I Interview Playwrights Part 18: Marisa Wegrzyn

Marisa Wegrzyn 

Hometown: Wilmette, IL  

Current Town: Chicago, IL  

Q: You have two shows coming up in California. Can you tell me about the plays and about the productions?

A:  The Butcher of Baraboo is a black comedy set in Baraboo, Wisconsin and it's about a women (the town butcher) whose husband is missing, presumed dead, and everybody suspects she chopped him up and dumped him in Devil's Lake. Ten Cent Night is a dark family comedy/drama set in 1973 Texas about a woman who is a failed, alcoholic musician who returns home after stealing money from her mute, criminal boyfriend to pay for her little sister's heart surgery.  



Q: Are you going to be able to go to the rehearsals and/or performances?

A;  I went to a few days of rehearsal for Ten Cent Night, about two weeks into their rehearsal process. Crammed four weeks worth of my notes into a few days and made cuts and revisions. Don't know when I'll see the production. For The Butcher of Baraboo, I had a two hour phone conversation with the director a few weeks before she cast the show, and that was it for my direct involvement. I'm going to see it this weekend.  


Q: I have heard that Chicago is an amazing theater town. If I dropped in there tomorrow, what shows would you recommend I go see or what theater companies should I check out?

A:  Go see Graceland at Profiles Theatre, Oedipus produced by The Hypocrites, and Poseidon! An Upsidedown Musical produced by Hell in a Handbag . You can stay on my couch, Adam. When are you going to take me up on that offer?

Q:   Do you think Chicago's theater has a certain aesthetic and if so what is that aesthetic?

A;  I suppose when people think "Chicago theatre" they think about something with great acting, probably produced in a small, charmingly dumpy space, but there isn't a unifying aesthetic for all Chicago theater other than geography. There are a few different scenes. The storefront/fringe scene, a mid-level scene with a tiny subscriber base, an upper-level scene with a large subscriber base (Goodman/Steppenwolf/Chicago Shakespeare, etc), and the Broadway touring shows. Also there's the comedy scene (improv and sketch) which doesn't have much crossover with the theatre scene. It's rare to find people who are regularly active in both the comedy and theater scenes. It's like finding a unicorn.

Q: You've managed to base yourself out of Chicago while getting shows up in lots of other places. Do you have any tips on how you did that or recommendations for other playwrights?

A;  Luck. Right place right time. I did a lot of playwriting in college and had a few full length plays in good shape by the time I graduated. I found my agent through one of my friends from college. My friend Erica Nagle was interning in the Literary Department at the McCarter Theatre, and she struck up a conversation with an agent who was transitioning agencies and looking to take on new writers. Erica pitched my writing to her so well that my now-Agent Morgan Jenness e-mailed me and asked to read my stuff, and she took me on, introduced me to some people in New York and elsewhere. I had a few teachers at Washington University in St Louis who recommended my work to theatre friends. One of those people was Ed Sobel the director of New Play Development at Steppenwolf, and he read a couple of my plays, gave me a table reading at the theatre to introduce me and my work to Artistic Director Martha Lavey. Steppenwolf commissioned me, and produced that commissioned play. Ed really supported Chicago writers at Steppenwolf. I've been fortunate to meet people who believe in me and my writing. They've recommended my work to others. Just do good work that makes people want to meet you. And when you meet, be yourself and be the person who plays well with others -- hopefully they're the same person.  

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A;  I like serious stuff that's a little funny, and funny stuff that's a little serious.  

Q: What advice would you give to a playwright just starting out?

 A:  Somebody told me during my first workshop experience: "Your play is your baby. Everybody thinks they know how to raise your baby. But only you know how to raise your baby." I'm not sure if that's helpful. I'm not really into babies. Especially crying babies. Especially crying babies in Starbucks. If your baby will not stop crying in Starbucks, you need to take your baby home, please.

Q:  Plugs:
 
A;  The Butcher of Baraboo at MOXIE Theatre in San Diego, CA: http://www.moxietheatre.com/ Ten Cent Night at The Victory Theatre Center in Burbank, CA: http://www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org/ Hickorydickory at Chicago Dramatists (staged reading July 11): http://www.chicagodramatists.org/events/satseries.html

I Interview Playwrights Part 17: Ken Urban

Ken Urban

Hometown: New Jersey, The Garden State

Current Town: Cambridge, MA and New York

Q: Tell me a little about your SPF show that's coming up.

A: THE HAPPY SAD is about a group of seven people in an east coast city with subways and irony, all trying to figure out how to make relationships work in a world of too many options. The play starts with a straight couple breaking up and another couple, a gay couple, negotiating the monogamy question. Since cities are like villages, we see how their lives of these different people end up connecting. And sometimes when things get difficult, they break out into song. It’s my ode to bisexuals. Not really. Actually, the play has a really clear origin. I was on Amtrak heading back to Boston from New York, right before Thanksgiving in 2007, and I ran into a friend. We sat and talked for a long time. She told me how a guy she was dating broke up with her that weekend, but she was also seeing someone else. Then the next day another friend told me how he and his boyfriend were thinking of “opening” things up. And I kept thinking: wow, there are so many options and possibilities now. We aren’t confined in the way our parents were – get married, buy a house, have kids, get old, die. We can try something else. But having lots of options doesn’t necessarily guarantee happiness. I wanted to write about that excitement and confusion. I like to give myself rules when I write. Keeps me focused. For this play, I had two: one, to write about the subject matter with utter honestly, even when it cut very close to home; and two, the characters would sing, but that the play was in no way a musical (i.e. the songs did not advance the plot in the way they do in a musicals). I am excited for the SPF workshop. Trip Cullman is directing and we have a great cast, which includes many of my favorite actors. I’m touched they are giving up their July to do the show and to do a pretty revealing play with two weeks of rehearsal. There is a fair amount of nudity in this show and everyone is so brave about it.

Q: Who wrote the songs?

A: My band wrote all the songs in the show. We’re called The Avon Barksdale -- we all love the TV show The Wire. We’ve been playing together for over a year and writing lots of songs. We have a rehearsal space up here where we write and record. For the songs in HAPPY SAD, I wrote the lyrics and melodies, basic chord structures sometimes, and then brought them to the rest of the band. They were really game, so we dove in and made some indie rock. Our recordings of the songs will be used in the production. Right now, they are being mastered and soon will be available on iTunes and Amazon, so people can get their hands on them.

Q: Now, the last time I talked to you, you were trying to figure out what to do next year. Do you know where you're living and what you're doing now? Can you talk about what decisions you had to make, or not?

A: I will be living in Cambridge, MA, still teaching at Harvard, and going back and forth to New York, where I am working on a couple of projects. So everything is the same as it has been the past 3 years. It was a strange year. I thought I wanted certain things and then I got them and realized that I didn't want those things. There was something else I thought I wanted and then didn’t get, then I realized I didn't actually want it all that much either. Is that vague enough? Sorry to be cryptic. It's a weird thing to talk about -- knowing you are beyond certain things, that you are have reached a certain place in your career and that those things are not really what you want anymore, or even what you need. There is no road map for being a playwright so we all sort of pretend we know what we are doing. I do know that there is no grad school in my future. I will never be a master of fine arts, but I’m already a doctor, so that’s OK.

Q: You have your own theater company, do you not? How do you manage to juggle a theater company, your writing and a full time job teaching?

A: Um, I don’t anymore. I am no longer the AD of The Committee, the company in New York I founded. I handed the company over to director Dylan McCullough and he is making plans for the company’s next stage. I am excited to see what he does. I found running a company exciting but draining, especially now that I live in Cambridge. It feels good to spend most of my time writing and teaching, and not waking up at 2am anymore, thinking, “Oh crap, I forgot to revise that mission statement or finish that budget or whatever.” I look back at what we did with The Committee, and still I’m amazed, how the hell did we do that? Still, not much has changed. I’m basically a workaholic. I work all the time.

Q; What kind of theater excites you?

A: I’m pretty old-fashioned actually. I like interesting stories told in unfamiliar ways. I want to be moved viscerally and intellectually. I do not like safety or irony that’s too cool for school. There are so many fantastic writers writing for the theatre right now. It is an exciting time to be an American playwright. We’re all poor as fuck but still, it’s great.

Q: I was thinking about questions to ask you and I realized I don't really know how to describe your work. Are there ways your plays have been described that you liked and would like to share? Or even better, how would you describe it?

A; Yikes. I know I should have a good answer for this one and I don’t. If I had to say what all my plays share, it’s that my characters all have a need to understand the world. In THE HAPPY SAD, the characters want to understand their desires. In SENSE OF AN ENDING, the journalist Charles wants to understand what happened in Rwanda during the genocide. But in both cases, it’s not a facile knowledge, but a knowledge that’s felt on the body. While in terms of subject matter and style, my plays can seem, at first glance, wildly different, what they share is that need. They fail, but they keep trying. Maybe true understanding is an impossibility. An actor once said to me that she could always tell a Ken Urban play because they have a specific sound. That pleased me to no end. I work hard to sound like no one else. In a strange way, I think the trajectory of my writing is akin to the career of some bands I like. Animal Collective’s early records are so difficult and interesting, and while the new one is ostensibly a pop album, those songs have a weirdness to them that carries over from the early stuff. My early plays are so obtuse and weird, and even though now I want to connect more to a larger audience, the new work carries the traces of those earlier experiments.

Q: What sort of advice do you have for playwrights starting out or even other kinds of playwrights?

A: Write a lot. See lots of plays. Meet lots of directors and actors. Develop a really strong bullshit detector. Figure out whose comments to trust and whose not to trust. Get a thick skin because you will need it. Don’t go into debt to get an MFA. Have lots of safe sex. Never forget why you love doing it. Don’t listen to playwrights who give advice.

Q: May I have a link please for those who want to go see your show?

A: http://www.spfnyc.com/festival/show.cfm?id=79 http://www.kenurban.org

Q: Any other upcoming shows?

A: I have a reading of SENSE OF AN ENDING at Williamstown this summer to celebrate the play winning the 2008 L. Arnold Weissberger Prize, then in November, my play NIBBLER is getting a production at Theatre of NOTE in Los Angeles. NIBBLER is my ode to growing up in South Jersey. That production will feature original music from Xiu Xiu and The Avon Barksdale. Mark Seldis is directing that. We’ve worked together before and I am excited to start rehearsals in August.

wow

Gender study --playwrights

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/theater/24play.html

I Interview Playwrights Part 16: Callie Kimball

Callie Kimball  
 
Hometown: Daytona Beach, Florida

Current Town: New York

Q: Tell me a little, if you will, about your play going up in this summer's DC fringe.

A: I produced MAY 39th at DC Fringe in 2006, the first year there was a Fringe there. I wanted to write a play about how two people negotiate the emotional and physical give-and-take at the start of a relationship, so I set it the morning after a first date, 1,000 years in the future. After I wrote the play, I realized it was also about the ways we sometimes deliberately court pain. Last year I wrote a companion piece, MAY 40th, which is set in the same world, but with two new characters. These people are trying to figure out how to proceed after immeasurable damage has been done to one by the other.

Q: How much has it changed since its previous presentation?

A: I've never revised a play as much as I have MAY 39th. It was successful in '06, but I was never satisfied with it. Last year, Christy Denny, an up-and-coming director (she just AD'd David Adjmi's play "Stunning") asked if I wanted to do a pure workshop, with no goal in sight other than exploring the play. I know a lot of playwrights complain about being workshopped to death, but I had never had the chance, and I knew I was eager to pull the play apart and figure it out. It ended up having a reading at the Kennedy Center late last year, and people who had seen it in '06 couldn't tell what I had changed, when in fact I had completely torn it apart! I had cut a printout of the script into beats, and had laid it out on my bedroom floor, rearranging it to build a more deliberate arc into the play. Then I worked on the play further at a workshop that Electric Pear Productions gave me this spring here in NY. It's still the same story, with the same twist at the end, but it's been pared down to tell the story in what I hope is a much more compelling way. I cut a LOT of exposition and "future speak." It always feels good when you can cut a play down to the bones.

Q; Not that long ago you moved from the DC area to NYC. How has the move been? What do you notice most about the difference in day to day life in New York?

A: I. Love. NY. I love how the most intimate moments are lived in public here. DC was a great town to start writing plays in (I started there as an actor), but there kind of wasn't anything left for me there. I had self-produced three times in two years, and I'm sure I could have kept doing that, but eventually you want OTHER people to produce your plays. I had had a few commissions from smaller theaters, including two at Washington Shakespeare Company, a company I adore and who gave me complete freedom. Some of the larger theaters knew I existed, but there's that whole Backyard Syndrome, where you kind of have to go off and prove your mettle elsewhere for them to take a risk on you. I figured the time was right to try NY. I have a lot of non-theatre friends in NY, so I knew that even if nothing took off for me career-wise, I'd have a good time and enjoy consuming theater, if not making it. It's funny, people say it's so brave to move to NY, but really there's nothing to lose. I wasn't earning enough to live on as a teaching artist in DC, so it's not like I left some great money job. I've been very lucky so far. I landed a job in Social Media at NBC, which I'm very grateful for. I also volunteered to read scripts for Jesse Berger at Red Bull Theater, because we had known each other back in DC years before, and he made me Literary Manager. It's been helpful to be affiliated with such a respected outfit as Red Bull, and reading so many scripts is also helping me grow as a playwright. I highly recommend volunteering as a script-reader if you are a playwright! There's something so invigorating about pulling up stakes--it's a chance to find new approaches to the goals that are most important to you. I know it's stretched me in ways I can't even put into words. I'm enjoying seeing theater and meeting people as I try to find the places where my work might make sense. People have been very welcoming. I love it here!

Q: If I was moving to DC, what theaters would you recommend I check out?

A; DC is great because there's something for everyone on the menu. At any given time there are something like 65 theatres in town. When I was there, I sought out work at smaller venues, like Solas Nua, Longacre Lea, Rorschach and the now-NYC-based Project Y, but I also loved going to Woolly Mammoth and Theater J. I also deeply love classical plays, so The Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington Stage Guild, and Washington Shakespeare Company were also favorites of mine.

Q; What kind of theater excites you?

A: Oooh I love the dark stuff. I love plays that explore issues rigorously, refusing to reduce complexities to black-and-white. I can't stand plays that co-opt stories of "other" simply to assuage liberal guilt--that kind of self-loathing is so boring. It's dishonest to present a marginalized demographic as if it were no more than a tool for arty self-flagellation. Give me something difficult, something muddy and bloody and emotionally terrifying, that asks questions that make people uncomfortable. I'm hungry for that.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: I (gulp) am working on a solo piece with music that a friend from Minneapolis and I are planning on taking on the Fringe circuit next summer. She plays banjo. I started working on it in a two-day workshop at LAByrinth last year, and I'm really excited and really terrified, which is of course the best place to be! This character is hugely pregnant, but her husband has now left her. He was kidnapped and tortured abroad (nothing noble--a case of mistaken identity), and she's in the middle of converting to Judaism and finishing a ridiculously useless PhD. So how does she go on, how does she make sense of all this? She basically tries and fails to superimpose meaning on all this chaos. But there's this baby, this future, right there inside of her.

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

A: Read plays. Watch plays. Learn as much as you can about what's going on in the world. Find ways to contribute to your community. Ask questions. Don't be afraid to fail. You have to do something badly before you can do it well. Don't take the good reviews too seriously, because then you have to take the bad ones seriously, too.

Q: Link please for people who want to come see your show in DC.

A:   http://www.calliekimball.com/53940

I Interview Playwrights Part 15: Deborah Stein

Deborah Stein  

Hometown: New York, NY

Current Town: Minneapolis, MN

Q: You're headed to the Bay Area Playwrights Festival this summer. Tell me a little about the play you're working on there.

A: The play is called NATASHA AND THE COAT, and it's about the fashion industry and Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I actually started it five years ago and was overwhelmed by both the subject matter and the scope of it, and I shoved it in a drawer (literally) and only excavated it this past autumn. In a lot of ways, it's different from anything I've written before - a straightforward narrative about a family, clash between generations, based partially on personal experience. It's the first time when I need to figure out how old someone is, and where their parents were born, in order to fully develop and craft the characters - usually I work much more with allegory and archetypes. And I think it's going to be in two acts with an intermission - another first for me!

Q: Who are you working with on it?

A: Sean Daniels will be directing, with a stellar local cast including Corey Fischer and Naomi Newman, who founded the Traveling Jewish Theatre in San Francisco. They were in an earlier reading, in May, and were invaluable resources to discover the truth and nuance of the world I'm writing about.

Q: You are the new Bush fellow. Congratulations! Can you explain what that is? It's 50,000 dollars, right? How long does a playwright have to live in Minneapolis to be eligible to apply?

A: Thanks!! I'm pretty freaking excited. The Bush Foundation awards Artist Fellowship in a number of different disciplines. It's a total of $50,000 disbursed over 12 or 24 months, depending on how you want to use the fellowship. You need to be a resident of MN, ND, or SD for at least 12 months at the time of application.

Q: How did you come to start writing plays?

A: I acted in children's theatre when I was a kid, and started directing when I was in high school. In college I studied directing and creative writing, but mainly focused on poetry - I thought of those two creative pursuits as being decidedly different from each other. After college, I interned with the Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia, a physical theatre company making ensemble-based works. I was the assistant director, and part of my job was to transcribe rehearsal improvs to be shaped into performance text. Over the course of the rehearsal process, I became more and more involved in shaping the text, to the point of editing the transcriptions and providing additional writing that was based on gesture or character proposals from the acting ensemble or the director or even the designers. My credit on the production ended up being "writer" and I worked in this way with Pig Iron on six shows between 2000 and 2006. In the middle of it all I decided to go to grad school to try writing plays on my own, without the ensemble. I still do a mix of both processes - in fact, one of my other summer projects is to work with Pig Iron again, which will be like a sort of homecoming.

Q: What kind of theater do you want to make? / What kind of theater that other people make excites you?

A: Plays that are events, that capitalize on all that is vital and thrilling about live performance--raw and alive, all those people in a space together, having a communal experience which will happen exactly once. Plays that are like rock concerts, where your whole body is involved, whether you are artist or audience--where the line between those roles is blurred. Plays that recognize and embrace that we are in a specific place, in a specific moment of time. I dream of creating theatre on a massive scale, reaching audiences who don’t ordinarily go to see plays, sharing something unique in the collective present.

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

A: Go see lots of theatre. See it in both epic scales (Ariane Mnouchkine, Robert Lepage) and small, scrappy local companies doing it in the backyard. Identify like-minded collaborators, find your fellow travelers, work with them often. Pursue the big dreams and the large scale but also don't be afraid to do it yourself, don't wait for some large institution to give you a gold stamp, the only way to find and hone your voice by trying and failing and trying again. Theatre happens in three dimensions, in real time and space; what's on the page is the beginning, not the end.

Q: Link please for those in the Bay Area who want to see your play presentation:

http://www.playwrightsfoundation.org/index.php?p=182

I Interview Playwrights Part 14: Qui Nguyen

Qui Nguyen  

Hometown: El Dorado , Arkansas

Current Town : Brooklyn , NY


Q: You're remounting your show “Fight Girl Battle World” which I caught last year and loved. Can you tell us a bit about that? 

A:  Every year, my company, Vampire Cowboys, sets out to take on a different genre. With “Fight Girl Battle World”, we took on Sci-fi. This was our version of something like “BladeRunner”, except funnier, with a laughably small budget, and more kung fu. The outcome ended up becoming one of our most popular shows we’ve ever produced. After we closed it last year, we worked on finding the right opportunity to bring it back. We were offered slots in several different festivals but ended up choosing to go with HERE Arts Center’s Sublet Series for several reasons; HERE is definitely one of my favorite venues in the city, it gave us the luxury of being in the space for an entire week, and Vampire Cowboys just produced “Soul Samurai” this past winter there and we’re going to be producing our next show “Alice In Slasherland” there next Spring. It made for the perfect place for a remount.  

Q: Is it true it's your most popular show to date? Why do you think that is?

A:  Well, it’s definitely between that or our most recent “Soul Samurai”. Both shows sold out really quickly and both received a ton of love by both press and our audience. “Fight Girl Battle World” however sells more t’shirts than any of our other productions to date and, even after a whole year, we still get people who randomly email us about how much they loved the original run. I think “Fight Girl” just tickles people in that right way that makes them want to come back. It appeals to that little nerdy kid inside all of us who dug “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, or “Firefly”. I dig it because it makes me laugh a lot. It’s perhaps the same for everyone else.

Q: Your plays contain a great deal of exciting and acrobatic fight scenes. Besides being the playwright, you are also the fight choreographer for many of your shows. Is it hard to be both the playwright and the fight choreographer but not the director?

A: Not really. I love writing and I love making fights. I however suck at helping actors explore moments and nuance. It’s just not a skill I have. I’m a bit too impatient for it. Robert who directs all my Vampire Cowboys shows is a master at this stuff, he can manipulate a scene to give it not only tension but texture. He’s good at exploring situations with actors and figuring how it’s all going work onstage. That’s what he enjoys. I however like writing cool dialogue and making people hit each other. It’s just a uniquely different skill-set.

Q: How did you become a playwright?

A: I originally wanted to be a novelist or a comic book writer and was pretty sure I was going to be that throughout undergrad even though I was an acting major at that time. However I started getting really frustrated that I kept getting cast either as the “stereotypical Asian” or none at all because of my race. So I started writing my own plays, shows that weren’t race or gender specific so anyone could play any role they wanted. That same ethos exists still today with my Vampire Cowboys plays. With the exception of “Soul Samurai”, all the other roles in all our other productions have all been racially neutral and we’ve been very conscious to make sure our company is as diversely cast as possible. People of color need superheroes and action stars too, so that’s what keeps me making the shows that I do. I like making heroes.

Q: Where can people go to buy your published plays?

A: Amazon, Drama Book Shop, and Playscripts.com. FGBW MOS LDID BW

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: All sorts. Anything written by living breathing playwrights. I don’t dig on the dead guys. Not cause I don’t appreciate what they did, I’m just tired of seeing a dead fucker like Shakespeare get literally thousands of productions a year while my friends struggle to get even one. That’s bullshit. My friends are better writers than that. They too deserve mad kudos.

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

A: Eat three meals daily, workout at least one hour a day, drink plenty of water, and smile.

Q: Link please and info for people who want to see "Fight Girl Battle World": http://www.vampirecowboys.com/shows.htm