.  Why would anyone want to do that?  You're the one who wants your play done, so you go do it!  You can fail as many times as you want while nobody cares. Do so. Those pie in the sky mythical producers aren't going to help you with your play until it's already a proven commodity (or you are).   Make plays to entertain yourself and your friends, and if you keep doing it (like if you keep doing anything long enough) you will develop, and you will wake up one day and realize you have a THING...a THING you do which is your own, that you do really well.  Don't be ashamed by that thing, just keep developing it until its too huge and awesome to be ignored, even by the square old people we all so desperately want to impress, so we get a BIG SHOW produced somewhere. 

Q:  Any plugs?

A:   "STRAIGHT UP VAMPIRE: The History of Vampires in Colonial Pennsylvania as Performed to the Music of Paula Abdul" is performing 2 shows at Joe's Pub on February 10 and 11th. This is a co-written show, with serious copyright issues, so was never meant to be more than a one-off lark.  We've brought it back at least once a year for over 3 years because people like it so much, and its so easy to stage.  A great, fun, totally retarded ("but surprisingly intricate" - the New Yorker) play for Valentine's Day.  The great Corn Mo plays Benjamin Franklin. 

Also, the JOLLYSHIP CD "It's Not the Moon's Fault" is finally finished and available for purchase through paypal (http://thewhizbang.org/moonsfault.html).  It will be on Itunes in a few weeks...

I Interview Playwrights Part 103: Dylan Dawson

Dylan Dawson

Hometown: Minneapolis, MN

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q: I just saw a reading of a play of yours with Naked Angels. Can you talk a little about that play and how it came about and the horrible discrimination tall people have to deal with?

A: Yes, thank you, Adam, it’s a serious problem. “TALL (A TALE)” stars and centers around Will Rogers – the actor soon to be seen in Lincoln Center’s When the Rain Stops Falling, not the vaudevillian cowboy – and what happens when he decides to have his shins removed in a questionable (and completely non-existent, I hope) medical procedure so that he can star in a major Hollywood film. Having once been a struggling actor “of height”, I thought it would be nice to write something for a bunch of similarly un-stunted actors, and finally reveal some hard truths about what it’s like to get hit in the face by umbrellas all the time. People just don’t know.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I just wrote a short little something for the 52nd Street Project, which is where all the cool 9 to 18 year old kids in Hell’s Kitchen hang out apparently. I started mentoring there a few months ago, and fell completely in love with the work they do. It’s great to see kids learn about conflict resolution through the creative process of making a play. And selfishly, it’s good for me to be reminded of the freedom theater allows, like, oh I can write a play about a pair of dice, and the problems they face while randomly doling out the fate of others! You know, or something…

I also have a short play coming that’s a part of the goddamn incredible Ars Nova’s Play Group show, Missed Connections NYC. The evening is based on those guilty pleasure craigslist posts of the same name. Mine is titled “Chuck E. Cheese” and explores a meeting that takes place in the seventh circle of Hell that is that loud and grimy institution. There might be a full length in there, who knows?

Other than that, I’m trying to choose what next to write. I tend to go off of titles, and so far I have “Models In Space!”, “…I’m Going To Find Out!” and “These HANDS!” Something with an exclamation point at the end of it. We’ll see. I’m also working on a play about a pair of dice and the problems they face while randomly doling out the…no I’m not, just kidding. Maybe.

Q: Are you still driving a truck or do you have a different day job?

A: I am no longer driving trucks at the Public Theater, no. You know someone just reminded me that it was about three years ago this week when I knocked down pretty much the entire scaffolding structure they have out front there, endangering the lives of dozens of hip and innocent Under the Radar patrons in the process.

No, these days I’ve been doing work as a documentary researcher, or rather rockumentary researcher as the subjects I’ve been dealing with thus far have been the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, exclusively. It’s a sweet job, ideal for me as a writer really. And I work from home, so the only life in jeopardy is my own.

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

A: I don’t know what it is with kids and potions, but when I was in kindergarten, my friend and I agreed to make these secret magic potion thingies that we thought, or rather decided, would turn us into werewolves. And by potion I mean just every awful thing I could find around the house. Pickle juice, chocolate sauce, rubber cement – I think my mom stopped me just in time from adding Clorox or something. And then I drank like two unfortunate sips and waited, and at dinner when nothing happened, I broke down crying because I wasn’t the Wolf Man. So my mom did the logical thing and took me to the store to get werewolf makeup, which I immediately applied and ran outside, howling at the moon for the rest of the evening. I proceeded to tell my friend the next day that my potion had worked brilliantly and that I couldn’t understand why his hadn’t.

I don’t know if that explains my writing, but as a person I’ve matured very little since then.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Boy, you know, I’d like to say something important here, but really just anything that entertains me or keeps me riveted in the theater excites me. Anything that doesn’t make me wish I was at the movies instead. Maybe that makes me part of the problem, I dunno. I just saw L’effet de Serge at Under the Radar, and that was about the most entertaining thing I’ve seen all year, but entertaining in a way that could only happen in a live, shared space. L’effet de Serge and Avatar. That’s entertainment.

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

A:  I still consider myself very much starting out, and therefore feel weird giving out advice. Writing is such a different shitshow for everyone. All I’d say is share your work. When you finish a draft of something, buy three bottles of wine, invite your friends over, get them as drunk as you can while making sure they’re still cognizant enough to be critical, and just have them read the damn thing. My other motto is “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” So be sure to get people who challenge and even intimidate you to take a look at what you’re doing. Also, apply for everything, and don’t worry about getting rejected. I love collecting things, and am garnering a fine collection of rejection letters, I must say. All I can hope is that someday they’ll be worth something.

Q: Any plugs?

A:  The aforementioned:

YOU ARE HERE: NEW PLAYS IN NEW PLACES at the 52nd St Project. The other writers include: Carly Mensch, Don Nguyen, Lloyd Suh, Karen Trott, and Emily Chadwick Weiss. All shows are free, but reservations are strongly recommended. You must call 212.642.5052 to book seats

Friday, January 29 @ 7:30 pm
Saturday, January 30 @ 7:30 pm
Sunday, January 31 @ 3:00 pm

MISSED CONNECTIONS NYC at Ars Nova. The other writers include: Annie Baker, Bekah Brunstetter, Kristoffer Diaz, Zayd Dohrn, Tasha Gordon-Solmon, Amy Herzog, Sam Hunter, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Steven Levenson, Matthew Lopez, Janine Nabers, and Samuel Brett Williams. (You are missed, sir!)
January 27 – 30th at 8pm. Tickets at https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/704705.

I Interview Playwrights Part 102: Pia Wilson

Pia Wilson

Hometown: Hillside, NJ

Current Town: Montclair, NJ

Q:  Tell me about the reading you have coming up in Harlem.

A:  I'm going to be a part of Classical Theatre of Harlem's Future Classics reading series with my play, RED ROOSTER. We're going to be at The Schomburg Center on January 20th at 7pm. 

I really love this play.  It's about a Hurricane Katrina survivor and her hopes for a new home.  It was inspired by a trip I took to New Orleans about 18 months after Katrina hit.  When I went into the Ninth Ward, it looked like Katrina had hit the day before.  Talking to the people, they said they needed the story told.  They didn't think people in the rest of the country knew how much they were still suffering.  This is partially my way of telling the story.  The play is also infused with family stories, since both of my parents were from the South: Mom, Alabama, and Dad, South Carolina.

Q:  You're a part of the Public's Emerging Writers Group.  What's that like?

A:  It's like being part of this really talented family.  Before I was in the EWG, I was sort of an island in the theater community.  With the EWG, I'm part of an intimate community of artists, and through the EWG, I was introduced to the NYC theater community at large.  And the theater community is just full of some fun people!

During our year, we met some fantastic playwrights.  We also got to observe two shows behind the scenes.  So, I got to watch Oskar Eustis direct HAMLET and Liesl Tommy direct THE GOOD NEGRO.  They were amazing experiences, and I got to work with Liesl on my EWG reading in June 2009.  Don't ask me what kind of deal I had to make with the Devil to make out like that.

I really view The Public as my artistic home.  Mandy Hackett, Liz Frankel and Lisa Kopitsky all worked so hard to make sure we felt like a family.  And we do!

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

A:  Well, there is no one story that explains who I am as a writer. I meandered about, experimenting with different kinds of writing, until I hit on playwriting, which was right for me.

If I remember correctly, I started writing poems in a class in grade school because we were making calendars for our parents.  The teacher really loved my poems and so did my parents.  From that point on, my mom and dad pretty much decided writing was my gift from God and that it should be encouraged.  My entire family -- brother, aunts, uncles and cousins -- pretty much accepted that as fact, and there was never a moment I wasn't encouraged to write. 

I remember one line from a poem I wrote in 7th or 8th grade.  I was in the Hillside Enrichment Program, and some of us got to take a summer course at Montclair State University.  The courses were just for us kids though.  We were asked to write a poem in which each line of the poem described a color in the rainbow.  I don't know what kind of dark rainbows I was looking at, but the last line of my poem said, "Black is silence."

Q:  What is Pia Quarterly?  Where can I get my copy?

A:  Ha! Pia Quarterly is my blog for now, though I do plan to publish an issue or two!  You can help me write it. 

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I am a big fan of plays with rich characters and a message.  I like political plays, and that doesn't mean you're getting lectured. For instance, I think David Henry Hwang's YELLOW FACE is a brilliant discussion on race.  It's funny and has a strong human element.

Tracey Scott Wilson's THE GOOD NEGRO was a great piece of work to me.  Well-crafted with a beautiful realism to it.  I actually felt like I was watching a piece of history unfold on stage.  The story was strong as was the message behind it.

I like plays with heart like Eisa Davis' ANGELA'S MIXTAPE.  It also asked the question of "Who am I in relation to my family?" It was a fun, engaging piece. 

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

A:  For writers just starting out, I'd advise them to read some books on drama writing.  Look at your scripts with a hard cold eye.  Read them out loud to hear them.  Then start rewriting.  The writing is in the rewriting.  Don't hand over a piece of work, promising to fix it later. 

On the fun side, get out at mix and mingle.  Go see plays and get to know the community.  The New York theater community is wonderful. 

Oh! And write how you write -- not what you think people are going to produce.  Have an artistic vision and be yourself.

Q:  Any plugs?

A:  Aside from the reading with The Classical Theatre of Harlem, I'm also going to be a part of three short play festivals in February:

- A GODDESS ONCE will be part of Horse Trade Theater Group's The Fire This Time Festival (Feb. 4-7) in NYC.
- WHATEVER AND DELICATELY will be part of Teatro del Pueblo's Political Theatre Festival (Feb. 18 - March 7) in Minnesota
- THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RED SEA will be part of Three Monos Ensemble's Minutes Before... Short Play Festival (Feb. 28) in NYC.

I Interview Playwrights Part 101: Theresa Rebeck

Theresa Rebeck

Hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q: Can you tell me a little about The Understudy now at Roundabout?

A: It's a backstage comedy about an understudy rehearsal for an undiscovered Kafka play which is running on Broadway, starring two action stars. It was a complete fluke that our play ended up running in New York at the same time Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman did A Steady Rain. We thought that was pretty funny. Anyway we are running now until January 17. The play stars Mark Paul Gosselaar as Jake, the movie star, Justin Kirk as the understudy, and Julie White plays the stage manager.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I'm working on a new play for The Magic Theater in San Francisco. It's based on a one act I wrote in 1992. I'm also working on commissions for Denver Center Theater and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

Q: You have also written TV, films and novels. What sort of mental adjustment has to be made to move from one medium to another? Which come(s) most naturally?

A: Well, it is easiest for me to write plays. I like every aspect of working on them, the first draft, the characters talking in my head, taking it all apart again for later drafts, readings and rehearsals. On the other hand I HATE the politics of New York theater and it's really taken a toll on my interior life. I like writing novels because it takes so much more time and it's a much less brutal world, politically. My editor and publisher, Shaye Areheart at Random House is extremely rigorous with me but so kind and supportive--which finally I feel like writers need. And then there's television, which can be brutal as well. But I like how fast television is, and right now I'm working with collaborators who are wonderful.

Q: The life of a writer has ups and downs. Do you have any advice on how one navigates that?

A:  I actually have written a whole book about this, Free Fire Zone. So for my full answer to this question you should go read that book. The thumbnail answer is that Show Business truly can and will drive you crazy and so you have three choices: 1. Quit; 2. Stay in it and be driven crazy; or 3. Stay in it and figure out how to be happy and sane in spite of the horrors. For me that means a lot of things like going to the gym, taking yoga classes, meditation, reading the Tao Te Ching, going to the movies. Trying not to care that other people are more famous and successful than me. You just have to work on it every day: Don't get driven crazy by Show Business.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like theater that tells a story, that has great acting, that has beautiful language and at least a few really good laughs. I want to be emotionally moved and intellectually provoked. I want to see something that opens my spirit and moves me to empathy.

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

A:  I think that young playwrights should spend more of their time working on the basics of playwriting--scene work, dialogue, character, action. I think they should try to hear the rhythms of language in their own idiom. I think that they shouldn't worry so much about being "unconventional." A friend of mine recently confessed that younger writers are being taught, in some programs, that anything "conventional" is not cool. I think that's catastrophic thinking. Too many young writers spend so much time trying to be post modern that they don't finally write about anything at all.

Q:  Plugs please:

A:  I have a new novel coming out in May, Twelve Rooms With a View. Also I want to reiterate that I think Free Fire Zone really is a good read for anyone in this crazy business. I tell a lot of funny stories about horrible things that have happened to me, and there's also lots of useful information in it, like what the difference is between a studio and a network, or how to talk to movie stars. You can get them both on Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.com.

requests, please

Who are the playwrights you would most like to see interviewed that I have not yet interviewed?  I can't do everyone, and not everyone may necessarily want to do it but I am interested to hear who you want to hear from.

my 2009 in review

In ’09 I had a total of eight productions of six different full length plays.  I was able to attend six of them.  Four of the productions were from published plays.   I also had another play published in ’09 and managed to get my first TV job.

For the first half of 2009 I was still living in Minneapolis looking for 12 dollar an hour temp work, riding my bike everywhere so I didn’t have to pay two dollars for the bus. I was also in New York twice for extended periods because of two shows I had that went up.  We left MN at the end of June and I was in CT for about two weeks and then I headed to Atlanta to work on that TV show and was there for about five months working extremely long hours and getting paid two to three times more than I ever made as an administrative assistant in New York. Now I’m in a cottage on a lake in Connecticut.  It’s been kind of a crazy year.

Oh, and I interviewed 100 playwrights, many of whom are friends of mine.  What else?  I wrote a couple new plays and five or so episodes of that show.   Kristen and I bought a car.  Again, I have the feeling like I didn’t do enough this year.  I’m impatient at how long it takes to do everything.  I have a lot to write and don’t know when I will get to it. 

Anyway, Happy New Year.  I don’t know what is next for any of us but I hope for an adventure.

Stop Whatever You're Doing

and read this book!!

Are you a playwright or an artistic director?  Thinking of starting a theater company?  Thinking about going to grad school for playwriting?  Read this first.

It's depressing, surprising, astounding and a must-read.

(full disclosure:  I was one of the 30 playwrights interviewed for it in a round table a little while back.)

100 Playwright Interviews

Me
Arlene Hutton
Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas
Lucas Hnath
Enrique Urueta
Tarell Alvin McCraney
Anne Washburn 
Julia Jarcho
Lisa D'Amour
Rajiv Joseph
Carly Mensch
Marielle Heller
Larry Kunofsky
Edith Freni
Tommy Smith
Jeremy Kareken
Rob Handel
Stephen Adly Guirgis
Kara Manning
Libby Emmons
Adam Bock
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Liz Duffy Adams
Winter Miller
Jenny Schwartz
Kristen Palmer
Patrick Gabridge
Mike Batistick
Mariah MacCarthy
Jay Bernzweig
Gina Gionfriddo
Darren Canady
Alejandro Morales
Ann Marie Healy
Christopher Shinn
Sam Forman
Erin Courtney
Gary Winter
J. Holtham
Caridad Svich
Samuel Brett Williams
Trista Baldwin
Mat Smart
Bathsheba Doran
August Schulenburg
Jeff Lewonczyk
Rehana Mirza
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
David Johnston
Dan Dietz
Mark Schultz
Lucy Thurber
George Brant
Brooke Berman
Julia Jordan
Joshua Conkel
Kyle Jarrow
Christina Ham
Rachel Axler
Laura Lynn MacDonald
Steve Patterson
Erin Browne
Annie Baker
Crystal Skillman
Blair Singer
Daniel Goldfarb
Heidi Schreck
Itamar Moses
EM Lewis
Bekah Brunstetter
Mac Rogers
Cusi Cram
Michael Puzzo
Megan Mostyn-Brown
Andrea Ciannavei
Sarah Gubbins
Kim Rosenstock
Tim Braun
Rachel Shukert
Kristoffer Diaz
Jason Grote
Dan Trujillo
Marisa Wegrzyn
Ken Urban
Callie Kimball
Deborah Stein
Qui Nguyen
Victoria Stewart
Malachy Walsh
Jessica Dickey
Kara Lee Corthron
Zayd Dohrn
Madeleine George
Sheila Callaghan
Daniel Talbott
David Adjmi
Dominic Orlando
Matthew Freeman
Anna Ziegler
James Comtois

I have a ten min play in this

This year, Smith and Kraus has combined its two annual ten-minute play books into this one volume, divided into three sections: Plays for Two Actors, Plays for Three or Four Actors, and Plays for Five or Six Actors. Now, you can get the best ten-minute plays produced during the 2008 2009 theatrical season all in one book!

In this volume you will find fifty-one ten-minute plays. All have been produced successfully. Some have even won awards. These plays are written in a wide variety of styles. Some are realistic, some are not. Some are comic (laughs); some are dramatic (no laughs).

There are a few plays in this book by playwrights who are pretty well established (Don Nigro, Jacquelyn Reingold, and Eduardo Machado are three examples); but most are by terrific new writers you never heard of, playwrights destined without a doubt to become far better known when their full-length work gets produced by major theaters. And you read their work first here!


Plays for Two Actors

Plays for One Man and One Woman
All Good Cretins Go to Heaven, Kathleen Warnock
The Can Can, Kelly Younger
Deja Vu All Over Again, Robin Rice Lichtig
Feeding Time at the Human House, David Wiener
Life Coming Up, Sharyn Rothstein
Novices, Monica Raymond
The Pain in the Poetry, Glen Alterman
Quarks, William Borden
Road Kill, William Crosby Wells
A Short History of Weather, Jonathan Yukich
Super versus Bacara Resort and Spa, Stephanie Hutchinson
The Transfiguration of Linda, S. W. Senek
Valentine s Play, Jenny Lyn Bader
A Very Very Short Play, Jacquelyn Reingold
Whistling in the Dark, Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro
Plays for Two Men
Crossing the Border, Eduardo Machado
Crows over Wheatfield (or The Nuance of the Leap), Gregory Hischak
Fragment of a Paper Airplane, Carlos Murillo
Marilyn Gets Ice Cream, Don Nigro
Plays for Two Women
Counting Rita, Patrick Gabridge
Critical Care, Bara Swain
The Grand Scheme, Jack Neary
Plays for Any Combination of Men and Women
A Figment, Ron Weaver
Tech Support, Henry Meyerson
What s the Meta?, Andrew Biss

Plays for Three or Four Actors
Plays for One Man and Two Women
The Chocolate Affair, Stephanie Allison Walker
Life Is Just a Bowl of Cellos, Ann L. Gibbs
More Precious Than Diamonds, Stephanie Hutchinson
Stuffed Grape Leaves, Damon Chua
Plays for Two Men and One Woman
After Godot, George Freek
Daddy Took My Debt Away, Bekah Brunstetter
Enter the Naked Woman, Brendon Etter
Poor Shem, Gregory Hischak
Transpiration, Vincent Delaney
Reverse Evolution, Brian Polak
Plays for Two Men and Two Women
Beautiful Noises, Scott C. Sickles
Cate Blanchett Wants to Be My Friend on Facebook, Alex Broun
Letters from Quebec to Providence in the Rain, Don Nigro
Snow, Adam Szymkowicz
Stick and Move, Greg Lam
Theft, Jerrod Bogard
Yin Yang, Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro
Play for Three Men and One Woman
A Gravedigger s Tale, Mark Borkowski
Play for Four Women
Parkersburg, Laura Jacqmin

Plays for Five or Six Actors
(Various Combinations)
The Blues Street Jazz Club Rehearses, William Borden
Cabman, William Orem
An Epic Story of Love and Sex in Ten Minutes: Chapter One, Richard Vet
Good Girl, Julia Brownell
Open House, Michael J. Grady
The Real Story, Neil Olson

Get it here.

nytheater podcasts

The podcast Matt Freeman and I did about Pretty Theft was the most downloaded nytheatercast of '09.

See the rest here:

http://www.facebook.com/notes/martin-denton/nytheatre-readers-and-listeners-choice-2009/213196562402

Listen to the podcast Matt and I did here:

http://www.nytheatrecast.com/episode.php?t=282

Playwright Interview Part 100: James Comtois Interviews Me

James Comtois was the first playwright I interviewed for this series so I thought it would be fun if he interviewed me for #100.  (Many people suggested I be interviewed for #100.  I resisted out of modesty and then realized I wasn't modest.  So here you go.)

Adam Szymkowicz 

Hometown:  Colchester, CT

Q:  What originally got you into writing plays? 

A:  I was an actor for years and then in college when I started writing, I started writing plays. I got addicted to theater but found acting scary and unsatisfying, so writing for theater seemed like a good idea.  It still does, sometimes.  I don’t feel the urge to act except when I see an actor not doing something as well as I know I could.  That happens less these days.  Most actors are better than me.

Q:  You’re also a graduate of Columbia and Juilliard.  Have you noticed an effect, positive or negative, on having post-graduate degrees with your writing and/or career? 

A:  Yes. 

Negative includes 88 thou or so of debilitating debt from Columbia.  Positive includes that I wrote a lot of plays during my years in grad school.  In addition, Juilliard has definitely helped me a great deal careerwise, although I'm still not yet where I want to be.

Q:  You spent the last five months writing for a television show.  Can you tell us a little bit about the show, what writing for it has been like and what writing for television has been like for you in general? 

A:  I signed a three page confidentiality agreement so I’m not sure what I can actually say about the show.  What I can tell you probably, without getting in trouble, is that on an average network show, you write 22 episodes over 9 months.  On a cable show (like HBO or Showtime) they write 12 or 13 episodes over 5 months.  On the show I was writing for, we wrote 46 episodes in 5 months.  We were taping three shows a week and once we started taping there was no break.  It was exhausting.

Q:  Although there are some self-evident differences, what are the biggest differences you’ve found with writing for television versus writing for the stage? 

A:  Keep in mind, I only wrote for this one atypical show.  But... it’s sort of like writing in a different but similar language.  The expectations are different.  What is considered good is different. It has also made me appreciate what can be done with 6 minds working on something as opposed to one mind.  At the same time that the voice can be diluted, other things get sharper.  It’s why some sitcoms are so funny.  In theory, you’re using the funniest joke that the room can come up with.

Q:    I’ve been making a living writing for various trade newspapers, so on one hand, I’ve been making a living as a writer, but on the other, my day job writing is so different from my playwriting I see no connection.  Do you find there’s a link between writing for television and writing for the stage, or do you find the two jobs to be completely disparate (as Andrew O’Heir once said, like “comparing apples to hyenas”)? 

A:  They’re different.  In this case, this show is vastly different from what I normally write if for no other reason than I’m a white kid from small town Connecticut and it’s about African Americans in Atlanta.  But there are other reasons too.  The 30 min format (24 min really)  is vastly different.  The structure is different.  You have to think about what your act break is and how to end each scene.  A scene is this many pages generally and there are this many of them.  It’s more like being a mechanic in some ways.  There is a lot of problem solving.  Some of the things I know how to do from playwriting are useless in the writing room and some of them are very helpful.

Q:   You’ve been pretty tenacious about getting your plays produced regionally.  You had five plays of yours staged around the country in 2009 alone (that’s not including the staged readings or having two plays published this year).  Although you covered this a bit in the comments section of one of your blog entries, can you give a little more detail about how you go about getting your work staged so frequently? 

A:  In 2009, I had 8 full length plays produced and one play published.  At this point, I don’t send out as many plays as I used to.  I do still email theaters sometimes to promote my published plays but I’m not sure how much that helps.  My agent is sending out my new plays.  I need to start doing more of that myself.  I’ve been working 12-15 hour days the past 5 months so a lot of things I would submit to normally got by me this year. 

But advice-wise, playwrights need to get their stuff out there and up on a stage.  Do whatever you have to to get your plays out there.  Send to as many places as you can.  Give your plays to directors and actors you like.  If it's not working, put the play up yourself and repeat.  And repeat.

Q:  Although you have relationships with different companies, you don’t have your own theatre company.  What are the pros and cons of being a “free agent,” so to speak? 

A:  I don’t like being a free agent.  It means I have to work harder to get people to put my plays up.  I have to show them to more people. I do have some great relationships but yeah, I wish I had my own theater.  On the other hand, I would probably be working a lot harder if I were producing my own plays.  Ideally, some theater would adopt me and produce every new play I write, preferably an off Broadway or large regional theater.

Q:   I’ll now go to one question you’ve asked all of your interview subjects: what type of theatre excites you? 

A:  I want to have a good time.  I want to laugh, I want to be engaged, I want to care.  I like plays about things.  I like crazy off the wall experiments and I like naturalism too.   Most importantly, I like a narrative.  If you’re not telling me a story, I get bored and I hate your play.  I dont' want to hate your play.  I want you to show me somethign new.  I get excited by something I haven’t seen before.

Q:    Let’s do another one of your old standards: what advice do you have for a playwright just starting out?

A:  I wrote a long post about that once.  You can find it here:

http://aszym.blogspot.com/2009/01/advice-for-playwrights-starting-out.html

Q:   Finally, whatcha got in store for us in 2010?  New plays you’re working on?  New productions?  You’ve got beans, Adam.  Spill ‘em. 

A:  I have a couple readings coming up in January and 2 or 3 productions that I know of in March.  I have a couple films I want to write, a pilot or two I’m working on and a whole list of plays I plan to write.  Oh, and a couple novels I’ve been working on.  I just have to figure out when I can do all the things I want to do.

Advice

Gary Winter pointed me to this:  Advice to Young Composers

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/the-score-advice-to-young-composers/

I Interview Playwrights Part 99: Arlene Hutton

Arlene Hutton

Hometown: Gosh, I never know how to answer that question! Although I was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, I lived the first few years of my life in Mississippi. We moved to Florida when I was eight. But my parents always called Kentucky “home.” I’m the daughter of hillbillies. There’s a lot of material there.

Current Town: New York City

Q: Tell me about your recent readings at The Barrow Group and Ensemble Studio Theatre.

A: I like writing for specific actors. I wrote RUNNING some years ago, for Seth Barrish and Lee Brock, and put it away to work on other pieces, completely forgetting about it. Actor David Arrow reminded me of it and he did a wonderful reading for me at The Players which led me to more revisions. The first public reading was at The Barrow Group with Seth and Lee, on the day of the New York City Marathon, and we’re now discussing how to develop it further. VACUUM was begun in the Catskills a year ago, at a ‘pataphysics retreat with Erik Ehn, written for Polly Adams for Octoberfest at EST and we did a workshop at HERE. It’s quite different from anything I’ve ever written, so who knows what will happen with it.
For years I developed my work at New Dramatists and 78th Street Theatre Lab. Now that I’m an alumna, or “Old Dramatist,” and things have changed at 78th Street Theatre Lab, due to real estate and economics, I’m happy to have other sandboxes to play in, happy to be developing work at HERE, EST and The Barrow Group.

Q: What else are you working on?


A: I have a commission beginning in the spring of 2010, but I can’t talk about it yet.

Q: You and Craig Pospisil wrote a play together over email.


A: Yes, we did!

Q: Can you describe how that worked?


A: For years Craig and I have talked about working together, but we’ve always been too busy. In the late summer of 2008 I e-mailed him, saying “let’s write a play together on-line.” I would e-mail him a line of dialogue and he’d e-mail back. We started with nothing planned, just lines of dialogue, sort of like an e-mailed “T. J. & Dave.” I played two of the characters and he played two others. We had met years ago in an improv workshop and we’ve worked together many times on TheATrainPlays, so this was like improvising. We were having a good time, e-mailing back and forth. And then one day he wrote and said, hey, do you know what? We have forty pages. Let’s read it. We did and kept going. It’s called OUT OF THE FRYING PAN. It’s wonderfully silly, partly because of Craigs’ terrific sense of humor and partly because we would try to trick each other at times, or set up challenges to be fixed. Once I took both my characters out of the room so he had to continue on his own for a while. Craig is one of the smartest and funniest people I know, so it’s been like playing tennis with someone better than you and seeing your own game improve.

Q: Have you heard it out loud?


A: Yes! After we finally wrote “end of play” we had a reading with some wonderful actors, including Stephanie D’Abruzzo (AVENUE Q), Ryan Duncan (SHREK), Dennis Holland (DRIFT) and Margot Avery (NICKEL AND DIMED).

Q: What is the revision process going to be like?


A: We haven’t figured that out yet! We’ve both been busy, but we hope to get back to it.

Q: You are probably best known for THE NIBROC TRILOGY. Can you talk a little about those plays?


A: Well, first of all, I never set out to write a trilogy, but I loved the characters so much that I wanted to keep spending time with them. LAST TRAIN TO NIBROC started as a one-act, just the scene on the train, written for Alexandra Geis. I wrote two more scenes and produced the full-length myself for the second New York Fringe Festival, directed by Michael Montel. That production moved to the 78th Street Theatre Lab, traveled to Edinburgh and then ran Off-Broadway. SEE ROCK CITY was written years later, at the Australian National Playwright’s Conference because I needed to write something there and I knew the characters well. There were two extra actresses available in my time slot, so I wrote them in as the mothers. That play was chosen for development at the New Harmony Project. I wrote a proposal for the third play so I could go back there again as a writer-in-residence. Each play in the TRILOGY was written in less than two weeks and then revised and workshopped over a period of time, at New Harmony, at Orlando Playfest, at the Actor’s Coop. Director Eric Nightengale has been an important part of the process and we co-produced the TRILOGY at 78th Street in 2007. Several theatres around the country have presented the entire cycle, including B Street in Sacramento and Echo Theatre in Dallas. LAST TRAIN TO NIBROC has had, what, close to two hundred productions around the country maybe, most recently at The Kitchen and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. I’m not kidding myself, though. Its popularity probably has a lot to do with the economy. The play is two characters and a bench. Only a solo show would be less expensive.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?


A: Anything with purpose and authenticity. It can be BLACK WATCH from Scotland or an elementary school doing FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.


I like physical theatre – especially the sort of work I see from international companies at the Edinburgh Fringe, at BAM, at the Lincoln Center summer festival or at St. Anne’s Warehouse. Although some of my own pieces can almost be (and have been) presented as radio plays, what I especially seek out are strong visual works.

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


A: Well, I personally “started out” after working for years on and off stage, so I had a lot of experience in the theatre before I began writing my first play. So here’s what I say to young playwrights when I teach at colleges and conferences: Learn to do everything – act, direct, make costumes, build sets – and do it for other people’s plays. Work with the best people you can find, those that both support you and challenge you to be your best. See as many plays as you can see. See readings of plays (they’re usually free!) Read every play you can. Don’t be afraid to produce or co-produce your plays yourself. Take the Commercial Theatre Institute’s weekend intensive on producing and learn everything you can about the business. Keep applying to New Dramatists and the MacDowell Colony and the New Harmony Project and all those wonderful places that serve writers and give you community. Join the Dramatists’ Guild.

I Interview Playwrights Part 98: Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas

photo by Marlene Ramirez-Cancio

Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas

Hometown: Miami, FL.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm getting my play BLIND MOUTH SINGING ready for a production in Havana. A talented Mexican writer by the name of Rodrigo Vargas handled the translation into Spanish. Even translating the title was hard. We came up with CANTO DEL POZO NEGRO. This is the first time that a Cuban theater company is producing a play by a Cuban-American playwright and I'm very pleased. I see the production as part of the ongoing process of strengthening ties and relaxing tensions between Cubans who live on the island and Cubans who live outside the island. The fact that we're able to do this today owes a lot to the bridge building work done by Cuban-American artists as varied as Ana Mendieta, Dolores Prida and Achy Obejas. I'm walking in their footsteps.

Q:  Do you find there are different challenges when writing fiction than writing plays? Which comes easier to you?

A:  Both genres are exacting for a writer. With fiction, well, getting it out into the world is less work of  course. Sometimes it feels great not to have to explain a text to, I don't know, yet another designer. But other times I feel very lucky to be able to get a text out of my head and into an actor's body. It feels less lonely. Sometimes I think that's the biggest advantage that writing plays has over writing novels, the playwright gets to hangout with actors. But ultimately I believe genre chooses the material, not the other way around. This is maybe why adaptations always make me a little sad. When I sit down to write, a mood or tone establishes itself and that almost always seems to insist on its ideal genre. Interiority, reflection, the confessional impulse -- all of that seems best suited to the page. Playfulness, affection, ghosts, history -- to me that seems better suited for the stage. It depends on the material. Interestingly though I've never had a question about where a particular text belongs. That always seems obvious. The text insists on the genre it needs. The rest of it, the differences in process between publishing and staging, those are just the lucky consequences.

Q:  Can you talk about what it's like to be a NYTW Creative Resident Fellow?
A:  I don't know of a theater that supports artists more than NYTW. The folks over there really seem to take seriously the idea that we should run our organizations in an artist-centric way. Every decision they make -- scheduling, design choices, casting, choosing collaborators -- it's all driven by artistic needs. There is an openness, an accessibility to that theater that you feel the minute you walk in. Also a kind of restless curiosity about the theatrical form and also the world. New York would be
infinitely impoverished without them. I've benefitted handsomely from their generosity, they supported me and my work during a two year residency. So many of my favorite theater artists in New York are people I've met at NYTW. I could go on.

Q:  Tell me a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A:  María Irene Fornés once asked me if I played with dolls when I was a child. When I told her I, in fact, had not, she looked at me with wonder and asked, Then how did you ever learn how to write plays? I remember this incident fondly because it speaks volumes about Irene's wondrous, idiosyncratic methods but also because it confirms my general allergy to trying to understand art by examining the childhood of the artist who created it. If you really want to pursue this line of inquiry I'd be happy to send you my father's mailing address (he's serving time in a federal penitentiary in Indiana and likes to get mail). And let me know what theories he comes up with, I'm curious.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?
A:  The surprising kind.

Q:  Is it true you make your playwriting students read books on architecture or visual art before they even start talking about theater?

A:  It's true. Those terrible books on how scripts should be written have done such a successful job of shrinking the vocabulary of our theater. There is a certain kind of well educated, middle class student who comes to theater with all of this baggage, all of these rules. Conflict, psychology, the moral of the story, the most reductive ideals about symbolism. Stuff they learned by watching the Sundance channel or listening to too many post-show talk backs. But what I also find is that those same young people have this other vocabulary around mood, environment, spatial relationships, a more visceral relationship to art that they've experienced when listening to music, walking through great buildings, falling in love or even traveling. And so part of what I try to do is get young people to see that all those other ways they have of describing experience or thinking about art, all those more mysterious and idiosyncratic insights they don't think apply to theater, well they apply.

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

A:  Remember that you aren't competing against anyone, that's the beauty of art. If you like competition try Wall Street. Be fearless. See everything. Try everything. Stay up late. Kiss people. Of both genders. Commit an act of civil disobedience in defense of a cause you care about. Make as many friends outside of the theater scene as you can. Live the kind of life that gives you something to write about -- even if that means you spend your twenties living dangerously and fully and with no time to write.

Q:  Any plugs?

A:  This has been a exciting season in New York. Standouts for me include Liz Duffy Adams's play OR, at the Women's Project (lots of cross dressing and a three-way), Tarell Alvin McCraney's trilogy at the Public (the world just seems bigger when you walk out of that theater) and Sarah Ruhl's IN THE NEXT ROOM, OR THE VIBRATOR PLAY (a play that makes you very happy you have a body). I'm looking forward to Packawallop's production of Alejandro Morales's MAREA. What a bold writer he is. Also Katie Pearl and Lisa D'Amour's collaboration this December at PS 122. Those two are visionaries and New York is lucky to be hosting their piece.

I Interview Playwrights Part 97: Lucas Hnath

Lucas Hnath

Hometown:  Orlando, Florida.

Current Town:  New York, NY.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A: Working on a couple of things right now. I’m currently finishing up work on a commission from Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The play is called Isaac’s Eye. It’s about Isaac Newton and the day he decided to figure out what light was made of by sticking a needle into his eye. It’s a comedy.

The Actors Theatre of Louisville is producing my ten-minute play, " The Courtship of Anna Nicole Smith." It’s about one of J. Howard Marshall’s many attempts to convince Anna Nicole to marry him.

There are also a couple of other plays and screenplays I’m finishing up or rewriting. Probably the most interesting of those is a play called sake tasting with a seance to follow. The play was first produced a little over a year ago. It’s an attempt to re-imagine an 18th century Chikamatsu love suicide play called, “Love Suicides at the Women’s Temple.” Instead of just adapting the original, we ("we" = Jyana Browne, Andrew Grusetskie, Kristine Kuroiwa, and myself) stage an open rehearsal of the Chikamatsu play, and at a certain point the actors begin channeling the dead Japanese youngsters depicted in the original story. From that point on, you’re watching a seance, complete with some pretty trippy magic tricks. I was really happy with the first “experimental run” of the play, and now I’m reworking it to make it tighter and scarier. Once I’m done and once we can reassemble the original creative team, we’ll probably do it again.

Q:  Can you talk about the play you were working on when we were in the 24 SEVEN workshop together?

A:  Odile’s Ordeal  – it might be my favorite play. I basically set out to write a re-imagining of Cocteau’s play, “Orphee,” as though it were written by Gertrude Stein and cast with the trio of hipsters from Godard’s Band of Outsiders. On top of all of that, the play is written to entirely be lip-synced. And it's a comedy.

When I brought the play to 24Seven, it was just a bunch of moments and scraps of dialogue. During those weeks in the lab, I was able to turn it into a decent working draft. And then after that, director Linsay Firman came in and gave me a lot of feedback that helped take it to the next level. Now the next step is to find a theatre where we can workshop the play, experiment with the play's technical aspects, and tweak those aspects to further enhance the dramatic content of the play.

Q:  You went to NYU for grad school, didn't you? How did you like that? Their program is not in playwriting or in screenwriting but in both. Did you feel pulled in one direction or another at the time?

A:  I loved NYU. I did both my B.F.A. and M.F.A in the Department of Dramatic Writing.
I do think that the program is what you make of it. There aren’t many opportunities to get your full-length plays produced by the school. Instead, you need to go out into the world and make it happen yourself.

That said, all of us who were at NYU got amazing story training. Teachers like Paul Selig and Martin Epstein would help you figure out why you're writing and your aesthetic. And then a screenwriting teacher like Mark Dickerman would put you through storytelling boot camp. So I never felt pulled in one direction or another. Rather, I felt like the two sides of the department complimented each other.

It’s also kind of amazing when I think back on who my classmates were over the course of those years – folks like Edith Freni, Ethan Youngerman, Jason Grote, Annie Baker, Liz Flahive, Itamar Moses, Anne Washburn, Rinne Groff, Gary Winter, Madeleine George, Jim Knable, etc. And I think if you look at the work of those writers, you'll notice a great balance between solid story-telling and theatrical invention.
Q:  When you write screenplays, do you have to get in a different mindset than when you write plays?

A:  Only until very recently my screenplays were all action thrillers. Very little dialogue. A lot of violence and gore. And in a weird way, to me, this feels more like writing a play than it would were I writing an indie drama walk-and-talk. When I write a play, I’m first and foremost thinking about the theatrical environment and how characters interact with it, and I find that’s what you have to think about when you write an action sequence.

On the other hand, typically my screenwriting experience has involved a lot of collaboration with and input from a producer, so that makes the writing experience very different. I find myself thinking a lot more about how the screenplay will interact with the movie marketplace.

Also, my dialogue writing skills were harder to transfer to the screen. When I write a play I’m generally letting the language get really awkward. It’s as though I’m pretending that I don’t speak English very well. That doesn’t translate so well to screenplays. That said, I think I’ve finally figured out a way to take what I do with theatrical dialogue and translate it to the screen. We'll see...

Q:  Tell me a story from your childhood that describes who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  Which story to tell... I grew up in Orlando, Florida in a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome house. We had no neighbors. We were surrounded by orange groves and there was a gun range across the street. The setting of my childhood was pretty surreal, and I think it informs a lot of my work.

On top of that, for much of my childhood my family attended an evangelical mega-church. The sanctuary where the kids' church service was held was bigger than most Broadway houses. When I was 8 or 9, I became interested in becoming a preacher and I was also really into magic. I started writing sermons that featured stage illusions – we'd called them “object lessons.” They began letting me perform these sermons, so I became something of a "minor celebrity" at the church and people would come to me to pray for them when they were sick or had problems, etc.

And then one day, someone, I forget who, had claimed that I prayed for her and that her disease (it was something really serious like cancer) went away. So after that, there was a stretch of time where more people were coming to me to be healed. It was a pretty strange experience, because I had no idea what I had done in the first place and now I was being asked to reproduce something I didn’t understand. And I wondered: What if the “power” went away? What if I also had the power to harm? There was something kind of terrifying about it.

 Most of my plays have a moment like that: A character is forced to deal with something they’ve done or created over which they have very little control, but it's something they must control or else the consequences will be dire.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  What I like to see and what I aspire to are plays that can generate contradictory emotional responses in the audience. Specifically, I like it when a play has a moment that makes the audience member feel repulsed (ewww), affectionate (awww), and then laugh all at once. I genuinely believe those types of moments are good for the brain. In the world of modern theatre, I think people like Richard Foreman, Jeffrey M. Jones, Marie Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, and David Greenspan are great at crafting those types of moments.

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

A:  Three things:

1. Find a director. Collaborating with a director can give you new tools for your theatrical bag of tricks. And directors can also be useful in getting your work introduced to producers and theatre companies.

2. Direct your own work. Every playwright should try this at least once. There’s a weird prejudice against playwrights directing their own work and I think it’s really dangerous. Playwrights are expected to just write the text and not to think about how the play works on stage? That’s ridiculous. I think that crafting your play's theatricality is as important as writing the text and building the narrative. Directing helps you develop your theatrical sensibility.

3. Study the brain. Seriously. At the end of the day, the receptacle for a play is the collective audience brain; therefore, it’s really important to understand how the brain works. I try to read as much as I can on neurology. On my stack of books-to-read I always have stuff on everything from video game design, magic theory, theme park design – anything that will help me understand how people engage with visual and aural stimuli. When all is said and done, a playwright is just using a series of old carny tricks to manipulate audience brains.

Q:  Any Plugs?

A:  Sure. “The Courtship of Anne Nicole Smith” will happen at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, starting January 13. www.actorstheatre.org

And I’d also like to plug the 24Seven Lab and the awesomeness of its founders, Sarah Hayon, Edith Freni, Sharon Freedman. Playwrights should definitely check out their website and join their mailing list. And people with big checkbooks should support them. www.24sevenlab.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 96: Enrique Urueta

Enrique Urueta

Hometown:  Born in Radford, VA; raised in Halifax County, VA; my hometown of Clover is now an unincorporated township, so South Boston, VA is the closest approximation to hometown.

Current Town: San Francisco

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  At the moment I'm preparing for two upcoming productions. My play Learn To Be Latina will premiere with Impact Theatre in Berkeley in February 2010  (read about it here: http://www.impacttheatre.com/season/0910/ltbl.php) and then in June  Forever Never Comes
goes up with Crowded Fire here in San Francisco  (see http://www.crowdedfire.org/inDevelopment.html#FNC). Rewrites, rewrites, rewrites! When I need a break from those, I go back to work on First Person Singular, my first non-theatrical text. It's a collection of prose poems about a man who returns to San Francisco to figure out how and why his relationship failed and discovers along the way that sometimes things fall apart for all the right reasons.

Q:  What theater companies or shows should I check out when in SF?

A:  There is a lot of great work being done in the Bay Area.  Berkeley Rep and The Magic are great, of course, but there are lots of smaller gems that do truly outstanding work. I'm a huge fan of Crowded Fire Theater Company, Cuttingball Theater, Encore Theater Company, Campo Santo, Impact Theatre, Shotgun Players, and Killing My Lobster. The Jewish Theater of San Francisco, Z Space Studios, Aurora Theatre Company, and SF Playhouse are pretty wonderful, too. The performance series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts never fails to deliver something exciting.

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

A:  After a battery of intelligence tests when I was in second grade,  my parents were encouraged to place me in a school that had a gifted program. Thus began the daily 20+mile commute to Halifax County Elementary School. I didn't know anyone at all there and I was a shy, awkward kid, so making friends didn't come easily. A boy in my class invited me over for his birthday sleepover and I remember looking forward to it and the possibility of new friends. The whole thing turned out to be a disaster. There were all these expectations to play basketball and football, neither of which I was good at. To make matters worse, I brought my Gizmo toy (remember? From Gremlins?) to play/sleep with, which TOTALLY sent them over the edge. The sleepover turned into this seemingly endless taunting session where I got pushed around and called names like sissy and fag. One of them jokingly said "Are you sure you're not a girl?" and everyone began to laugh. Three things became clear at this moment: 1) There was an expectation of behavior that defined "boy" and by default (through non-fulfillment of those expectations) defined "girl"  2) that "girl" was somehow less than "boy" and 3) by not fulfilling expectations of being a boy, I would be called a fag.  Of course I didn't have that language for it at the time--I wasn't rocking out the queer and feminist theory at the time-- but that's the best translation of that awareness in retrospect. It was a profound moment of realization that there were predefined roles expected of people and that these roles had rules. I've been fascinated with gender and the social expectations of gendered behavior ever since, which is something I keep exploring in my writing.

Q:  What is it like to grow up in rural Virginia as a Latino/radical queer socialist?

A:  Look at you with the Facebook reference! ;-)

It's funny, because I don't think I grew up any of those things, but rather grew into those identities. In terms of class, I have an odd history of being both of privilege and then suddenly being extremely poor. That sudden shift also marked the transition between elementary school and junior high. I went from being comfortably middle-class to being on the free/reduced lunch program. It's an awkward age in which change is palpable. It reverberates throughout my senses to this day.  The suddenness of that class shift burns that awkwardness into memory.

I grew up in an area where race was defined in terms of white and black. Looking back, it's fascinating to see how I navigated myself socially as a function of being in this seemingly undefined space. The school cafeterias were always the most self-segregated spaces along lines of race and class, and I was able to sit at either a black table or a white table without it being a question. At the time, there wasn't a large number of latinos in the area. That combined with the fact that my sisters and I spoke perfect English allowed for an amount of privilege. Ostensibly, we weren't white but the fact that we weren't black meant that we were afforded privileges of whiteness. Aside from migrant workers coming in for the summer, there wasn't a large latino presence. There was my family, which is Colombian, a Puerto Rican family, a Chicano family, and a Cuban family, and I don't recall our families ever really interacting. What I do recall is going to Colombia for the first time in 9th grade for six weeks and coming back with this realization of a cultural heritage that was incidental at best up until that point, as well as an awareness of myself as "other."

I knew that I liked guys from the age of 4, but I didn't come out to anyone until my senior year, and even then it was only to a small group of friends who all turned out to be queer anyway. It wasn't until attending The College of William and Mary (*shudder*) that I faced direct homophobia. I decided to be completely out from day one, and pretty soon I had a knife in my door. That sort of set the tone of what was to come:  slashed tires, bottles thrown at my head at frat parties (thankfully drunk people have bad aim), things being thrown at my car windshield while I was driving, being harassed by total closet cases (one of whom now lives in SF and cruised me at Gold's Gym earlier this year before I gave him a reminder of our history) and being told by campus administration that if I wasn't "so loud about it" that things like that wouldn't happen. That coupled with the overt racism I faced, both from students and faculty, made me seek out something that could help me explain what the hell was going on, why I felt like I didn't seem to fit anywhere. That search led me to taking a couple of writing workshops with Lois Weaver (of Split Britches Theater Company) who was in residence for a semester, and those workshops gave me a space to honestly and openly explore issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Those workshops left me wanting to read more about feminism, queerness, and race, so I began to take more classes that allowed me to learn more and ultimately give me the pieces of the puzzle that explained why my experience of the world was so different from everyone else around me. If anything is to blame, it's theatre. Theatre introduced me to feminism, which introduced me to queer theory, Marxism, and critical race theory. I went to college an apolitical aspiring paleontologist and left imagining myself to be the bastard child of Che Guevara and Oscar Wilde with Gloria Anzaldua as my spiritual grandmother. Wouldn't that be a fabulous lineage?

Q:  Why are you looking at me like that?

A:  Cuz I see you, Adam. Shakin' that ass. Shakin' that ass.

Q:  What is the purpose of theater?

A:  I believe theatre is a powerful space for people to gather together and collectively witness stories that make us laugh or cry or in some way move us, provoke us to think. It is a space for us to gather and see that through all our differences there is the possibility of connection. We see this through our identification with character, with story, and with each other as audience members as we bear witness together to the events that unfold on stage. Aesthetics is politics and nowhere is this more powerfully felt than in the liveness of theatre. Theatre historically has been a tool that shapes and reinforces ideologies about race, gender, class, power, and the state. As artists we can create a theatre that reinforces the social norms that keep us divided or we can use the same tools to critique the structures that shape us and bring us to a shared recognition of our common humanity so that we can move forward. I choose the latter.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind of theatre that most excites me has a depth of character, richness of story, a necessity for existence, and an awareness of itself as theatre by actively interrogating the formal, linguistic, and temporal/spacial constraints of live narrative. Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Beckett, Chekhov, Ionesco, Miller, Williams, Albee, Pinter, Sam Shepard, Michel Tremblay, Enrique Buenaventura, Adrienne Kennedy, Maria Irene Fornes, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, Suzan-Lori Parks, John Guare, Tony Kushner, Jose Rivera, Reza Abdoh.  Each of them did/do this in their own way, and I continually go back to their plays for inspiration when I'm feeling stuck. There are so many playwrights writing today whose work I'm excited by:  Sheila Callaghan, Christine Evans, Liz Duffy Adams, Juliana Francis-Kelly, Mickey Birnbaum, Octavio Solis, Migdalia Cruz, Nilo Cruz, Naomi Iizuka, Christina Anderson, Robert O'Hara, Daniel Alexander Jones, Cassandra Medley, Kristen Greenidge, David Adjmi, Heidi Schreck, C. Denby Swanson, Victor Lodato, Jenny Schwartz, Luis Alfaro, Jorge Ignacio Cortinas, Alejandro Morales, Ricardo Bracho, Evelina Fernandez, Marisela Trevino Orta, Jason Grote, Betty Shamieh, Yusef El Guindi, Abi Basch, Krista Knight, Christopher Chen, Adam Bock, Quiara Hudes, Sarah Ruhl, Carl Hancock Rux, Thomas Bradshaw, Tarell McCraney, Marcus Gardley, Eisa Davis, Zakiyyah Alexander, Sarah Hammond, Young Jean Lee, Anne Washburn, Melissa James Gibson, Paloma Pedrero, Elaine Romero, Carlos Murillo, Brad Fraser, Judith Thompson, Caridad Svich, Sung Rno, Crystal Skillman, Lucy Thurber, Ken Prestininzi, Lauren Yee, Sherry Kramer, Eugenie Chan, Peter Nachtrieb, Deborah Stein, Kristoffer Diaz, Jordan Harrison, Kia and Kara Corthron, Mark Ravenhill, Phillip Ridley, Alice Tuan, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Steve Yockey, Andrea Kuchlewska, and Karen Zacarias, just to name a few. And of course you, Adam. ;-)

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

A:  There's over two thousand years of theatrical history---take the time and familiarize yourself with the breadth of it (experimental theatre began with Euripedes). Read lots of plays. Go see lots of plays. Identify what it is you like/don't like and why. Try to arrive at a definition of your aesthetic, but allow it room to breathe and shift. Find the theatres that match your aesthetic and develop relationships with them (a good start is by seeing their productions). Practice transcribing real conversations, study linguistics, and bury yourself in poetry. Listen to music. Language is more than words, it is rhythm, melody. It has consonance and dissonance. Be fully aware of the potential (and limits) of language. Draw. Paint. Take pictures. Look at art, really look at images and composition. You create the play world on the page, and how you write the play can affect the visual translation. Don't be afraid to think imagistically, but don't direct on the page. Watch tv and film, but be aware of how theatre is different. Be nerdy about something. Anything. Be generous of spirit, of knowledge, of self. There's little money to be made in theatre, so why turn this into a competitive sport? Be happy for your friends' successes. Their success can lead to your own. Take time off before gradschool. An MFA for the sake of an MFA is not a reason to get an MFA, and it most certainly is not worth going massively into debt. Write what you know. Write what you don't know. Write from your heart. Write from your gut. Try not to write from your head. Write what you want to see, not what you think they want to see. Write about what most matters to you. Write. Write. Write. Push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Try something new in each play. Be ambitious. Don't be afraid to ask difficult questions or travel difficult terrain. Don't be afraid to fail big! Give audiences credit--they're smarter than theatres would have you believe. Not everyone is going to like your work. Not everyone should like your work. If you're not pissing someone off with your writing, you're doing something wrong. Learn all the rules of playwriting--and then fucking break them all. Above all else, have fun. Otherwise why bother?

Q:  Any plugs?

A:  I've got a big year ahead! Learn To Be Latina in February with Impact Theatre and Forever Never Comes in June  with Crowded Fire. Visit their websites and sign up for their e-mail list.

http://www.impacttheatre.com

http://www.crowdedfire.org

If you want to be on my e-mail list, drop me a line at enriqueuruetaplays at gmail.com. Hope to see you in the audience!