175 Playwrights

Andrew Rosendorf 

Don Nigro 

Barton Bishop

Peter Parnell 

Gary Sunshine

Emily DeVoti

Kenny Finkle 

Kate Moira Ryan

Sam Hunter 

Johnna Adams

Katharine Clark Gray

Laura Eason

David Caudle 

Jacqueline Goldfinger

Christopher Chen

Craig Pospisil

Jessica Provenz 

Deron Bos

Sarah Sander

Zakiyyah Alexander

Kate E. Ryan 

Susan Bernfield

Karla Jennings

Jami Brandli

Kenneth Lin

Heidi Darchuk

Kathleen Warnock

Beau Willimon

Greg Keller

Les Hunter

Anton Dudley

Aaron Carter

Jerrod Bogard

Emily Schwend

Courtney Baron

Craig  "muMs" Grant

Amy Herzog

Stacey Luftig

Vincent Delaney

Kathryn Walat

Paul Mullin

Kirsten Greenidge

Derek Ahonen

Francine Volpe

Julie Marie  Myatt

Lauren Yee

Richard Martin Hirsch

Ed Cardona, Jr.

Terence Anthony

Alena Smith

Gabriel Jason Dean

Sharr White

Michael Lew

Craig Wright

Laura Jacqmin

Stanton Wood

Jamie Pachino

Boo Killebrew

Daniel Reitz

Alan Berks

Erik Ehn

Krista Knight

Steve Yockey

Desi Moreno-Penson

Andrea Stolowitz

Clay McLeod Chapman

Kelly Younger

Lisa Dillman

Ellen Margolis

Claire Willett

Lucy Alibar

Nick Jones

Dylan Dawson

Pia Wilson

Theresa Rebeck

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 Interview Playwrights Part 175: Andrew Rosendorf

Andrew Rosendorf

Hometown: McLean, VA.

Current Town: West Palm Beach, FL.

Q:  Word on the street is you have a play at Florida Stage in the fall. Tell me about that.

A:  That street is all about getting the word out. I have to be careful what I tell it.

Last May, Florida Stage commissioned me to examine the water shortage in South Florida. I’m not from Florida so I knew very little about its history. Essentially, I had to go from being an ignorant American to someone who understands the complexity of the political and environmental issues that face Florida, the United States, and the world. The result is Cane – a play that examines how a state that was once drowning in water is now so dry. If I’ve done my job, the issues all take a backseat to a very specific human story i.e. no talking heads. And, I’m using Florida as a microcosm for the issues involving water that are currently facing the world.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  There are a few things I’ve been kicking around at various stages. I’ve worked at a sleep-away summer camp for more than half my life, so I (like many) have a camp play in me. I do feel summer camp has been romanticized while the truth of the situation gets lost. I’m getting close to being finally able to write my version.

I’ve also become fascinated by social media. I’m interested in how it affects the way we now are touching one another. Is it bringing us closer together or actually isolating us further?

Lastly, I’m bandying about a short film that I haven’t found the right way to describe yet. It has to do with how we derive pleasure from pain...I know how that sounds... It scares me...on many levels...why I feel I have to write this...

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

A:  Oh man. My childhood. Does that mean I can no longer claim that I’m a child? You know, I’ll share this because I think it is my way of answering this question: I don’t remember much of my childhood. I had thought that this was common for most people, but only within the last five years have I learned that it’s not. I remember images or get flashes of moments when I see something or hear something or smell something that reminds me of a moment, but as quickly as it appeared it disappears. I think this inherently influences – consciously & subconsciously – why writing was the way I had to go.

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

A:  The worry of producibility. I understand it. I get it. I wish it wasn’t there.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  This is going to be an uncreative list: Arthur Miller, Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Tony Kushner, Sarah Ruhl, & Aaron Sorkin

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Playwrights that have a handle on their story and find the best theatrical way to tell it. Knowing that the story could be told no other way. That the structure is influenced by the story. And theater that uses everything at its disposal – not for spectacle but because it’s in support of the emotion.

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

A:  Two things. The first is to emotionally risk in your work. When this was first told to me, it seemed as if I was stupid. Why hadn’t I figured that out? The more vulnerable you are in your writing the more it will connect with an audience. The more it will set your writing apart.

The other is not to preplan. Do your character work. Know what you want to explore. Research when you need. Have some plot ideas and signposts. But as soon as you start writing trust the subconscious. Just be there with the characters. Don’t impose or impede them. It’s worrisome, exhilarating, frightening. Inevitably your characters will take over and say something or do something that is a hundred times better than if I had their every moment planned out.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Jack’s Precious Moment by Sam Hunter which is now being produced through P73. I’ve only just begun to get to know his work and man am I blown away and inspired by what he’s doing. And Janine Nabers. Full disclosure – she and I went to grad school together. She’s sorta been all over the place this year from the Soho Writer/Director Lab to a Dramatists Guild Fellowship to Sundance. Amazing writer...taught me so much. I’m a wee bit in awe, but don’t tell her I said so.

I Interview Playwrights Part 174: Don Nigro

Don Nigro

Q: Hometown, Current Town:

A: I was born in Canton, Ohio (I think where the hospital used to be there's a theatre now) and now live by the woods just outside Malvern, a small town in east Ohio where my father was born. His parents were Italian immigrants. My mother's family were pioneer folk and I think at least one Delaware or Wyandot lady is also in there somewhere. I hope so, anyway.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I've found it's bad luck for me to talk about what I'm writing until I'm almost done. Hemingway said that if you talk about it, you kill it, and that's the case with me, although perhaps it's different with sane people. I'm not superstitious about it, but somehow talking about a play while I'm right in the middle of writing it seems to shut the door that leads to that bizarre subterranean place where all the good stuff comes from. I just finished a play called Mysterium in which Freud and Jung are on a boat in the middle of the ocean at night having an increasingly shrill disagreement about which one of them is hysterical when the Nazis start manning the life boats.

Q: How many plays have you written? If my count is correct, you have 48 plays published by Sam French. Does anyone else come close to that? Is it possible that you have written more plays than anyone else ever has?

A: You're correct that Samuel French has published 48 volumes of my plays so far---but some of these are collections, so the total number of published plays is more like 135, I think. But French has also recently added all the as yet unpublished ones to its online catalogue, so the total number available for leasing through them is now at 322, I think. I know that sounds like a lot, but you have to take into consideration that I have nothing else to do here but watch the squirrels. Lope de Vega wrote about 1800 plays, so I don't think I'm going to catch up. In fact, I don't write all that quickly. It's taken me ten or fifteen years to finish some plays. If they don't feel right I put them aside and pick them up again next week or next year or whenever. It doesn't really matter how much you write, as long as you're completely immersed in it while you're writing it. You just sort of trust the voices and see what comes out. It's the way I investigate the world.

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 wrote about this in a play called The Dark. I'm four years old, helping to dust my books and toys in my room when suddenly my brain just goes to this other place, and I realize, this isn't me, I'm not this child with this name living in this house, I'm actually somebody else entirely. I'm---and then my mother is shaking me and saying, Hey, where were you? and I'm sitting there with the dust rag in my hand trying to remember where I just was, what my real name is, only I can't. I had those experiences, gradually less and less intense, all through my childhood, that sensation of having come from another place, of almost being able to remember who I really was. Some years later, I took a wrong turn in a building and stumbled into an empty theatre, and suddenly had this intensely eerie feeling that I was back there, in that other place before I was born. It still feels like that to me.

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

A: I think the American confusion of a thing's value with its ability to generate capital is tragic, and has always crippled and polluted the theatre here. Hit and flop are code words for profit and loss. This is an enormously short-sighted way of looking at art, which is an investigation into possible truths through imagination. The imagination comes first. Everything else in civilization follows from that. Theatre is the imagination made flesh. A society that sees art as trivial makes itself systematically stupid and ultimately destroys itself.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, Chekhov, and a lot of British and Irish drama from about 1950: Beckett and Pinter, early Bond and Arden, Peter Barnes, Stoppard. Non-dramatic work that's been important to me: Yeats, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Proust, Borges, and that masterpiece of surrealism, the King James Bible. Also Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: You can find sudden, numinous, stunning, riveting theatre in the oddest places, often not where you're expecting it at all. It can happen just about anywhere. And even when it's misguided and inept, there's often something weirdly holy about it, in odd moments, if you just look, and give yourself to it. As Yogi Berra said, You can see a lot if you observe.

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

A: Don't take my advice.

I Interview Playwrights Part 173: Barton Bishop

Barton Bishop

Hometown: Tampa, FL.

Current Town: Astoria, Queens, NY.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’ve got a new play going up in the fall here in NYC, via the good and wonderful people at the New York Theatre Experiment. It’s called Up Up Down Down. The title’s a video game thing, a reference to the Konami cheat code from the original Nintendo days, but it’s also a reference to bipolar disorder (well, lookit that, that there works on TWO levels!). It’s about geeks and terrorism and video games and family and paranoia. And it’s a love story. It should be great!

And I recently(ish) finished a play trilogy I was working on for quite some time. That was cathartic in all sorts of ways. I originally thought they were three separate pieces, but, I’ve decided to insist that (and I may be shooting myself in the foot here..) – whatever happens, wherever, whenever, however – the plays receive their world premiere as a whole, as a trilogy, in rep.

With the initial writing of those scripts sort of wrapped up (for now), I’m tinkering away on several new projects. One is a play about a socially impossible Southern blogger, a fanboy of all things geek who finally finds the love of his life only to lose her to a small zombie uprising. So now the uprising is over, the zombies are quarantined on an island, things are back to normal, and our guy’s got her chained up in the basement and he’s trying to keep her a secret and keep her alive, hoping they find a cure. It’s a whole letting go thing, playing with how the inability to move forward after a loss can devour you and those around you. Literally. And – as of now – I’m playing with having it move back and forth between “before” and “after,” so we can see the reality of their relationship contrasted with how he’s romanticizing it now that she’s (sort of) gone, forgetting all the things that weren’t working, etc.

I’m also working on a new play about a hipster high-school music teacher who discovers her existence is an accident in the space-time continuum and that she has to be “deleted” in order to stop the universe from tearing apart. Pardon the pitchtastic way of talking about it, but I’ve been thinking of it as a kind of It’s A Wonderful Life and Our Town meets LOST thing.

So yeah... I’m hoping to have a readable draft of one of these projects wrapped up by the end of the summer.

You know, it’s the ongoing tug-of-war, though, the day jobs, the side gigs, etc, finding that balance, trying to figure out which hands to bet on… I mean – I’ve held down my financial fort for the last 7 years by adapting anime into English. I don’t speak Japanese, I get rough (and usually hysterical) translations and I rework the dialogue / adapt it. Depending on the company and the project, I sometimes end up rewriting the material entirely, tweaking the narratives, characters, backstories, changing stuff around… It’s kinda fun because I have to work with the pre-existing animation so it’s an exercise in working within strict limitations. I often say it feels like doing that New Yorker caption contest at 30 frames per second. The work has actually taught me a lot about dialogue structure. But – you know, this was one of those gigs that I fell into after grad school and I thought, “cool, I’ll do this for a while.” ….and then somehow it’s 7 years later and I’m working on what MIGHT be my 400th episode…

I’m also writing for a video game company right now, which is a geek dream come true, I won’t lie. I’m actually incredibly excited about the gig. I’ve always been passionate about the medium and where it can go. I’ve been a lifelong gamer, owned almost every console since the Atari 2600… In a lot of weird ways, I feel this deep personal connection to gaming, it’s like - We were childhood friends. We took our first baby steps together. We grew up together. We matured together (though both of our maturations are arguable). We had sex with an alien hooker while driving an Ice Cream truck 95 miles an hour against freeway traffic in order to escape the Zombie Pig Cops From Mars together. So many memories.

But – so yes – to try to bring it all back – I sometimes (and I think a lot of writers I know feel this way) find myself trying to figure out what to focus on, how to divide my creative energies, etc… You know – “in this crazy modern world of ours.”

I’ll admit it, the question “what are you working on now?” can actually send me into a neurotic panic, within seconds I’m going “I don’t KNOW! I can’t DECIDE, I don’t know WHO I AM, I don’t know what I should BE DOING!! WAAAAH! GIVE ME BEER AND ICE CREAM”

….But then I calm down and remind myself that I’m one of those people who thinks variety is a good thing. Especially for writers. It’s good to hop around, step away, come back… It’s that whole breathe in / breathe out thing. Everything can inform everything. And there’s no rush.

Um.

Did I answer the question?

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 ran away from home once. But I wasn’t allowed to cross the street, so I just wandered around my block until I got hungry. Then I went home.

Wait, no. I’m not sure I like what that says about me.

I’ll tell you another one – In fifth grade, this dickhead in my class walked up to me and said “Hey, did you know that if you put an F in front of your name, it would spell fart!?” And I informed him that, “No, actually, it would spell FBart.” The kids around us laughed. At the dickhead. It was in this moment that I realized the true power of the wit. It was great. And then the dickhead beat the hell out of me.

I had no idea what was cool when I was a kid. Here’s another story – When I was in, like, fourth grade, I committed my first theft. I stole a cassette copy of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required album from a friend’s dad. I think I was hoping it would have “In The Air Tonight” on it. It didn’t. Either way, I thought it was the best thing ever. I even asked my mom if I could get my hair cut like Phil’s. She informed me that Phil’s “haircut” was called a receding hairline bordering on baldness and that I didn’t want that. I didn’t care, I thought Phil was a badass. He looked so intense and awesome. Fortunately, I soon went on to discover R.E.M. and Zeppelin and New Order and straightened myself out.

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

A:  I would magically find a way for theatre companies to not have to rely on the failing not-for-profit model.

Oh! - ..and I’d make directors and actors and artistic directors and producers subject to ongoing talkback and feedback sessions in which me and my playwright friends (and an audience, of course, free admission!) can tell them how we think they can fix their work and better do their jobs.

No, no, I’m kidding, I’m kidding, I’m kidding! …Calm down, YOU! It was a joke!

But really – less development crap. Edward Albee once said “The best way to support a young playwright is to produce her first five plays.” That’s as true as it gets. A reading can only get you so far. But I think most plays reach that point – and I think this happens relatively early on in the process – where they need more than a reading. A play needs a director and some designers and some actors, all of whom are coming together and giving the play more than just a few quick hours trying to figure out where to put the music stands and whether or not there’s going to be bottled water. Everyone involved needs to get to know the play as intimately as the playwright knows it, to give it the same respect and consideration, and, really, to have something at stake. Just like the writer has something at stake. The best rewrites I make are the ones I make during rehearsal. Because a trust system starts to form, I don’t know – something kinetic and binding happens during rehearsal that just can’t happen in a reading. The conversation stops being “We might do this play if you make it more like this,” and it becomes “Shit, we’re ALL in this, this thing is happening, let’s do what we can to make it rock.”

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Anyone who made it happen or is making it happen or is gonna make it happen someday.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Live nude theatre!!

..No…

….Um…

You know, I imagine I might’ve – at one point had a list of prerequisites. Rules For Enjoyment. I don’t know anymore, I honestly don’t. It’s on an “I know it when I experience it” basis. I will say that honesty is nice. And I tend to respond to sincerity of heart in whatever form it takes. I’m definitely a heart guy. I don’t really respond to intellectual or aesthetical exercises if there’s no heart beating at the center of it all. I feel like real heart is the one thing you can’t fake. Everything else is wallpaper.

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

A:  Find a creative home. Find the people who know you and who get you and who get what you’re going for. They can’t be Yes People, though. They have to challenge you. But the most important thing is that they know you and they get you. Don’t bother too much with the people who don’t. If you do and you’re not careful, they’ll turn you into something you’re not.

I Interview Playwrights Part 172: Peter Parnell

Peter Parnell

Hometown: Douglaston, Queens, NY

Current Town:  Manhattan

Q:  What are you working on now?


A:  I’ve been working on two stage musical projects. One is a new book for a musical from the 1960s called “On A Clear Day You Can See Forever”, originally written by Alan Jay Lerner, with music and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane. It’s a project the director Michael Mayer approached me about doing. The other is a new musical, for which I’m writing the book, with music and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, for Susan Stroman to direct. So, although I’ve never worked on a musical before, I’m starting at the top.

Q:  You're the head of the membership committee at the guild. Why should every playwright join the Dramatists Guild?

A:  There are many reasons. One of the foremost is that, although we’re not a union, we’re the only organization in the country which advocates for playwrights in concrete ways, including offering free legal advice, as well as informing them of the current standards regarding many types of play contracts. The Guild is also active in rigorously defending copyright, and in protecting playwrights with regards to ownership of their work. There are many areas which, whether you’re a beginning or more experienced playwright, it’s important to know about. What are your basic rights regarding a production? What does it mean to have approvals of production elements? What kind of billing and royalty payments are you entitled to? What does it mean to sign over a portion of your play’s future income to a third party, and how obligated are you to do so? Some of these and other issues are undergoing changes right now, and the Guild is at the forefront of the conversation. And I should add this isn’t only about the so-called Commercial Theater. It’s about the not for profit arena, from the major LORT theatres to the smallest theatres – anywhere, in fact, that you’ve written a play for a paying audience. But—and this is more of an emotional argument, I guess – we all know that playwrighting can be a tough profession, and is also collaborative, in that your allies in getting your vision across are actors, directors, and designers. But who understands best what it’s like to be the person who first faced the blank page? Other playwrights. We’re all part of a community that can offer strength – and understanding, and comfort—in numbers.

Q:  You adapted the novel of the Cider House Rules into two stage plays. What is the challenge of adapting someone else's work and how do you decide what to leave in and what to take out?

A:  I’ve worked on a couple of projects that involved adapting source material.

Cider House was one, and it came with a fairly specific mandate. Tom Hulce, who loved John Irving’s book, had brought it to Jane Jones, who had founded a theatre company in Seattle called Book-It, which used the complete narrative voice in dramatizing various short fiction for the stage. Book-It had never done a full-length novel before, and knew they needed a writer to help shape, and then dramatize, this enormous, picaresque book. So, I knew from the beginning that I had an acting company, and, once Dan Sullivan at Seattle Rep got excited about the idea, a theatre in which to put the play on. Tom, Jane and I decided early that needed two plays to tell the story. The challenge for me was finding a theatrical style that was faithful to John’s voice, but allowed for dramatic rather than fictive movement. It took me a long time to find it. When I did, it was by starting to dramatize a small section of the book I felt most comfortable with, and dissecting it, doubling back over John’s repetitions and rhythms. I had remembered reading an unfinished Thornton Wilder play, The Emporium, based on a Kafka novel, (but set in an orphanage and a department store!) It was wonderful, and it had a style that felt right for Irving’s novel (not only, but partly, because it, too, is set in an orphanage). This section ultimately became the second act of the first evening (which was in three acts).


I wrote a lot more of Cider House than we could use, but of course we couldn’t dramatize all the characters and events that take place in the book. But we got in a lot. Both evenings combined took eight hours in Seattle. When we went to the Taper, we cut it down to six.


There’s an aspect of mimicry that happens with this kind of adaptation. You have to become so familiar with the original voice, it has to become so a part of your bones, that you feel you can create as if you were the author himself. Something very touching happened after John Irving saw Cider House. There’s a moment in the second play, in Dr. Larch’s death scene, in which he imagines ballroom dancing with some of the many women who he saved (and, most importantly, one he didn’t save, who haunts him throughout the play). John told me that the ballroom dancing surprised him because, though he never put it in the novel, his original notes had contained this characteristic of Larch’s, that he loved to ballroom dance. It was as if I had gone into John’s head, and pulled this image out.


Q:  Besides having plays on and off Broadway and in large regional theaters, you have worked extensively in TV drama. How does one navigate between the two worlds and how do you find time to do both?

A:  When I was starting out as a playwright, there was still a bit of a stigma attached to writing for TV. I didn’t actually work on a TV script until Aaron Sorkin and John Wells invited me to be a part of The West Wing in 1999. By that time, more and more playwrights were becoming involved in both being on staff and in writing pilots. Now, I think we’ve entered a kind of new golden age in writing for TV, and cable shows especially are finding provocative, exciting ways to tell stories. And it’s important for a playwright to learn the techniques of TV writing, if only to make a living while you’re working on your next play. I find the forms quite different, but that may be more because of the kinds of plays I write. Writing for TV is a job, and highly collaborative, and you’re often not the final arbiter of what gets on the screen (including your credit). But, you learn how to work quickly when you need to, and how to solve creative problems quickly, and you can get paid nicely for your time. These are not necessarily bad things.

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

A:  When I was in fifth grade, I wrote and starred in a school play called Captain Goodwill’s Friendship Tour. I don’t remember very much about it, except that at the climax of the show, when everybody was expecting the main character to return to America, and sing “America the Beautiful”, I had him stay in England and sing “For He Is An Englishman” from H.M.S. Pinafore. Even then I was an Anglophile, and even then, though I didn’t know it, I was already gay. But the thing I remember most about it was that, after I got cast as the lead in my own show, my best friend, Jeffrey Cohen, called me up and, trying to disguise his voice, told me that if I accepted the role of Captain Goodwill, I’d be beaten up the next day outside of class. I knew it was Jeffrey who called, and after I told my mom, she called Jeffrey’s mom (who told her for some reason Jeffrey was now crying), and SHE insisted Jeffrey get on the phone and apologize to me. Which he did. What did this teach me? To always be prepared for a bad review from SOMEBODY, I guess. It may also help account for an unhealthy inhibited narcissism (rather than an unhealthy but at least uninhibited narcissism) that has made possessing naked ambition an area of conflict for me my entire life.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Anything that works.

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

A:  To write, and not be afraid of rewriting. To try to keep in mind what originally excited you about an idea, and to also be willing to let go of it. To listen to those you really trust, but also stand your ground. In other words, stay flexible. And if somebody invites you somewhere, always say yes.

I Interview Playwrights Part 171: Gary Sunshine

Gary Sunshine

Hometown: Seaford, New York

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A: I've been in LA since November working as a staff writer on HBO's "Hung." Right before I left home, I did a workshop of my new play at New Dramatists called GOOD DEEDS FOR A WEARY WORLD, and it was recently workshopped again at Theatre of NOTE in LA. And I just finished up a screenplay for Starry Night Entertainment called MOSCOWS, about a secretly wealthy young librarian and her obsession with her college acting teacher.

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

A: When I was about 11, I was cast as the Scarecrow in the Maplewood Day Camp production of "The Wizard of Oz." I was a tiny kid with a big head and a really big voice, which may explain why the drama counselor gave me a song from "Pippin" to sing--one usually performed by a 70- year-old woman. For the slow, sad verse at the top of the song, they had me sit at the lip of the stage a la Judy Garland, and sing into a microphone with a long cord. And then they had me burst to my feet and belt
out the chorus "Oh, it's time to start living, time take a little from the world I'm giving..." The Maplewood Day Camp audience ate it up (at least in my memory of this). This has always felt like a seminal experience. It made me love theater, love connecting with an audience, and, most likely, it made me pretty gay.

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

A: I'd go back to the time when plays didn't have to be considered perfect to go up, because it was more important for as many voices to be heard as possible, and not much money was riding on each production. I'd minimize "development" because ultimately, you don't learn all that much about your play from readings--you learn from productions.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Chekhov. Albee. Sondheim. Kushner. Fornes. Used to be Beckett but I think the older I get, the more reluctant I feel to face what he has to say about the world. I hope that changes for me.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A: Funny, I wanted to say "theater that looks and sounds nothing like TV" but if it's done well, I could care less. Theater that tells the truth and makes me pant.

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

A: Connect yourself to creative "homes"--where you feel safe enough to write in ways you'd never imagined. Get your work out there and build up a community of peers whom you can share the process with and make theater with.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Watch HUNG on HBO this summer!

I Interview Playwrights Part 170: Emily DeVoti

Emily DeVoti

Hometown: Sheffield, Massachusetts

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY



Q:  Tell me please about your play currently running at New Georges.


A:  It runs through May 22nd!  The play is called MILK, and it’s set on a dairy farm in rural Massachusetts in 1984, on the cusp of Reagan’s second election.  It’s about a couple about to lose their family farm, when a wealthy NYC businessman offers them an obscene amount of money for the right to bring his family there and “teach them values.”  It’s about the courage to deal with change.  It’s about the economic reality beneath our shifting American landscape.  It’s about Blondie, Stan Smiths, young love, 80s music, and the role of comedy in our lives.  Something I’ve learned from the play is that so many people have associations with farms, usually from their childhoods, and foster nostalgia for them.  So, as it is for me, the nostalgia for a rural landscape blends nicely with nostalgia for youth and the pain of reinventing oneself, growing up in order to survive.  My boyfriend (Joe Roland, another playwright) brought one of his adult education students to the play, and afterwards the student said it reminded him of growing up in Honduras!  (His grandmother had a farm.) I love discovering there is universality there.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just finished a re-write of my play DIRT, my play about a Pre-Raphaelite poet and his 18 year secret, cross-class love affair with a maid of all work.  The poet also took photos of working class women, and navigated his unconsummated relationship with his lover in a way clearly ringing of a dirt fetish.  Last spring, I had a reading of it at The National Theater in London—the wonderful director Max Stafford-Clark (Out of Joint Theater, former Artistic Director of The Royal Court) read it and helped to bring me over there.  It was a great experience and hearing the play in London, where it takes place, helped me to see the story anew and dive in and make the final touches on the play.  I’m also just starting a commission from Shakespeare and Company (Lenox, MA) and Colorado Shakespeare Festival.  In loose affiliation with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, they’re commissioning an American History Cycle of plays, to try to create for America what Shakespeare created for England: a way to preserve and tell the story of our past through our own political and subjective lens.  On another note, I’m also writing a screenplay in collaboration with a director—it’s about a very modern romantic love quadrangle.

Q:  You're one of the editors of the theater section in the Brooklyn Rail. How has that affected your perspective on writing or theater?


A:  I started The Brooklyn Rail twelve years ago with friends during my first year as a grad student at NYU/Tisch in the dramatic writing program (where I got my MFA).  At first, we didn’t cover theater.  I actually prefer to write about life: political angles of the ordinary, essays.  However, after a few years, I saw an opportunity to create a theater section as a place where we don’t write criticism—I actually don’t believe in criticism, as it is only one person’s point of view and its power over public perception is dangerous—but where I could create a space for writers to speak with one another in public.  So, we do preview pieces, interviews, and—my pet project—In Dialogue, a column where a playwright reads the work of a peer, interviews her/him, and then writes an essay incorporating text from that writer’s work.  What the Rail did for me is give me the opportunity to be generous with my peers.  There are so few opportunities in theater that it can make us competitive with one another, but I think that we are stronger when we are supportive of each other. 

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


A:  When I was a kid, I liked to lock myself in the trunk of the family car, then jimmy the lock to try to get myself out.  Sometimes, my family wouldn’t know I was in there, and once they even took off with me locked in there.  I like dark places.  I like to listen to people and sounds when they don’t know I’m there.  I like to close my eyes and observe the world.  I also like getting out of tricky places, so with my writing I sometimes set up tricky situations, then love the challenge of finding my way out.

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

A:  Access.  I think that downtown theater, and new plays, have the power to reach people outside of the theater community.  But I feel that because of lack of funds for advertising, and audiences’ lack of awareness below the belt of 42nd street, that our conversations are kept small.  Our conversations could be much larger, and I would love to see that happen.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?


A:  Caryl Churchill is the writer who has touched me most profoundly.  When I first read her work, it sparked recognition in me. Partly because the roles of women are so vibrant, bold and unsentimental.  And also because of how she explores history.  In her writing, history is a vivid place in direct relationship to our present times.  It’s not a distant object to be held up and ogled.  Her plays dig into it and attack it with surprising anachronisms.  Most of my plays are historical works, too, but they are not costume dramas.  I feel that history is a greatly unexplored element of American theater and life.  “We” (as a general American populace; and I know I’d being reductive here) don’t want to look back.  We want to look forward and live “in the moment,” yet when we do look at history, we are surprisingly sentimental.  But actually, we live in history every moment—it informs what we do, who we are and who we can become.  I also have been very influenced by Tony Kushner as an example of how a writer can be at once highly political and intellectual and yet deeply hilarious and accessible; forging a certain kind of model I can strive to live up to.  Tony also read and was supportive of my work when I was just starting out, and I will always admire and learn from his generosity.


Q:  What kind of theater excites you?


A:  Honest theater.  And by that, I don’t mean realism, necessarily.  Theater that comes from something lived, something that you can recognize that percolates up through whatever medium the story is told in.  I can’t know it until I hear it.  But when I do, it’s very exciting.  I also am a real believer in comedy—not the genre of comedy, but comedic touches—I believe that as comedy and tragedy are twin sides of each other, good comedy has deep roots of hard truths in it.

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


A:  Associate yourself with a theater company you admire—volunteer, help out, become a friend.  Don’t feel obliged to see theater that you think is hip and cool, and to be influenced in that direction.  See the shows that you think you will like and want to be able to write, but also be open to surprises.  Don’t try to write like writers who are already successful.  Find and honor your own voice and vision.

Q:  Plugs, please:


A:  Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks!  It’s running in June, and it’s their last year at the OHIO Theater.  Anne Washburn’s play THE SMALL is awesome, funny and dark; her voice is always brilliant.  And Kate E. Ryan’s DOT should also be great.  Also, Madeleine George’s wonderful play ZERO HOUR, which will be produced by 13P June 22-July 11.

I Interview Playwrights Part 169: Kenny Finkle

Kenny Finkle


Hometown:  Miami, Florida


Current Town:  New York City


Q:  Tell me please about your play now being performed at the Old Globe.

A:  The play that was at the Old Globe is called “Alive and Well” and is a two-character comedy about a Civil War re-enactor and a Reporter who get lost in the Virginia wilderness together while looking for The Lonesome Soldier – a Confederate Soldier that some locals have sighted and believe to be the real deal… It’s ultimately about America’s love/hate romance with itself. It had its premiere this past fall (Sept 09) at the Virginia Stage Company, who originally commissioned and developed the play.


Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  In July, my new play “Penelope, of Ithaca” is going to open at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, NY which has been my artistic home away from home for the last 10 years. They are opening their brand new theatre this summer and “Penelope” will be the first new play in the space.


In June I’m going to go out to Steamboat Springs, Colorado with the Atlantic Theatre Company to workshop my play “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”.


I’m also in the midst of a rewrite of a commission for commercial producer Matt Murphy.


And finally I’m working with this very cool theatre company – Operating Theatre – on a production of my play “Transatlantica” (which was done at the Flea in 2002) for October in the city.

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

A:  Growing up there was this bully on my block named Billy and he used to come over to my house, like once a week to beat the hell out of me.


The first few times he beat me up, I tried to fight back to get him to stop but I didn’t really know how to fight back - I never learned to fight. I think probably my Dad tried to teach me but I was stubborn and refused to learn…


I didn’t tell anyone that this was going on and never asked anyone for help. I basically just spent a lot of time in my room thinking about how I could stop Billy from beating me up. I also spent a lot of time in my room wearing my mom’s nightgowns and dancing around pretending to be Olivia Newton John. Needless to say, neither the dancing nor the thinking helped me solve my problem.


And then one afternoon I was watching “Facts of Life” (my favorite TV show growing up, except maybe for “Diff’rent Strokes”, “The Great Space Coaster”, “Small Wonder”, “The Love Boat”, “Fantasy Island”, “Dynasty”, “It’s a Living” and “Maud”) and Blair’s cousin Jerry, (remember her? She was the one that had cerebral palsy) came on the show and she was wearing that famous t-shirt – “I’m not drunk, I have cerebral palsy” and that somehow made me think of me and Billy and I thought that if I laughed while Billy was whaling on me maybe that would do the trick (now I wonder how I possibly came to this conclusion and I also wonder if this somehow connects to my love of really rough sex…but I think that’s probably a subject for another kind of interview at another time…or maybe not…anyone reading this that wants to discuss rough sex and where the desire for it comes from, feel free to get in contact).


The next time Billy came by to beat me up, I tried my laughing tactic and it totally freaked him out. I remember him stopping his assault and looking at me with a real sense of curiosity…like what strange creature is this?


Billy never came by to beat me up again…and I missed him.

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

A:  I have this kind of ridiculous idea that theatre artists should have these cards that are given out by a “Committee” that tells them how much time they are allowed to use on stage. Every theatre artist starts out with 10 minutes of stage time at the beginning of their career and each year they are evaluated and given more or less time depending on how they used the time they had allotted. If they were able to fill the 10 minutes completely, then they could move on to 15 minutes and so on and so on. Sometimes artists would be required to go back to smaller amounts of time if they abused the amount of time they had. Sometimes artists could advocate for more time but they’d have to prove that the time was really needed. This idea of course brings up a whole bunch of problems and questions – but I feel like I go see shows all the time that are 15-20-25 minutes too long and I think – “if the Committee had given them less time, this play would have been fantastic!”

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  In no particular order:

John Guare

My Mom

Madonna

Craig Lucas

Moises Kauffman

John Cameron Mitchell in “Hedwig”

Cherry Jones in “The Heiress”

Kevin Moriarty

Jeremy Dobrish

Sheri Wilner

Peter Flynn

Kate Walat

And everyone else in the Good Writer’s Group

Eugene O’Neill

Prince – but not now, back in like the pre and post “Purple Rain” time, probably up to around 1990…

Bjork

Gina Gionfriddo

Jason Schuler and the Operating Theatre

Beth Whitaker

Jack DePalma

Peter Flynn

Chris Hanna

Nicky Martin

Donald Margulies

Robert Anderson

Susan Bernfield

Chekhov

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I’m pretty open as far as style/type…I just need my theatre to be passionate, true, daring and as lean as possible without losing the juicy parts.


I was most recently excited by the Orphan Home Cycle and Keen Company’s production of “I Never Sang for my Father”.


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

A:

1. Make your writing your first priority and figure the rest out as you go.

3. Don’t worry about the order of things until the very last minute

2. Take your time getting an agent.


Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come up to Ithaca at the end of July and see my play “Penelope, Of Ithaca” – it’s a hot hot romance and Ithaca is pretty cool too..If you come, I promise to buy you drinks all night at Stella’s Atomic Lounge.

Also

Do you know about these theater podcasts?


http://www.nytheatrecast.com/

I Interview Playwrights Part 168: Kate Moira Ryan

Kate Moira Ryan

Hometown:

My hometown is Yonkers, New York.

Current Town:

Currently I live in Brooklyn Heights section of NYC.

Q: Tell me about Bass For Picasso.

A: In Bass for Picasso a food writer for The New York Times throws a dinner party for her friends recreating recipes from the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. The guest list includes Pilar, her multilingual art detective lover, who has spent time in Guantanamo for visa problems; Bricka Matson, a lesbian widow with a small child and Republican in-laws who are trying to gain custody; Joe, an OB/GYN whose lover is a geographically challenged crystal meth addict; and Kev, a playwright who has recently fallen off the wagon and written a soon-to open Off-Broadway play about all of them.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: Oh God, what am I not working on. Christian Parker the Associate Artistic Director at the Atlantic Theater said to me this weekend that I am probably the most eclectic writer he knows. I am working on the book to a musical loosely based on Diana Oughton, a member of the 70’s radical group the Weathermen. (She got blown up in the townhouse on West 11th street.) David Clement is doing the music. With Linda Chapman (my collaborator from the Beebo Brinker Chronicles), I am working on the obscenity trial of The Well of Loneliness, a rather dour groundbreaking Lesbian novel written by an equally dour woman by the name of Radclyffe Hall. And this summer at Williamstown, Judy Gold and I will be continuing our long time collaboration and will be presenting her latest one person show, It’s Jewdy’s Show, My life as a sitcom which will be directed by Amanda Charlton.

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, when I was a child, I wanted to be a boy. I think being a boy for me meant not wearing little smocked dresses that my mother had sewn and being able to play with as many guns as possible. Well, I was sent to this very sweet Presbyterian nursery school where they sang songs in French and the teachers seemed like they were 105. One day as I was playing dress up, I put on the batman cape and I was told to take it off because girls did not wear batman capes. And I refused. And I was made to sit in the corner. The great thing is that when my Mom picked me up, she agreed with me. I mean I wasn’t daughter she expected, but my mother has always been an unabashed feminist.

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

A: I would have my work done more. I would lower the production values on new plays and do a ton more new plays. I would cast more disabled people in abled roles. I would call my company ephemeral theater- I’d get the work up, get it seen and then move on to the next one. I’d do the work of emerging, established writers. And I’d also make it cross cultural. I love Eastern European work. This past year I did an adaptation of Olga Mukhina’s play TANYA TANYA for the New Russian Drama Festival at Towson University.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: I love Stephen Sondheim and Tom Stoppard. I am also a huge fan of Moss Hart. I also love the work of my contemporaries like Doug Wright and I have to say David Pittu’s WHAT’S THAT SMELL-will always be among my top ten faves.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Theater that’s fun, inventive and a little off, but you know I am an old show tune queen, so slam me into a seat watching Sweeney Todd and I am in heaven.

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

A: Produce your own work, don’t be afraid to try TV to support yourself (I wish I had) and work on as many different types of vehicles as possible. Don’t ‘write what you know’ there’s a great goddamn world out there and the public library to find out about it-write what you want to know.

Q: Plugs:

A: Come see BASS FOR PICASS0. You can get twenty dollar tiks by going on ticketcentral.com and putting in the promo code staf (f). It’s a very fun zany play that is horrifying the critics by how demented it is. And the best part is I get you in and out in 75 minutes.

I Interview Playwrights Part 167: Sam Hunter

Sam Hunter

Hometown: A town called Moscow in northern Idaho.

Current Town: New York.

Q:  Tell me about the play you have coming up with P73.

A:  It’s a play that for a long time was called GOD OF MEAT—now it’s called JACK’S PRECIOUS MOMENT (I seem to frequently do this thing where I have an initial title which is replaced by a better one later on). It was the first play that I wrote during my PONY Fellowship year with the Lark, and I developed it in the Lark Playwrights Workshop and with the Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco. Page 73 eventually got a hold of it, and I got to know them a bit better last summer at their Yale Residency. That’s also where I got to know Kip Fagan, who is directing the show and is one of my new favorite people.

The story centers the family of a man from Idaho who went to Iraq for contract work and ended up being beheaded on video. The play takes place shortly after the release of the video and centers around his fundamentalist Christian family who travel to the Precious Moments Chapel in Missouri to find a solution to their grief.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I’m just starting rehearsals for my play FIVE GENOCIDES which will be in Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Festival, and directed by the amazing and talented Davis McCallum. Also, my play THE WHALE is being workshopped in PlayPenn in July with Hal Brooks at the helm, and I’m working on a commission for Partial Comfort Productions that will be produced in September.

Also, I’m officiating a wedding in July in Idaho for my best friend from high school—my third wedding as an officiant!

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’ll tell three, but I’ll keep them short.

When I was about 12, I was riding my bike home from the video rental store and when I didn’t slow down as I approached a blind alley, I got hit by a pickup. My bike went under the front wheel and I was thrown over the hood and rolled off onto the ground. Moments later, I stood up—not a single scratch on me—and carried my bike and VHS tape home.

Five years later, I had just transferred to a different high school, and one of my first days there I ate a sandwich from a food co-op a few blocks away. I didn’t realize it had a whole bunch of peanut sauce in it. Now, I knew I was allergic to peanuts at the time, but having never had a truly severe reaction to them, I wasn’t as careful as I should have been. I immediately went into anaphylactic shock; my lungs filled up with fluid, and I suffocated. I was entirely purple by the time the ambulance got there. I don’t remember much, but I do remember the moment of letting go—and the moment of being revived thanks to an obscene amount of epinephrine being pumped into my veins. The peanuts eventually worked their way through my system and I got through it, luckily without permanent brain damage.

Five years after that, I was in a refugee camp outside of Hebron working with these guys named Mohammed and Ihab who were part of a theater company there. Around 3 AM, the Israeli Army raided the camp and we all hid. My curiosity got the better of me though, and I went out onto the deck to look. As one of the armored jeeps rode by, there was a huge explosion and I fell down to the floor. I looked up and Mohammed and Ihab were making fun of me, because it was just a sound bomb.

Point is, both in terms of my life and my writing, I often feel very stupid, and very, very lucky.

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

A:  First and foremost, speaking as someone who shops in the big-and-tall section, the seats are too small. Second, I’d love to see more playwrights-in-residence at theaters in NYC and around the country. There are so many great theaters out there, and so many playwrights in those communities who need artistic homes.

Also: health insurance, please.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The second I try to identify the kinds of plays that I like and don’t like, I immediately see a play that proves me wrong. Normally I might say that I don’t really care for subtle naturalism, but the brilliance of writers like Emily Schwend and Annie Baker quickly prove me wrong. I think the one thing that is a requirement for me is guts and originality. Guts meaning the willingness to take chances in form and content, and originality meaning offering something more than what I can get for free from a good movie on the Hallmark Channel.

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

A:  Stop it. No, just kidding.

First, business-wise: buy a laser printer. Seriously. The most important thing I ever did when I was just starting out was buy a printer that could handle me printing out the five to ten scripts a week that I was printing out to send to every single developmental and workshop opportunity I was eligible for. My first year at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, the lovely Sarah Hammond showed me a spreadsheet she had made where she listed all the places she had sent her scripts, and it taught me a valuable lesson. You have to be your own agent. The first few applications and artist statements are going to be incredibly annoying and time-consuming, but it gets easier as you do more and more of them. Back in the day I could throw a full application together in less than 20 minutes. The trick is to send out so many applications that when the rejection letters come, you barely remember submitting and therefore don’t really care.

Second, artsy-wise: be careful about labeling yourself. The moment you decide what kind of writer you are, you limit your writing. Don’t be scared to write the kinds of plays you may think you don’t like.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Go see Greg Keller’s fantastic play DUTCH MASTERS, produced by Labyrinth at the Cherry Pit. Greg and I were classmates at Juilliard and apart from being a kind and generous guy, he’s a crazy talented writer.

Also, if you find yourself in Connecticut this Summer, go see Molly Smith Metzler’s funny and devastating play CLOSE UP SPACE at the O’Neill.

And some shameless self-serving plugs: Go see my play JACK’S PRECIOUS MOMENT, produced by Page 73 and directed by wonderful Kip Fagan, at 59E59. Performances start May 21st. Also, go see FIVE GENOCIDES, directed by the amazing Davis McCallum, produced as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks 2010 at the Ohio (perhaps your last chance to see something there), starting June 13th. Also in Summerworks this year: DOT by Kate E. Ryan and THE SMALL by Anne Washburn. Finally, Partial Comfort has commissioned me to write their Season 8 show, which will open in September at the Wild Project.

Here are some great things you should check out

A bunch  Profiles of Women Playwrights

Theatrespeak interviews

Zach's People You Should Know

5 questions from Clyde Fitch Report's Leonard Jacobs

Portraits of artists and playwrights by Peter Bellamy

I Interview Playwrights Part 166: Johnna Adams

Johnna Adams


Hometown: Austin, TX

Current Town: Astoria, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I have several plays jockeying around in my head, vying for attention. The one that is actually getting written at the moment is a two-person 90 minute play that I am tentatively calling Nurture. It is my first boy-meets-girl kind of script, although my boy and my girl are so seriously screwed up, it is also a satire and black comedy—not at all a (shudder) romance. In addition to that I have an ambitious idea for another verse play (a companion piece to my rhyming verse play Lickspittles, Buttonholers and Damned Pernicious Go-Betweens) taking place in England over the course of a wacky Regency-area house party. Seven women all trying marry one man. A sex-farce in rhyme. I also have three prequel play to the Angel Eaters trilogy in my head, a West Texas tragedy set in the 1950s, and a tentative plan to develop a script about the eighteenth century Bluestocking Circle with my friend, dramaturg Kay Mitchell.

Q:  You moved from LA to NYC not too long ago. How is the theater different there on the West Coast?

A:  Surprisingly, the companies I worked with (mainly in Orange County) are similar to off-off New York companies in quality of work. There are some wonderful storefront theaters that I was privileged to work with back there. The main difference is that there are a lot more small companies in New York. No theaters out in LA are formed by playwrights looking to produce their own plays, either. They are almost exclusively formed by actors looking to showcase for industry, or just in it for the love of theater. The 99 seat contract that the LA theaters work under is more generous to producers than the showcase contracts. While actors are looking to use theater as a spring board to film and TV industry success, playwrights don’t have any real expectations of their plays moving on to bigger productions any where. Some playwrights hope to have things optioned for film—but not moved on to New York. Having even a really small off-off production of a ten minute play in New York is considered a very big deal by most playwrights in California. Most playwrights send their plays out to contests and query large theaters, something that I don’t see most New York playwrights doing.

Q:  Isn't Flux great? Can you tell me about the trilogy of yours they did in rep?

A:  Flux is beyond great. Flux is the most generous, open-hearted and supportive group of people on the planet. The trilogy was a once-in-a-lifetime, beyond my wildest dreams adventure. I am still amazed that they tackled the project and pulled it off so beautifully. It was a miracle to me. I am still, however, apologizing to everyone I meet for the third play, 8 Little Antichrists. I still think it had some great ideas in it that I am proud of, but it was a hot mess. I am so happy that Gus got nominated for an IT award for his fantastic work as Ezekiel in that play, though. That made it all feel worth it. I loved getting to write in such an epic scope and hope to write more plays in what I am consider a cycle instead of a trilogy now.

Q:  How many trilogies of plays have you written? Do you set out to write a trilogy or does one play just lead to the next?

A:  I have written three trilogies, Angel Eaters probably holds us the best. My plays Cockfighters, Tumblewings and Godsbreath are all part of a trilogy I call The Cockfighters Trilogy. That had a reading in Los Angeles a few years ago by Bootleg Theater, but production plans were scrapped because, again, the third play was a hot mess. In that trilogy, Cockfighters and Tumblewings are two unrelated plays that are linked together by the third play. It is very much a precursor to Angel Eaters and deals with same themes. And I have a trilogy that is so old, the first play was written on a Brothers electric typewriter in the early nineties and I no longer have a copy of it. It was a family saga about a family dealing with murder and alien invasion. In a departure from the later trilogies, the third play was the only producible play, The Miracle of Mary Mack’s Baby—which has been produced twice by STAGEStheatre in Fullerton, CA.

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

A:  Just like in my play Rattlers, the undertaker who prepared my mother’s body for burial was in love with her when they were children. And I really do have a second cousin named Snake who takes visitors on tours of rattlesnake nests and participates in rattlesnake rodeos. I visited him when I was 16 and got to touch rattlesnakes. He gave me a box of rattles he had cut off the snakes to take home. The entire cab of his pickup truck was lined with snake skin. He used to throw a live rattlesnake into his pickup when he parked It somewhere and called it his car alarm. Recently someone he took out on a tour got bitten and died (I think of a heart attack). Rattlers, scarily enough, is actually my most autobiographical play.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that makes me laugh a lot and then unexpectedly cry. Theater where you can feel the air leave the room for a minute as the audience holds their breath.

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

A:  Think quantity over quality. Too many playwrights get bogged down trying to make their early plays wonderful plays. My first six plays (not even including the two lousy full length screenplays I wrote early on) were complete crap. That is eight full length works that were learning scripts. I know that is completely disheartening for a new playwright. But they can take some comfort in the fact that I was a really slow learner and they can undoubtedly improve on that learning curve. However, you have to take an honest look at your early plays and not be disheartened if they disappoint you. Move on. It takes time to get your playwriting to come from your subconscious and for your fingertips to understand your plays as well as your imaginations. Your imagination is inert, but your fingers are agile little workers. Fingers actually do things, fantasies don’t. Your plays live there, not in your head.

Q:  Any plugs?

A:  I am acting in Gus Schulenburg’s Jacob’s House. A beautiful, rich, biblically-scoped retelling of the story of Jacob. I play patriarch Isaac on his deathbed and young Tamar cleaning a toilet. Gus is a playwright everybody should pay full attention to. Go see it (http://www.fluxtheatre.org/). And I am starting grad school in August, studying with Tina Howe at Hunters College toward an MFA in playwriting. That is going to be a dream come true. I have loved her writing for years. And she is unbelievably kind and nurturing. I had dinner with her and my future MFA classmates (Holly Hepp-Galvan, Chris Weikel and Callie Kimball) last night and she has a brilliant theatrical aesthetic, amazing life experience, and a warm, caring heart. I can’t wait.

I Interview Playwrights Part 165: Katharine Clark Gray

Katharine Clark Gray

Hometown: Syracuse, NY

Current town: Philadelphia, PA

Q:  Tell me please about your play 516 going up in Philly.

A:  It's a 3-handed revenge romance set in academia: a term paper ghostwriter falls in lust with a client as he uses her to advance his thesis work. When she rats him out to a hated professor, the true machinations begin. The upcoming production at Philadelphia Theatre Workshop marks its official World Premiere, but an earlier version was workshopped at the NY Fringe festival (with the wonderful Kristina Valada-Viars), and of course had readings and readings before that. Also: it's pronounced "Five Sixteen", like a college course number, not "Five One Six" like the area code.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  My play User 927 won Reverie Productions' '09 Next Generation contest and is set for an NYC workshop production soon; right now it's being adapted into a screenplay. The two major scripts in development are Timber Land, about a Southern fugitive who lands in Bangor's liberal activist community; and The Pestilence is Coming, a crazy, gigantic musical based on a rock album by the Minor Leagues and Camus' The Plague. For a while I was on a kick writing larger and larger-scope plays; Pestilence is kind of the absurd extreme, complete with a chorus of nurses and patients doing choreography with gurneys and, of course, a singing rat. Luckily it was a commissioned work (by Full Circle Theatre Co. in NYC) so it already has production support. Pitching big plays to small companies has never been so tough. My next piece will probably be two dudes in a room.

Q:  You received a Pew Fellowship for Playwriting in 2008. How has that impacted your writing and career?

A:  I haven't had a 'day job' in over a year, which will change anyone! It's reformed my focus: as a former actor, I spent a long time trying to be a Swiss Army knife of a person: all things to all theaters. I think at long last I've learned to respect my field enough to stop constantly looking for backup plans. That said, working at home can really make one hungry for human contact. I've joined a number of literary organizations and have started teaching a workshop on new materials (with my husband Nicholas Gray) that handily remind me that theatre is not a solo sport.

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

A:  The first profession I ever seriously considered was cartoonist. When I was about nine, I drew a strip called "Kids Will Be Kids" that was half autobiography, half rip-off of "Calvin and Hobbes" and "Bloom County". There was a long saga about one of the characters getting a bad perm that was unfortunately ripped from the headlines of my life. But it was good enough to get printed in the Syracuse University campus newspaper, which made me feel like king pimp daddy for like a month.

When I think about it, both those strips (C&H and BC) pretty much encapsulate the tone I try to strike in my work: verbose but brutal, with humor that draws from deep, dark places.

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

A:  There's a lot of safety endemic to the form these days: in particular, palatable politics that pass themselves off as 'edgy' to make self-satisfied patrons feel like rebels. Make me squirm; make me angry; make me cry. Don't congratulate me or yourselves for the bare minimum of cognitive thought. Safe theatre is the Bob Evans thruway stop of art.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Brecht and Weill, for Threepenny. Chekhov, for writing the world's saddest comedies. Stanislavski, for founding a revolution. Shepard, for his exquisite spareness; Stoppard, for his intelligence. Mamet, period. Kushner, for Angels. Lynn Nottage for Ruined. LaBute, McDonagh and Marber for finding empathy in misanthropy. Eve Ensler, for socially impactful theatre that isn't lame. Stephen Adly Guirgis, for writing the world's dirtiest prophets. For that matter, all the LAByrinth founders and members, for creating a true modern company. Stephen Belber. Those insane bungee-cord folks at De La Guarda. The Donmar Warehouse Theatre. And August Wilson, perhaps the greatest playwright of our time.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  You know it when you see it: something that makes you tingle and sweat, like the show is squeezing a fistful of your heart. That's a bullshit answer, I know, but genre / subject matter / general formula matter far less than the daring things you do with them.

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

A:  Don't spend your career seeking someone else's approval.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:
 kef productions has a new production up: Marisa Wegrzyn's Killing Women, opening May 13 at The Beckett on Theatre Row. Go see it.

Kristin Marting at HERE Arts Center has started a monthly Community Think Tank on different topics. The next one is # 3 – "Freedom", Wed. July 7.

The Production Company is an intriguing group concentrating on creating an alliance between Australian and American theatre artists. They have two projects coming up in '10: join their mailing list and you'll hear all about it.

Keep the following playwrights on your radar: in New York, Mac Rogers. In Philly, P. Seth Bauer, Jacqueline Goldfinger, and Nick Wardigo. All these people should be famous. And it has to be said: Kristoffer Diaz got absolutely robbed at the Pulitzers.

I Interview Playwrights Part 164: Laura Eason

Laura Eason

Hometown: Evanston, IL

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY. I lived in Chicago for a long time and still frequently work at Lookingglass Theatre (where I am a company member) and Steppenwolf Theatre so people often think I still live there but I've lived in New York for almost five years now. I go where the work is and much of it still happens to still be in Chicago, which is fine with me!

Q:  Tell me please about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer now at Hartford Stage.

A:  Hartford Stage commissioned me to write a new adaptation of the Twain novel. Jeremy Cohen, the Associate Artistic Director who is also the play's director, called me a little over a year ago asking, "are you interested in a commission to write this play and if you are here are your production dates." The kind of call you always hope to get. So, they committed to the production before reading one word of the play. Obviously, it's based on Twain's book and the intent was to keep the adaptation true to the source material but, still, even with my good track record, they took a bit of a risk having never worked with me before. The development process was wonderful with Jeremy, artistic director Michael Wilson and the rest of their artistic staff. They are all really smart and supportive and Hartford Stage is a wonderful place to work. I'm so happy to have had the opportunity and I couldn't be more thrilled with this production. Jeremy did a wonderful job and put together a remarkable teams of designers and actors. My hope was that we could create a genuinely playful, fun adventure that kids would love but that grown-ups would, too, and that it would spark memories of their own childhoods. Never once did we think of it as "children's theatre". I don't know how to do that or really what that means. We just made the best show we could of this story using incredible artists and it turned out really well. It's very physical and visual with movement sections created by Tommy Rapley of the House Theatre of Chicago and an amazing score by the Broken Chord Collective, beautiful, transformative set by my Lookingglass colleague Dan Ostling, and perfect lights by Robert Wierzel, among others. And it does appeal to the large span in the age range of the audience (which is from about 6 to 80's) in a wonderful way. We are hoping this production will live on in 2011- - 2012. There has been a lot of interest regionally.

Q:  You write both adaptations and totally original works, can you talk about that?

A:  About half of what I do is adaptation, the other original. I could talk forever about adaptation and why I love it and think it's great. Adaptation and story theatre are an essential and really rich part of the theatrical landscape in Chicago. I don't think that's so in New York, which I think is too bad. (Although it is totally accepted in the realm of musical theatre, which is interesting to me.) But I won't bore everyone to death with that conversation. Suffice to say, I think adaptation can yield gorgeous and unforgettable work. In relation to my work specifically, getting to spend a lot of time and become very intimate with great works of literature (I've adapted Dickens and Twain and Wharton to name a few) is a huge pleasure and I think has made me a much better writer in general. Also, I have learned a lot about clarity of story telling and structure doing adaptation. A lot of people think it's just editing which isn't at all the case when it is done well. You are, ideally, constructing something new that has it's own point of view and a big idea at the center. You're using elements from something already existing, of course, but you are creating an original and cohesive dramatic structure and a theatrical delivery system suited to that story. In my experience, adaptation is as hard as creating original work. Again, plenty more to say on why that is, but I'll leave it at that.

The other half of what I do is original. Because my adaptation work is often sprawling, plot driven, very theatrical with a strong physical and visual sense and scenes are often short and economical, almost filmic, my original work (at least right now) is almost a response and tends to be very character-driven with long scenes and lives more in realism I also have a couple of "hybrid pieces" that combine realistic scenes with more metaphoric movement sections which, I think, is a cool combo-platter not a lot of people are exploring.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I have an original two character play called Sex with Strangers that is part of the subscription series at Steppenwolf next year that deals with the public/private self. I am going to direct a new adaptation I did of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome at Lookingglass next year (I often direct my own work at Lookingglass). So, I'm working on rewrites of both of those. I also have a three character play that I did a reading of at Rattlestick in January called Plainfield Ace -- I am working on a rewrite of that to do another reading with them. I'm also dipping my toe in the water of book-writing for musicals. I was just brought on as book writer to a fantastic musical project that's been in the works for a while called The Mistress Cycle that lyricist and composer Beth Blatt and Jenny Giering have created and developed. Kent Nicholson, whose work I have admired for a while, since his CA days, will be directing. I'm very excited about it. I'm also working on the book of a musical that Grammy winner Kurt Elling is developing. In addition to being an incredible artist and one of the finest voices in music today, he is just generally the coolest and super fun to hang out with and listen to his stories. I'm also working on a short piece for a project the playwright's lab of 2008 - 2010 (that I am a member of) at the Women's Project is putting together. There are 11 playwrights in my group and we've all grown really close and are putting together a final project that will be in the Julia Miles in July. Stay tuned. Finally, I have co-written a screenplay with writer/actor Paul Oakley Stovall adapted from his play As Much as You Can which should be happening off-Broadway in the next year. The screenplay was just optioned and we're hoping the movie gets made in the next year. I'm very interested in branching out into more screenwriting. I think that's all. Also always researching and exploring ideas for future projects.

Q:  You were once the Artistic Director of Lookingglass. Has helming a theater affected the way you write?

A:  I was AD for a total of six years and saw a lot of shows through development and production. I think it has made me more understanding of how much budgetary concerns affect artistic choices and that the difference between a cast of 8 and a cast of 5 can be the difference between your play getting done or not. It sucks, but that is true. So, I think it makes me balance out my work. I don't write all 10 character plays. I make some small shows, too, because I know more people are looking for them. I also think I appreciate how hard everyone works to get a show up. So, when I'm in process, I try to be really open to input and to the collaboration that is theater making. Being a good leader is knowing you don't have to have every good idea, you just need to know the good idea when you hear it, no matter who comes up with it. That is true for writing for the theatre, too. You don't always have to have the idea. An actor or the director or the dramaturg might have a fantastic suggestion and, to me, being a good writer is actually being open to those suggestions.

Q:  What theaters or shows in Chicago should I check out?

A:  There are around 300 active companies in Chicago, just so people know. As well as god knows how many one-off productions.... the scene is huge and robust. And although I'm there a lot, I can't keep up like I could when I lived there so there are newer companies I don't know. But some that have been around a little while (for 15 years plus to at least a year or two) that people might not have heard of that are fantastic are: Redmoon, Dog and Pony, The House Theatre, Silk Road, About Face, Pavement Group, 500 Clown, Congo Square, The Side Project, Theatre Seven, XIII Pocket, Timeline, Curious, Red Orchid... oh, so many more but that's what I can think of off the top of my head. I know I'm going to regret it tomorrow when I realize who I forgot...

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

A:  When I was 6, I really starting to have doubts about Santa Claus and these other magical characters (the Tooth Fairy, etc) being real and having a hunch it was all my parents making. So, when I lost my next tooth, I put it under my pillow and didn't tell my parents. In the morning, when I woke up and found the tooth still there and no money, I marched into their room, brandishing my tooth like a weapon, and announced, "There is no Santa Clause, no Tooth Fairy, no Easter Bunny" and marched out. And that was that.

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

A:  I would make everyone stop having such an inferiority complex! Everyone is always moping around, soul searching "Is the theatre irrelevant?" or in crisis mode "The theater is dying!" or so generally insecure that we feel like we have to have movie stars in plays or people won't come to them. I just want everyone in the theatre to stop all the hand wringing! Can we please just be proud of what we do and feel good about it? Sure, there isn't a lot of money in it. OK. Does that always need to be the headline?! How much better would it be if we all walked around talking about how awesome the theatre is?! 'Cause it is! We get to tell beautiful and ugly and scary and thoughtful and dangerous and moving and important stories that help us think about what it means to be human. What is better than that? Sure, maybe every once in a while we can complain about how we don't want to have to go to the laundromat anymore and wish the theatre could afford us a washer and dryer (see, I fall victim, too) but really, we need to encourage each other to stop theatre bashing. It's like the perfectly pretty, nice, smart girl in school who is constantly talking about how boring, stupid and ugly she is. When you first meet her you think, 'hey, she's kinda cute and really nice and, wow, maybe this could be something' but by the time she stops pointing out all of her faults you're like, 'Jesus, what was I thinking! Get me away from her!' If WE can't celebrate all the many wonderful things that a life in the theatre is -- and they are many -- then why should non-theatre people respect us or care about us. Seriously. And if theatre were going to die, it would already be dead -- we would have killed it with our pathetic attitudes!

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Joyce Piven who runs the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, IL where i took theatre classes as a child. She taught me the power of storytelling, the importance and value of ensemble, she introduced me to story theatre and she showed me how to make magic in an empty room on an empty stage with just her body and her voice, she taught me that anything can be summoned in the theatre with the power of the imagination. I am in the theater because of her and think of her all the time. Beyond that... Frank Galati who was a teacher of mine at Northwestern, incredible adaptor and director, I learned adaptation from him and how to conceive pieces where you can't really separate the text and the direction, the words and the physical life, it is all one large connected gesture, something my friend Michael Rohd calls 'total theatre'. Frank's production of The Grapes of Wrath is still deeply influential to me. Mary Zimmerman, my friend and frequent collaborator. Before I was a writer I was an actor and I was in 10 of her plays, starting with the first things she ever directed and I learned so much watching her work and growing her talent over the years. I learned from her that if you make the work you want to make, trying only to please yourself, and don't listen to what others want you to be or what critics or people you don't care about think of what you make, if you can stay true to yourself and you walk away feeling you did everything you wanted and it was what you wanted it to be, you will be happy. Also my fellow ensemble members at Lookingglass theatre who decided to make a company when they were just out of school and it's given me my whole professional (and to a large extent personal) life... and have made 20 years worth of incredible work that I've learned so much from. As for playwrights whose work was important to me... I saw a Streetcar that Bob Falls directed at a now defunct theatre in Chicago called Wisdom Bridge when I was 14 and it changed my life. It was an incredible production and my world was totally rocked by the power of the play and this door that was opened onto another world that I got to step into. It was totally magical and a little scary and completely thrilling. I came home and pulled out my Mom's copy of the play and read it and re-read it. I continue to deeply love that play. And Chekhov. I love me some Chekhov. Those were early influences.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre that creates a full and compelling world that I feel totally immersed in and that has an important idea or question at the center of it. So, although I love big epic theatre, I'm not aesthetically biased, I can love something totally straight ahead if it's a compelling world and really ABOUT something. I'm not persuaded by work that is really only an exploration of style I have to care. It has to say something and mean something. In the last few years, some things that stayed with me include The Elephant Vanishes (Complicite at Lincoln Center), Hotel Cassiopeia (Siti Company and Charles Mee) Daniel Talbott's Slipping (Rising Phoenix Repertory at Rattlestick) Heidi Stillman's adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov at Lookingglass in Chicago, GATZ (ERS), The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya at Lake Lucille, August Osage County (that I saw opening night in Chicago, unforgettable), In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play, there are more but those are some good ones. My hunch is Circle Mirror Transformation would have been on that list but my baby came 10 days early so I couldn't get to it and I had to give up my tickets.

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

A:  Write. Just write. And then find a few people who you really, really trust that are smart and talented who you know are genuinely on your side to be in dialogue with you about your work. Invite friends over to read your work out loud so you can hear it (but don't listen to them talk about your play unless they are those really trusted friends). Learn how to listen to the idea behind prescriptive suggestions when you receive them, think about what people are circling around as being the problem, don't listen to their suggested solution, that will just make you irritated and defensive but they might be pointing out a problem that is worth paying attention to. If you can't get someone else to produce your work, find some friends that will help you do it yourself. Make your own opportunities. You don't have to wait for anyone to give you permission. Don't be a snob -- nothing in relation to your work is too small or low profile if good people are behind it... a 10 minute play festival in a basement somewhere with people you think are cool? Yes, do that. Finally, it's a process. The first draft might suck a little, but it will keep getting better, you just have to keep moving forward. That's just the process.

Q: Plugs, please:

A:  The Adventure of Tom Sawyer runs another week at Hartford Stage. The Women's Project Show is July 15th at the Julia Miles. And people can always find what I'm up to at www.lauraeason.com. Thanks!