I Interview Playwrights Part 240: Jon Steinhagen

Jon Steinhagen


Hometown: Chicago

Current Town: Chicago

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm spinning a bunch of different plates at present. Currently, my play THE ALTOONA DADA SOCIETY PRESENTS THE VELVET GENTLEMAN is playing at the New York Fringe, produced by the fabulous people at Playlab NYC - performances continue through August 26th. Here in Chicago, I'm deep into rewrites for ACES, a "Las Vegas comedy" that will open in May at Signal Ensemble Theatre. Next week, Raven Theatre is presenting a 3-performance workshop production of my play DATING WALTER DANTE. This October, Marie Kemp is directing a black box production of my play SOMETHING MORE COMFORTABLE at Syracuse University. Sometime this fall there will be a second reading of a new play that was recently read at Chicago Dramatists, BLIZZARD '67. In the hopper is a first draft of a play called MENDICITY CITY - which manages to combine Depression-era Chicago and vampires - and a bunch of short stories burning to be written, but - alas - time is at a premium, so they ferment as notes only for now. I'm a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists, so I'm also working to get my next project ready to be read at our Saturday Series readings, which happen every weekend (barring holidays, of course) and are enormously fun and helpful in the development of the plays!

Q:  You are also an actor. How does your writing affect your acting and vice versa?

A:  I learn something new about storytelling with each new role I play and from every actor with whom I share a scene. I recently ended a long run of Neil Simon's THE ODD COUPLE - I played Felix - and I was amazed at the rhythm of the language, the pacing of the humor...but also found another layer to the play I didn't suspect was there. I don't know that I would have found it had I not been physically engaged in the story. I just opened Tom Stoppard's THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND at Signal Ensemble Theatre - I'm playing Birdboot, the philandering critic - and the richness of the language and the density of ideas is astounding. As if closing one show and opening another in a space of nine days isn't crazy enough, I began rehearsals this week for CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, in which I'll be playing Big Daddy. Table readings have been amazing. That play's got the best second act of any play I know - maybe one of the best acts anywhere, really. Essentially, performing these great roles in these great plays reminds me, always, that as a storyteller myself I ought to focus on the "what happens next?" of the story, seek urgency, and examine my story ideas in terms of "what makes this day [in which the play's action begins] different from all the others?" And - as a playwright - it has always been of utmost value to me to have informal, table readings of my new scripts, because nothing replaces hearing how an actor speaks the dialogue. Lastly, because I'm an actor and know so many fantastic actors, I tend to lean towards peopling my stories with characters that I'D want to play: male, female, young, old...anthropomorphic...

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 eight or nine years old, I won a prize in a state-wide poetry thingamajig - one of those conferences where schools are solicited for entries from students. I had written a poem called "Toast," which was essentially an brief ode to toast, the text shaped like a piece of toast. I got to go to the conference, which I remember very well for so long ago - the guest speaker (I do not recall who she was) spoke on creativity, and illustrated a point about imagination by posing the basic of a situation and asking the students to come up with the backstory. Evidently, I raised my hand and concocted a rather lurid and racy response (something about a dogcatcher's wife poisoning the dogs as an act of revenge for divorce proceedings). Everyone laughed at me because that came out of the mouth of a child. I recall being somewhat upset by the laughter because I was being dead serious. Nowadays, I'm not so upset.

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

A:  I'd love to see more collaboration between theater companies. I realize that's a very tall order - the logistics of co-producing a show, getting the opportunity organized, getting the talent lined up...but I think it would be huge fun and an excellent way for those who tend to be a little isolationist within the bound of their theater company to meet new people, get new perspectives on stories and audiences...and maybe even have the wherewithal to produce new and established plays that require larger casts.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I started out writing music and lyrics for musicals, and Frank Loesser's work inspired me at the outset and continues to be a golden hallmark. I tend to have influences and heroes from many disciplines, not just theater but movies and literature as well: Woody Allen, the collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, Steven Millhauser, Kevin Wilson, Will Eno, Agatha Christie...Edward Albee looms large in my life and thoughts...Mia McCullough's work made me consider attempting plays as well as musicals - she's the playwright I wished I could be...Theresa Rebeck is brilliant, as she does wonderful work in theater, television, and literature (her two novels are prizes)...

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  All kinds, I find all of it inspiring, from "The Bald Soprano" to "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" to "The King and I" to "Next To Normal" - that, and everything that's happening now and tomorrow. I'm always keen to find out what's coming up next, what playwrights are writing, how they're writing it, and how they are telling their stories. I am very lucky to be living and writing during a very inventive time.

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

A:  Get involved with a theater company, somehow. Even if you can't act, find some way to connect with the people who will someday be directing, acting in, producing, designing, and marketing your work. Keep lots of notebooks. See as much as you can. Read the old and the new. Ask people how they're doing. Ask them what they're working on. Encourage them to tell you their stories, and they will ask you to tell them yours - it's the best and easiest way to determine if what you're dreaming is going along in a way that energizes you and someone else. Be a person people are happy to see. I'm reminded of a Gertrude Stein quote, which I shall now paraphrase and probably misquote, but: start with a small audience - if they understand you, they will make a big noise.

Q:  Plugs, please:


A: 
Playlab NYC presents
THE ALTOONA DADA SOCIETY PRESENTS THE VELVET GENTLEMAN
at the New York International Fringe Festival
through August 26th (Venue #15)
http://web.mac.com/playlabnyc/Site/Home.html

Signal Ensemble Theatre presents
ACES
opening May 2011
http://signalensemble.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 239: Leslye Headland

Leslye Headland

Current Town - Los Angeles, CA

Q:  Tell me about your play that is at Second Stage and just got extended

A;  Bachelorette is a play about the in-between space. The place you are when you're reconciling who you thought you were gonna be when you grew up with who you've become. The place when partying starts to look a lot like addiction. The moment you used to pass off as a bad night of drinking, sex and mistakes has suddenly extended into a bad life of drinking, sex and mistakes.

This production was produced by the Second Stage Uptown series which is an incredible program that gives younger, less-established playwrights a chance to see their work on its feet professionally. It was directed by Trip Cullman. It stars an incredible group of young actors: Tracee Chimo, Carmen M. Herlihy, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Fran Kranz, Eddie Kaye Thomas, and Katherine Waterston.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I'm in the middle of writing a play called The Accidental Blonde in which the two lead characters live out their frustrations on either side of the stage. It's like a split-screen play. So there are two stories going on at once. In my Seven Deadly Play series, this is the sin of "Envy".

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 was always planning productions that never happened. I would just decide one day that me and my friends would do "Peter Pan" and then I would enlist all of them to help me make posters, hold auditions, try to find a public space to perform in... all before dinner. Then I would have to let go of the whole idea because it was never gonna happen and I'd eat my dinner sad that I wasn't old enough to direct and produce plays.

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

A:  I wish some sort of Federal Theatre Project-type thing that could exist and employ thousands of theater artists. But that's impossible to do without government censorship or interference. So I guess I would just outlaw musicals based on old movies or an artist's catalogue of songs.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  John Cassavetes, Sarah Kane, Hallie Flanagan, Brian Wilson, Charles M. Schulz,

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The complete opposite of what I write. I love stuff that takes risks narratively especially non-linear re-magining of classics. My favorite theater is directed and produced by Janicza Bravo, a brilliant artist living in LA.

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

A;  You need to get your heart broken. Otherwise, what you're writing is bullshit. Also, quit your day job as soon as possible.

UPDATE from Leslye:  a better way to put it is Quit the Job You Think You Need. obviously you gotta pay the bills. but I'm always encouraging other writers to make writing their full time job and do whatever you need to do to pay rent. If you have to work 50... hours a week to make rent, THEN MAKE YOUR RENT LOWER! I lived on a couch for two years so I could write Mon-Thurs from 9-5 and work 14-hours at minimum wage Fri-Sun. I saved money by not getting a car in LA. And any LA-native will tell you is NOT a public transportation/walking city. But I did it for years. Even after I started getting paid for writing.

I'm not flippantly suggesting that people quit their jobs because i'm some sort of trust-fund case without any grasp of what living in the real world is like. I did it! I quit my job, wrote full-time and I survived. It paid off! I got an agent and a young theatre company started producing my plays. I can't promise that'll happen to everyone but I know it never would've happened if I'd stayed answering phones 50 hours a week, writing on the side, and trying to get my theatre companies/agencies to read my unsolicited submissions.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Tune in to TERRIERS, a show I wrote on this year, premiering Sept. 8 on FX. Created by Ted Griffin (Ocean's 11). Produced by Shawn Ryan (The Shield).

The Accidental Blonde will premiere Oct. 8 in LA. Go to www.iamatheatre.com for details.

You will have to wait a week or so

for the next interview.  I am going out of town on a silent and unplugged writing retreat so there will be blog silence. 

I Interview Playwrights Part 238: Kate Tarker

Kate Tarker

Hometown:
I am bits and pieces of lots of places – but I lived in a small town in Germany for what really felt like forever. No offense, small town in Germany.

Current Town:
Brooklyntown. Crown Heights edition.

Q:  Tell me about The Green.

A:  In brief:
Leeann has lucked into her dream job: She’s managing a chimpanzee sanctuary in the wilds of Africa. Surrounded by poachers, antagonistic adolescent chimps and an eccentric boss, she finds it difficult to balance caring for people and caring for animals. With human allegiances unraveling and chimps running a wild mock, the line between humans and animals dissolves under the canopy of the African jungle.

In very brief:
The line between humans and animals dissolves under the canopy of the African jungle.

It was/is being developed at ESPA, which is an incredibly supportive place for emerging playwrights. You want to go to there.

The seed of this play came from my own experiences volunteering at a chimpanzee sanctuary in Africa. It’s a play of course – so of necessity, it has abandoned real things as they were – but the emotional core of it is centered around my own memories and feelings of a place and situation, and I think it’s all the richer for that.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  This weekend I am going on a silent playwriting retreat, devised by Erik Ehn. I am mad excited to start something from silence and without any preconceived play ideas.

And then in the fall I am going on a pilgrimage to Berlin for a week, and I want to wrap a play around that. My basic impulse is to write something about some expat US Army employees on vacation in Berlin. So we’ll see how that goes. Vacation behavior is much more interesting to me than living room behavior.

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 a little girl, I was sick all the time in the hospital and I day dreamed a lot in the forest by the castle ruins where the men yodeled and my uncle’s dog attacked me so my uncle died of leukemia and my parents divorced and I read a lot of feminist theory and at times thought I was descended from royalty until that was a lie but we lost my toy poodle out there and I read the Brothers Karamazov and so I had to get 200 stitches.

Also-
I was a painter for a while
Until I was in a strange situation where I couldn’t get my paints
Due to the customs office and some lies here and there
And so I listened to things instead
And became a writer.

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

A:  I think it is a huge problem that theatre actors have a union but playwrights just have a guild (lovely as that guild may be). On a practical level we’re just not on the same economic playing field. The number of characters we write is directly influenced by the expenses imposed on us by equity -- which means fewer actors in plays, fewer roles for actors, and smaller stories. I’m not sure anyone’s winning here. I think there should really be a way to make it possible for playwrights to have a union without taking away their copyright on their material. Or else the actors’ union needs to compromise more, at the very least on the off-off-Broadway level; they’re making it harder and more expensive than it should be to play around and experiment.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Pinter. Albee. Churchill. Orton. Tessa LaNeve.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I enjoy plays in which you are pitched somewhere between hilarity and despair, and sometimes don’t know the difference between the two.

I also enjoy all other plays, if they surprise me.

I love it when plays become huge cross-disciplinary collaborations between visual artists and musicians and dancers and writers.

I rarely enjoy new plays about middle-aged married couples being angry, unless they are angry about something strange and exciting and unrelated to their marriage.

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

A:  I will share some advice given to me by others.

New York City is the place to be, if you have a little money and you want to be free.

- homeless man on the street

It will never be harder than in the beginning.

- Mac Wellman

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Reading of THE GREEN, directed by Glynis Rigsby: August 22 @ 12 PM, 59E59 Theater, FREE but RSVP to espa@primarystages.org AND why stop there when you can come see all four plays in the reading series:
http://www.primarystages.org/sites/default/files/ESPA%20Drills.pdf

I Interview Playwrights Part 237: David Holstein

David Holstein

Hometown: New York

Current Town: Los Angeles

Q;  Tell me about your show in Chicago.

A:  About a year and half ago Chicago Shakespeare commissioned my good friend (and brilliant composer) Alan Schmuckler and I to write a musical for their summer family series. We decided to take on a readaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes. In the original fable, there's this kid at the end who's the only one who sees the Emperor for who he is (really naked). So we thought it would be sort of fun to take that kid and essentially make that character into the Emperor's daughter and write a show about how kids can see what their parents can't (and visa versa). I don't really know how to write a children's show. So we set out to write a story that worked at eye level for adults, but that kids could also enjoy.

Q:  What is it like to write for Weeds? Isn't Carly the bomb?

A:  Carly (Mensch) is the bomb. Our offices were across the hall from each other. We thought about stringing some soup cans together so we could talk to each other. Instead we bought Nerf guns and shot them at each other's doors. We even got to write an episode together (ep 9, it's the only episode with a Chekov reference in the title). But yeah, writing for Weeds is awesome. We have a license to kill when it comes to storytelling. That is, there's not a lot of things we can't do or stories we're verboten to tell. Part of that comes from writing on premium cable, but mainly we just have these great actors and ballsy writers who equally encourage us to make dark dark drama as well as slappy happy broad comedy.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  Between Weeds seasons I wrote on a new show coming out in October called Gigantic. It's a dramedy for TeenNick about kids of famous actors who run amuck in LA. The network said we could lean towards the edgier side, so I tried to insert the phrase "rickety slut" into the dialogue a lot. It appears in episode 9. I'm also working on a new play that deals with alien abductions and divorce. I'd really like to finish that.

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

A:  When I was 15 I had a crush on a girl I was in a community musical with. I thought if I wrote her a screenplay she would fall in love with me. It didn't work.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My senior year at Northwestern, I was told we would have a guest lecturer in our creative writing program for the winter semester. His name was Tracy Letts. I'm not sure if he ever taught another class. Anywhere. He's such a fucking animal. He cursed a lot in class. Killer Joe teaches me so much every time I read it. Same with Martin McDonagh's stuff. It's funny because I don't write those types of plays, but I wish I could. Rolin Jones might be my favorite living writer.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I get excited by theater when I know that what I'm watching couldn't be anything else but a play. Or rather that it needs to be a play. Television is too often about reality, and so I really appreciate when I'm watching something on stage that has created its own reality, with its own rules that couldn't exist in any other medium.

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

A:  Keep writing. Work with your friends. Don't listen to people who yell. Keep some lemon candy in your pocket. And remember that you're never as bad as your worst reviews and never as good as your best.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  A play of mine called The B-Team was recently published. Check it out!
http://www.originalworksonline.com/b-team.htm

And if you're in Chicago this summer, The Emperor's New Clothes is playing at Chicago Shakes on Navy Pier until Aug 29.

I Interview Playwrights Part 236: Trav S.D.

Photo by Joe Silva

Trav S.D.

Hometown: Wakefield, Rhode Island

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I am collaborating on an opera with an extremely talented young composer named David Mallamud. It's a cross between Gilbert & Sullivan and Universal horror pictures I call The Curse of the Rat-man.

Q:  Tell me about "No Applause--Just Throw Money"

A:  It's a very personal history of vaudeville and its legacies within show business and American culture in general. It came out at the end of 2005 and required four years of very fun research. The book strives to be entertaining as it delivers information (ironically, most books on this topic just aren't). I would say 98% of its readers (including, thankfully some important critics) prize it on that basis. 2% seem to be old sticks in the mud who only believe something is serious if it's boring.

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 a very small child there was an incident where I got a lot of mirthful attention from a roomful of grown-ups by repeatedly falling on my bottom, bouncing back up, and falling down again. This was my first arena, my first applause. Most of the time I was a quiet, almost silent child. I spent most of my time alone, dreaming. But the materializing of those dreams into concrete action, even foolishness, to be shared with others in order to communicate...this was an entirely distinct phenomenon. When I write, I write for myself, but I write for the room, too. The goal ultimately is universal pleasure. This is why so many people in the theatre go insane.

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

A:  Something to do with the broadness of access. To over-simply, the audience for theatre continues to skew "rich", "white" and "old". When I was in school, they used to bus hundreds of us to the local regional theatre several times a year. There's far less of that now, and if anything there needs to be far more. Theatre (I think) is the one place besides houses of worship where you go and are immersed in lessons of tolerance and empathy, whether its through the play you're seeing...or the very fact of sharing space with other, live, smelly humans. It's absolutely vital to the survival of our democracy that we learn to be civil and listen to each other across all the lines that supposedly divide us. Technology is taking us drastically, horribly in the other direction and it bodes ill. Whether its funded privately or publicly I don't care, but everyone needs to be exposed to the theatre.

There's another side of the coin, of course. One is education and outreach. Kids (and nowadays plenty of adults) need to be taught to sit still for two hours and open themselves to classics. The other side is that producers need to stay in tune with the culture at large. It needs to reflect, or at least incorporate the values and concerns but above all the aesthetics of the broader (i.e., popular) culture. I think Indie theatre does a very good job of this. Off-Broadway and Broadway not so much, although they are getting better, and I am getting more and more encouraged all the time.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Oh the list is so long,but here are a few: Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde, Charles Ludlam, Joe Orton, Sam Shepard...

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Poetry, but it's so bloody rare. It used to be considered mandatory, now almost no one ever "goes there". Among contemporaries I like Kirk Wood Bromley. And Young Jean Lee gets very interesting, very intoxicating affects by purposefully doing things "wrong". Sometimes editors mistakenly think (because I'm a "vaudeville fan") that I'll automatically enjoy light theater, but as a general rule I hate it. I'm looking for a complex experience...laughter and tears, and with lots and lots of levels. A child should get it, but it should challenge us, too. (I might add to my "seminal theatrical experiences" a production of "Waiting for Godot" I saw at Trinity Rep when I was 13. Burlesque clown Bert Lahr had starred in it several decades before. The emotional reality was completely accessible to me at 13, and since no one EVER knows the answers to its questions, the 13 years old's experience of the play is just as valid as a philosophers. To me, that's the best kind of theatre. Light on the outside, heavy at the center. Just like a Tootsie Pop).

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

A:  Have rich parents and attend Yale.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My next play will be produced at LaMama ETC, but that's not until March of next year. Until then, you can see me act in Ian W. Hill's Spacemen from Space at the Brick Theatre in late August, and perform some of my pop songs with some of my downtown cohorts at Dixon Place in Trav S.D.'s Last Chance Saloon, Sept 24.