400 Playwright Interviews

Julia Brownell
David Anzuelo
David Wiener
M.Z. Ribalow
Neena Beber
Joe Roland
Radha Blank
Kelley Girod
Sean Gill
David Bar Katz
Daniel Alexander Jones
Taylor Mac
Sharyn Rothstein
Jon Kern
Sylvan Oswald
Mickey Birnbaum
Jeff Talbott
Deborah Brevoort
Rob Askins
Paul Cohen
Stephen Karam 
Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig
Karen Smith Vastola
David Grimm
Claire Moodey
Bess Wohl 
Wendy MacLeod 
Kate Mulley
Octavio Solis
Ian W. Hill
Monica Byrne
Don Nguyen 
Dana Lynn Formby
Dennis Miles
Marco Ramirez
Warren Manzi 
Mia McCullough 
Ellen McLaughlin
Tom Jacobson
Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro
Hannah Moscovitch
Alessandro King
Alex Lewin
Laurel Haines
Renee Calarco
E. Hunter Spreen 
Michael Lluberes
Kathleen Akerley  
Sonya Sobieski 
Gwydion Suilebhan 
Jane Miller
Eric Lane
David West Read
Katie May
John Pollono
Mona Mansour
Miranda Huba 
Lydia Stryk
Rachel Jendrzejewski 
Karen Malpede 
Darcy Fowler
Daniel Pearle
Heather Lynn MacDonald 
Gabe McKinley
Keith Josef Adkins 
Brian Quirk
Israela Margalit
Kia Corthron
Christina Anderson
Jenny Lyn Bader
Catherine Trieschmann
Oliver Mayer
Jessica Brickman
Kari Bentley-Quinn
John Kolvenbach
Daniel Keene
James Carter
Josh Tobiessen
Victor Lesniewski
Abi Basch
Matthew Paul Olmos
Stephanie Fleischmann
Chana Porter
Elana Greenfield 
Eugenie Chan
Roland Tec 
Jeff Goode
Elaine Avila 
Ashlin Halfnight 
Charlotte Meehan 
Marisela Treviño Orta
Quiara Alegria Hudes
Kait Kerrigan
Bianca Bagatourian 
Kyoung H. Park
Honor Molloy
Anna Moench 
Martin Blank
Paul Thureen
Yusef Miller
Lauren Gunderson
Jennifer Fawcett
Andrea Kuchlewska
A. Rey Pamatmat
Sean Christopher Lewis
Rachel Bonds
Lynn Rosen
Jennifer Barclay
Peggy Stafford
James McManus
Philip Dawkins
Jen Silverman
Lally Katz
Anne Garcia-Romero
Tony Adams
christopher oscar peña
Lynne Kaufman
David J. Loehr
Julie Hebert
Aditi Brennan Kapil
Elaine Romero
Alexis Clements
Lila Rose Kaplan
Barry Levey
Michael I. Walker

Maya Macdonald
Mando Alvarado
Adam Rapp
Eliza Clark
Margot Bordelon
Ben Snyder
Emily Bohannon
Cheri Magid
Jason Chimonides 
Karinne Keithley
Rich Orloff
David Simpatico
Deborah Zoe Laufer
Brian Polak
Kate Fodor
Sibyl Kempson
Gary Garrison
Saviana Stanescu
Brian Bauman
Mark Harvey Levine
Lisa Soland
Sigrid Gilmer
Anthony Weigh 
Maria Alexandria Beech
Catherine Filloux 
Jordan Harrison
Alexandra Collier
Jessica Goldberg
Nick Starr
Young Jean Lee
Christina Gorman
Ruth McKee
Johnny Klein
Leslie Bramm
Jennifer Maisel
Jon Steinhagen
Leslye Headland
Kate Tarker
David Holstein
Trav S.D.
Chad Beckim
Ruben Carbajal
Martyna Majok
Sam Marks
Stacy Davidowitz 
Molly Rice
Julia Pascal
Yussef El Guindi
Meg Gibson
Daniel McCoy
Amber Reed
Joshua Fardon
Dan O'Brien
Jonathan Blitstein
Dominique Morisseau
Fielding Edlow
Joshua Allen
Peter Gil-Sheridan
Tira Palmquist
Sarah Hammond
Charlotte Miller
Deborah Yarchun
Anna Kerrigan
Luis Alfaro
Jonathan Caren
Jennifer Haley
Sofia Alvarez
Kevin R. Free
Ken Weitzman
Michael Golamco
J. C. Lee
Ruth Margraff
Kirk Lynn
Tanya Saracho
Daria Polatin 
Delaney Britt Brewer
Alice Tuan
Alice Austen
Jeffrey Sweet
Dan LeFranc
Andrew Hinderaker
Brett Neveu
Christine Evans
Jon Tuttle
Nikole Beckwith
Andrea Lepcio
Gregory Moss
Hannah Bos
Steven Levenson
Molly Smith Metzler
Matthew Lopez
Lee Blessing
Joshua James
Chisa Hutchinson
Rob Ackerman
Janine Nabers
Cory Hinkle
Stefanie Zadravec
Michael Mitnick
Jordan Seavey
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 400: Julia Brownell

Julia Brownell

Hometown:  Ridgewood, NJ. In terms of theater, basically this means I was a 35 minute bus trip away from Port Authority. I'd take the bus in with my friends or my brother, eat at the Olive Garden, and see a Broadway show.

Current Town:  Los Angeles, CA and Hoboken, NJ. For the last two years, I've lived in LA for 7 or 8 months of the year and then shuttled back to Hoboken for the rest of the time. I've lived in sublets in Los Angeles; all my stuff - my clothes, my bed, my cat, my husband - are on the East Coast. It's not ideal.

Q:  What are you working on now:

A:  My play All-American is in previews at the Duke Theater on 42nd Street. It's an LCT3 play, produced by Lincoln Center. It's a play about sports - a retired professional football player, his high school quarterback daughter, her twin brother, and their mom. I'm excited about it because I think these are characters we don't see onstage so often. It's directed by Evan Cabnet, who is a fantastic director and brilliant with new plays, and has an amazing cast. The LCT3 program is amazing, too, because all tickets are only $20, so I don't feel bad asking my friends to come!

Q:  What was it like writing for Hung?

A:  Writing for television is intense; the pace is fast and the hours are very long. I have always really enjoyed sleeping, so it was a bit of an adjustment. But ultimately it's very exciting, and I love going to work everyday and seeing eight other writers. I find playwriting and screenwriting pretty lonely. Before I worked in TV I had a day job and I loved it because of the social interaction part. It's pretty great to come in and have other people doing what I'm doing, feeling what I'm feeling, to collaborate with, to commiserate with, and most of all, to learn from. Our showrunners started out as playwrights in New York so we have a lot of playwrights on the show; it's a pretty cool environment.

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 played sports, particularly soccer and basketball, and almost every day after school when I didn't have practice I'd go outside and kick the soccer ball against the side of our house or shoot hoops and write stories, plays, movies, whatever in my head. I'd stay out there for hours, just kicking the ball and making up characters and dialogue. When I was maybe twelve or thirteen, I wrote an entire musical in my head. Never wrote it down, never performed it, but I still know a bunch of the songs. (Note: it's not good at all. It's pretty bad.) Now, as an adult, I run 8 miles or so every morning before I sit down to write. That's when I think through everything; when I finally sit down to write the words just come out - I've already planned it out. I really can't write without running beforehand.

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

A:  I'd give regional theaters more credit. Living in (or just outside) New York I've sometimes felt like there's a bias against anything not produced in New York (with the exception of maybe Chicago). I've spent a lot of time at several regional theatres - Hartford Stage, Trinity Rep, the Alliance - and the work they do is as exciting or more exciting than what happens in New York. Plus, the community support they get is tremendous. At the Alliance I really felt like the community had a real stake in the theater they did; in a sense, they were rooting for it. I love the fact that I can be in New York and have ten different options of exciting stuff to see, but I also wish that regional theaters got a bit more prestige, a bit more recognition.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My first theatrical hero was Edward Albee - I read Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf the summer before my freshman year of college and I remember thinking, I didn't know a play could could jump off the page like this. It's one of those plays where I remember exactly where I was when I read it and how I felt. After that, Chris Durang, because I didn't know you could make characters talked the way his characters talked.

Connie Congdon taught me playwriting in college and made me believe I could do it. She also taught me to think theatrically in a way I hadn't before. We spent a lot of time just sitting around her office, shooting the shit and making each other laugh. I admired her career - all of a sudden being a playwright seemed feasible. It was a career and a life. After college, as I interned at Hartford Stage and then The Public Theater and then went to NYU for grad school, they flooded in - not just writers but directors and actors and designers and administrators, etc. There's a lot of pretty fantastic and talented people in this world. Jeremy B. Cohen of Hartford Stage (and now the Producing Artistic Director of the Minneapolis Playwright's Center) was an early mentor for me - he's just so passionate about new plays and developing playwrights. I was very lucky to meet him when I was 22.

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

A:  I learned this in grad school - I can't remember who said it - and I've found it tremendously important to remember as I try to navigate my career: only writing is writing. Researching your play is not writing. Taking meetings with production companies in LA is not writing. Sending out your work to a festival or contest and writing a cover letter is not writing. Pitching a movie is not writing. To be a writer you have to write. Yes, you have to advocate for yourself and put yourself out there, but I strongly believe that the work is in the writing and the rest will eventually fall into place.

Also in grad school, Janet Neipris told us about peaks and valleys. She would make a hand motion when she did it. Everybody's career takes a different course - peaks and valleys - so there's no use comparing yourself to other people. Your career will be your career, and nobody has the same journey. It's really important to me to not get caught up worrying about who's had what production where and who sold what screenplay or whatever. I just try to get passionate and excited about my own stuff, and other people's stuff that I like, and not get too caught up in the small world pettiness of it all.

Oh yeah, and know who you trust to look at your work. Have one or two or three people whose notes you believe in to look at your writing, and take everyone else's advice with a grain of salt. Listen to notes, but be particular about the notes you take.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come see All-American at the Duke on 42nd Street - it runs through November 19. We have Monday night shows! http://www.lct.org/showMain.htm?id=206

My husband's a founding member of a theater company, Fault Line Theater, which is running a fantastic production of Aristophanes' "The Frogs" at 4th Street Theater which also runs through November 19. This company makes classical theater so fun and so accessible. http://www.faultlinetheatre.com/

Also watch season 3 of "Hung" at 10 pm on HBO on Sundays.

I Interview Playwrights Part 399: David Anzuelo

David Anzuelo

Home town: El Paso, Texas

Current Town: NYC, NY

Q: What are you working on now

A: A new play called US/UK about a twink American hustler in London in 1989. I'm also working on re-writes for a workshop presentation of a personal-myth piece called Estrellita/Luminaria.

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

A: As a kid, I was a huge comic book fanatic, horror movie buff and greek mythology geek. I'd spend hours pouring over back issues of silver age super-hero comic books; memorizing trivia. Every weekend I'd go to the movies w/ my Pop or watch cable monster movies and then re-inact the plots with my Star Wars and Micro-naut action figures. By the time I was 11, I'd read everything in the public library on Greek and Roman mythology and had a decent knowledge of Minoan and Spartan culture. All of this was fed and encouraged by my Parents who were ecstatic that they had a son who loved to read.

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

A: If I could, the one thing I'd change about theater over all, is the price of tickets. Broadway is ridiculously over-priced and even off-broadway is too much for many folks. I love the theater companies who have a "pay what you can" night.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: My theater heroes are: Euripides; Aeschylus; Sophocles; Jean Genet; Joe Orton; Tennessee Williams; Tony Kushner; Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino; Peter Sellars; Grotowski; Ping Chong; Lee Nagrin; Stephen Adly Guirgus, Lucy Thurber; Kazuo Ohno; Min Tanaka and Pina Bausch. Although many will say the last three listed are choreographers more than theater artists. But I feel that they were really doing theater.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind of theater that excites me is one that is at once ancient and contemporary at the same time. I love theater that is visceral and physical and doesn't get too cerebral. I want theater that will provoke thought; enlighten people to new ideas and worlds and will leave an emotional imprint that lasts. I want sex and love and music and struggle. That's the kind of theater that excites me.

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


A:  What advice do I have to fledgling playwrights? At the onset of a new piece write freely. Write what turns YOU on. Write it exactly as you see it in your mind. Don't worry about what people will think. It may be the only chance you have to see it live in any physical form.

And work with collaborators who have a rock&roll warrior philosophy. By that I mean, that they will work with you as a team; that they are disciplined athlete-artists and have intrepid spirits during the creation of the new work, but will be emotional dare-devils during performances and kick the work to a level even you didn't expect.

Q:  Plugs, Please.

A: Right now Carlo Alban's INTRINGULIS is still running at Intar...I directed. And Thomas Bradshaw's BURNING is in pre-views at The New Group for which I'm the fight-director. Talk about intrepid artists! See these guy's work!

I Interview Playwrights Part 398: David Wiener

David Wiener

Hometown: Irvine, California

Current Town: Hoboken, New Jersey

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Right now, I'm working on a new play about the relationship between loneliness and political violence in America. And I sold a TV pilot recently, so I should probably get cracking on that.

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 nineteen, I saw Robert Stevens perform as King Lear at Stratford on Avon. It was a luminous production and a truly magnificent performance. Stevens was pitiable and potent all at once. Anyway, the play ended and the house went dark for about six seconds. And during that six seconds the audience was completely, absolutely, silent. I felt electrified and shaken just knowing that somewhere in that darkness, a thousand other humans were simultaneously processing the sheer beauty and power of what we had all just communally witnessed. Then, the lights came on and, as if a single organism, everyone stood. I've never recovered from that. I suppose I've spent the past 15 years of my life chasing those six seconds in the dark.

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

A:  Theater, is perfect. It's a dynamic art form that, I think more than any other, has the capacity to engender empathy. It's not a one-way transmission like film or TV or visual art. Theater is a communication-- an ephemeral conversation between play and audience, performer and play. I think the live communal dynamic is magnificent. And we're lucky to have it.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I think anyone who endeavors to do this lonely, unyielding, difficult thing is heroic in some sense.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A;  I love good storytelling. And I gravitate towards theater in which the story proceeds from emotional causality rather than the explication of plot. In my own writing, I try to focus on the emotional needs of my characters and allow them to dictate what happens next. Perhaps that sounds a little odd, but I’ve found that, somehow, if I can relax enough to simply feel and listen without editing, then these emotional needs lead my characters to action. I should say that, even with a lot of practice, it's very difficult to achieve that level of relaxation. But it does occur. And when it does, I experience a mode of writing in which I'm transcribing rather than composing. In other words, I'm not ahead of the action. I am, or rather, my characters are, just reacting on the basis of their emotional needs. The result is a story in which mystery and revelation coexist. And what they say and do becomes surprising-- Even to me. Especially to me. In spite of my otherwise practical, rational, logical thinking, writing plays has made me a big believer in the power of the unconscious mind. I think relaxation allows the unconscious to confront those aspects of ourselves about which we are unresolved. And at the point of that confrontation, creativity occurs.

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

A:  1. Ask for help. No one ever does this alone. The theater is full of generous, experienced, artists who embrace the responsibility of helping the next generation of artists to grow and find their own voices-- these people are the true care-takers of our art form. Personally, I've been fortunate to have had many remarkable mentors throughout my career. I owe a lot to writers like David Henry Hwang, Lisa Kron, Frank Pugliese, Theresa Rebeck and Arthur Kopit, to name only a few.

2. Seek out forums where you can engage with your colleagues about your work. There are a multitude of groups, fellowships, theaters, colonies, etc. that bring writers together around the development process. Some involve directors and actors as well. Each has it's own energy and method. Find the ones that work for you and go. And work. And listen. Personally I’ve benefitted tremendously from working at the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab, The Lark Fellowship, The Ojai Playwrights’ Conference, and New Dramatists.

3. Finally, relax, be patient, and remove the word “Deserve” from your vocabulary.

Q:  Plugs, please:


A:  My play, CASSIOPEIA is being presented at Boston Court in LA at their PLAY/Ground festival December 10th-12th.
My new play, GOLIATH, is having its first reading at New Dramatists November 14th.

Of Great Import

Have you seen this yet?


http://sadplaywright.com/

How about this?

http://charlesisherwoodsyogurtshop.tumblr.com/

Both are good times.

I Interview Playwrights Part 397: M.Z. Ribalow

Meir Ribalow

Hometown: New York City.

Current Town: New York City.

Q:  Tell me about Peanuts and Crackerjacks.

A:  It’s a novel (my first to be published) about a young pitching coach for a major league team in Buffalo who discovers that baseball, his great true love, has changed in ways that reflect our constantly evolving society. Tradition clashes with modernity both on and off the baseball diamond in hilarious, ironic and unexpected ways. I’m obviously honored that Pulitzer Prize Laureate N. Scott Momaday wrote that “Ribalow has written a book that truly belongs among the monuments of baseball literature. It is full of learning and lore, wit and wisdom.” Can’t ask for more appreciation than that, can you?

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  A new play, a new novel, a new poetry collection (my first one, Chasing Ghosts, was just published), and a non-fiction book about how films reflect our values. And Plays from New River 2, the second in our annual series of published new plays that emerge from New River Dramatists. I’m Series Editor.

Q:  What was it like reading scripts at the Public for Joe Papp?

A:  Fascinating, but it’s worth noting that Joe asked me to start a Literary Department; there hadn’t been one at The Public. So I wasn’t just reading scripts, I was creating a mechanism for evaluating around a thousand plays a year that were submitted to us, making sure that every single play was read fairly and at least twice before deciding on its disposition. Gave me not only a phenomenal education on how to read plays, but enormous empathy for people pouring so much energy and dedication into writing them. At that point in my life, I was mostly directing, and writing, as I always had, fiction and poetry. I didn’t start writing plays until my last year working at The NY Shakespeare Festival.

Q:  Tell me about New River.

A:  Mark Woods and I started New River Dramatists because we both had the same dream: to create a haven for gifted playwrights where they would be encouraged to write the best work of which they were capable. The creative partnership has worked out well, because Mark wanted to build it and I wanted to establish the process and run the room. Mark found this paradise in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina: in the woods, on the river, beautiful cabins, fantastic food, and we pay writers to come down and work with actors, writing whatever they want. We don’t care what each writer writes, because we don’t produce, so we’re not looking for plays to present; we’re looking for talent to nurture. We see our mision as doing what we can to raise the level of storytelling. The results have been pretty impressive: since we began a dozen years ago, we’ve developed nearly 400 new plays and screenplays, almost half have been produced or optioned all over the world, and our writers have won all sorts of major awards. So it’s nice to be validated. But this is a labor of love and, we both feel, of necessity. We badly need better stories to tell and by which to live. Anyway, it went so well artistically that it seemed natural to add New River Fiction and New River Poetry to our public presentations in NYC (at The Players) and elsewhere. So now we present evenings of all three genres, put all three on our New River Radio Show on Art International Radio (AIR) online (the URL is http://urls.artonair.org/newriver) and I’m now editing not only the Plays from New River series but also publications of Currents: New River Fiction (2012), and Capturing Chaos: New River Poetry.

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

A:  I yearn for a theatre based more on true artistic excellence and less on trendy mediocrity and perceived commerciality.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Shakespeare, Pinter, Chekhov, Ibsen, Moliere, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Joe Papp, Jose Ferrer.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  An original voice on a timeless subject. I prefer ambitious (not to be confused with pretentious) theatre, and I’d rather read a flawed play that no one else but that writer would have written than a beautifully done play that’s just a variation of something I’ve seen a hundred times.

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

A:  If you are writing out of love and passion and a deep need to write, don’t let anyone discourage you. They can’t keep you from writing, so keep doing it. Remember, you’re not writing for the Madding Crowd; you’re writing for yourself, God and The Unknown Friend.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Please listen to our radio show (http://urls.artonair.org/newriver). We’re proud of the work, and it’s free 24/7.

Check out New River at www.newriverdramatists.org.

New River Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-River-Dramatists/165603406784387

New River Twitter:
Twitter, New River Dramatists (@Newriverdrama)!

Meir Ribalow Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1658394507

Information on Peanuts and Crackerjacks (a novel):
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6598-9

Information on Chasing Ghosts (poetry):
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6598-9

I Interview Playwrights Part 396: Neena Beber

Neena Beber

Hometown:
Miami, Florida. Still Home.

Current Town:
New York City. Current can’t ever really replace Home, though it  has been a long slog of time.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Trying to finish a bunch of plays I started a while back. I have a very  poor sense of time which is why I need theatre to contain it for me. 

Q:  How has your TV writing affected your playwriting, if it has? 

A:  When I first started writing for TV, my writing for theatre got a little  stranger. I didn't want to write anything that resembled the TV writing at all. That meant no naturalistic dialogue, no banter, no jokey jokes, no straightforward narrative. I wanted there to be at least one metaphorical thread in my theatre work, even better three  or four or five. I wanted sideways sprawl and characters who neither learn nor grow. I became really interested in the space of the theatre, the live event, the meta-reality of theatre itself -- what it means to be in a room with people, real people, crossing in time and space with you.

Now I think TV and film have helped me really think about craft and story and economy and precision, and theatre has helped me see that you don’t need to be afraid to bring your voice and your singular oddness and peculiar humor to the screen big or small. I am not at this point concerned with one being too this and the other being too that.

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 mom decided it would be fun for us to learn a new word a day.  This was before those word-a-day calendars. She was a real wordsmith, an ace at Scrabble and an amazing, charming storyteller. She really understood people and what made them tick. She had this ability to turn the ordinary stuff of life into something magical. Nothing was lost on her. And she appreciated language, words. So I remember sitting on our back porch getting our words. The first word was procrastination. See, I took piano lessons but would only practice when we were heading out the door. When the recital came, I had no idea what I was doing. I made up a tune on the spot. I was winging it, and I thought I pulled it off because no one said anything; of course, no one knew what to say! It was both comical and  dreadful at the same time. Comical and dreadful is a heady combination. I think at some level even then, I knew I was just banging keys. I really was planning to figure it out later -- and not just later, but after, which some might say is really too late.

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

A:  No second guessing from anyone about anything.


Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?


A:  Growing up my theatrical hero was Mad Guy Mogi, my great uncle, a silent film actor, magician, lion tamer, shrunken head seller, lentil soup eater, professional worrier, eccentric dancer, kosher-keeper.  The few times I met him, he was wearing a top hat, a cape, and a giant, gnarled monster hand that he would transform to a normal hand before your very eyes, as he reached to shake yours. He was my hero, or really my meta-hero, because my mom was my hero who conveyed who he was to me, valued who he was, celebrated him in all his eccentricities.

Of course I also have my long list of names, people who come to me when I need them most. Some of them are ghosts sitting on my shoulder; too many of them are ghosts for me now. They taught me.  They teach me. They raise the bar.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I think it is always exciting to have people performing live in a room using their time and energy to delight us. It’s like we’re all kings and queens. I love the attempt at communication that I may not completely understand, not yet anyway. I want to walk a mile in your shoes even if they don’t fit.

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

A:  Start your own thing and go forth fearlessly. Remind older playwrights why.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I prefer to go bald.

I Interview Playwrights Part 395: Joe Roland

 
Joe Roland

Current Town: New York, NY.

Q:  Tell me about On The Line.

A:  I wanted to tell a story about working class people that didn't take place in a trailer and managed avoid the issues of both crystal meth and incest. In On The Line, things are working for these people until their jobs are threatened. It's amazing what having a job can do for someone; and it can be frightening to watch what happens when good jobs disappear.

The play is about what happens to three friends who are caught between loyalties. The loyalties to their union, their jobs, their families and each other.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I'm finishing up my play Lester and Doyle LLP, which is about a young woman whose ambitions come in direct conflict with her principles when she is surrounded by corruption at the law office where she works. It's a comedy.

Q:  How does your acting inform your writing and vice-versa?
 

A:  It's all about story telling no matter which side you approach it from. The question I ask myself over and over, whether I'm acting or writing is "What's the story?" I learned to write by watching Mike Nichols teach a master class where it was all about telling the story.

I teach a playwriting and performance workshop to union members, and I think it's important that they experience both to see what each one requires from the 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 whatever the age is when you no longer want to ride a tricycle, I asked my parents if I could have a regular bike. They declined the request, offering some nonsense about my not being ready. The next morning I rode my little green hand-me-down tricycle to the end of the driveway and waited for the garbage truck. When it arrived I instructed the garbage men to crush my tricycle, and they did, as I watched with great satisfaction. My parents were not amused, and I was without any mode of transportation for some time. But I felt good about my decision. Still do.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
 

A:  My teachers. Arthur Miller. O'Neill. And anyone who is trying to have a life in the theater, something that takes a truly heroic effort these days. Kipp Osborne (He opened a theater in this economy, if that's not heroic, don't talk to me.) Bill Buell.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  A good story well told. Honest.

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

A:  None. I don't want to encourage anyone. Seriously, you've already got a couple of hundred playwrights on this site, don't you think it's time we started to cull the herd a little bit?

But if you just can't help it and have to write plays: Arthur Miller said to write a play is a noble act. Make it count. Write about what matters to you. And if you find a way to get your work produced consistently, tell the rest of us.

Q:  Plugs, please:

 

A:  On the Line at the Canal Park Playhouse. Death of a Salesman.

I Interview Playwrights Part 394: Radha Blank

Radha Blank

Hometown: Williamsburg, Brooklyn/Harlem, NY

Current Town: Harlem

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Two plays....HappyFlowerNail...my first solo show in over ten years...follows the different women who call a Korean-owned nail salon (under threat from revitalization of Bed-Stuy Brooklyn) home...then there's Casket Sharp...takes place in a funeral home in a deprived Black town. It's about death rituals and gang rites. One screenplay...a mockumentary....

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'd get in trouble from time to time while in grammar school...always running my mouth or cracking jokes...I'd have to write these letters of apology and they'd always start like....'Dear Miss Such&Such...I am very sorry that I disturbed the class this afternoon....but maybe if you paid more attention to me or if we did more exciting things in class then' Lol. My mom had saved some of these letters....she couldn't believe my gall...and even agreed with some of my grade school sentiments. She figured I'd either be a great writer or a pretty good lawyer. I think I always had a knack for seeing things from another perspective...and definitely attacking injustice...because that was simply unjust (making me write those long ass letters).

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

A:  I wish there was more investment in creating new audiences...and valuing those audiences instead of catering to the same ol' same ol'.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Joe Papp...(theater for the people which includes the poor, thanks) Alice Childress...(she was not afraid to walk away from Bway if it meant changing her vision) John O'Neill and all of the folks connected to the Free Southern Theater movement.. (to create social justice theater around human rights, voting rights in the heart of the south at the time of Jim Crow...was beyond bold...it was life changing)

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater with balls...theater that is not about pleasing an audience but the artist being true to themselves, the message of the work and connecting with audiences who celebrate that. And I love theater that leaves me thinking about it's themes/subjects looong after its done...theater that punches me in the gut...the kind that makes we want to create some change, like The Exonerated by Jessica Blank or Born Bad by Debbie Tucker Green...

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

A:  yes, learn the craft...but take as long as you need to figure out what your voice is...the kind of stories that speak to you....

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  We just closed seed....(seedtheplay.com) but hope to have another life down the road...and then there's HappyFlowerNail...coming soon...by hook or by crook! LOL.

I Interview Playwrights Part 393: Kelley Girod

Kelley Girod

Hometown: Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Current Town: Manhattan

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  As a producer, I'm going into my 3rd year of producing a play festival that I founded called "The Fire This Time." It's a festival for playwrights of African and African American descent whose stories don't often get told. This festival came about due to my own frustration as a writer. I felt that there was a standard perception of what a "black play" is and I was not writing that play. Other playwrights started to voice the same concern as well. Anything that is written by a black playwright is a black play no matter the content or style. So three years ago myself, Germono Toussaint, Pia Wilson and Radha Blank gathered in a room to discuss this problem and now we are going into our 3rd year of programming from Jan 17th - 25th. This includes our ten minute plays for our new playwrights, readings of full lengths for our 2nd year playwrights and this year we will start producing full productions of our playwrights starting with Pia Wilson's "The Flower Thief" in August 2012! I am very proud of this festival and that we can commit to giving platforms to emerging playwrights.

As a playwright I am working on a new play with Keith Beauchamp who is an emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. He produced and directed the documentary "The Untold Story of Emmet Louis Til" and is currently the only African American man with his own series on tv, The Injustice Files, on Investigation Discovery, which reopens cold cases from the civil rights era. I am also finally writing a screenplay with my brother John who is a producer down in Louisiana. Both projects are in the early stages so I'll just save you from a very vague, overly conceptualized explanation of what I'm trying to work out:)

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

A:  Ok, so I have to give a brief explanation before I tell the story. And now I'm afraid the lead-up is just going to make readers say "Uh, that's it?...." But anyway, the first thing to know is that I am one of TEN children. I am number five. Growing up in a Cajun/Creole family in Louisiana, a big family like ours is actually not uncommon. My mother was one of fourteen herself. Ok, second thing to know, Cajuns and Creoles are very, very unique people. Cajuns are the descendents of the Acadians exiled from Nova Scotia in the Grande Derangement, a historical event made famous by Longfellow's poem "Evangeline." My ancestors were the founders of the first Acadian or Cajun settlement in Louisiana. Creoles are French - speaking people of mixed descent. Both of my parents were raised speaking French and yes, I know a lot of curse words in Cajun and Creole French. So mix big families, with lots of storytelling in broken English, stories that had both the dark and light sides of spirituality and the supernatural, place them all in a city where there isn't much to do and the following story is what you get:

So my siblings and I came up at a time when there wasn't much in the way of playstations, internet etc. Saturdays were spent outside building clubhouses and tents. To be authentic, if we built a clubhouse or tent we had to use the bathroom outside because if we went inside to use the bathroom the whole thing wasn't "real." The girls used a bucket, I'm sure my mom still doesn't know about this. If it was raining we were inside playing our favorite games - church or gangsters depending on how we felt. Our game of gangsters once led me to make a small packet of fake cocaine by putting baking soda in a little ziplock. Suffice it to say my mother was beyond startled when she later found it on the floor. We also enjoyed playing a good game of "house" every now and then. In my favorite episode of that game I played the teenage daughter who was returning home after a stint in drug rehab. When I entered the room my brother, who was playing the father, sniffed the air and said "I smell LSD."

But it was the game of "Army" that I think really explains me as a writer. In this particular game, in order to be "real," we dragged a garden hose into the house up to the second floor and dropped it from my brother's bedroom window. One of my brothers then climbed down the house into the garden. We were supposed to do the same. This was an army training drill. Another brother was too small to climb down the hose so we were instructed by our "Drill Sergeant" to throw him out of the window, which we did without thinking twice(a soldier never questions his/her leader!) and my brother caught him. I was supposed to be next to climb down the hose when I heard my mother coming up the stairs. I ran like hell and hid in the closet. She walked in, saw the hose out the window and just walked back out. I am sure at that point she had really just had enough.

What I learned from these childhood adventures that still sticks in my writing - play, have fun, take risks and go all the way with them. In childhood we don't think twice about going as far as we need to go no matter where it leads us. When I am writing my plays, that is my adult playground, that is where I am with my siblings again and I am someone else, in a whole new world.

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

A:  Before suggesting any changes I would want the honest answers to some of theses questions:
Do literary managers actually read the plays that are submitted? And if so, how do they know who is a man or a woman, black or white, and why should any of those things factors into a play being put up? That same question goes to producers, but from them, I'd like to know why a playwright's gender and ethnicity factor into the marketing of a play? Also, when you have a man flying over an audience in a spiderman suit, how do you explain theatre's main aspect - suspension of disbelief through story and staging- to future theatre-makers?

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Tennessee Williams because if you spent as much time in the South around Southern women as I have, you'd understand just why this man was a genius. No one really captures the beauty and complexities of the South and the Southern woman like Williams. Just thinking about the last line of "The Glass Menagerie" gives me chills and makes me want to cry at the same time.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  New plays!

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A:  1) Take care of yourself! I can't stress this enough. Exercise, get sleep, eat well. If you don't have health insurance there are always low-income options. When you do finally get your big break, you don't want your reviews being read to you by your nurse at Bellevue.

2) Keep it in perspective. If you ever find yourself complaining to a cancer survivor about how you didn't get into the EWG it may be time to reassess some things. The same goes for if you ever find yourself scouring the internet for bad reviews of a colleague's play. Just not cool.

3)Always surround yourself with people who will be honest with you and learn how to take criticism for what it is.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come to The Fire This Time, January 16-25th 2012. Look out for our upcoming website www.firethistimefestival.com!

I Interview Playwrights Part 392: Sean Gill

Sean Gill

Hometown: Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

Current Town: Brooklyn.

Q:  Tell me about the Dreams of the Clockmaker.

A:  Dreams of the Clockmaker is an unusual piece and not your typical one-woman show, particularly in terms of its scope, mood, and tonal shifts. We follow our enigmatic lady on a stage as she regales us with troubling visions of a dystopian future, enacts a low-rent 80’s magic show, and bewilders us with Dust Bowl occultism while reliving her captivity in the stately mansion of a master manipulator known only as “The Clockmaker.”

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I’m looking to mount a full production of another mysterious, otherworldly play of mine called Laurie Deacon and the Night Caller, and I am in the process of writing a new one, which may or may not involve time travel and 13th Century monks. I have several films in the works including a neighborly revenge flick called Slumlord Shitheel Slaughter, an ode to watery beer and urban archaeology called Puttin’ on the Schlitz, and a freakish tale of puppetry and class warfare (set in a cesspool) called Fresh Piss.

Q:  How does filmmaking inform your playwriting and vice-versa?

A:  My plays often come across as cinematic, from the perspective of sound (I always do my own sound design) to visual elements. For example, in my play Aenigma, I envisioned (and director Rachel Klein effectuated) the playback of a blackmailed videocassette, complete with actors rewinding and fast-forwarding and simulating tape anomalies. In terms of my plays informing my films, I often make silent films which require a very particular form of theatricality, and I’ve recently moved toward puppetry and set-building, occasionally on a miniature scale.

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

A:  Since I was a boy, I’ve been a careful observer of the miniature comedies and tragedies that play out between the lines in our day-to-day lives, and there’s a certain amount of material that naturally flows from these observations. I remember when I was five or six, a nearby city park would have “goldfish days” whereupon a wading pool would be filled with goldfish, and excitable youngsters armed with tupperware and plastic bags would paddle in pursuit of that simple joy of cradling something alive in their hands. I didn’t participate, because my family wouldn’t acquiesce to a pet, goldfish or not, so I simply watched. After some time had passed and the kiddie frenzy had abated, I remained. In their wake, the children (guided only by momentary euphoria and not with any ill intent) had left behind hundreds of squished and trampled goldfish, grotesque and oozing. I felt a profound despair. I looked around, and no one seemed to notice. I didn’t shake the sensation for days.

On a lighter note but in a similar vein, some years later at Halloween time, our elementary school cafeteria offered Vampire Popsicles with a jet-black exterior and a runny, sticky “blood” interior. Designed to appeal to “kids who love gross things,” they fell flat amongst the student body because they were simply too gross. I envisioned a whole storyline that there was some young, enterprising lunch lady who’d put her ass on the line, arguing in that theoretical cafeteria board room (in the midst of boring Fla-Vor-Ice hardliners!) that the kids would really enjoy the change of pace. To make a long story short, eight months later, at the hottest, balmiest Field Day in memory, the unused Vampire Pops were rolled out at the end of the day as the only means of refreshment for an army of sweat-soaked, severely exhausted youth. The children, myself included, tore into the Vampire Pops with horrifying voracity, turning our mouths inky-black and inadvertently covering our bodies with goopy blood sauce. Even calling it 'goopy' or “gooey” insinuates more rigidity than it deserved. As soon as you hit the center, it was like you were holding a wine bottle upside down above your face and pulled out the cork. If you weren't prepared, your face, hands, and shirt would be showered in sticky, viscous, bloody fluid. It was ludicrous– they might as well have handed us squirt guns filled with maple syrup! We resembled the aftermath of a massacre. The Vampire Pops had transformed a grueling, mandatory school activity into a stunning vision of gory, apocalyptic chaos, and I delighted in it. I’m unsure if others saw the full extent of the situation’s absurdity, but I was happy to take a step back and chronicle the miniature comedy.

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


A:  Gone are the halcyon days of profound pageantry and breathtaking spectacle, of cramming seven hundred dancers and cigarette-smoking extras and dangerous, deranged animals onto one rickety stage. Or maybe they never happened. Perhaps it’s merely the fever-dream of an audience member who’s seen too many Busby Berkeley numbers and Cecil B. DeMille epics. Anyway, at Broadway prices, I basically want to be seeing the Sack of Rome or the last days of Pompeii.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  This is a tough one, and there’s so many to list, so let’s say Euripides, Eugene O’Neill, Antonin Artaud, Yukio Mishima, David Mamet, Ellen Stewart, and Julian Beck. And though it’s technically not “theater” in the purest sense, the teleplays of Rod Serling. And as long as we’re going that far– hell, the Grand Guignol splendors of Alice Cooper live!

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Many kinds, and across many spectrums. Brazen, ball-squashing gutter theater. Doily-enshrouded theater of the upper crust. Theater of exquisite craft featuring costumes, puppets, spectacle, or what-have-you that’s not prefabricated nonsense, but carefully built and rigorously fashioned by men and women with their own hands. Work that lives and breathes with the creators’ joy. Work that lives and breathes with the creators’ torment.

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

A:  Surround yourself with friends and collaborators who excite you, whom you trust completely, and whose company you enjoy; people who aren’t afraid to be brutally honest, yet are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt as you bounce your loopier ideas off of one another. Cultivate other interests, savor your free time, and don’t let your day job(s) get the best of you.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Well, of course, there’s my show Dreams of the Clockmaker http://vimeo.com/27958787, which runs from October 17-30th at the Wild Project, but I would also sincerely recommend Rachel Klein’s morbid fantasia The Tragedy of Maria Macabre http://vimeo.com/28088659 (for which I did the sound design), which runs semi-concurrently with Clockmaker at the Wild Project from October 20th-30th.

I Interview Playwrights Part 391: David Bar Katz

David Bar Katz

Hometown:  Philadelphia, PA

Current Town:  New York City

Q:  Tell me about your upcoming show with LAB.

A:  The play is called The Atmosphere of Memory. The title's taken from Tennessee Williams's stage directions for The Glass Menagerie. It's a bit of a send-up of narcissistic writers who think the traumas of their lives and their dysfunctional families are so interesting they deserve to be plays. Though it is based on some major drama that occurred in my life when certain members of my family were offended when they saw themselves portrayed in Freak. I thought I had disguised them well as Latinos, but I was mistaken. I'm really proud that it's a LAB play, not just that it's being done there but that the way it was developed was uniquely LAByrinth. We are predominantly a company of actors, though many members write and direct as well, and I wrote the play specifically for LAB company members like Ellen Burstyn, Melissa Ross and David Deblinger. The play wouldn't have come into being without them.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I have a pilot at Showtime about a sobriety coach that I'm working on, a few screenplays in development, one an adaptation of a Grant Morrison graphic novel called Joe the Barbarian that I'm especially excited about, being a comic book geek. Also a sci-fi tween novel called Chronicles of the Chosen and many plays in various states of undress.

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 only six I led an uprising at the Terezin concentration camp. At the time I didn't think it was a big deal, but my therapist seems to think I should look at how it effected me more closely. I was a solitary kid and read a lot of comic books and Philip Roth at an inappropriate age. My step-father taught film studies at Penn so in an age before TCM and video rentals I got to see a lot of old films projected in my living room. So the actors always looked life-sized which I guess is why I like theater the best.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  O'Neill, Avram Goldfadn, Tennessee Williams, Neil Simon, Sondheim. I can't write a word without one of them looking over my shoulder or touching my hand.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Passion. When you sit in the theater and you see a writer, director and actors pull their hearts out and leave them on the stage.

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

A:  Write in long-hand. Seeing something on a screen in word or final draft creates the illusion of being done.

Coming up next

Fat Cat Killers in Philly

Nerve in Halifax

New York One Min Play Festival at Primary Stages

A Night of Burlesque to Benefit a production of my play Elsewhere in NYC

What else?  A couple productions of Pretty Theft in the winter.   Why Overhead and Herbie in NYC.  Another couple of Nerve productions.  Two productions of Hearts Like Fists.  Two productions of Incendiary.  and a web series.

I Interview Playwrights Part 390: Daniel Alexander Jones

Daniel Alexander Jones

Hometown: Springfield, Massachusetts. McKnight Neighborhood in the 1970s.

Current Town: New York City. Manhattan. Inwood.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I just recorded the new music project for Jomama Jones (my alter/altar-ego) In LA, with composer Bobby Halvorson. I am also collaborating with Bobby on a musical adaptation of a 107 year-old children's book. In NY, I am putting the finishing touches on my newest play, Phantasmatron, which is a speculative historical drama set in 1864 involving Mary Todd Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckly and a pair of Spiritualist twins. And, I'm starting the academic year at Fordham University, where I am an Assistant Professor; I'm very much looking forward to working with our students - they are spectacular people.

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 Summer 1977, just after the birth of my brother, I contracted a strange illness. My body ached, I was continually feverish and I lost most of the meat off my bones. The pediatrician put me on all sorts of medicines, none of which worked; I was waylaid for half the Summer. All I could tolerate was ice cold Hi-C. Though I'm pretty sure I had always felt connected to "the other side" so to speak, i.e. aware of the presence of energies and entities not in this reality, somehow during this extended fever dream state, with my physical self so weakened and in unexpected isolation, I experienced my first true lifting of the veil. The warp and weft of time loosened and a visceral sense of the precarious pulse of life accompanied my every waking moment. I'll never forget the first day I was allowed outside. The sunlight was electric honey. I could hear the tones of the bees flying through the air and literally feel them land on the plump clover and feel the bend in the stems of the tiny flowers. It was almost too much. Before I had language to describe it, I was experiencing the musical idea of all things. I saw both the thing itself, and its living blueprint simultaneously. That fever changed me. I think it removed some part of me from unconscious connection to other people and things; there's a tinge of isolation in me that I can trace back to this time. Most importantly, it cemented something in my perceptive abilities; I see more than what's immediately visible. Thinking about this question makes me realize that as an artist I consistently seek to theatricalize unseen architectures.

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

A:  Changes are already underway and the heat is being generated outside traditional structures. The rich examples provided by many contemporary musicians and visual artists (who have simply and directly cultivated new audiences and broad platforms) motivate me to get up and get moving in service of my dreams and those of my colleagues. Direct address. Pearl Damour's recent How to Build a Forest; Aaron Landsman and Mallory Catlett's evolving City Council Meeting, Erik Ehn's Soulographie and Sharon Bridgforth's upcoming River See, are but four examples of artists creating networks and partnering with forward-acting institutions to make work that seeks to engage beyond typical structures. The American theatre writ-large does not seem to want the kinds of change that I, or many of my collaborators, would wish for it. Therefore I have learned to pour the full measure of my desire for change into my own work. I am hugely inspired by and drawn to artists and institutions who have planted themselves firmly in this twenty-first century and are committed to dynamic, collaborative exploration of the possibilities for live art in the lives of all sorts of American people in all sorts of modalities. The comfort of knowing exactly what story will be told, exactly how it will be told and exactly who will be telling it leads, in my opinion, to a dangerous complacency. And the idea of making art by consensus (which ends up being the fate of many new plays) is in direct opposition to the theatre I seek. I don't want art to lull me to sleep, I want art to wake me up. So, we do it differently. Of late, I returned to Audre Lorde's infallible quote, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." I am no longer interested in trying to dismantle self-repairing elitist structures, or systems of thought, that do not in fact support the future expansion of the art form for which they claim to exist. Unwelcoming systems are maintained by individuals who make choices. I intend to leave that all be. We're making something new now.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My heroes are people who make the room sing. My heroes are people who speak truth with power. My heroes are people who choose joy. My heroes are people who make a way out of no way. My heroes are people who share. My heroes are people who don't suffer fools. My heroes are people who take responsibility for the gifts and the powers they possess and cultivate their craft. My people seek to heal and not harm. There are many - I will omit some for brevity's sake - but I could fill your blog with names. I was fortunate enough to be mentored by several of them including Aishah Rahman, John Emigh, Robbie McCauley and the late Rebecca Rice and Kathryn Gagnon. I will never forget being a frequent visitor in the room with Paula Vogel, Anna Deavere Smith and David Savran at Brown University when they taught a workshop together - I have rarely felt such a creative charge in the air. The writers and/or performers Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Bridget Carpenter, Naomi Iizuka, Ruth Margraff, Erik Ehn, Jake-ann Jones, Eisa Davis. Lisa Kron. Peggy Shaw. Lois Weaver. Lisa Damour and Katie Pearl. Stacey Karen Robinson. The Rude Mechanicals. Jason Neulander. My former colleagues at Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre in Austin. Elissa Adams. The visionary artistic leaders at New Dramatists and The Playwrights' Center. Polly Carl. Many of them I get to work with - including Helga Davis, Sharon Bridgforth, Bobby Halvorson, Grisha Coleman, Barbara Duchow, Walter Kitundu, Vinie Burrows, Tea Alagíc and recently Sarah Benson. And there is a long list of students who I've had the privilege of working with who inspire me beyond belief. A few of my heroes succumbed to the shadow side of the artist's journey; and I have struggled (as have many of my colleagues) with the experience of seeing anger, bitterness and resentment consume the capacities of some artists who had been burning torches. No-one can hide from the shadow side. Yet, I have been given tremendous lessons and resonant examples by artists who found ways to transmute the negatives, too. They found ways to tap the generative capacities of darkness and ways to harness and direct their energies to make something luminous and lasting. Two legendary artists, Josephine Baker and Lena Horne continue to 'minister' to me through their life stories. There are so many to name. And that fact alone is inspiration, to me.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that is all in. 100% plus. Theater that leaves you trembling and ready to greet the dawn with new resolve. Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge springs to mind - it used impossibility like a diver uses a diving board. Theater that knows it can conjure the holy ghost and does it fearlessly - watching Omi Osun place the headdress upon her head and dance out the ritual of becoming 'king', her eyes glinting in the twilight, sweat coating her skin like diamond dust, strut, strut, strut... in Sharon Bridgforth's delta dandi at SummerStage in Harlem last year. Theatre that depends upon the essence of its own form - the pulsing, breathing, human presence demanding and binding the willing imaginations of its audience members in a live, ephemeral moment. Watching Anna Deavere Smith do an early, stripped down, "unplugged" performance of Fires in the Mirror - no light or sound cues - just her, a table, a rolling chair, her grand arms and angular legs, her voice ricocheting off the wooden beams of Rites and Reason Theatre - we were all close enough to hear each breath - a once in a lifetime experience. Theatre that honors the virtuosity of elders and the insight of new arrivals simultaneously. Watching legendary actor Vinie Burrows and the gorgeous young actor Sonja Perryman recount the aftermath of a lynching in my own Phoenix Fabrik - Sonja as bright and urgent as a night star, Vinie, as vast as the indigo that surrounds it. Theater of quantum physics. Theatre that reminds us of who and what we really can be.

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

A:  Give yourself the permission and approval you seek. Make work. Make work. Make work. Develop your practice. Beware of choices you are making that are about consensus - collaboration offers you and your fellow artists an opportunity to reach beyond yourselves to find the most resonant expression for a project, yes - but that does not mean that you should be writing for other people to agree or 'like' what you write. It means you should let your work with others push you toward writing the thing that is most honest. Be willing to stand your ground - and - be willing to let go of something you thought was sure - so long as you are pursuing that most honest thing. Learn the difference between self-confidence and egotism; learn the difference between a loud voice and a talented voice. Seek humility through your constant attention to all aspects of your practice. Volunteer a measure of your time, quietly, consistently, in the service of others' work. Devour the body of work of as many playwrights as you have fingers and toes. At least. Challenge yourself to move beyond the facile language of "like and dislike" and spend time analyzing, reflecting upon and describing pieces of art (be they theatre, dance, music, visual art, film) that you say you like and that you say you hate. Learn the nature of the elements that resonate with you - ask yourself why they do. Learn what the elements are that put you off - look more deeply into your own aversion. Ask more questions than you spout answers. Drink water. Get sleep. Develop a parallel practice - get really good at something that has nothing (ostensibly) to do with theater - planting trees, baking cakes, repairing bicycles, digging wells, planning rallies, coaching... whatever. Remember you are not the first. Challenge the viral ideas of exceptionalism and the pursuit of fame. Devote yourself to becoming the best craftsperson you can become and remember that more often than not, most other artists are seeking to do the same.

Q:  Plugs please.

A:  Jomama Jones's albums RADIATE and LONE STAR are available on iTunes and CD Baby and we will release the EP SIX WAYS HOME in 2012. Stay looped in through danielalexanderjones.com.

I Interview Playwrights Part 389: Taylor Mac

Taylor Mac

Hometown: Stockton, California. Not the land of the sea but the land of tract housing and blending into nothing.

Current Town: New York City and Southfield, Ma

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A few projects: the libretto for a composed-through musical about the ethics of small government, the philosopher Philippa Foot and her grandfather Grover Cleveland; an all ages play set in an actual mud pit that celebrates failure (and where the entire audience is dressed as frogs); a kitchen-sink drama about the end of men and the changing demographics of our country; and a twenty-four hour concert of the history of popular music.

Q:  How would you describe the process by which you create a new piece?

A:  It's always different but they tend to use pastiche, which can be confusing because pastiche is often associated with work that's hodgepodge or stolen from other sources. My work is about variance. I like to show the full range of who we are as people and the themes I'm discussing in the work. If we're honest great works of art are often in the genre of pastiche: "War and Peace" is a pastiche of romance novel, critical theory, and history. One could make the same argument (and I do) for any Shakespeare play. My plays often squish genre's, styles, and forms together with the hope that by doing so I'll create work that honors (by acknowledging) the past and present but whose goal is to help dream the culture forward.

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

A:  I was just reading Steve Jobs obituary in the Times this morning and when asked about market research he said, "It's not the consumers job to know what they want". I've been trying to get the theater community to recognize this for awhile now. We ask our audience to tell us what kind of theater we should be making way too much. Instead I'd like us to become experts on the needs and wants of humanity. That's our job. A true curiosity and a disciplined exploration of what's under the surface. If we ask the audience what they want, they'll tell us to give them what they know, which keeps the work stuck in tropes, nostalgia, and safety. If we do our job and figure out what our audience needs in the present moment, we dream the culture forward.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Plato, Molière, Shakespeare, Wilde and his sister Wilder (Thorton), Shaw, Rice, Williams, Kondoleon, Ludlum, Eichelberger, Papp, and Harry Hayes are the ones whose work has inspired me but who I never met. Elizabeth Swados, Morgan Jenness, Justin Bond, Michael Warren Powell, Lanford Wilson, Romulus Linney, Mercedes Ruehl, Bill Irwin, Karen Finley, Sam Shepard, Naomi Wallace, Penny Arcade, and David Greenspan are the ones who I've been taught by, encountered, and/or admired from a distance.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  When theater reveals something I didn't know about the world, my understanding of myself and the others around me; when it reminds me of something I'd forgotten about the world, myself and others around me; and when it creates a community out of the audience and players, allows them to be present in the moment and inspires them to further the conversation the work put forth.

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

A:  Write, write, write. Make, make, make. Share, share, share. And whatever you do, don't ask for permission to be creative.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Three upcoming concerts at Joe's Pub in NYC (Oct 16th, Oct 23rd, and Nov 6th) and two upcoming productions of "The Lily's Revenge" (one in New Orleans in the spring of 2012 and one in Edinburgh in August of 2012).

I Interview Playwrights Part 388: Sharyn Rothstein

Sharyn Rothstein

Hometown: Avon, CT

Current Town: NYC

Q:  Tell me about The Invested.

A:  As the economy started imploding (the first time), I noticed that the few women who were at the top of major Wall Street banks and firms seemed to be losing or walking away from their jobs. Whistleblowers tend to disproportionately be women, so I thought that was an interesting correlation – one that nobody seemed to be talking about.

I was also interested in generational differences when it comes to money and Wall Street – when I graduated college in 2003 it felt like anybody, even a playwright with a sociology degree, could go get a job at a hedge fund and make ridiculous amounts of money. Obviously, there was a reason it felt that way.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  My newest play is a three-person comedy about amateur actors putting on a historical melodrama about Alexander Hamilton in an Applebee’s. I’ve also been working on a musical comedy based on the biblical story of Esther for a couple of years now… we’ll be workshopping that again soon. My play March, about two teenagers who meet on an online fantasy game, will be produced in April.

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 other kid’s parents were telling them – or telling them without telling them – that they had to pursue something practical, my amazing mother (also a writer) told me, “Somebody has to be Steven Speilberg.”

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

A:  The virgin/whore problem with new plays. Every theater only wants to produce a world premiere, so once a play has been produced – unless it’s gotten tremendous press – it basically becomes the sad girl at the semi-formal who nobody will dance with anymore. It’s unfair to writers, who want to see their work produced as much as possible, and it’s unfair to theaters, who are missing out on wonderful plays that have had the benefit of going through a production.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I guess I’m old school: I love well-structured plays with complex characters and some funny to them, even if they’re not comedies. I love playwrights who have the guts to put whole, weird, complicated characters on the page and I love directors and actors who aren’t afraid to bring those characters alive.

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

A:  Finding directors you love and trust is just like dating. You’re going to kiss some frogs, but when you find your prince – or princess – hold them tight and never let them go. Find opportunities to work with them. The same goes for actors – your plays will always be better if you know and respect the other artists you’re working with.

And if you can, find a community. I’ve been very lucky to be a member of Youngblood and Ars Nova Play Group, but if you don’t have access to a group that already exists, start your own. Getting feedback from other writers you trust will make your work better – and hanging out with other playwrights will ensure that you’re never sober for long.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My BFF’s show is at LCT3 next month. All-American by Julia Brownell. It’s a wonderful – and wonderfully funny – play. Check it out.

I Interview Playwrights Part 387: Jon Kern

photo by RJ Tolan
Jon Kern

Hometown: New York (Manhattan)

Current Town: New York (Brooklyn)

Q:  Tell me about We in Silence Hear a Whisper.

A:  We in Silence Hear a Whisper tells the story of a young refugee girl trying to survive in Sudan as she’s pursued by the malevolent Man on a Horse. To do the Hollywood thing, the play is No Country for Old Men meets Alice in Wonderland meets a Nicholas Kristoff NYT column on the genocide in Sudan. My first ideas for the play came in 2004, when I was reading those Kristoff columns. I didn’t begin writing the play until 2008 when I had a deadline for an EST/Youngblood reading. I wanted to see if I could write about something as soul crushing as genocide while still having the elements of good entertainment: humor, action, and empathy. An older draft of the play is responsible for my being awarded a Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, which basically stopped me from quitting play writing. It’s very gratifying to see the play finally get produced [thanks to Red Fern and Melanie Williams] after many, many, many rewrites.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m presently working on rewrites for my chopsocky multi-ethnic identity play Tapefaces: Legend of a Kung Fu Master – Season 1 DVD with the director Sherri Barber for Ars Nova’s ANT Fest. I’m waiting around as my agent shops my best full-length Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want to Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them, which is its own kind of Beckettian work. Currently, I’m helping the playwright Carla Ching hone her play The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness as dramaturg/drinking buddy. Soon, I’m to begin developing a new play with the Civilians R&D Group on internet addiction. I also have an outstanding [as in late] Sloan Commission, which makes it hard for me to look EST’s Graeme Gillis in the eye. And my agent wants me to work on this comedy about a college football so he doesn’t have to try to sell chopsocky multi-ethnic identity plays to a wary off-Broadway community.

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 hardest I ever worked in school – elementary or high school – was on crafting jokes. And I was a nerd. I used to have to double bag my textbooks in two brown Macy’s Cellar bags because my backpack was already packed to the ripping point. The first instance of hard work was in 5th grade, when for parents’ day, I wrote a commercial sketch for Billy Bob’s Bar-b-que Sauce, a parody of the Folger’s crystals commercials where they would surprise customers with the reveal that the coffee they ordered was in fact Folger’s! Replace “Folger’s” with “Billy Bob’s Bar-b-que Sauce,” add a bunch of kids doing over-the-top Southern accents, and you get the idea. It was this moment that I first knew I wanted to be a writer. The second instance of hard work was in senior year of high school when I stayed up all night crafting comedy bits from The New York Times articles for a presentation on The Daily Show. Many years later I found out a friend of mine didn’t believe I wrote the jokes. Accusations of plagiarism: the highest of compliments. From these two experiences I realized the only thing I can conceive worth spending hours and hours of energy and effort to do well is entertaining other people. Everything else, such as making money or being an adult human being, seems unimportant.

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

A:  “Theater” is not a monolith. There are many different kinds of and forms of theater going on, each with their own specific issues to address. I’m not sure there is a single panacea for the multi-faced commercial art known as “theater.” If I had to reach, the one thing I can think of that applies somewhat universally is the lack of well-executed sword fights. Sword fights have been exciting entertainment for millennia. Anything that wishes to label itself as “theater” could stand a few more sword fights. I too am guilty of this.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I could give a list of famous names [Chekhov, Pinter, Churchill] or slightly less famous names [Lloyd Suh, New Dramatists], or seem sentimental and say my parents, whose self-dramatizing nature and emotional neglect truly helped to create most of my characters’ voices. [I love you, Mom and Dad!] But instead I choose to interpret this question with the answer, “My favorite theatrical superhero is Nightcrawler: he could teleport, his appearance made him an outsider, and I believe he quoted from Shakespeare a couple of times in the Alan Davis run on Excalibur.”

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I fell out of my front row seat from laughing when I saw Quinn Bauriedel, Geoff Sobelle, and Trey Lyford’s Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines at Here Arts Center. I also loved, and still think upon, the Foundry Theater’s production of Ariana Reines’s Telephone. The connecting thread between these two shows is lost on me, and I’m inside my own head.

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

A:  Learn to cook. It saves you money, and makes for better parties. Also, don’t be afraid to ask people for assistance, even if you feel they are more successful than you, and don’t get discouraged if they say no. Even when they say no, they wish they could say yes.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  We in Silence Hear a Whisper runs from October 5 - 23 at The Theater at the 14th Street Y, 344 East 14th Street, produced by Red Fern Theater Company. For tickets and showtimes and other such details, go to here: http://redferntheatre.org/p_we_in_silence_hear_a_whisper.asp

Tapefaces: Legend of a Kung Fu Master – Season 1 DVD will be a part of Ars Nova’s ANT Fest on Nov. 15. You can get tickets, and see a disturbing photo, here: http://www.arsnovanyc.com/index.php/lineup/149-tapefaces-legend-of-a-kung-fu-master-season-1-dvd

Carla Ching’s The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness runs from November 8 - December 4 at The Connelly Theater, 220 E 4th St., produced by the Ma-Yi Theater Company. To found out more about this play [which I am proud to be associated with], go here: http://www.ma-yitheatre.org