I Interview Playwrights Part 364: Mia McCullough

Mia McCullough


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

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

Q:  What are you working on now?
 

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


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

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

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

 

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


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

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

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

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

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

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

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

Q:  Plugs, please:

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

I Interview Playwrights Part 363: Ellen McLaughlin

Ellen McLaughlin

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

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

Q:  Tell me about Ajax in Iraq.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q:  What else are you working on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

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

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

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

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

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

Q:  Plugs, please:

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

I Interview Playwrights Part 362: Tom Jacobson

Tom Jacobson

Hometown: Oklahoma City

Current Town: Los Angeles

Q:  What are you working on now?

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

Q:  How many plays have you written?

A:  50 full lengths.

Q:  What is your process like?

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

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

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

Q:  How would you characterize the LA theater scene?

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

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

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

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

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

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

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

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

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

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

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

Q:  Plugs, please:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom's website

tomorrow

CLOWN BAR
by Adam Szymkowicz
directed by Kip Fagan

Lyrics by Adam Szymkowicz and Adam Overett
Music by Adam Overett

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

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

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

I Interview Playwrights Part 361: Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Hometown: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Current Town: Cambridge, Massachusetts

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

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

Q: What else are you working on?

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

Q: Tell me about the Huntington Playwright Fellows Program.

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

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

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

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

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

I Interview Playwrights Part 360: Hannah Moscovitch

Hannah Moscovitch

Hometown:
Ottawa, Canada

Current Town:
Toronto, Canada

Q:  What are you working on now?

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

Q:  How would you characterize Canadian theater?

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

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

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

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

A:  The ticket prices.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

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

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

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

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

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

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

Q:  Plugs, please:

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

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

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

upcoming and right now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Interview Playwrights Part 359: Alessandro King

Alessandro King

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: New York City

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

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

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

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

Q:  What else are you working on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

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

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

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

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

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

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

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

Q:  Plugs, please:

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.monsterliterature.com/

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

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

Summer classes at ESPA

studying with great people like Tanya Barfield, Sheri Wilner, Bekah Brunstetter, and Daniel Talbott.

Check it out!  www.primarystages.org/espa

I Interview Playwrights Part 358: Alex Lewin

Alex Lewin

Hometown: A couple of suburbs in Bergen County, NJ (my dad commuted across the George Washington Bridge), and then, after the age of 13, various locales in the 310 area code of Los Angeles. I was born in Suffern, NY. All of which means I don’t really think of myself as having a hometown.

Current Town: New York City.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A two-character, one-scene play called The Interview, about a 30-something, gay, aspiring filmmaker — sort of a member of today’s creative class — who is volunteering to be a “big brother” and is going through the screening process. As you might guess, I’ve been through this, and the extensive interview, which I knew was going to be personal and probing, surprised even me. They want to make sure any volunteer is a) psychologically stable, and b) not a child molester, and I was fascinated by the strategies they employ to gauge those things, and also by the interviewer’s agility in departing from the questionnaire when necessary. The play imagines an interview like the one I went through, but with an interviewer who happens to be having the worst day of her life, and an interviewee who happens to have some sexual proclivities that he can’t really hide (and doesn’t feel he should have to hide) from his interlocutor.

I’m also writing a screenplay called The Impostor, which is inspired by the Ghanian journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who is something of a chameleon/master of disguise. He goes “undercover” inside weapons smuggling rackets, or corrupt government agencies, and then exposes them in his newspaper — and nobody knows what he really looks like. In my story a journalist like Anas goes inside a high-class Washington, D.C., brothel, masquerading as a (female) prostitute. I jokingly pitch it as All the President’s Men meets Tootsie.

And I’m working with New York Theatre Workshop and Laura Flanders of GRITtv on a piece that will use the language of primary documents of the American Revolutionary period — writings of Madison and Jefferson, the Constitution and formal objections to it, populist agrarian pamphlets — and somehow (we’re in the very early stages) depict a debate or a rally or a polemic that is meant to take back a lot of this language from the lunatic right. (A phrase, by the way, that is becoming more and more a redundancy.) When they reference Jefferson and Republicanism, and when they purport to be “preserving” the Constitution, they’re almost always willfully misinterpreting American history and the thinking of the (so-called) founding fathers. Ask me in a month or two and I’ll be able to tell you more specifically what this piece is going to look like.

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

A:  This is your hardest question, Adam. The difficulty for me is that I was generally a cranky, frustrated child. I was an unhappy child who had a happy childhood. And I think that’s probably the answer to this question: I hated being treated like a child, I hated being a child, I couldn’t wait to grow up. (It’s why the Peter Pan mythology has always bored me to tears. Why would anyone want to be a child forever?) I never read children’s books, I read mysteries and spy novels, even though I didn’t always understand what I was reading. I hated the Narnia stuff. When the Nursery Rhymes category comes up on “Jeopardy!” I just throw my hands up in surrender.

I’ll tell you a story the significance of which I can’t possibly name, but for some reason it feels like a right answer to your question. When I was eight years old I went to a sleepaway camp, Camp Watonka, and I remember walking across a big lawn at twilight and stopping to stare at a boy, a year or two older than me, who was wearing a teal t-shirt and blue jeans. The sleeve of his shirt stopped just above his elbow, revealing a hint of upper arm, and the hem of the shirt stopped just barely below his crotch. All I knew was that something I really wanted was being simultaneously called attention to and withheld from me. He snapped me out of my reverie by demanding, “Got a prob?” I hurried on to wherever I was going. To this day a t-shirt and jeans is, to me, the sexiest outfit a man can wear.

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

A:  I would love to see theatres guarantee production to their commissionees. I would love it if theatres said, “Here’s a commission. Whatever you write, we’re gonna do it.” With certain understandings and qualifications of course: if, for instance, the playwright writes a 17-character play, s/he’s got to understand that the theatre won’t be splurging, then, for some elaborate set. Or the converse: If the playwright needs to have a functioning volcano and a waterfall, they’ve got to keep the cast small. Et cetera.

If plays were generated in such a fashion — as Angels in America was — I believe they would be more audacious. Bigger in every sense. One of the great qualities about the graduate theatre program at UC San Diego, where I got my MFA, is that each writer basically has an open-ended commission. For three seasons. You write a play (a one-act in your first year, full-lengths in years two and three) and somehow, some way, the department finds a way to produce what you write, even on shoestring budgets, during the Baldwin New Play Festival every April. They make it happen. Everyone gets together and finds a way. It’s what gave me the courage to write a three-act, ten-actor play about God and geopolitics and archaeology and the Koran and sex and ghosts, a play unlike anything I’d built before. And then that was the play, The Near East, that got me a lot of attention when I came out of grad school.

If theatres worked that way, how might American playwriting be different? I believe we’d see more political plays, more boundary-busting plays. And, yes, of course, a lot of them would be bad, but they’d be audaciously bad. I think we’d see American plays move away from modest, intermission-less, four-character dramadies with literate, minimalist dialogue. I’d rather see an ambitious travesty than a timid mediocrity. I’m not kidding when I ask: When’s the last time you saw a play with a volcano or a waterfall?

The obvious objection is, “Whoa, wait a second, how could a theatre possibly commit to producing a play that doesn’t even exist? Isn’t that taking too big a chance?” To which I respond: Theatres that do new work, I expect, would like this idea because most of them don’t really program plays, anyway — they program writers. (Which may actually be the real problem.)

Also, I wish the New York Times would publish more than one critic’s review of a given play, as the British papers do, and as the Times sometimes does with books.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Eugene O’Neill, the greatest of American playwrights. Caryl Churchill, the greatest playwright alive. Amy Freed. Larry Kramer. Jon Robin Baitz for writing The Paris Letter. My first theatre teacher, Ted Walch, who, when I was fifteen, put a copy of Glengarry Glen Ross in my hands and changed my life. Suzan-Lori Parks, all of whose plays, good or bad, are audacious. And he may be an unusual suspect, but the late, great film critic Robin Wood wrote about art as a form of protest — an antidote to all the bullshit — in a way that makes me proud to be an artist.

Q:  What kind of theatre excites you?

A:  Theatre that responds to film. (Consciously, I mean.)

It seems obvious to say I’m excited by theatre that provokes debate, but I also love theatre that depicts debate, and I feel like I don’t see that very often. (David Hare’s A Map of the World is one of my favorite plays.)

I’m excited by “well made,” three-act, naturalistic drama. Very old-fashioned of me, I know, but I believe most theatre audiences and producers are secretly excited by that type of theatre, too. (And not because such plays are safe or conservative or non-threatening. Just the opposite. In our era of theatre, such plays are audacious.)

Also, I love a good dick joke. Not kidding. Theatre should aspire to be lowbrow and highbrow all at the same time. Shakespeare wasn’t above a fart reference or a pussy pun. A lot of plays I see strike me as really, really polite. I can’t resist quoting Anthony Lane’s review of The Bridges of Madison County: “If you added the word ‘Cheerios’ or ‘horny,’ for instance, the whole thing would faint with shock.”

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

A:  Don’t mistake intellectualism for intelligence. (Your own and others’.) Don’t worry about being smart, don’t try to be Tony Kushner. Keep figuring out who you are and keep expressing it as best you can. Talent is directly proportional to self-awareness. Also: the people you know to be phony will ultimately end up unhappy, so try not to obsess on them.

I’ll also pass along one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received: “Don’t do business with anybody you would not invite into your home.”

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  If you find yourself in the Evansville, Indiana, area on June 4, come see a reading of my play Alexandria at the New Harmony Project, where I’ll be workshopping the play for two weeks.

Also, I co-author, with Aaron Rich, the blog They’ll Love It In Pomona, where Aaron and I review movies and make fun of one another along the way.

I Interview Playwrights Part 357: Laurel Haines

Laurel Haines

Hometown: White Plains, NY

Current Town: Astoria, NY

Q:  Tell me about your play currently at the Flea.

A:  Future Anxiety takes place in the not-too-distant future, when all of our current problems have expanded into utter nightmares (though if the tsunami/earthquake/nuclear meltdown in Japan isn’t an utter nightmare, I don’t know what is). In Future Anxiety, Americans are sent to China to work off the national debt, strawberries are extinct, and toilet paper is rationed to one square a day. The situations are ludicrous, horrific, and yet strangely plausible.

And it’s a comedy, actually. Karl is building a homemade spaceship, and everyone wants to get on board. They think they’re going to escape to another planet, which might be real, or it might be one of Karl’s acid flashbacks. He’s desperately trying to convince his ex-girlfriend Christine, who works as a re-entry therapist for cryonics patients, to come with him.

The play has a long list of characters and Jim Simpson, the director, has cast 23 of the Bats, the Flea’s resident acting company. It’s really a dream come true for me, because I never thought any theater would do this show without doubling and tripling the parts. Actually, recently I began to think that no one would do this show, period, and I would have to produce it myself. So it’s wonderful to see the play realized so completely.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I’m writing a musical with Nan Hoffman about a detective who’s searching for the money lost in a ponzi scheme. It’s a 40s noir spoof with echoes of Madoff. I’m also working on a new play that I started in the Play Development Collective’s Winter Intensive.

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

A:  My awkward adolescence probably explains everything.

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

A:  I would create an eccentric billionaire who would give grants for productions of new plays by unknown and emerging playwrights. Kind of like that amazing lady who gave $100 million to Poetry Magazine - Ruth Lilly. There’s got to be a billionaire out there who thinks new plays are cool. S/he would be a hero – bringing new voices to the American theater and saving their plays from obscurity.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  That imaginary billionaire. And any group that’s producing new plays or bringing theater into the schools.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Everything except the boring kind.

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

A:  Take risks and go crazy. Write things that don’t make sense but might be brilliant. Or bad. Stop caring if it’s bad. If you’re passionate, you’ll eventually write something great.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Future Anxiety is running at the Flea Theater in Tribeca through May 26. Shows are Tues-Sat @ 7pm; Sat Mat. @ 3pm
$25 General
Pay-What-You-Can on TUESDAYS**
Go to http://www.theflea.org/ or call 212.352.3101

**Pay-What-You-Can tickets available at the door only, starting @ 6pm each Tuesday & are valid only for that performance.

I Interview Playwrights Part 356: Renee Calarco

Renee Calarco

Hometown: Rochester, NY

Current Town: Washington, DC

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m revising THE RELIGION THING, which is an uncomfortable comedy that’s scheduled for production at Theater J in January 2012. It’s a play I’ve been working on in fits and starts for about six years; there were some terrific development readings at Charter Theater/First Draft Geva Theatre, and Theater J.

Also, I just finished a revision of KEEPERS OF THE WESTERN DOOR , which is another uncomfortable comedy… about Alzheimer’s. (Because nothing says “comedy” like degenerative brain disease, right?)

Q: How would you characterize the DC theater scene?

A: Vibrant, very collegial, and more experimental that people give it credit for being. Also, audiences here are insanely smart and willing to invest their time in seeing new work. I’m an associate artist with Charter Theater/First Draft, and our mission is to develop new plays and the audiences who love them. We hold monthly free staged readings of new plays, and it’s just crazy how many people turn out for them—anywhere from 25 – 50 people on a Tuesday night. Nearly everyone stays for the post-reading discussions. Audiences just want to be heard. They want to connect, they want to engage with artists, they want to watch theater being made. And they will follow artists anywhere if we’re willing to pay attention to them.

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 come from a family that absolutely worships the performing arts; growing up, I had all these relatives who were really talented amateur artists. My maternal grandmother was an actor and singer in local Yiddish theater; my maternal grandfather was a playwright, songwriter, and director; my mom was a jazz singer; my uncle was a director and opera singer. My great-uncle was a vaudeville-style comedian. Everyone worked for a living first, and did their art on the side. It was heartbreaking because we all knew that everyone was kind of dying a little inside---desperately wanting to spend all their time performing and writing—and knowing that economically, it was impossible. My brother Joe was the first person in our family who really made the commitment to make a living doing theater. My cousin Gina is just starting her professional acting career. And I’m still a bit in both worlds: I’m a playwright who has a day job (that’s theater-related).

Anyway, here’s my story. When I was in high school, I was hanging out with my friends in the auditorium; I think we were getting ready for play rehearsal or drama class. As we sat there on the stage, I thought, “This stage is absolutely bare…and anything can happen right now. We can just make something up right now and it would still be like a performance.” It’s kind of a cheesy story, but that feeling eventually led me to doing improv, which then led me to playwriting. And now you know why improv is the gateway drug to playwriting.

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

A: The notion that theaters have to somehow educate audiences about how important theater is. Audiences aren’t dumb. If we don’t want to entertain audiences first, I think that’s a problem. As a playwright friend of mine once said, “Nobody was ever forced to take hockey appreciation class in school.”

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Anything that’s surprising and that tells a great story. Anything that could only happen on stage, rather than on TV or in the movies. I love bare-bones productions and I love over-the-top spectacle. Really, I just like to be surprised.

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

A: Take an acting class. Take an improv class. Learn about design and stage management. And spend time with people who aren’t in the theater. This is advice I’m constantly giving to myself, as well. See plays, but also see other forms of art. The best thing about living in DC is all of the free museums!

Q: Plugs, please:

A: THE RELIGION THING opens at Theater J on January 4, 2012:

http://washingtondcjcc.org/center-for-arts/theater-j/

I Interview Playwrights Part 355: E. Hunter Spreen

E. Hunter Spreen

Hometown: I was born in Hartford City, IN. My family moved around a lot, so I lived in Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky.

Current Town: Los Altos Hills, CA

Q: Tell me about your play with Shotgun.

A: Care of Trees is about love and belief and what happens to your relationship when your partner goes somewhere that you can't follow or that you don't understand. The play also tackles some big questions w/r/t our relationship with the planet, but in a deeply personal way - through the vehicle of a love story. When I first started the play, I had this idea that I'd write a stripped down play with two actors and not much else. But I had trouble getting it started and keeping it going, so I brought in this idea that Travis would film his wife, he'd be obsessed with trying to document what he considered symptoms of Georgia's illness and she would resist because she sees her situation in a completely different way. Eventually, that idea evolved into a writing screenplays that would be filmed and which would run within the play. The idea was that these films would be like the spontaneous films we shoot of our lives with our digital cameras and cellphones. They're not made for an audience, they're just ways of capturing moments. It's been amazing watching how the story emerges through the interplay of actors and those films.

The play was commissioned for Shotgun's 20th Anniversary season. Patrick Dooley, the AD, commissioned five new plays to mark the occasion, so a whole season of new work, and I'm honored to have gotten to write this for them.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I'm thinking about my next four plays - Dumb Puppy, The Archive and a couple of others. How that work's going to proceed. The Archive is a devised work that will rely on community involvement to generate the material. It's a large scale project and I need to spend some time figuring out how to structure the generation process logistically and how to do the outreach on the scale that I want to do it. So mostly it's planning and writing out all the steps - from generation to devising to performance. Dumb Puppy is more manageable. I sit down and write it (at least that's what we hope for). I've tried to write it twice before, each time getting a few more pages. The time feels right to take it on again. As for the other two plays, I need to spend time in the Ransom Library in Austin doing research and so those plays require a bit more in terms of resources - ie. money, but also time and research assistance so that I could get through the material more efficiently. Plus having a partner or team would effect the material and take some of the decisions about it out of my hands which I always like.

I'm also working on a community art project that's being devised by Moïse Touré and Frances Viet over the next year. We did the first phase a couple of weeks ago. I went into the studio for a film interview and then Frances created choreography based on my answers. They'll come back to San Francisco a couple more times and then the community they've assembled will perform the piece. So it's still being shaped and discovered. I have no idea at this point what it's going to look like, but the time in the studio was incredibly powerful and moving. I was paired with a film-maker and we were interviewed together. The exciting thing for me is that the project brings together people from all walks of life and presents their perspective both on film and on stage.

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

A: Here's a list. Make of it what you will.

1. As a kid, I liked to watch Batman. I would press my face against the TV screen and look at all the dots in the image and listen to the sound.
2. I loved to read. I would read the covers off of books. I can remember the first book I could read all by myself. When I was in high school, I would bring stacks of books home and read them all over the weekend.
3. I was an obsessive spinner. I would stand in the middle of a room and spin spin spin until I annoyed my grandmother and she would make me stop.
4. When I was a kid, I believed that baptism was real - like when you were immersed you really did die and when you were lifted out of the water you came back to life. So going to church was very disturbing to me. This whole elective drowning thing freaked me out. Equally disturbing - no one else seemed to be as horrified by it as I was. This is an example of why you shouldn't believe everything you think.
5. When I was six I remember I couldn't sleep one night. I was terrified for some reason and so I couldn't get to sleep. I kept going downstairs and trying to get in bed with my mom and dad. I claimed that I smelled smoke. I was lying and my dad knew it. He kept taking me back upstairs and putting me in bed. I got up three or four times. And my dad took me right back upstairs. But the last time he took me up, my bed was on fire. We got out of the house before the whole place burst into flames. Sometimes I feel like that when I write. I think something and then it happens. You know, kind of like Drew Barrymore in Fire Starter.
6. I'm not convinced any of these items explain who I am as a writer.

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

A:  We'd get as excited about failure as we do about success. I wish there were places where I could just experiment - you know, hey people, this might not work but I'm going for it. Come watch it and tell me what you think. Sam Shepard had that freedom and there's so much imagination and playfulness in his early plays. They don't all work, but he was just writing and making and figuring it out by having productions go up. It's hard to support that kind of work now. I dream about buying a farm and converting a barn - like how cliché is that? But really, I'd like to create this place where experimentation could take place with the support of the community that surrounds it. I think there are companies doing that already - Double Edge is the first that comes to mind. Alongside the idea of fostering experimentation, I'd like to challenge the idea that an artist's scope and practice has to be limited.

What do I mean by that?

I often feel like there's a perception in the theater community that if I focus on the formal concerns of playwrighting or theater, then I can't be politically engaged or dealing with the big "issues" we face globally or locally. Or if I'm interested in generating community-based work, then I can't or shouldn't be interested in the formal aspects of theater as an art form. Somehow these things are mutually exclusive and that the audience who might be interested in one wouldn't or couldn't or shouldn't be interested the the other. There's a pigeon-holing that takes place and I'm not sure why that happens. Sure, there's the art as commerce trope, but I'm not convinced that marketing is the only reason for this situation.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My kids. They're just endless fountains of creativity and inspiration.

These people are influences and sources of inspiration:

Pina Bausch, Tim Etchells, Andy Kaufman, Bill Hicks, Gertrude Stein, Glenn Gould, Jacques LeCoq, Anne Bogart & Siti Company, Mary Overlie, Robert Wilson, Hunter S. Thompson, Zeami, Arianne Mnouchkine, David Foster Wallace, William S. Burroughs, Elevator Repair Service, Superamas, Mike Daisey, Forced Entertainment, William Gibson, Jaques Derrida, Derrick Jensen, Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation, Dorothy Lemoult, Ming Zhu-Hii, Jeff Wood, Susannah Martin, Brian Eno, Lester Bangs, Tarkovsky, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Ida Rolf.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like theater that is present and that can mean many things -
it can be about the performers or it can be about the play itself or even better - both at the same time. It starts with an acknowledgement that we're all in the room together or the alley or bathroom or wherever it's happening. That's what's so great about flash mobs or pop-up theater - there's no getting around the fact that this thing is happening right now. Part of that is novelty, but part of that is this great sense of play and willingness to participate fully in life and that theater can be part of that, celebrate that, and not be this thing that happens in a dark room and you have to sit still for. Which kind of contradicts what I said in my what would you change about theater question - maybe.
But it can also happen in the room too. And when it does, it leaves an impression, it's like it rearranges all the cells in my body.

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

A:  Write. Really. Don't worry about success or failure or outcome. Just write. You don't need permission to do this. Try to write everyday. Read plays. When I first started writing plays I would pick a playwright and read everything they'd ever written and in some cases, everything that had been written about them. I also read every book or play or see any film they might mention (if I haven't already) as being an influence to them. I kind of obsessive like that. Some call it "google stalking," I call it inspiration. See plays and readings. Don't forget to bring a notebook and a pen with you wherever you go.

Allow yourself to make "mistakes" and right terrible first drafts. When I started writing I was horrible and I'm not being modest. I was terrible. If I'd been in grad school, they would have taken me aside and told me to consider another career. School would not have made me better and it would have been embarrassing and frustrating for everyone. I kept at it because occasionally I would get something on the page that was exciting and alive. It took me many years to be able to sustain my voice as a writer, technically, but also physically and emotionally. It took time to build up the stamina to deal with the toll writing takes on me.

Stick it out and keep writing. If you're a writer, you won't have any other choice.

I say this because this is also part of that pigeon-holing thing that happens. There's this idea that if your talent or ability doesn't express itself when you're young - like in your twenties, then you are hosed. When I was in my twenties I could barely feed myself and make it through the day. I was a mess. But there's this idea about success and what that means and what it looks like and how it happens or doesn't and what that means for you and your artistic life if you're going to have one. And even though we don't see or hear as much about the exceptions, they are out there and they are making work. Have you heard about Marta Beckett? She's an actress/ballerina who runs the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction. She's out there in the middle of the desert making theater on her own terms. What she offers may not be your taste, but she has been performing and running that space since 1967. She's in her eighties now and still performing. She is such an inspiration.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Care of Trees opens May 21 and runs through June 19 at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley. http://www.shotgunplayers.org/2011_careoftrees.htm

National Playwrighting Month (NAPLWRIMO) is in November. http://www.naplwrimo.org/ Last year I had my first go at taking the reins for the event and it was tough because I was in the midst of writing my MA thesis and writing Care of Trees, so it was tough trying to juggle everything and keep up with the daily maintenance and support that goes into the event. This year, I can do more planning and can be more involved in directly contributing to the community that emerges during the event. I'd like to expand what we do on the site, to make it an active year round community and then we'd have that marathon month of writing in November.

I Interview Playwrights Part 354: Michael Lluberes

Michael Lluberes

Hometown: Okemos, Michigan.

Current Town: New York, NY

Q: Tell me about The Boy in the Bathroom.

“The Boy in the Bathroom” is a three person musical I wrote with composer Joe Maloney. Here’s the blurb about it: “David lives in his bathroom. He never comes out. His mother feeds him thin, flat food she can slide under the door. He has everything he needs. David has obsessive-compulsive disorder and he's not going anywhere... until he meets Julie... and discovers that there might be something - or someone – on the other side of the door that will make it worth opening...”

I’m very proud of the work Joe and I have done on it. Hopefully it’s funny and sad and weird. It’s a very different kind of musical – the subject matter – the size – it’s intimate and personal. We wanted to create a really tiny world that would hopefully have a larger resonance. I think the piece surprises people. It feels much more like a play than a musical.

We originally did it at The New York Musical Theatre Festival and since then the show has received a lot of wonderful development opportunities. It’s now in a production at The Chance Theater in Orange County, CA through May 22nd.

Q: What else are you working on?

A:  I’ve been commissioned by No Rules Theatre Company in D.C. to adapt and direct a new version of Peter Pan. This is going to be a very dark and dangerous new take. I think J.M. Barrie wrote such a beautiful story about the pain of growing up. I’m reading a lot right now about his life and it’s opening a lot of windows. A wonderful imagination often emerges from dark places in childhood. I want the play to be both a child’s dream and nightmare. I want to create a fun and scary theatrical playground. I want the play to be thrilling battle between childhood and adulthood. It’s going to be all about imagination. I’m very excited about it.

I just received a New Artist Initiative grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a residency this summer at The Hambidge Center. Hambidge is a beautiful artist’s retreat in the mountains of North Georgia. I plan on using the time there to work on Peter Pan.

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

A:  You’ll have to buy me a drink first.

I don’t know about a specific story, but for as far back as I can remember I was always making theatre. When I was little, I would put on plays with my toys in the bathtub. I used to force my sister and the neighbor kids to put on shows in the backyard with me. My mother sewed red curtains and we put up a little make shift stage in a corner of my basement. I used to do plays on a trampoline in the round. I wore a red cape for a year when I was seven.

Later in high school I would put on rebel productions with a group of my friends. We would steal huge boulders from the City Park and orange fencing from construction sites for our sets. In one play I made a boy dress up in a Dorothy dress and a girl actually throw up in a bucket. I directed plays by Brecht and Ionesco while the other kids were doing “Damn Yankees”. I wore a beret. I was that kid. Today I still feel like I’m just a little kid making plays.

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

A:  One thing: I want theatres and producers to take more chances on new untested plays and artists.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

Shakespeare, Stephen Sondheim, Orson Welles, Charles Laughton, Peter Brook, Zero Mostel, Tennessee Williams, Simon Callow, Bill Finn, Edward Albee, Albert Cullum, Tony Kushner, Kaufman and Hart, Marian Seldes, The Muppets, The Group Theatre. My teachers: Gerald Freedman, Lewis J. Stadlen, Marty Rader. I devour biographies of theatrical giants of the past, the greats who broke through something and created a huge change – a new way of thinking or feeling about theatre.

Also, my friends are my theatrical heroes. Some of them are working for pennies and cheeseburgers and are creating really amazing work all over the country.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I’m excited by anything that I haven’t seen before. I’m excited by plays and musicals that change the form, that do something different and new. I want theatre to surprise me. Most of the time I sit in the theatre and I feel like I know what the person on stage is going to say or sing next or where they’re going to move. I love being surprised. I like crazy theatrical plays that are also deeply personal and heartfelt. I’m excited when I see a story about people who don’t normally get plays written about them. I love things that make you laugh and cry at the same time. I’m excited by the combination of contradictory things, the juxtaposition of things in theatre. The big and the small, the highbrow and the lowbrow, the pretty and the ugly, the extraordinary and the mundane, the dirty and the sparkly, the hilarious and the heartbreaking, the old and the new smashed together in one play.

I actually think we’re living in a really exciting time for new musical theatre right now – there’s a whole crop of original small musicals out there. I’m truly inspired by the writers and composers in our generation who are trying to do something new and exciting with the form. You’re not necessarily going to see them on Broadway - the “American Musical” is still a fairly conservative art form – but it’s also a comparatively young art form and my hope is that it turns into something as diverse and exciting as independent film is. There’s room in musical theatre for all kinds of different subject matter, characters, music and storytelling. I’m really excited to see what happens next.

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

A:  Be yourself. Write the play or musical that you want to see.

Be theatrical. Don’t put something on stage that you could see on TV.

There’s a lot of rejection. People will either get your play or they won’t – but you only need one person to get it.

Be personal. When you’re young and just starting out there’s no reason to not wear your heart on your sleeve. Make your plays personal.

Put your play up yourself. Just do it. Plays are meant to be seen and performed - not read.

Also, and I have to remind myself of this all the time: We are writing plays for people to see. We are telling stories. We are trying to make people less afraid, or more hopeful, or challenge them, or make them think, or entertain them. We’re not creating theatre for ourselves in a box, we are communicating with people.

Q: Plugs, please:

A:  My website:
www.MichaelLluberes.com

The Boy in the Bathroom at The Chance Theater in Orange County, CA
through May 22nd.
www.chancetheater.com

Reading at Primary Stages May 23 at 3pm

Where You Can't Follow
by Adam Szymkowicz
Directed by Lucie Tiberghien
Starring Michael Cerveris, Heidi Schreck, Bahvesh Patel, Jessica Love

Matt's doctor tells him he doesn't have long to live. He realizes he's
never been in love before, so he leaves home, flies to Paris and tries
to find love before it's too late.

All Readings will be held at Primary Stages, Studio A

307 West 38th Street, Suite 1510

New York, NY 10018

All readings are free and open to the public. Reservations are
requested and can be made by emailing readings@primarystages.org or by
calling 212-840-9705.

http://www.theatermania.com/new-york/news/05-2011/works-by-bekah-brunstetter-janine-nabers-adam-szym_36906.html

I Interview Playwrights Part 353: Kathleen Akerley

Kathleen Akerley 

Hometown:  I was born in Swindon, England but did the bulk of my growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Current Town:  Cheverly, Maryland

Q:  What are you working on now? 

A:  Two weeks ago I finished the draft of a full length play called Something Past In Front of the Light for production in August.  We're going to get together to read it later this month so I can have some edits ready for first rehearsal:  so despite the fact that I have a short play (Law & Ordure) due days ago and despite the fact that there is nothing more to be done with the first one until I hear the read, I keep using my writing time to go into the draft of the first one and just look at it when I really need to be getting more of the second one out of my head and onto the paper.  And I have something due in about 60 hours for the playwriting collective I'm in, unless I want to skip the challenge which I don't, and all of that's in my head too.  So I'm not working on anything right now while working on three things, which tends to encourage a lot of staring out the window.

Q:  How would you characterize DC theater? 

A:  Overcrowded.  Filled with many very driven, artistic and lovely people who must be counting on Adam Smith, or possibly even Darwin, to sort it all out, and who randomly sample from capitalist or socialist philosophies as suits them in any given moment to avoid being naturally de-selected (economically, of course:  it is a lion-free environment).  Generally, though, they're also folks who can be counted on to have interesting and open-minded conversations and to support each other's work.

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 checked in with my family on this one because that's often both illuminating and objective:  my brother sent back a huge tally of stories about me being confrontational with cops (I had never added them up!) as well as other authority figures, my father sent back one choice from the same list.  Perhaps the connection is tenuous, but:  I am impatient with unexamined assertions, bland generalizations, resting on simplified views, both in human interactions and in plays, and I get hornet-mad at people who abuse their authority, whether it's legal authority or the authority you have over someone's time and experience when you get them into your theater.

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

A:  I would get people to stop using the little money we have on encouraging the audience perception that theater is only valid when it's recently upgraded and shiny.  Since I will certainly fail in that initiative, I will then try to get people to stop writing monologue plays with wholly self-aware protagonists.  This second failure will drive me out of theater and I will have to live out my days giving massages in Thailand.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Harold Pinter for so many reasons, but mostly for writing and living the line 'Don't let them tell you what to do.'

Q:  What kind of theater excites you? 

A:  I saw a production of Trojan Women at La Ma Ma about six years ago in which an actor slid on her back, head first, down a sharply raked wall from about twenty feet up.  She controlled the descent with a kind of alternating-shoulder oscillation, her hair was long and flowed out below her, her dress was blue and the fabric light -- the total effect of seeing someone who'd just been thrown into the sea was stunning.  Every time I direct a play now I tell the actors that every scene has to have its blue dress moment or else we didn't find the point of the scene.  I'm excited by theater that doesn't explain itself, does use a lot of muscle, doesn't rest on its points or over-simplify, and knows that absurdism/magical realism (my favorites) doesn't mean conceptually self-indulgent or undisciplined.

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

A:  1.  No one reminds anyone of a shared past in full sentences, no one states the theme of the play.  Let the audience meet you with their thinking, let them leave with questions.  2.  The longer a monologue, the more it should reveal something about the speaker that s/he doesn't know s/he's saying.  3.  Everything you think is interesting:  you can figure out later, in the editing stage, if it's relevant.  Is my view!

Q:  Plugs, please: 

A:  If you're in DC in August or early September, come on by the Callan Theatre and see my play about the Devil collaborating on his biopic with a documentary filmmaker (www.longacrelea.org).  If you're in DC later in September or October, come see Law & Ordure, which is one of five plays in the Hope Operas, a new-works project established two years ago to support local charities.

I Interview Playwrights Part 352: Sonya Sobieski

Sonya Sobieski

Hometown: Maplewood, New Jersey (by way of Cincinnati , Ohio )

Current Town : New York Fucking City

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I just finished a new full-length play, the first since Commedia dell Smartass, which was produced by New Georges in 2005, just before my daughter was born. The daughter part kind of explains the hiatus. I’ve been writing a lot of one-act musicals in the last five years, as the form seems well-served by short spurts of energy. Some of those have coalesced and expanded into The Unfortunate Squirrel, a feel-good musical about the emptiness of modern life, which will have two public readings this month!

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 think it was around seventh grade, and a classmate I didn’t know very well asked, “Hey, are you the girl who makes the funny faces?” And my response was to give her a look, like, “Who, me?” I didn’t even realize that I was making a face—and essentially answering her question—until I’d done it. Recently I find myself writing characters who don’t speak, yet they’re always incredibly emotive and interesting. I spent many many years in childhood and young adulthood not knowing the right thing to say, and yet I was desperate to connect with others. It was a constant struggle. Playwriting is probably a way to resolve that—to use all those years of listening in order to create something that cannot be completed without other people.

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

A:  People would care. And I don’t mean non-theatre people. I mean theatre people. I wish we’d care more about what our peers and our potential peers were doing. I wish we weren’t slaves to The New York Times.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Mac Wellman, even though he’d be surprised to hear it. Artaud, because he advocated that theatre be big, emotional, and messy. Dan Rothenberg of Pig Iron is a current favorite. Lynn Nottage, because she has the seemingly miraculous ability to write plays that are both hard-hitting and uplifting, and she has a kickass sense of humor.

Q:  Any other influences?

A:  Woody Allen, romantic comedies, desire for the supernatural to be true.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Sleep No More, My Last Play, Confidence Man, Hell House. Ambitious, unusual, site-specific pieces that are experiences, not just literature. The po-mo comic-book/sci-fi/martial-arts mashups of Vampire Cowboys. I mean, I also like a good “play play” like Good People or Kin. Kin felt like a comforting, warm bath. Perfect. But not exciting. Well, the bear scene was exciting. The rest was lovely.

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

A:  Don’t spend more than two years working in a literary department. If you have profitable skills, consider taking a money job right out of college, make a bundle, and then you can do whatever you want starting in your late twenties, which is plenty young enough. But if you choose to go the internship/day-job route, that’s fine, too. Just write A LOT and don’t listen to critics, external or internal. Have fun and meet people. Be nice to everyone.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Readings of The Unfortunate Squirrel on Friday May 20 @ 9PM (Tada!, 15 W. 28th St. ) and Wednesday May 25 @ 4PM (Ripley-Grier Studios, 520 Eighth Ave. ) Lots of fun and singing. For info and reservations, http://flyingcarpettheatre.com/current-productions/the-unfortunate-squirrel/ I work free-lance as a playwriting mentor, helping individuals develop their scripts and ideas and write at their full potential. Says one of my clients/students: “You get the eye of a literary manager, with the heart of a fellow writer.” Register through NYU http://www.scps.nyu.edu/course-detail/X32.9608/20111/playwriting-tutorial-working-with-a-dramaturg or contact me directly at sonyasobieski at yahoo.