Jun 15, 2009
Turned in a TV script this morning
Don't want to say much more about it now, but you may hear more once I hear the response.
I can say I was paid to write an episode of a TV show and it's more money probably than I would be paid for an off broadway show and it's only like 25 minutes long and took less than 2 weeks of my time.
Jun 14, 2009
I Interview Playwrights Part 8: Madeleine George
Madeleine George
Hometown: Amherst, Massachusetts.
Current Town: Brooklyn, New York.
Q: Please tell me a bit about your show at Clubbed Thumb.
A: The play, Precious Little, is about a linguist who, in her early forties, decides to have a baby on her own and discovers through prenatal testing that the child may have a genetic abnormality. Through her encounters with an odd bunch of confidants (younger girlfriend, elderly speaker of a dying language, gorilla at the zoo) she tries to figure out whether she can deal with having a child who might never speak to her. It's a play about the limits but also the luxuries of language, about what we cherish about our uniquely human capacity for language as well as what it costs us to communicate in this way.
Q: If I remember correctly you were one of those people who was in a playwriting program in high school. What was that like and how did it affect your later playwriting?
A: I had the good fortune to participate in the Young Playwrights Festival when I was 17 and again when I was 18 years old. It was crazy to be produced Off-Broadway at that age, thrilling and destabilizing and I think a little warping--they put me up in the Chelsea loft of a pair of corporate lawyers who worked 20-hour days and were rarely home, so I would wake up every morning in this giant, off-the-hook beautiful apartment, stroll down the block for coffee and muffins, lie around the cavernous living room reading the Times and waiting to wander over to rehearsal, work on my play all afternoon and watch Mystery Science Theater and Beavis and Butthead with my fellow kid playwrights all night. Obviously it's been something of an adjustment growing into the realities of the profession since then. But I wouldn't trade the experience--it was an extraordinary first encounter with New York theater.
Q: You are also one of the members of 13P. When does your show come up? What kind of experience has it been to be part of an organization of playwrights producing playwrights?
A: My heart is full of love for 13P. I love being part of a group of writers whose work I admire, love to contribute to productions whose success ripples out to benefit more than just the people immediately involved in each show, love watching plays that might not otherwise reach the stage emerge fully formed out of a mist of eagerness, labor, and an Equity showcase budget. One of my favorite kinds of people is the Extremely Competent and Pragmatic Theater Person, the young producer or development associate or technical director or general manager who can anticipate any problem, fix any broken thing, handle any crisis. I'm emphatically not this kind of person, but I love to be around them--it calms me on a deep level--and 13P's all-volunteer staff is full of them, so even our staff and productions meetings are totally delightful to me. Next up for us is P#8, Lucy Thurber's Monstrosity, in July 2009, then P#9, Julia Jarcho's play American Treasure, in November 2009. My 13P show comes up in spring 2010, pending money, and then it's Sarah Ruhl, Young Jean Lee, Erin Courtney, and we're done. If people are curious to find out more, they could take a look at 13P's lovely new website: http://13p.org/
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: My two favorite things to do at the theater are weep and think, preferably simultaneously. I like plays that take as given the notion that thinking and feeling arise from the same impulse and are inextricably intertwined--Wallace Shawn, Tom Stoppard, Suzan-Lori Parks, Anne Washburn, Rob Handel, Dan LeFranc, etc. etc. etc. Also I've been thinking lately about the expansive, beautiful things farce can do--I recently saw all three plays of Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests trilogy in a single day and it was perhaps the most mind-bendingly joyful theatrical experience of my life.
Q: Your day job is writing young adult novels, one of the more interesting, (I would think) day jobs a playwright could have. How do you think that affects your playwriting, if at all?
A: Actually, "day job" is stretching it a little for my relationship to YA novels--it's more like a long-term side experiment in a different genre (my real day job is running a college program in a prison). But I highly recommend it for playwrights who are curious to work in fiction--first of all it's one of the only areas of the publishing world that isn't totally going under, at least so far, and second of all it's a flexible form, heightened and somehow inherently melodramatic, like adolescence itself, which makes it ideal for dramatic writers. I've found it educational to work out novel-length story problems in my books--we'll see in the long run what impact that experiment has on my playwriting.
Here is one of Madeleine's books.
Q: Where can people go to buy tickets for your show?
Jun 11, 2009
I Interview Playwrights Part 7: Sheila Callaghan
Sheila Callaghan Hometown: Freehold New Jersey
Current Town: Brooklyn, NY and Studio City, CA
Q: You've had quite a year. First an Off Broadway show which was the talk of the town and subsequently published in American Theater and now you're writing for Diablo Cody's Showtime show The United States Of Tara. How do you feel?
A: Exhilarated, terrified, in constant crisis mode, overwhelmed, exhausted, awed, thrilled. And other stuff.
Q: Tell me about your experience with That Pretty Pretty and with Kip and the Rattlestick. What were the reactions you were getting to the show?
A: For the most part, the responses were incredibly strong and often very personal, whether positive or negative. We got people who were in deep deep love with the project, grateful to see something like that on stage... I got a lot of emails from young female writers who said the play reaffirmed their faith in the power of theatre. And, we got people who didn't get the joke, who thought the play propagated the same ideas that in actuality it strove to critique. And of course there were a few furious people, some walkouts, etc. I'm not used to receiving personal attacks leveled at me because of my work, so it was a bit of a shock to my ego. But I've recovered I think, and perhaps my skin is thicker for it. The play had always terrified me, and I understand that kind of response in general is one worth following through for better or worse.
Q: You just had a kid very recently. How are you finding balancing your home and work life? You and your husband are on different coasts right now, aren't you? Do you get to see each other?
A: I don't know that I'm balancing it terribly well yet. On the sleep-deprived days I feel like I'm on the verge of mental collapse. But on good days, where the shit explosions and teething fits are at a civilized minimum, I feel like a superhero. But I love having this tiny being in my life. I am fully smitten. He's a very cheerful baby, very adaptable, which is good with all the traveling we do. This is an expensive, challenging, invigorating time for us. We've been doing a bunch of cross-country visiting, so he's been able to see his daddy every two weeks. Though often I feel like a single mom, which gives me a whole new respect for women who raise children on their own. I hope he brags to people someday about how we were able to pull it off. Right now I'm at my desk in my Tara office and he's next to me in his little musical walker. I'm so lucky I get to have him on the lot with me. I don't know how I would do this if I had a 9-9 TV job and a full-time nanny for him. I think we would have lasted less than a week.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Everything. Smart loud ballsy shit. Quiet pensive loaded shit. Quirky, absurd, silly shit. Romantic realistic heart-twisting shit. Long plays, short plays, plays that aren't plays. When stuff is done well, with commitment and vision and a fierce love of form, I get crazed and happy.
Q: What advice do you have for younger or less experienced playwrights?
A; None. I don't know what I'm doing.
Q: What time is Tara on or do you have a play coming up to plug?
A: Tara is between seasons, so you can check the website to see when season 2 airs. My play FEVER/DREAM is running at Woolly Mammoth Theatre right now. A huge wild fantastical modern adaptation of Pedro Calderon de la Barca's LIFE IS A DREAM. It's a monster.
Jun 7, 2009
I Interview Playwrights Part 6: Daniel Talbott
Daniel Talbott
Hometown: The Bay Area, California
Current Town: Brooklyn
Q: Tell me about the play you have going up at Rattlestick.
A; It’s the first play I ever tried to write and it’s called Slipping. It’s about this kid Eli who has recently lost his father in a car accident and then moves to Iowa with his mother from San Francisco to try to make a fresh start. I’m hoping it’s a simple love story about two guys and how getting what you want and being loved is actually sometimes the hardest thing. Having someone say I’m cool with you the way you are and I’m going to try to be there no matter what can often be the catalyst for the dam breaking and having to finally let go of stuff and deal with your life. It’s a play I’ve been working on and developing with a bunch of really cool peeps since 2001 and I feel like I finally have a small, simple play that focuses on the actors. I really hope it has a good honest heart to it and that people dig it.
Q: When did you write this play?
A: I started working on it during my third year at school and I can’t even remember why I started writing it other than I’d read an article in the New York Times about Sarah Kane and was so inspired by her story and her age and her writing that I wanted to try to write something myself, so I just dove in and gave it a shot and my first thought was like Damn, this is fuckin hard. As a young actor I hope I already had an immense respect for playwrights, but trying to do it myself gave me a whole new understanding of just how remarkable actual playwrights are and how insanely difficult it is to write a play, much less attempt to write a decent one.
Q: Isn't it true that while you were studying acting at Juilliard they did this play at the Royal Court in London? What was that like? Did you have to miss classes here to see your play there?
A: It was weird cause I didn’t know what the Royal Court really was until I started reading a lot about Sarah Kane, and then I found out they had a young writers program and that Sarah Kane I think had worked there, so I thought what the hell I’ll send it over to them and if they hate it and it sucks at least it was across the Atlantic and hopefully no one will give me a hard time for it being crappy. So I submitted it to them and then was so wrapped up in school that I kind of forgot about it until I got a call from them to be a part of Workers Writes and their Young Writers Programme. And to be honest when they called I actually thought it was one of my classmates fucking with me cause they all knew how obsessed I’d become with the writing over there and what was going on at the Royal Court and I thought they’d just left me a message to screw with me. So I went to class and was like, Ha ha you all are funny, and they thought I was insane, so finally Ola Animashawun called back and I literally almost passed out I was so excited. Juilliard was so supportive and cool about the whole thing and they actually helped work my rep season rehearsal around the time at the Royal Court so I didn’t miss anything, and I got to go back and forth about three times for rehearsals and opening and stuff. It was really amazing and Addie and I got to spend a week in London together in this amazing place in Sloane Square and it was just completely extraordinary and fun.
Q: You are one of those renaissance men of theater. You act, you direct, you write and you have your own theater company. How do you do all those things? Do you ever set about to direct say and an acting job comes along and you have to do that instead?
A: I’ve always just been in love with the theatre and said to myself that no matter what, whether I suck, or people think I’m bad or good, that this is it and I’ve always wanted to do as much in the theatre as I possibly can. I know this sounds dorky but it’s my life, along with my friends and my family, and there are so many aspects of it and I want to do as much of it as possible. I think that the more I do in the theatre the more I understand it from all these different angles and I think all of it’s helped to make me a better actor, director, artistic director, etc. When I work as an actor I think I understand directing better, and vice versa – it just opens me up and makes me a little less afraid of things, which is always my biggest battle. They way I deal with juggling stuff right now is that I’m first and foremost an actor and artistic director, and now one of the three literary managers at Rattlestick along with Julie Kline and Denis Butkus. So that helps me make decisions and so far I’ve been really lucky with being able to balance things, and my wife Addie and the rest of the RPRers have been insanely great about helping me do that. We all pitch in and pick up each others’ slack and I think are a really really wonderful team together.
Q: Right now you're in St. Louis acting in the Merry Wives of Windsor and Bailey and Addie are with you, are they not? How old is your son now? Do you find it hard to balance raising a kid with your artistic endeavors. (I'm sure Addie, your wife, gets much credit too) Do you go everywhere together every time you get an out-of-town job?
A: Yeah, we’ve been out in St. Louis working on Merry Wives with one of my favorite people on earth, Jesse Berger, for the last seven weeks or so and it’s been a really really great time with an awesome group of actors and Addie and B are both out here for the whole time. We try to go everywhere together and to not be apart as a family as much as possible. It kills me to be away from either of them for that long and I really didn’t want to get married and then spend half of each year away from each other. I think it’s a tough balance that most of the theatre folk I know go through, and I think we’re all trying to balance it and deal with it in the best way possible, and it can be hard. But I’m really lucky to have an extraordinary wife and son who really prop me up and are there for me and I hope I’m also there for them and they make me fight harder to hopefully be a better human being and man. I really struggle with confidence and fear and having them around reminds me of the important things and helps me be a tad more brave hopefully. B’s also three and half right now and school hasn’t fully come into play yet, so I think it will be even harder once he starts full time. I’ve actually been trying to do like one play out of town and then one play in town as much as possible so we can be home and stuff and also be working with RPR and with Rattlestick. At the same time though I tend to make a lot more money in regional theatre and we have to be able to pay our bills, and especially with not being able to sing most of what I go up for in town with theatre stuff is Off-Broadway which I love but doesn’t pay much. So the balance of the two makes it possible for us to make our living and hopefully get to be home and yet see a lot of the country too which is cool. I’m also not one of those actors that looks down on regional theatre. I love being able to travel around and work in a lot of different places and go with my family. I also believe in the regional theater and think it’s one of the great movements in American theatre history. I think it’s so extraordinarily important for theatre to be happening everywhere and it makes me sad when people rip on it, or act like it’s sub-par in some way. Theatre is theatre and there’s great and not-so-great theatre happening everywhere.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I love theatre that’s fucking with something and really trying to go there. I hate smug, cool theatre and theatre that’s hiding behind past achievements or snobbery. I think theatre has to have a great driving heart behind it and an extraordinary imagination and a searching for truth. I also like theatre that’s ugly and really risking something, not just pretending to. I think we all can dig deeper and work harder and have to do that as storytellers. It’s not about us, or our careers, and that can be really hard to remember sometimes but all that stuff can get in the way if you’re not careful. Not that we all don’t want to be successful, I mean we’d be crazy not to want that, but hopefully we all fight for it for the right reasons. I’ve been really impressed with Marin Ireland, Tommy Sadoski, David Adjmi, Mark Schultz, Lucy Thurber and Jessica Dickey this year and how all of their successes, at least to me, have come from the quality of their work and how hard they strive and how much they care about being artists and dedicate themselves. It’s so cool to see all that work pay off in such brilliant ways, and that their success comes from such humanity and quality. I think I also really love the way the Sarah Kane answered this same question: I love experiential theatre.
Q: I notice that your theater, Rising Phoenix does a lot of ghost story plays. Would you care to comment on your obsession with ghosts?
A: I’m actually not sure what that is other than that I love the supernatural and the unexplained. I love things that are mysteries; I kind of hate that so much of the time people need to know everything, or at least try to know everything. I love imagining the many, many things out there that we don’t know and that science and technology really can’t stake a claim to yet. I love the spiritual and the unknown, and I guess that means I love the supernatural. There’s got to be something bigger than you and me and something that’s not just blood and dirt, hopefully.
Q: What advice do you have for a young playwright starting out? (or a young theater artist of any ilk for that matter)
A: Do it with your heart and your work and be yourself. You also don’t have to be an asshole, no matter what certain people tell you and no matter how other people are acting. Be good to other people and it will hopefully empower them to do their best work which in turn will only make you better. Never think you’re better than someone else and/or look down on other peeps. We’ve all been good and we’ve all been bad and we’re all in this together as a team.
Q: Where can people go to get tickets to your play at Rattlestick? (link please)
A: Ticks will be on sale soon on SmartTix and it would rock to have you all come check out the play. http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showCode=SLI2&GUID=2712c77d-0d41-4c8f-b98e-ee9dd36d3fa9
Jun 6, 2009
I interview playwrights part 5: David Adjmi
David AdjmiHometown: Brooklyn, NY
Current Town: toggling Minneapolis and Brooklyn
Q: Tell me about your play Stunning.
Q: It's going up at Lincoln Center, right? That must be exciting.
A: It's really frightening and exciting, and I've never had a play on in New York before so I definitely feel the pressure. We're all working like dogs.
Q: You're one of those playwrights who write more than one play at a time. What's the most that you've had going at once? Do you have a bunch you're writing right now? What are they about?
A: Well I usually only am actively writing 2 plays at once, and I work on one in the morning and usually rewrite the other at night. And I'll jot ideas or dialogue for other plays while I'm doing that. But these last plays I wrote that way were kind of intense and I got really sick for writing sixteen hours a day so I had to stop that. Now I'm doing just one at a time. I'm writing a commission for Berkeley Rep which is sort of about the oil industry, and I'm working on a screenplay which is sort of about Shirley MacLaine, but that's all I'll say.
Q: What kind of theatre excites you?
Q: What do you look for in collaborators? (actors, directors, etc.)
A: Well with my director I need to work with someone who gets that my plays have very specific needs and really works to figure out what they are. I also like to work closely in the process and I need a director who's going to help carve out for me what my role is in the process. I don't like the ambiguity in the room of "oh, who is this scary playwright? why is he talking to us??" I like directors who are secure in who they are and in their work. In terms of actors, I love really generous actors who are deft with my style, which is not easy, and also have a real raw emotional access
Q: Do you have advice for the playwrights who read my blog? Is there anything you wish you had known a few years back that you could impart on the masses?
A: Well my plays and my experiences I think are specific to me and how I work and what I need, and we all have to come to it individually I think. That said, I think patience and faith and commitment to process both with yourself and your collaborators is enormously important. I didn't always have those things. I panicked quite easily and capitulated quite easily. I don't like to make choices out of fear -- in my writing or in production. There's always a moment where things can go south in production, or in development and it's usually when you are being asked to abandon your instincts when something doesn't work. It's extremely important for YOU, the AUTHOR, to understand for yourself WHY something doesn't work, and feel it on a gut level, before you change or abandon anything in the writing. That takes a kind of fortitude I didn't have when I started writing.
Q: You have a book of plays coming out, don't you? Can people pre-order that?
A: Oh gee, I don't know. I don't even have the galleys yet. It's not coming out til early 2010 so there's time.
Q: Where can people go to buy tickets to Stunning?
A: You can get them on the website for Lincoln Center, which is http://lct.org/showMain.htm?id=185, or at the box office of the Duke Theatre, which is where we're playing.
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