tomorrow

CLOWN BAR
by Adam Szymkowicz
directed by Kip Fagan

Lyrics by Adam Szymkowicz and Adam Overett
Music by Adam Overett

with Alex Anfanger, Brett Aresco, Stephen Bel Davies, Sam Breslin Wright, Jamie Effros, Jessy Hodges, Beth Hoyt, Jessica Pohly, Dominic Spillane, and Steve Stout

Long ago Happy left the Clown Bar and the organized clown crime world to work for the good guys.  Now his junkie brother Timmy has been murdered, and Happy returns to his old life to ask a few questions.  Can he go home again without getting sucked into the seedy clown underbelly of vice and violence?  And will he survive the gun toting clowns who used to be his friends? Or Blinky, the lady clown he left behind?

ONE NIGHT ONLY: Sunday, June 19 at 7 p.m.
Seventh Street Small Stage
at Jimmy’s No. 43
43 East 7th Street (between 2nd/3rd Aves)
6 to Astor Place, R/W to 8th Street, F to 2nd Avenue
Seating extremely limited – for reservations and information please call 212.946.5198

I Interview Playwrights Part 361: Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Hometown: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Current Town: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Q: Tell me about your play next season with the Huntington Theatre.

A: I have lived in Harvard Square for 46 years and been a playwright for 30 years so it was time to write a Cambridge comedy about friends on the cusp of old age. In Before I Leave You, Emily’s cozy world threatens to fall apart: her husband Koji suddenly embraces his Asian roots as his theater career takes off; her best friend Jeremy has a mysterious illness and stops work on his novel; her son leaves home to live with a grocery checkout girl; and her girlfriend Trish has her eyes on Koji. Longtime friendships morph and crumble in the blink of an eye.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: For the last year I have been researching and writing the first draft of Mammal Heat, my golem/robot play. The four characters are Golp, a humanoid with feelings (and with all of Google poured into his head); Maggie, the scientist who created him; Maggie’s 8-year-old daughter, Abigail, who plays with him; and Maggie’s embittered 59-year-old mother, who teaches him about the facts of life. Mammal Heat is a domestic robot play with a window, via TV, to the war raging on the other side of the world.

Q: Tell me about the Huntington Playwright Fellows Program.

A: I am very happy being a Huntington Fellow. Playwrights often feel like itinerant peddlers as they wander from theater to theater, displaying their wares. It’s extremely nice to have a professional roof over your head, especially one that invites its HPFs to all its performances (as well as opening night parties), and makes you eligible for a reading at the end of your tenure. There’s a forty-year age span in our small group and an exciting range of styles and subject matter. Our bi-weekly discussions, under the sharp and genial direction of Lisa Timmel and Charles Haugland, are lively, helpful, and fun. It’s surprising that I enjoy the TPFs so much, being the sort that usually works slowly over time (and also the sort that tends to overanalyze my critics), but I find “the rose, the thorn, the bud” approach to the TPF discussions very nurturing. Most of my writing life I’ve felt like a part-timer; now at 72 I’m finally working full-time.

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

A: As an Asian American woman playwright, I would like the audience to park its assumptions at the theater door. I realize that’s impossible - I admit I tend to be excited by and supersensitive to Asian American plays because it’s like seeing something done by my family. But as a playwright I tend to write what I feel like writing; I don’t let someone else dictate the terms. I believe if you write on what moves you, everything you are will go into your play. One more thing - I think my Asian American characters should be judged like any of my other characters, not just as representatives of a group, but on their own terms.

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

A: Keep a journal, write two hours a day, read hundreds of plays, go to a play a week, get to know your local playwrights and rush to see their plays, when you have writer’s block distract yourself with a 10-minute play and submit it to the innumerable festivals in your favorite cities all over the country, have close friends (other than yourself) that you study and know inside out. Never give up, never despair – after three decades of doing what you love most, the Huntington might give you a call.

I Interview Playwrights Part 360: Hannah Moscovitch

Hannah Moscovitch

Hometown:
Ottawa, Canada

Current Town:
Toronto, Canada

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m in Banff, working on a play commissioned by the Banff Centre called We are at War about the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. It’s based on interviews with three veterans who did tours in Panjwaii, one military psychiatrist who runs a PTSD clinic in Ottawa, and two journalists who were embedded with our troops.

Q:  How would you characterize Canadian theater?

A:  I spend most of my time in Toronto and theatre culture varies a lot across the country (we only have one tenth the population of the States but we’re so spread out that different aesthetics develop regionally). Okay but I’d say Canadian plays tend to explore ambiguity, complexity of human experience, and subtle shades of meaning. And our sense of humor is relatively self-deprecating and ironic. It comes from knowing we’re an icy outpost and not at the centre of things. And to be honest a lot of the plays that get done in Canada are made in England or the States. Canadian theatre culture is young. Almost all of the great Canadian playwrights are alive.

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

A:  It’s common knowledge in my family that I’m terrified of spiders. It’s true that when I was a little girl I was terrified of spiders. Now I’m not scared of them but somehow it’s become so much a part of my identity within my family and it’s so expected of me that I’ll lose my shit when I see a spider that I pretend to be frightened of spiders. I scream and run out of the room over spiders even though I’m not at all afraid.

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

A:  The ticket prices.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My first heroes were the Canadians playwrights: Judith Thompson, John Mighton, Daniel MacIvor, George F. Walker, David French, Claudia Dey, Morwyn Brebner, Michael Healey, Adam Pettle, Wajdi Mouawad, Michel Tremblay, Michel Marc Bouchard, Robert LePage...

At the moment I’m reading a lot of Edward Bond. It’s blowing my mind.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I don’t have a kind, I don’t think. I’m pretty fervent about believing that you don’t have to suppress one theatrical style to promote another. I get excited about verbatim, experimental performance, language-based plays, story-based plays, image and spectacle based plays, musicals. I like whatever’s beautiful and intelligent. I like what’s good.

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

A:  Produce your own work, find colleagues you want to collaborate with over and over again, and develop relationships with theatre companies who will produce your plays. The best case scenario is to develop a primary relationship with one artistic director who will produce all your plays (and take risks with you). Either that or built your own theatre company and tour your own work.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  East of Berlin and The Russian Play are being produced by Signal Ensemble in Chicago in October.

Little One is being premiered by Theatre Crisis at Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto in August.

The Children’s Republic is being premiered by Tarragon Theatre (where I’m in residence) in Toronto in November.

upcoming and right now

1.  I have a play in 300 Vaginas at Blue Coyote.  It's a really good night.  Go if you can.  now playing.

2.  Then, after that, a Production of Clown Bar with Rising Phoenix Rep
Directed by Kip Fagan
Seventh Street Small Stage at Jimmy’s No. 43  NYC
June 19.  7pm  (Free performance, one night only see website for details)

3.  Then a reading of my really new play The Artist at the Chance in CA in the OC July 20.  (I'm the resident playwright at the Chance Theater this year.  Did I tell you that?)

4.  A production of Nerve in LA in July.  (production # 11 of that play) Everything I've heard so far about the planned production sounds exciting.  I'll let you know details when they can be revealed.

5.  In August, Elsewhere will be done at Theatre Conspiracy in Fort Meyers, FL.

6.  In October, I will have 3 productions of three different plays in two different cities.  Rehearsing those will be tricky.  I'll let you know more soon.

7.  And there are at least 7 other planned productions I know of in '11 and '12 so far.

I Interview Playwrights Part 359: Alessandro King

Alessandro King

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about the play you have coming up with Trustus.

A:  Swing ’39 is an imagined story about a group of girls from 1939 Harlem who win a competition to meet the King of Swing, Benny Goodman. The play is about the relationships that spring up between the Italian Harlem residents and the members of the Goodman organization, including one girl who becomes romantically involved with Benny himself.

I’d characterize the play as a character-driven ensemble piece, initially inspired by the works of Chekhov and Terence Rattigan, two greats I was reading a lot of when I wrote the first draft three years ago.

Swing ‘39 was originally done at Sarah Lawrence College, a production in which I actually played Benny. This August you can catch it at the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s part of the Trustus Playwrights Festival, one of the oldest play festivals in the country. I am extremely honored and excited about this wonderful opportunity.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’ve been developing my new play, Tabor, at INTAR, where I’m a member of The Pound, the new emerging artists lab there. I will most likely have a reading up some time this summer.

I’m rewriting a one-act of mine, North Island, that I hope to pair with another short piece with similar themes. And I am in the middle of research for my long-term major project, a play about Al Smith, my favorite New York figure.

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 used to collect Carl Barks comic books, and I started before I could even read. I used to cut them up and make collages out of them. I still have my big journal with each page devoted to a different character – Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Gladstone Gander. Each page is filled not just with pictures of the featured character, but images that represent what the character is “about.” So the Donald page, for example, also has pictures of bad stuff happening to Gladstone, his arch-nemesis.

I think this shows that even before I could comprehend narrative and plot, I had a very strong interest in character. I understood that personalities were being expressed and contrasted, and that each character had an ineffable yet specific essence.

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

A:  I think there are playwrights on this blog who are more eloquent when it comes to this question. But I will say that the affordability of ticket prices gets my vote for the top dilemma. If we could magically remedy that, I think many of the other problems would be helped.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I am who I am thanks to a crack team of teachers and professors: Bill Williams and Michael Gilbert of Trinity School, and Stuart Spencer, Amlin Gray and Christine Farrell of Sarah Lawrence College.

My favorite playwrights are Shakespeare, Chekhov, Terence Rattigan, Lanford Wilson and Kenneth Lonergan. They love their characters. Lonergan and Annie Baker are the two contemporary writers on my must-see list.

I read Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms a year ago and it is my new favorite play. It makes me smile just to think of it.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like to leave the theater thinking about the characters. If I leave thinking about the writer or the director – how capable they are, how smart they are – that’s good, but it’s better if I don’t realize they’re there at all. As a writer I try to be invisible.

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

A:  Well I am definitely just starting out myself, so I feel a little bashful about this one. But I will say this: I got the Trustus production by submitting to everything I was eligible for in the Dramatists Sourcebook. And I have a file cabinet with dozens of rejection letters. So, if at first…

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Swing ’39 goes into previews at Trustus on August 10th, with an opening night of August 12th:

http://www.trustus.org/show.php?show_id=6

Come down before the fifteenth and we’ll grab a drink!

My zany improv show, Listen, Kid!, currently plays at the Magnet Theater in New York:

http://magnettheater.com/viewshow.php?showid=36829

If you have children, you simply must take them to a Monster Literature show:

http://www.monsterliterature.com/

And if you’re planning on visiting the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer, you’d be crazy to miss the reading of Sarah Hammond’s beautiful House on Stilts on July 8th.

Thanks for checking out my interview! If you’d like to read one of my plays, shoot me an e-mail at AlessandroMKing at gmail dot com.

Summer classes at ESPA

studying with great people like Tanya Barfield, Sheri Wilner, Bekah Brunstetter, and Daniel Talbott.

Check it out!  www.primarystages.org/espa