I Interview Playwrights Part 111: Andrea Stolowitz

Andrea Stolowitz

Hometown: NYC

Current Town: Portland

Q:  Tell me about Memory Water that's up now in the Fertile Ground Festival.

A:  Memory Water started out when the director Samantha asked me to do an adaptation of the folk tale La Llorona. After doing much research I decided in my version to tie her story to the historical figure of Cortes' translator Malinalli. Samantha was already working with Chisao Hata for the piece and the idea was to tell a new story with text, movement and image.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  About to start a new play--not sure about exact story yet but I intend to start working in earnest in Feb. when I go to Port Townsend. I have another play (TALES OF DOOMED LOVE) being included in a theater festival there at Key City Public theater and will go for a few extra days and treat it like a writing retreat. Then I have another week at Soapstone Residency to work some more.

Q:  You are a Dramatists Guild Rep.  What does that mean and what do your duties entail?

A:  It means that I (and Steve Patterson my co-rep) try to provide guild services, support, and outreach to dramatists in Oregon. This basically means maintaining a list serve, creating a community, and answering legal questions. My personal campaign is to help playwrights, directors and other collaborators understand their rights and responsibilities. I am particularly interested in helping directors understand what is legal in terms of deconstructing text. Too many directors play "fast and loose" with a text without understanding the very real legal implications they face.

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 16 (in 1989) I decided to do a volunteer environmental work camp in Siberia. The wall had just come down, I had taken a few years of high school Russian, and there I was in Siberia.

I am always on a quest "to know".

Q:   What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like Ann Bogart's (Siti company's) work a lot. I like how the visual and other theatrical elements tell the story along with the text.

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

A:  Write,  seek out professionals you admire and work with and learn from them, and find your tribe.

Q:   Plugs, please.

A:
Playwrights West
http://www.playwrightswest.org/

I Interview Playwrights Part 110: Clay McLeod Chapman

Clay McLeod Chapman

Hometown: Richmond, Virginia

Current Town: Brooklyn, New York

Q: Tell me about your play Teaser Cow that's up right now. How did this come about?

A: teaser cow came about as a commissioned work from the company One Year Lease. They split their year between New York and the mountains of Greece, which isn't such a bad way to live -- and they invited me to craft a script around their acting ensemble, picking a myth that tickled my fancy and catering it to their crew. I'd been reading Fast Food Nation at the time, total fluke -- only to start thinking about the Minotaur as a possible starting point for the project. The two elements just adhered themselves together in my head until I couldn't separate them. Chalk it up to fortuitous timing, but reading through Schlosser's book was all it took. It was fun drawing parallels between ancient Greece and our modern day beef industry... And surprisingly simple.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: 2009 was the year of saying yes to everything. Anything that came my way, I took it. Writer-for-hire gigs, commissioned gigs, you name it. From there, it's up to me to try and find myself in these projects. See if there's a way to subtly instill my own sense of storytelling into work where I'm not the genesis-point. I've been juggling a bunch of different projects, either my own or others -- and it's been a blast so far. Challenging, but fun. I've been writing the book for a new musical with soft rocker Bruce Hornsby, so my mom's really happy with that one. We've been developing it for a few years now and we're finally moving onto the regional theatre phase, hoping to bring it back to New York in 2011. Fingers crossed. I've been developing this one-man musical with this band called the Venn Diagrams, titled JULIAN. We just got a residency at Dixon Place, which has been a great help furthering it along. Dixon Place is downright amazing. I've also been on the creative team for this mondo-crazy project called The Ride -- which is essentially is us taking a fleet of tour buses here in New York and renovating them into these theatres on wheels. Literally -- a theatre on wheels. Basically, it's going to be a musical that takes place on a tour bus through Manhattan, with all the action taking place on the streets. Crazy.

Q: Can you talk a little about the Pumpkin Pie Show, what it is and how it came to be?

A: The Pumpkin Pie Show is my baby. It's my protective blanket, it's my stamp collection. Whenever someone asks what's it about, I always tell people it's a rigorous storytelling session -- which makes it kind of sound like a bunch of ol' bubbas sitting on the front porch spinning yarns, but it's really an opportunity for me and my friends to connect with an audience on a level that a lot of fourth-wall theatre doesn't allow us to do. When I'm performing in something, I want to really see the whites of the audiences eyes. I want to achieve a level of intimacy and personal connectivity that the fourth wall tends to shut down. So the Pumpkin Pie Show is a series of short stories that I've written, all within the first person narrative -- handed over to a group of actors, namely me and my best friend (and amazing performer) Hanna Cheek. Rather than disregard the audience, we go through these stories as if they were direct-address monologues, performing a set-list of however many pieces each night based on a certain theme or whatnot. It's more like going to a rock concert, in my mind -- where the band interacts with the audience as they go through their set-list of songs. Bands, some bands, the bands I like, don't shirk off the audience. They tend to play to the audience, which was always something I wished theatre did more of -- so that's what we try to do with the Pumpkin Pie Show. Every year we have a new one, complete with new stories. We've been performing for over ten years now and I really hope I can keep doing it until the day I die. It's a super-small endeavor, where we're performing to thirty or fifty people a night. That intimacy is something we've grown dependent on. That's the value of the show. This isn't Broadway bound because the performance is contingent upon a personal connection between the audience and the performer. All we need is that link and the evening feels like something special. Something singular in its experience. Theatrical snow-flakes, you know?

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 mother always told me this story about myself when I was about two. I was just learning to walk, saddled up into one of those walker-stroller thingies. It's like a plastic donut on wheels with a diaper harnessed directly in the center. You slip your kid in and the diaper holds them up enough that their feet are just touching the floor, allowing them to walk along on their own while they're being wheeled around by this protective barrier. Or so I've been told. Well -- when I was two, we lived in this house where the door to our basement was situated inside our kitchen. Mom's doing the dishes while I'm strolling around in my walker. She's got her back to me, doing her thing while I'm doing mine. Somehow, the door to the basement was open. Just a crack. I'm rolling around -- only to make a bee-line for the basement door. My walker pushes up against it, opening it up even further -- and I take a header down fifteen or twenty wooden steps, taking the tumble while I'm still straddling this plastic doughnut. I land, walker included, on the concrete floor of our basement. Fractured my skull. My mom turns, hear's me screaming -- runs down the steps, finds me bleeding all along the basement floor. She panics. Must've gone crazy in that moment. She scoops me up with her hands, cradling my body in one hand and my head in the other -- and rushes out the door. She runs straight out into the street, screaming her head off. The first car the drives by stops and mom gets right in and demands they take her and me to the hospital. Turns out there's nothing to be done in regards to setting bone, considering it was my skull. I think I had to wear some kind of radar-dish like a dog wears whenever they're not allowed to nibble on themselves, just to keep me from scratching at my own fractured skull. The story would've ended there had it not been for the fact that when I was five -- I fractured my head all over again. This time at the county fair. Mom took me -- and here I am, running through the crowd, all fives years of myself going nutty because we're at the fair having fun. I'm not looking where I'm going, only to get clothes-lined by this young couple holding hands. I totally try to red-rover them, their linked-hands hooking me in the chin and sending me over backwards. I landed on a tent spike. The tent spike cracks open my skull. Again -- mom freaks. We're off to the hospital. Same story. And now -- now there's this ridge along the back slope of my skull. You can totally take your finger and run it down the length of my head and feel the indentation there. It's probably about three inches long and a half-inch wide. No lie.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I might sound like a bit of a broken record here, but I really do get into theatre that makes me feel valuable as an audience member. When I go see a show, I want to believe I'm not watching a movie or a television show. I want to be engaged in such a way that I know in my heart this experience will never be replicated ever again. No matter how many times the actors performer the exact same text, this given performance, our performance, will never ever be duplicated -- and that's because the audience changes. That gives value to them. I don't like it when theatre disregards what's beyond the fourth wall. It's not that I need actors jumping into my lap or anything, but I just want to feel like we're all regarding the sacred-qualities to theatre, which is two disparate elements (the audience and the performers) coming together in this one particular instance and forging a dynamic between each other, communicating with each other in very subtle ways. So, when I leave the theatre, I as an audience member feel special because I now know that this experience I had in the theatre will never ever be conjured up again -- at least not in the same way -- because tomorrow night it'll be a different group of audience members who will bring something altogether different than what I did.

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

A: Produce your own work. Do as much of the behind-the-scenes stuff yourself. Make it a labor of love more than anything else. The best way, I believe, to get your work out there is to just do it yourself.

Q: Plugs, please:

A:

The Pumpkin Pie Show! www.pumpkinpieshow.com

Teaser Cow! www.oneyearlease.org

Julian! http://dixonplace.org/html/artistinresidence.html

Bruce Hornsby! http://www.playbill.com/news/article/136184-Bruce-Hornsby-Musical-Will-Premiere-in-Virginia-in-January-2011

I Interview Playwrights Part 109: Kelly Younger

Kelly Younger

Hometown: Los Angeles, CA

Current Town: Los Angeles, CA

Q:  You adapted a novel for the stage.  Can you tell me about the project and what that was like?  What are the special challenges associated with adaptation?   

A:  Irish Repertory Theatre in NY commissioned me to adapt the novel Banished Children of Eve by Peter Quinn.  It's a massive Civil War novel set in the Lower East Side of NY where Irish-American and African-American tensions erupted in the bloody Draft Riots.  Like most historical novels, there are loads of characters (some fictional and some real), multiple locations, and lengthy-backstories.  To be honest, when I was flying out for the meeting and reading it on the plane, I kept thinking, "There's just no way I can adapt this!  It's a great novel but I can’t pinpoint a single dramatic line to connect all the different stories."  So about a half-hour before my meeting I was having a coffee near the theatre and starting to panic about what I was going to tell them.  Then it hit me. There are two characters -- an Irish man and an African-American woman -- who are both actors in a shoddy production of Uncle Tom's Cabin.  He is a minstrel actor and she is a mulatto actress who lightens her skin with stage make-up.  In other words, he plays in black face and she plays in white face.  They are lovers.  That's when I figured out it is essentially a Romeo and Juliet story with two warring families (in this case, newly arrived Irish and newly emancipated African-Americans) all living on top of one another in the Bowery district and violently competing for the bottom rung on the social ladder.  I decided to set the play in the theatre where these actors perform and live.  

And of course while all hell is breaking loose on the streets of NY, they need to decide who they really are once the make-up comes off.  Well, Irish Rep loved the idea and set me to work immediately.  

As far as special challenges go, the one that I found most difficult was balancing what was faithful to the novel and what was necessary for the play.  Audiences who are familiar with the book will recognize a scene here and there, but I had to take characters who never once cross paths in the novel and put them on stage together, and even in complicated relationships with one another.  So there was a certain amount of guilt.  I kept hearing a little voice saying, “But that’s not what happens in the book!”  Luckily, the novelist Peter Quinn has been enormously encouraging and generous.  In fact, he came to the workshop reading last summer, pulled me aside and said, "A novel can be very forgiving.  You can hide your mistakes.  But in a play, you can't hide.  These characters are now yours as well as mine, so do whatever you need to make it a play."  Talk about generous.  It also helped that we had incredibly talented actors like Tracie Thoms, David Wilson Barnes, Fred Applegate and Michelle Hurst, as well as an incredibly smart dramaturg in Kara Manning.  Ciaran O’Reilly, who just directed “Emperor Jones,” will direct the production later this fall.  He’s been an amazing guide since the very beginning of the commission.         

Q:  Can you tell me about Rorschach?  

A:   A little while back there was an article in the LA Times about the Rorschach inkblot test.  What caught my eye was the beautiful color plate of one of the inkblots.  And below it was this photograph of a guy from the 1920s named Hermann Rorschach.  It never occurred to me that there was an actual guy named Rorschach (other than Watchmen comics, ha!).  I asked myself, who is this guy who one day decided to paint some smudges and ask someone what they thought they saw in it?  I started to do a little research.  Turns out Hermann Rorschach was this brilliant Swiss psychologist who worked with schizophrenics.  When he was a kid, he loved playing this old parlor game called klecks where you would look at inkblots and talk about what you saw.  He decided to play it with his patients, and based on his experiences, wrote his entire dissertation on the experiment.  I started to nerd out on this stuff, and found a beat-up old copy of his book on eBay.  Long story short, Rorschach was sure this book would be a major contribution to the field of psychology, but instead, he ended up in the laughing stock.  No one took him or his test seriously, and before he could even defend himself, he died suddenly.  When I learned this fact, I felt totally heartbroken.  Here was a young guy who desperately wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist, but instead, was really an artist.  He just didn’t know it.  So I started writing about a character from the present who is obsessed with Rorschach from the past.  It’s a six-character play with both time-periods on stage at the same time.  It’s been described so far as funny, romantic, and moving, and even a little in the style of a Tom Stoppard play.  We just had a fancy backers reading of Rorschach here in LA with Jason Ritter in the lead.  There’s an amazing director attached (Cameron Watson) and my manager is handling all the details, so hopefully we’ll have an announcement soon. 

Q:  What else are you working on now? 

A:   New Repertory Theatre in Boston is developing my full-length play Tender.  They contacted me last fall to be part of their New Voices series and asked if I had a new play for them.  I said, “Sure.”  Then realized I had to write a new play in about four weeks!  After writing Banished Children of Eve (eight characters) and Rorschach (six) I really wanted to write a drama for a small cast in a single set that took place only in the present.  So, Tender is about a working mom realtor and her stay-at-home husband who are on the verge of foreclosure.  They’ve got to reappraise their assets, including her aging truck driver father and his new motorhome.  He’s spent his life driving what’s called a “yard goat” (a semi that moves trailers back and forth in the same warehouse yard, never leaving or going out on the open road).  Now that he’s too old to work, he blows his savings on a motorhome and wants to drive across country.  But when his daughter and son-in-law have to take away his keys, the shit hits the fan and they’ve got to learn that love is not some kind of loan that can be repaid.  I think it’s a play about the debt we owe our parents, the interest we charge our children, and the price of forgiveness.  I’m really interested in the idea of foreclosure, not just on something like a house or a car, but on a person, especially a family member.  I’m also being “groomed” (which makes me sound like a poodle) for television by CAA and going on meetings for some one-hour tv pilots I’ve written.  Even though I was born and raised in Los Angeles, “the industry” is a whole other world.

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

A:   I am a third generation Los Angelino.  In fact, I have a great great aunt who was married to a Sepulveda.  I’m also a distant relative of the outlaw Younger Brothers who rode with their cousins Frank and Jessie James.  This ancestry only means I sometimes feel entitled to run red lights on Sepulveda Boulevard, or on occasion, I have the urge to rob a bank.  Let me assure I have done neither.  I do, however, have a deep interest in Los Angeles history, the myth of California and the American West, etc.  My family has always been blue collar Irish-Catholic.  My dad is a truck driver and, unlike the character in my new play, really a tender guy.  He has a speech impediment.  I never knew this until grade school when I started going to friends’ houses and hearing their dads talk.  I just thought all dads spoke like mine.  Like most Irish homes, language was very important.  Often witty and lyrical, also sarcastic and dangerous, but important nonetheless.  It’s just that in my home, language was also very difficult.  Hard to get out.  My dad literally had to choose certain words over others because some would come out, others would not, especially when they were most needed.  I think growing up in this environment taught me three things.   First, to choose words carefully because they are these physical things that sometimes get stuck in your throat.  It also taught me to listen.  I’d have to wait and hear what word was struggling to get out.  Finally, it taught me empathy.  For me, there’s nothing harder than watching someone trying to say a word, unable to get it out, then seeing them choose a different word that is not actually what they wanted to say.  I guess that’s why I tend to write characters who struggle to say what they mean with the words they want to use.  But I also hope they show enormous courage and perseverance to do so. 

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?  

A:   Well, clearly language based plays.  I lived and studied in Dublin for about three years, so my education is rooted in writers like Synge and O’Casey and Wilde (as well as the local characters I met in pubs).  I can appreciate "physical theatre" and really progressive performance art and mixed media, etc. but really I’m a Friel, Miller, Wilder, Kushner, Guare kind of guy.  I want good story-telling.  I want to be entertained and moved and provoked to think and well as feel.  Wit by Margaret Edson is a beautiful play.  I’d love to have dinner with Lynn Nottage.  I think Rajiv Joseph is about the coolest guy I know, and Mike Vukadinovich is going to be a household name soon.  And I’m probably most jealous of having not written Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg.  I have moments when I wish I could write like Martin McDonagh, Sarah Kane, or Matt Pelfrey, but truth be told, if I had a time-machine I’d just go back and get drunk with Eugene O’Neill.     

Q:  What shows or theaters would you suggest I check out if I came to LA tomorrow?   

A:  As a playwright, I would suggest getting to know the LA branch of E.S.T. (I’m in their playwrights unit), the Road Theatre, the Echo Theatre, Theatre Tribe, and the Blank Theatre.  They’re all very supportive of new work.  I personally love seeing plays at the Furious Theatre and the Black Dahlia.  Both small venues, but always thrilling, smart and ambitious.  There’s also high quality work at larger stages like the Geffen, the Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre, A Noise Within, and the Theatre at Boston Court.  I’m most proud, however, of having started the LA Stage Alliance Ovation Fellows program to get students and recent alumni connected to LA performing arts (www.lastageblog.com/ovation-fellows).  So if you’ve just graduated and are moving to LA, consider applying for a fellowship.

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

A:  Don’t do talk-backs after a staged reading. The director wants a Q&A after a performance? That’s different because the play has been through rehearsals, rewrites, and is now in production. (Even then, try to avoid. Eric Bogosian says "Q&As are so popular in the regional theatres [because] everyone wants to know what the play is 'about.' It's a great way of avoiding what a play is.") But seriously, a talk-back after a reading? Refuse. Artistic Directors and Literary Managers will try and convince you it is good for the playwright, but really, they are trying to appease their audiences. Nothing can be more damaging to a new play (or an emerging playwright) than a well-meaning stranger offering ways to fix your work. A play is not written by committee. Also, do not let a director talk you into blocking a staged reading. Keep the actors seated. If they get up and move around, they become too self-conscious and the reading becomes about the acting and directing (not the play). It also raises audiences’ expectations in an unnecessary way. So, have the reading, keep the actors on their asses, then pour the wine.

Q:  Plugs please:  

A:  If you’re in Boston on March 1, New Repertory Theatre will produce the first staged reading of Tender.  Irish Repertory Theatre will produce Banished Children of Eve off-Broadway this Fall, but the exact dates are not being announced yet.  And I have some new publications, so visit www.KellyYounger.com.

I Interview Playwrights Part 108: Lisa Dillman

Lisa Dillman

Hometown: Kalamazoo, Michigan 



Current Town: Chicago



Q:  Tell me about the play you have coming up at Humana.

A: It’s called Ground. It was originally commissioned and developed at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre. The play looks at issues of disrupted family and community in a small town at the U.S.-Mexico border in southernmost New Mexico. The play’s characters include, among others, a border patrolman and a leading member of a citizen-run border surveillance group, but essentially it’s a story about a once cohesive community—and the families within it—that has been fractured by changes in U.S. immigration policy. 



Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  
I’m writing a play about two people who lose their jobs and are forced to reshape their lives when the economy tanks. They each take a very different path to climbing back into the workforce and creating some version of a Plan B. One becomes a full-time guinea pig for pharmaceutical trials; the other starts selling sex toys on commission. Their stories become intertwined as the play examines what it takes to re-envision the future in the face of total uncertainty.

I’m also in the early stages of a play about women and war, which  I’m writing with my longtime collaborators at Chicago’s Rivendell Theatre Ensemble.

Q:  If I went to Chicago tomorrow, what shows or theaters would you suggest I check out?

A:  Well, you’d be in luck because Tina Landau’s production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s BROTHER/SISTER PLAYS is starting previews at Steppenwolf. There’s also a brilliant production of THE PILLOWMAN running right now at the tiny Red Twist Theatre, directed by Kimberly Senior, where the audience sits pretty much inside the action. It’s terrifying and hugely compelling. As a general rule of thumb, I’d also recommend just about anything at A Red Orchid Theatre and Timeline Theatre Company.



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 thirteen, my family moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, for a year. I was a sullen, hormonal mess of newly minted teenagerness at the time; I missed my friends back home, and I was keenly aware of being an outsider (complete with very blond hair and lots of pimples) in this foreign place. My sister and I took classes at a local school, and my parents also home-schooled us in the areas of their particular expertise--visual art and creative writing. As part of the home curriculum, we had a three-hour writing class three times a week with my stepfather, Ken Macrorie, who was a longtime professor of creative writing. I’d been writing stories on my own for several years by that point, but up until that class my writing tended to reflect (or, more accurately, shamelessly imitate) whatever authors I was reading at the time. Ken was a great teacher—incredibly supportive and enthusiastic—and he never shied away from pointing out when we were ladling on the bullshit or dodging around honesty into trite phrases and soupy sentimentality. He loved words, and he was rigorous about emotional truth. During these intensives around the dining room table of our apartment at 13 Calle M. Bravo, all the work was read aloud. Hearing my stories spoken, something shifted in me. I began writing pieces almost completely based in dialogue. And it was as if a whole new creative universe opened up. The thrill of hearing my characters speak. I was so excited by that—I couldn’t get enough. I began to write the world as I saw and heard it, creating fictionalized worlds full of things I really believed, questioned, found hilarious. I felt so powerful! And all of a sudden I was really there—all of me, not just the displaced kid of me—in this amazing city in this fascinating country, exploring and meeting new people who were like and unlike me, and finding out about things I’d never experienced or thought about before. And writing it all down. In dialogue.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  
I’m drawn to work with strong characters and a strong narrative drive, no matter what shape that narrative might take. I tend to like work that assumes the audience is smart enough to fill in a few blanks. I’ve inherited my stepfather’s aversion to soupy emotionalism, but I’m always looking to be moved by what I see in the theatre.

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

A:  Do whatever it takes to find your tribe.
Stay open, keep learning.
Be generous with your colleagues.
Cultivate enthusiasm.
Be patient.

Q:  Any plugs:

A:  Humana, Humana, Humana …

I Interview Playwrights Part 107: Ellen Margolis

Ellen Margolis

Hometown:  Westbury, New York.  Or San Francisco.

Current Town:  Portland, Oregon.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Current project is seven plays about the afterlife.  Another--further out--is inspired by the history and values and skills of Parkour, the crazy Frenchy free-running, obstacle-vaulting, running-from-the-gendarmes sport.

Q:  Tell me about "The Politics of American Actor Training."

A:  In 2004, I convened a panel for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (in my other life, I'm a college professor) with that title.  Then, with a partner, I spent four years pursuing and editing articles from people invested in the future of the theatre, and now it's a book.  There are fourteen pieces, far-ranging and diverse.  The Indian director Chandradasan wrote a brilliant piece for us on the colonization of Indian theatre as manifest in training.  Victoria Lewis, a documentarian and activist for actors with disabilities, wrote a manifesto for access.  I'm very proud of the people and ideas we've brought together.  The book is far from comprehensive, of course; it's very much intended to be part of an ongoing, often uncomfortable, conversation. 

Q:  How would you characterize the theater scene in Portland?

A:  Hmm.  Small.  Supportive.  Strapped.  Sometimes sublime. 

There's definitely a community here, which is hugely important.  I'm part of a new new-works company here, Playwrights West, along with seven other writers.  As a company we are just coming out of the gate, but the two big Equity Houses--Artists Rep and Portland Center Stage--have already supported us with donated space.  Amazing.

Also, last week I audited the regional auditions for the company, and I have never seen a general audition handled with such care.  Beyond being well organized, there was respect evident in every detail--love, even.  And a real sense of wanting to educate young performers and raise the bar for all of us.  This all reflects the marvelous volunteers (artists and administrators) who work with the Portland Area Theatre Alliance.  I walked away from two days of auditions feeling uplifted.

There aren't too many nice spaces here.  If I got three wishes, one would be to create a beautiful Theatre Row for Portland.  On the other hand, there's good work happening in funky spaces, and good site-specific work as well.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  So much theatre excites me!  I still get teary-eyed when the house lights come down.  I always want and expect to see something great, and very often I do. 

One of my students, Ted Gold, may have summed things up best the other day when he said, "I like to leave the theatre Not Done."

I do love theatre that's wildly ambitious.  Last May I saw a cycle of 14 plays at Tricycle Theatre that covered 250 years of the political and social life of Afghanistan.  I feel like it was one of the gifts of my life that I got to spend that Sunday in that theatre.

I also find that very recently my taste is shifting back to story more than spectacle.  Don't know why, or if it's permanent or just a phase. 

There are so many playwrights whose work regularly makes me throw my hands up in delight and admiration and astonishment.  Martin McDonagh, Gina Gionfriddo, Jose Rivera.   Richard Greenberg.  Bruce Norris. A student of mine named Case Middleton.  All my Playwrights West colleagues.  I won't name them here, so you will go to our website: www.playwrightswest.org.  Pinter, Kushner, Shakespare, Craig Lucas, Suzan-Lori Parks.  I can't stop thinking of people!  Will Eno--brilliant. 

I guess I'm sort of playwright-oriented.  Then again, don't get me started on actors.  I love them.

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

A:  Don't be like me.  Get a lot of words on paper.

Q:  Any plugs:

A:  Go see David Greenspan do Plays at the Atlantic Theater because I can't. 
 

I Interview Playwrights Part 106: Claire Willett

Claire Willett

Hometown: Portland, Oregon

Current Town: Portland, Oregon

Q:  You have a reading of your play How the Light Gets In coming up at Fertile Ground Festival. Can you tell me about the play and festival?

A:  Well, here's the synopsis:

-----------------------

“There is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.”

After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Molly Fowler flees her past life for the only safe place she knows – Saint Gabriel Abbey, home of the Benedictine monks who once sheltered her mother. Reckless, self-destructive, with a knack for causing trouble, Molly is an unlikely monastery guest. She quickly makes an enemy of the ambitious Father John, who makes it a project to save her soul. Befriended by the monks who knew her mother, Molly learns some unsettling truths about her parents’ dark history . . . while finding herself drawn into a deep and unsettling intimacy with Brother Magnus, the monastery librarian. But when her past, and her mother’s, finally catch up with her, Molly’s struggle to discover who she is – and who she might become – are violently threatened. This is a story of redemption, and one lost girl’s winding and complex journey out of the darkness and into the light.

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For me, a new idea for a play comes when a handful of the millions of random disconnected things bouncing around in my brain bump into each other and stick together. So, for this play, the threads that first got it started were:

--Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem”

--monastic celibacy

--the death of my mother in March 2008

--Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show

--a group of early Roman female saints collectively known as the Virgin Martyrs

--a line in a book I first read ten years ago

--a Benedictine priest named Father Paschal Cheline

--the clash within 21st-century American Catholicism between the political right and left

--working with teenage girls at my church

-- Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose

So that’s the play.


The Fertile Ground Festival – you can check out the whole lineup here, and read the festival blog here (featuring a recurring guest-blogger stint by yours truly) – is really, really exciting. It’s a ten-day festival of new work by Portland artists. It’s completely different from any other new-work festival we’ve had, because it’s completely uncurated and open to anyone. You pay your fee, you’re in the festival. Everyone does their own thing. What makes it really special, and VERY Portland, is that it both gives emerging artists a voice on the same scale as the big companies, and gives those big companies an added financial stake in programming world premieres. As a participating artist, the most exciting thing about it is that it puts me in front of an audience who have already bought into the notion that new work needs to be supported, but who I might not have the resources to reach on my own.

I wrote some grants for the festival way back when it was but a glimmer in the eye of Festival Chair Trisha Mead, but no one would give us any money because it was way too speculative. No one knew what it was. But the first year was a huge success, and we have high hopes for Year 2. We’ve got over 50 works in the festival, and we’re branching out of straight theatre into some cross-discipline pieces – there’s a lot of dance, there’s a performance/visual arts collaboration, and a really exciting ballet/spoken-word fusion piece. That’s all new from last year. We’re hoping to get to a place where next year we can build some donor support, write some grants, and get a base of contributed income to maybe start paying some part-time staff. It’s totally volunteer-driven right now.

Q:  You're working with Mead Hunter on this reading. What do you like most about working with him? How did you get hooked up with him?

A:  The whole saga of my love affair with Mead Hunter can be found here, on the Fertile Ground Festival blog; they asked me to do a regular guest-blog series documenting my process of working with Mead, who I always tell people is the Tim Gunn of the Portland theatre world. He is amazing. He can fix everything. He's helped me cut my play nearly in half, from a ponderous, wordy, over-two-and-a-half-hour tome to a zippy little 90-minute-no-intermission play that is fully 65 pages shorter now than in the first draft. (Which makes me die a little inside. God, can you imagine if I had actually let people SEE that? Shudder.)

I have known Mead, mostly by reputation, for a long time; he was the literary director at Portland Center Stage and widely reputed as The Guy for new work in town. The best in the business. When he went freelance after leaving PCS, I met with him once or twice along with festival chair Trisha Mead to talk about finding a more significant role for him within the festival, and we got to know each other through that. On a whim, I e-mailed him for advice about whether or not this online playwriting class I was looking into was worth paying $400 for, and he basically said, "There's nothing you'll get from those classes that you can't get from smart, informed feedback from artists here." Which got the wheels a-turnin'. So I e-mailed him and was like, "Okay, let's do it."

I think working with Mead was the first "I'm a grownup playwright" thing that I did differently with this play than the last one. One of the things we still feel like Fertile Ground is missing is a way for writers to receive informed critical feedback. Because it's not curated or adjudicated, there are no mechanisms for us as writers to figure out what to fix or what to do differently next time unless we find them ourselves. So I decided I needed to man up and get a professional, with both an editor's and a literary director's brain, to go to town on my script so I'd know where I was.

The best thing about working with Mead is that he's incredibly perceptive. Never once did I feel like he was trying to push me in a certain direction with the script; on the contrary, I felt like he saw exactly where I was going, and all the advice, revisions, cuts, analysis and discussion in our process was specifically geared to help me get there. If the point you want to make is made but the scene continues for a page and a half afterwards, do we lose the point? Does this character detract from the main themes of the story more than he/she adds to it? It was like adjusting the focus on an old-school camera . . . every revision of the script made the picture click into focus a little more clearly.

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

A:  All my life I’ve been insanely terrified of snakes. We had the complete World Book Encyclopedia set when I was a kid, and if you looked up the entry for Snakes, it had like this huge, page-sized, horror-tastic photo of a cobra about to strike, and it scared the shit out of me. Big wide mouth, giant gleaming fangs, creepy-ass cobra hood all flared out . . . it could have been captioned, "The Last Thing You Will See Before You Die." But, for some demented reason, I was OBSESSED with it. I would sneak down to the basement and sit there and look at the snake pictures to scare myself on purpose. If Death Cobra wasn’t doing it for me, I would occasionally mix it up with either A) a lurid full-color illustration from my favorite dinosaur book depicting an archaeopteryx swooping down from the sky to grab a tiny, terrified prehistoric mammal in its talons; or B) the gruesome picture in my Children’s Book of Saints of Saint Sebastian on the rack. All three were a quick and efficient means of guaranteeing traumatic nightmares, but I could not stop. It was like crack for six-year-olds. I was addicted to the fear rush. So, so weird.

Q:  How would you describe the Portland theater scene?

A:  Portland is Portland . . . half Major U.S. Metropolitan Center and half Weird Little Town. I’m a native, so I’ve seen companies and artistic directors come and go over the years and have watched the theatre scene here change as the city has changed.

The two big guys in town are Portland Center Stage and Artists Repertory Theatre. I’ve worked at both and know them pretty well. They’re very different artistically, although they both do high-quality productions of whatever’s, like, the new hotness – the stuff coming out of Steppenwolf or MTC or South Coast Rep. Obviously, that’s vital to a healthy theatre ecology – you can’t not do Tracy Letts, you can’t not do Itamar Moses, and still call yourself a town that’s in touch with the pulse of the American theatre. But two healthy companies do not a theatre town make, and it’s important that we remember not to put all our eggs in their baskets.

That’s why the ever-growing number of small- and mid-sized companies is so exciting. Like, I’m smitten with Third Rail Rep; they’re SO Portland. A bunch of Portland’s top actors – they’re either all, or mostly all, Equity, I believe – got together and started their own theatre company, and from the moment they arrived on the scene they’ve forced every other company in town to up their game, even the big guys. Because it’s all actor-driven – no bells and whistles, no splashy production values, just cool smart interesting plays and phenomenal artists doing their thing. Every once in awhile I’ll read about a show another company is doing, and they’ll cast some of those actors and pick a really edgy show, and it’s like, “Oh, you wish you were Third Rail.” This year with Fertile Ground, something similar is happening with a group of Portland’s top playwrights, who got together and started their own company called Playwrights West. We’re all really excited to see what they do at the festival, since, like, every one of them are effing brilliant.

I think Portland is full of people who are locavores with our art just like we are with our organic veggies. We like the grown-right-here version of everything, we want to know where it comes from and who made it. We like knowing where our tomatoes were grown, we like independent bookstores and microbrews and small local coffee roasters (I hear there’s a Stumptown in New York now. YOU’RE WELCOME). I’ll tell you, every Portland theatre person I know watches that TNT show Leverage with Timothy Hutton, because they’re filming it here, and every episode I recognize someone and get a little rush of hometown-girl pride. I think one of the real joys of stuff like Fertile Ground is that it holds our theatre scene to the same standards Portlanders use for everything else. We like to celebrate stuff that connects us to a sense of place here, because we’re so head-over-heels crazy in love with this city.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I'm a sucker for anything that feels larger-than-life –I’m a Euripides girl at heart. I love plays about science and math (I have a little grantwriter-crush on the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation), like Arcadia and Proof. I love Moises Kaufman. I love smart plays about faith for smart people, like Doubt, A Man For All Seasons, and W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being. I’m crazy for Frank McGuiness (Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me is AMAZING), and Tracy Letts (marry me, August: Osage County). I love Angels In America, Pentecost, Metamorphoses, The Crucible, Take Me Out, Assassins, and Frost/Nixon.

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

A:  I AM a playwright just starting out. I mean, I've been writing forever, but only producing in Portland for a couple years, and that's just been staged readings. So I can't tell anyone how to become a working professional playwright. (And actually, if someone could tell ME, that would be great.) But I’m happy to share some of the things I’ve learned that have made me a better writer.

#1) The more you write, the better you write. I'm a grantwriter by profession, and I swear to God it's made me a better playwright. This play, How the Light Gets In, took me three months to write - well, to finish a first draft, anyway. The one before that took me five years. I’m a stronger writer all around now – I write clearer, I edit better, I make my points more strongly, I know my own habits as a writer (first draft is always way too long, must fight tendency to do everything at 2 a.m., can’t have it totally quiet, think way faster lying on my stomach than sitting at a desk, need to revise by working tiny little chunks at a time, basically useless before noon).

#2) Say something. I tried way too hard to be trendy when I was first starting out writing plays, and they were uniformly terrible. I had this preconceived notion of, like, what all the cool kids were doing, and I too wanted to write ludicrously over-complicated surrealist magical realism dramas, or biting commentaries on sexual politics among witty 30-something urbanites. So of course what I wrote was terrible. I still have those old scripts on my hard drive and refer back to them when I need an exercise in humility. They sucked because I was trying to create a story that fit within the framework I had already decided I was going to slavishly imitate, but I wasn’t saying anything. It turns out I don’t give a shit about sexual politics among witty 30-something urbanites. But I do care about lots of things that are worth writing about. And I write better when I really care.

#3) Use an editor. Mead Hunter has changed my life. Like OMG. I can’t even tell you.

#4) Find a director you like and stick with her. Workshopping a new play sometimes feels a little bit like inviting strangers into your home to make fun of your children. I always feel a little twitchy and vulnerable, and need someone to walk that fine line between pushing me and holding my hand. I work with the same director on everything, and she manages me like a pro. After so many years, we have a shorthand with each other, and can read each other’s minds in the audition room. She gets how I write so she catches all the little stuff (“You said X here but I think you really meant Y"), and she’s right every time.

#5) Find smart actors. The first play I ever workshopped was in college, for my senior thesis, and I basically cast my smartest actor friends and gave them permission to say anything they wanted. It was a little like being flayed alive, and I went home and cried after a lot of rehearsals, but the play was a hundred times better by the end of it. That’s still how I like to work – get a bunch of really smart people in my living room, with lots of coffee and wine, and let them talk.

Q:  Plugs please:

A:  If you're in or near Portland between Jan. 22 and Feb. 2, come see Fertile Ground! Here are some links to a couple shows I'm really, really excited about.

I belong to PG2, a playwright's group in Portland, and a couple of my colleagues have shows in the festival. The list for all of them is HERE.
I'm also really excited about Incorporamento, a dance/spoken-word collaboration featuring one of my colleagues from Oregon Ballet Theatre, principal dancer Gavin Larsen; and Playwrights West, who I mentioned above. They rock.