I Interview Playwrights Part 124: Sharr White

Sharr White

Hometown:  I grew up in Orange County, California until I was twelve, then Boulder, Colorado through high school.

Current Town:  I now live in Cold Spring, New York, which is an almost unbearably quaint little village on the Hudson River, an hour north of Manhattan.

Q:  Tell me about Sunlight, the play going up as a National New Play Network "rolling world premiere." What does that mean? Where are the productions and what is the play about?

A:  On the surface Sunlight is about an epic ideological power struggle between a liberal but abusive university president, and his conservative former protégé who is now dean of the university’s law school, and whom performed work during the Bush administration focusing on interrogation policy. The play unfolds in real time, and depicts the last hour and a half of the president’s tenure at the university. Word has come to Matthew (the president) that that Vincent (the protégé) is under investigation by the Defense Department for permissions given in 2002 that inadvertently resulted in the beating death of a teenager in Afghanistan. Matthew has stormed across campus and, in an impotent rage, has destroyed Vincent’s office. This is the last straw for the school faculty who have been abused by Matthew for years, and, on the night of the play, are across campus casting a vote of no confidence against him. The play takes place in Matthew’s residence where his daughter, Charlotte—who is married to Vincent—and Matt’s longtime assistant, Maryanne, are preparing for Matt’s exit from the university. What the play really is, though, is a kind of mourning piece for what we lost on the morning of September 11, both against our will, and willingly. And how the choices we made as a nation marked a tragic turning point for us. It’s really about the fact that nothing will ever be the same for us again.

The National New Play Network is a coalition of theatres who’s goal is to give new plays as wide a premiere as possible. Every year they select a handful of scripts for consideration, each of which comes with a small stipend for any Network theatres interested in producing. It’s a really, really wonderful way to launch a play. You don’t have to fear the property being killed by a New York launch you may not be ready for, and it allows you to modify the script right after its initial production and see how it plays immediately following. Sunlight premiered at Marin Theatre Company, and is in rehearsal at Phoenix Theatre Company in Indianapolis and ArtsWest in Seattle, and will be performed again this summer at New Jersey Rep. All because Marin Theatre Company introduced the play to NNPN.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m workshopping a new play in New York called The Other Place, which is about a medical researcher whose sudden appearance of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease allows her missing daughter to suddenly come back to her. It’s told in the first-person, and as the play unfolds we realize at the same time as the main character that nothing she says can be trusted.

I’m also writing a new play, which is a commission for South Coast Repertory—I’m not yet exactly sure what it’s about.

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 grew up in a very chaotic household. I’ve got a brother and four sisters, and my parents divorced when I was twelve, and I was relentlessly bullied when I was in grade school. When my mother moved us to Colorado I was able to reinvent myself, escape the bullying, even fit in a little. I think all my plays have central characters who are both a part of their surroundings and yet because of what they’ve been through, also quite lost. An acquaintance of mine told me a few years ago that my plays are about people who become found by others. And in many ways I think that’s true.

Q:  In your opinion, what is the purpose of theater?

A:  Human beings have a deep need not just to experience catharsis, but to experience catharsis together. On some level this is what has powered the building of group identity, of societies. Haiti, the China earthquakes, New Orleans, all the way down to local news stories that cause outpourings of emotion. Without minimizing the true depth of the human suffering that is actually happening, there is a reason for this secondary reaction, the reaction of those of us hearing about the news which creates subsets of societal identity. And what theatre does is allow for this catharsis and this identity to be experienced and tapped into without the experience of actual tragedy. For me, privately experiencing catharsis within a group of people, each of whom is privately experiencing exactly the same thing as me, is what makes that rare breathless silence in a good night of theatre so stunning; we’ve all agreed on some profound emotional level to stop breathing at the same time, and it’s glorious. And then someone in the audience chokes on their gum and ruins everything. And that’s life.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I’m really excited by anything experimental, with a lot of risk, a lot of humor and really big stakes. With one caveat, which is that I want to see it work. I’m not saying I won’t like a new piece if it doesn’t work, but I’m mystified by really tough pieces that actually do work. It’s like a really good magic trick; years later I want to be able to say “How did they do that”?

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

A: 
1. On output: Slow and steady wins the race. It doesn’t matter how much you write in one sitting, it only matters that you write every single day. A page; an hour; a half hour. Don’t bother with saving up your ideas for the few times in a year you can escape for long periods of binge writing; you’ll just procrastinate, and plays take time to develop properly. And I’m not talking about “writing time”, I’m talking about calendar time. You have to live with a play, make it a part of your life, before you begin to understand what it’s really about.

2. On Money: Don’t ever count on making any as a playwright, so find something else to do for money, and let yourself truly understand that you will be doing that something else for a long, long time. Make sure it’s something that lets you live and have a life—a good life—and that also lets you write. In my money life I’m an advertising copywriter. I didn’t think I could do this and be productive, but I’m more productive now than I’ve ever been, plus I can get my teeth cleaned for free. When I landed my first corporate job, my life got better. And my writing got better. I think of it as a sort of personal corporate subsidy of the arts.

3. On the savior myth: I think so many artists operate under a savior myth, which is that one day their lucky break will come—always in the form of some life-changing chunk of money or some incredible benefactor—and that everything in their lives will change. And so we wind up waiting and waiting for our windfall, until our lives are over. Here is the cold truth: There is no savior. There is no cavalry. You are your cavalry. Even when your plays become good enough to get a fantastic agent, or a few very good producer contacts, none of that matters unless you are writing, writing all the time, and writing well. And even then a good play will take years to reach market, and the payoff from a single property will be small, so you must have many, many good properties in order to even flirt with making a living. Which means write, write, write, write, write. This is a fact and must be added into the equation of your life as a playwright.

Q:  Plugs:

A:  If you’re in New York, plan on seeing Yank!. http://www.yankthemusical.com/

David Zellnik is a genius writer and a wonderful person, and he does deeply imaginative, connected work that I as a writer try to study.

I Interview Playwrights Part 123: Michael Lew

Michael Lew

Hometown: La Jolla, CA

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about microcrisis.

A:  microcrisis is a play about the next financial crisis. It's about what happens when bankers exploit microcredit, the small charitable loans to Third World entrepreneurs meant to alleviate global poverty. It's about bankers lumping microcredit into complex financial instruments that ravage the international economy. It's also a bonkers comedy. Stylistically, I'm trying to reconcile the wacky, senseless style of my short plays with the more serious intent of my full-lengths. I'm hoping to take the sensibilities I've honed in my shorts and use comedy as a weapon. I've also been thinking for the past several years about how to write an effective political play - how to do theater that reflects what's going on in the world without falling into the usual traps of preaching to the choir, defanging the truth, or making "expendable art" that's ripped from the headlines but forgotten tomorrow.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  microcrisis has been occupying most of my brain space lately. This is a workshop production, so I've been rewriting throughout the process. But after this ends I'm hoping to start up a new play for a couple of actresses that I like, and collaborate on a new musical with former Youngblooder Matt Schatz.

Q:  Tell us about Youngblood. Who are they what do they do, etc.

A:  Youngblood is an incredible incubator of emerging talent, housed at Ensemble Studio Theatre. It's a writers' group for playwrights under 30. We meet weekly to go over drafts in progress, do workshops like the one microcrisis is getting, produce a ton of short plays, go on artist retreats, and we do a monthly Sunday brunch series where the audience watches a series of new short plays all written on the same topic (while eating pancakes and drinking Bloody Marys). Youngblood and the Ma-Yi Writers' Lab have been my greatest fronts of support over the past several years as I continue trudging through emerging writer hell.

Q:  You had a short in Humana. What was that experience like?

A:  Yeah, I had a short last year (Roanoke, about re-enactors at the Roanoke Living Museum) and the year before that (In Paris You Will Find Many Baguettes But Only One True Love, about a sad sack and her best girlfriend who falls in love with a Parisian street mime). Both of those shorts actually got their start in Youngblood and premiered at Humana. Being at Actors Theatre of Louisville was incredible. The theaters there are so gorgeous, and the support system is astounding. To see these ridiculous plays getting fully produced was joyful and a little surreal. For instance, Roanoke had a huge teepee and an arrowhead display as part of the set, and one of the girls wore a breakaway skirt that she shed for the final dance number (which Matt Schatz composed). When Roanoke was first done at Youngblood, there was no set and I think the actors had to hunt through their closets for costumes. The Humana Festival itself is also quite fascinating. The plays themselves are really solid, but I'm also interested in how the machine of it works: the way the apprentice company does round the clock set changeovers to cram 10 different shows into 3 theater spaces. Or the way the entire theatre industry descends onto Louisville. It was really interesting being a gnome among giants and watching this whirlwind of drama onstage and off.

Q:  You're engaged to be married to another playwright. I'm married to another playwright and know a few other playwright couples, but we're rare. What are advantages of being a playwright couple?

A:  I am engaged to Rehana Mirza, whom I met in the Ma-Yi Writers' Lab. What's funny is that we want to accomplish VERY different things in our writing and yet we have a profound respect for the other person's work and a deep understanding of their writing mechanics. Oftentimes we'll suggest edits or lines that are absolutely in the other person's voice -- things that we'd never dream of putting into our own writing. I think the biggest advantage of being a playwright couple is always having an advocate - someone who knows your work inside and out and who's always willing to engage with you and keep pushing you to get better as a writer. I think another major advantage is an innate understanding of the difficulty of this career path. We're able to celebrate the small victories together and weather the many challenges. For instance, this is the second year in a row that I've been in rehearsal over Valentine's Day. Rehana didn't even blink. She gets that when we're in production it's a rare and lucky moment, and so what might seem like an obstacle or an inconvenience to anyone else is actually a cause for celebration to us.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  As I said early, lately I've been hunting for plays that attack the political world in a way that's nuanced, honest, and longlasting. I also like plays that transport me to other worlds, either through the language or through the writer's unique logic. I love plays with a good sense of humor. My favorite writers are Steve Belber, David Lindsay-Abiare, Julia Cho, Julia Jordan, Lloyd Suh, Qui Nguyen, and my fiancee Rehana. My favorite productions over the past few seasons have been Passing Strange, Blasted, and Princes of Waco (by fellow Youngblooder Rob Askins). I'll tell you what really excites me: plays that reflect our multicultural world and that depict a unique perspective. So often I see plays that portray the same kinds of people, that offer the same viewpoint, and that speak to the same kind of audience. It's as though year in and year out the titles change but I'm seeing the exact same play over and over again. I think that if this art form is going to be viable against other forms, we need to mount work that is vital and immediate. We need storytelling done in a form that's unavailable anywhere else. But above all, we need to hear stories from diverse artists, told from a different perspective.

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

A:  1) Surround yourself with a talented peer group (actors, directors, designers, and especially other writers). Talented peers will motivate you to sharpen your craft and step up to their level. 2) Learn the business side of theatre - definitely fight for what the theatre should be. But take a good, hard look at what the theatre is. 3) There's a limit to how far internships and schooling will take you. There's no shortcut for getting your hands dirty. 4) Aw, what the hell do I know about starting out, Adam? I've never even had a major full-length production. Nobody ever taught me anything that made this slog substantially easier. Some people love theatre so much that they're willing to slog on, and some people don't. It's all just an endurance game, no?

Q:  Plugs:

A:  last 2 performances of microcrisis at EST (52nd betw 10th and 11th) Thurs 2/25 and Fri 2/26. 7pm.

I Interview Playwrights Part 122: Craig Wright

Craig Wright

Q:  Tell me about Blind, the show you have going up at Rattlestick.

A:  It’s a play about Oedipus and Jocasta. It takes place in the period of time during which they’re both offstage in Sophocles’ play, and it assumes that the story Oedipus eventually tells the people of Thebes — that he found the queen dead and put out his eyes — isn’t the truth. It uses Oedipus’ relationship to Jocasta and the kingship as a metaphor for our culture’s relationship to economic privilege, and the economic and social crisis in ancient Thebes mirrors the crisis in our own land and time.

Q:  What else are you working on right now?

A:  I have a few pilots in process in the world of television and my new play THE GRAY SISTERS, which deals with four sisters handling the fallout from prolonged sexual abuse by their stepfather, premieres at Third Rail Rep in Portland, OR in April. They commissioned it.

Q:  You have had success both in TV and theater.  How do you find the time to continue to do  both?

A:  My son’s all grown up and in college. There isn’t much else to do besides work.

Q:  You most recently worked with, among other people, my friend and theatrical darling Sheila Callaghan on the Showtime show the United States of Tara.  What was that experience like and doesn't Sheila rock?

A:  Sheila is an immensely talented writer and a lot of fun to work with. Alan Ball, when I started at SIX FEET UNDER, told me I could have a future in television if I wanted one. I told Sheila the same thing about herself. What she chooses to do next remains to be seen, but whatever it is, it’ll be funny, provocative, and amazing. That’s just what she does.

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

A:  There was a street the kids called Bloody Lane about three blocks from where I lived when I was five. It was called Bloody Lane because the man who owned the house at the end of the street — it was really just a very long driveway — poisoned the squirrels in the trees, so there were always dead, run-over squirrels laying around in the rocks. Some 7th-graders on my street decided one day to ride their bikes down to the end of Bloody Lane and see what was there. I asked if I could come along. A gun came into play over the course of the adventure and I ended up with a badly broken leg, a good story, and the kind of protracted convalescence that tends to turns people into writers.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  My taste runs to the avant-garde: the Wooster Group, ZT Hollandia, Teatr Zar — these are companies that make work that inspires me.  At the same time, David Cromer’s perfect production of OUR TOWN was the best thing I’ve seen in a long while. I also just saw a show in Los Angeles called AN OAK TREE by Tim Crouch that was amazing. I like theater that doesn’t pretend to be simulating reality, theatre whose primary mechanism is what I would call “ceremonial” or “invocative.”

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

A:  Endeavor to be the most intrepid and honest person in the process when it comes to making the play itself better. Don’t settle for what other people will let you get away with. Don’t blame the actors. Make it better.

I Interview Playwrights Part 121: Laura Jacqmin

Laura  Jacqmin

Hometown: Shaker Heights, OH

Current Town: Chicago, IL

Q:  You're going to Sundance.  Congrats!  Can you talk about the play you're bringing there?

A:  Sure! The play is called "Look, we are breathing." It's about the death of a teenage boy and how the three main women in his life - his mother, his AP English teacher, and his most recent party hookup - just aren't sad about his death. I was planning to write a monologue play, but I cheated almost immediately: less than one page in, Mike (the deceased) shows up, and he continues to influence the direction of the play. I wanted to explore the death of a young person and the conflicted feelings those closest to him might have felt - particularly if this kid was pretty much a stranger to everyone. I thought I was a fully-formed person when I was a teenager, but I know better now.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  A weight-loss thriller comedy. No title yet. And DENTAL SOCIETY MIDWINTER MEETING, a hypertheatrical ensemble comedy about dentists set at the Skokie Marriott. Also, trying to chug through Chicago's endless winter - it always feels the worst in February.

Q:  What theaters or plays should I check out when in Chicago?

A:  There's no simple way to answer this question. Simply put, there are a million theater companies in Chicago and the fact that even the best rental venues are shockingly cheap means that there's way too much going on for a person to see even a small sampling. I'll be checking out Steppenwolf's Garage Rep next month (three shows by itinerant companies in the Garage space). Other exciting companies include Redmoon, Teatro Luna, The Strange Tree Group, and my home base, Chicago Dramatists.

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 sister and I loved radio when we were kids, so we would plug a microphone into the stereo and record our own radio shows on cassette tapes. We would do fake interviews with each other and pretend to be bands (I thought I was a truly excellent singer in third grade) and describe what we had done that day. I would never listen to what we recorded because I hated the sound of my own voice. Also, I liked to ask my dad to put on something by Stravinsky (usually Pulcinella or The Rite of Spring) and do "ballet" on the living room rug in a fake ballet outfit. I had no dance training, but I was absolutely convinced I was doing it right.

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

A:  Less fear. More honesty.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like story. I can sometimes be amused by gimmickry, but unless I have some concrete story to latch onto, I get exasperated. I also really enjoy being frightened by theater, which happens very, very rarely. A friend of mine directed a program of Beckett's shorts in college, and during "Not I" I just freaked out. It was terrifying and wonderful.

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

A:  Do your work, and work hard at it. Know where you're going with a project before you begin it, or at the very least, what you want to say. And don't get bitter; it's a time-waster and it never leads anywhere.

Q:  Plugs:

A:  I'm so proud of my fellow At Play Productions company members Harrison Rivers and Colette Robert, who will also be at Sundance with me, working on Harrison's play "When Last We Flew."

I Interview Playwrights Part 120: Stanton Wood

Stanton Wood

Hometown:  Southern California

Current Town:  Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about these one person shows you wrote for library tours. What are they about and how did you come to write them? Where can I go to see them?

A:  I’ve written three shows specifically for Urban Stages on Tour, which is a program that tours small-cast plays and arts-in-education projects throughout the New York City public library system (New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and Queens Public Library). At the Pole is about the discovery of the North Pole; Gates of Equality is about Martin Luther King; The Silkie is a collaboration with director Jon Levin that uses shadow and hand puppets and live music to tell a modern Brooklyn version of the Celtic legend about the sea people – seals who can shed their skin and walk around as people. The first two are monologue plays, and The Silkie is basically a story theatre piece with two actors and a violinist. Each show is about 30-40 minutes long and has to be simple and self-composed in its theatricality. It has to be transportable on the subway or a car, and the spaces radically vary – some performances are basically in a corner of the stacks, while some libraries actually have theatres with stages, and an audience can number anywhere from 9 to 130.

I ended up writing these because of my ongoing relationship with the company. Urban Stages produced several of my plays for young audiences on their main stage. One of those plays, my adaptation of The Snow Queen, had already toured the libraries as a staged reading, so I was familiar with the program and a natural fit when they decided to commission new work. You can find dates/times/locations on the web sites of the specific library systems (Queens: http://www.queenslibrary.org

Brooklyn: http://www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org


and New York: http://www.nypl.org

I try to keep a list on my web site (http://www.stantonwood.com ), and Urban Stages also keeps a list. I’m very fond of these projects. They probably have a truer cultural impact on my community than anything else I do.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m working on an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for director Edward Elefterion and Rabbit Hole Ensemble, where I’m a resident artist. This is my third adaptation for them – I did a version of Dracula (The Night of Nosferatu) and last summer a version of Voltaire’s Candide (Candide Americana). My goal is to have half the audience running out screaming and waving their arms in the air and the other half quietly rushing home to clone their cousin. I’m not even sure I’m kidding about that. It’s a great story, and I’m excited to put my own spin on it.

I’m also developing a play with director Matt Morrow called An Apology for the Life of Leni Reifenstahl. That’s a multimedia project that explores the life of “Hitler’s film maker” - as an artist, as a fascist propagandist, her political identity, her relationship with Hitler, her claims of art for art’s sake, and her relentless quest to define her own identity, often in contrast to reality. The woman is grotesquely fascinating, and working on this play is like staring at a really strange half-dead bug on my kitchen floor.

I’m also working on a novel, and a play for young audiences, and I have a monologue play I’m trying to put together. I also have this interactive narrative fairy tale annotation project I’ve been desperately wanting to do, and I’d also really like to do some radio drama in podcast form or as performance art.

Q:  Tell me about the Garden Project.

A:  I like to do little side projects that force me to think differently and collaborate with other types of artists, and I’d been doodling with the idea of doing a blog, but I didn’t want to do a real theatre blog because I’m too obsessive and passionate and would spend the entire day crafting complex manifestos that I would then eventually delete before posting.

So I opted for a fake blog, instead. I asked Chris Bonnell, who’s a visual artist and illustrator, if he’d be interested in collaborating, and we cooked up this project called The Unbelievably Strange Wildlife Garden(which you can access from my web site if you’re interested). With absolutely no guidance from me, Chris draws an unbelievably strange creature (quite literally), and then I take his illustration and name it and write up a description of it in a phony Wikipedia style, fictionally integrating it into history, culture, literature, art, the movies, etc. We’re not trying to fool anybody really, it’s more like documenting a completely parallel universe all our own. In addition to the blog posts, sometimes we’ll bring the blog into the “real world” through flyers and leaflets, like when we posted flyers in Park Slope asking people to help us find Gurgles, our missing pet Abyssinian Leaf Sneezer. I also came across these hilarious mid-20th Century black and white photos of the Iowa State Fair a while ago, so they became my vacation photos from a recent trip to a phony European country, which I also documented in the Garden. It’s completely silly, but what the heck. I just hope some Middle School student is not plagiarizing a homework assignment using a description of the Hump Backed Arctic Snake Dog:

Q:  What is it like creating characters in the gaming industry?

A:  It varies by game and genre, of course, and the level of involvement of the writer in the design process. Sometimes writers are brought in at the tail end to buff up the dialogue and create more interesting personalities for minor characters. At the other extreme, you’re involved in the design process, in which case you have the opportunity to make character choices that actually contribute to the gameplay and story.

Part of narrative game design is giving players meaningful choices, so that means that secondary characters you create have to respond dynamically to those decisions. It becomes more like contributing characters and dialogue to a play where you don’t have complete control over the main character, a dramatic story universe. What choices you allow the player, and how the characters respond to those choices in the context of their own goals, becomes part of the writing process.

For instance, some games feature traveling companions with whom you build relationships - as a player, over the course of the game you can make game decisions and dialogue choices that can either piss them off to the point where they abandon you, or make them fall in love with you. Crafting that dynamic universe of character, story, behavior and dialogue - that potentiality - is what’s exciting. You have a lot more control over the whole character because you deal with many more possibilities, but you have less control over how a player/audience experiences that character because they basically choose the content. It’s interesting, because theatre artists seem to be increasingly experimenting with theatrical experiences that respond dynamically to audience input in a meaningful way. We’re all going to be writing for the holodeck eventually.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like story, and strong characters, and physicality. I like to enter a world and be transported, but I also like when the show is intensely and passionately relevant to the community. I love it when the audience is acknowledged, even if it’s not breaking the fourth wall, but where we’re included, where there’s generosity. I like to see physicality, actors using their whole body, not just their head and their hands, where a universe can be sketched with a specific gesture or bodies moving in space. I enjoy when I have to engage imaginatively with a piece - when there’s puppets, or music, or actors playing many roles, or the performance invites me to use my imagination. I love it when a show uses the whole space, when actors get on the ground or fly around in the sky. I love great writing, great insight, great ideas that haunt me after the show is over - meaningful experiences, where a writer dug deep, was brave, experimented, and where a director and actors made bold, confident choices.

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

A:  Plastics. No, but seriously: Diversify. Even successful playwrights augment their income by other kinds of writing and by teaching.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Well, Rabbit Hole Ensemble will be producing my version of Frankenstein (as yet no title) in October in Manhattan. I’m doing a workshop of my play Ramona’s Kidnapper in late May at Urban Stages, which theoretically culminates in a staged reading. Gates of Equality, At the Pole, and The Silkie are touring the New York City libraries this spring. Also, something I’m very excited about, the New York Public Library is doing a 250th anniversary celebration of Voltaire’s Candide, and they’ve asked the Candide Americana team to be involved. I’m annotating an online version of the book (Chapters 3 and 20), and director Edward Eleferion and I and the cast will be blogging. The public will be able to add content also, I believe. It’s basically designed to be a big group dialogue and celebration of a great book, and I can’t wait to see how it plays out. Part of it is live already, although perhaps not the part I’ve contributed to. But don’t let that stop you. I’m not sure, but I believe the address is http://candide.nypl.org

 

I Interview Playwrights Part 119: Jamie Pachino

Jamie Pachino

Hometown: Baltimore, Maryland

Current Town: Los Angeles

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A television movie, a pass on a feature spec that's about to go out, and (pending rights issues): a new musical. I'll also be teaching playwrighting at University of California, Irvine again in March.

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

A:  This is a tricky question for me, as I moved to LA when I was 6 months pregnant and had another child a few years later, so I haven't seen as much theatre out here as I would like. (I'm much better versed in Chicago theatre, where I lived for 14 years). For me it tends to be individual productions that have captured my attention in LA, rather than specific companies (which tend to be somewhat fluid out here, given the industry) so my allegiance hasn't really settled anywhere.

Q:  What are the difficulties and rewards inherent in writing for TV, film as opposed to theater?

A:  I think all of the mediums right now are experiencing similar challenges, given the current economic climate. People tend to be looking for a "sure thing" and skittish about material that takes chances. Theatre-wise, there are fewer and fewer slots made available for new work, and less interest in giving those slots to writers without a "name". In addition, development opportunities are slipping away, so it's hard to form the relationships that lead an unproven writer to getting those chances in the first place. All this is especially frustrating because I think many of the plays that have come in the last 5-10 years have been astonishingly good.

On the plus side, for me theatre still offers the two best parts of writing: true collaboration, and the ability to take great flights of imagination. I honestly love nothing more than sitting in a dusty rehearsal room with actors and a director I trust, trying to get the best draft possible out of my script-- along with the opportunity to break the rules, be theatrical, and play with language in a way that simply doesn't translate to film or TV.

Film and TV wise, obviously the pay is a lot better (if you're going to live in LA with two kids, this is a big plus!). It also offers more exposure for your work, and a completely different set of skills to operate around. (Coming from a theatre background, learning the language of film and how to use it wisely has been a great learning experience, and really gratifying when I've gotten it right). I've also had a chance to dissect different genres as I've been fortunate enough to write for animation, drama, thriller, historical romance, true-to-life stories, and more-- all of which keeps me on my toes.

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 love the stories on your blog, but I don't have any aha moment or strange/delightful background story to share on this. I will tell you that while I studied to be an actress in college, both my father and my acting teacher kept telling me I was going to be a writer. Took me a few years to see the light, but they were right.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Nearly all of it excites me, but the material I'm most drawn to is bold.--Not meaning the set/stage is large-- but bold in language, theatricality, and ideas. I'm completely drawn to theatre that demands something back, that engages and enthralls, that has a big heart, and something to say, and can be entertaining and surprising along the way. (Not too much to ask, right?)

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

A:  Keep writing. Don't just finish one masterpiece and be done. A theatre may love your work-- but not have a slot for it-- and when they ask "what else have you got?" you want 3 more scripts ready to hand over. Plus, the only way you get better and find the core of your voice, is to keep writing.

In addition, relationships are incredibly important. I've been represented by two of the biggest agencies in the world, but EVERY SINGLE PRODUCTION I've ever gotten was because of a connection I had already made. Directors are the ones that walk your scripts into theatres; lit managers read everything, and if they fall in love with something but can't use it at their space, they'll send it to their lit manager friends (they also constantly move to new theatres); actors work all over and talk about scripts they're dying to do-- everybody talks. As a corollary to this: be pleasant to work with, all the time. It's hard enough to get your work up and it's a verrrrry small community. If you're a pain to work with, people will know.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My plays WAVING GOODBYE and THE RETURN TO MORALITY can be found at Playscripts, Inc. (www.playscripts.com).

My play SPLITTING INFINITY was just named the winner of the Francesca Primus Prize.

For more: www.jamiepachino.com