I Interview Playwrights Part 610: Brian Watkins

Brian Watkins

Hometown: Parker, Colorado

Current Town: Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me about the Lesser show.

A:  It's called JUST RIGHT JUST NOW. Six short pieces -- all set in a forgotten basement -- from six rather amazing playwrights. My piece, STUDY THAT HOUSE, is a very simple and spooky little tale about a man who inexplicably finds a dog in his basement and the course his life takes in grappling with the mystery of it. Every piece in the production is beautifully different, yet bound by a foundational theme of basements being these complex and dark little underworlds. Lesser A knows how to pick 'em; Laura Ramadei, Dan Abeles, and Nate Miller are such a great team to work with, as they really know how to get the right mix of people in the room. It’s been a joy to work on.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I just finished two new full-lengths: one’s a love story about a Civil War amputee with a peculiar secret. The other is called GAMES FOR AN EMPTY CUL-DE-SAC about 4 orphans that have quarantined themselves in their ramshackle childhood home to compete for parental authority. Now currently writing a play about beer.

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

A:  A lot of my family lives in the Northwest. Every Fourth of July, we’d all get together and ferry out to this island where there was some strange cabin on a clearing in the middle of the woods. My grandfather would gather everyone around and make us watch him leap over blazing fireworks, wearing very short shorts, while he bellowed lyrics from The Music Man.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Plasticene Theatre in Chicago, Sam Shepard, Beckett, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Eugene O'Neill, Will Eno, Yeats, Conor McPherson. And then there’s those non-theatre theatrical heroes like Bruce Nauman, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. I could go on and on… so I’ll stop.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre that travels long dramatic distances, that is constantly arriving at unexpected places. Bold and risky stuff, written from the gut, that teeters on the edge of falling on its face. It seems this brand of theatre is typically thought of as “visceral” or “sweaty” or “loud” but I think it can also include quiet or contemplative work. For examples, see above list.

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

A:  Pursue playwriting for the love of the craft and the community, not for what the craft and community can give you. Take a posture of ambitious selflessness. This means being a zealous listener. It also means writing every day. Taking risks and failing. Reading. Seeing as much theatre as possible. And sacrificing a whole lot of immediate comfort in exchange for slow, meaningful growth. As every writer knows, turning off the neurotic bullshit in our heads is half the battle. Ironically, I think the practice of focusing outward – of upholding something other than one’s individuality – can garner, in spades, the very things that writers typically strive to self-generate yet can’t sustain: inspiration, higher craftsmanship, a unique voice. You can find some true gems in the theatre community that practice this. When you find one, spend as much time with them as possible.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Go see the Lesser America show! JUST RIGHT JUST NOW is a great offering of work from playwrights Eric Dufault, Clare Barron, Anna Kerrigan, Lauren Morelli, Marco Ramirez, and myself. Stella Powell Jones and Peter James Cook are our two amazing directors. Round it out with a great cast and awesome designers, and boom, you got some ballsy, dark theatre. October 10-27. Get your tickets while you can.

Also, you should check out a rather fascinating collaborative exhibition between AIGA and Little Fury design studio, for which I have the honor of being head writer. We’ve compiled a team of great writers – including some incredible playwrights like Bekah Brunstetter and Eric Dufault – to pen fictional stories about well-designed common goods. The stories are hilarious and touching and fascinating; sort of like a literary/design experience that shines a whole new light on the gap between consumerism and craftsmanship. 5th Ave at 22nd Street. Nov 1-Dec 28.

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I Interview Playwrights Part 609: Lauren Morelli

Lauren Morelli

Hometown:
I was born in Pittsburgh, PA. I'm wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates hat as I type this, which is a little bandwagon-y of me, since they're currently in the playoffs for the first time since '92. I'm told that's really exciting.

Current Town:
I've been in LA for the last 7 years, after spending 6 years in New York.

Q:  Tell me about the Lesser show.

A:  The amazing folks from Lesser America reached out and asked if I'd be interested in writing a play for their next show, "Just Right Just Now." Their only stipulations were that it should be 10-15 minutes and be set in a basement. I was really excited about playing with how much you can accomplish in such a short amount of pages. You really can't be lazy. Somehow I ended up writing this play called "Rat & Roach," which is about a suicidal rat and a roach that falls in love with her. It's weird and hopefully a little beautiful. But mostly weird.

Q:  What is it like to write for Orange Is The New Black?

A:  It's a dream job, truly. Jenji Kohan, our creator and showrunner, has taught me so much about writing over the last two seasons. She pushes me to be better but also allows me space to be a misfit toy, which is probably the role I'm most comfortable playing. I hadn't written on a show previous to this, and couldn't fathom what it might be like to come up with story and characters with a room full of writers. It seemed so far from my own writing process, but as it turns out, it's a total joy to have six other people to bounce ideas off of and brainstorm with. When it's working well, it's like the best volleyball team you've ever seen (I said that like I've ever seen volleyball, or like that's a really common thing people watch. Maybe basketball or some sport that's actually popular?). In any case, you can lob an idea into the air and then someone else will catch it, make it better, throw it back. It's a really exhilarating process. When it's not going well it requires a lot of emotional eating and early drinking.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I'm developing a pilot about mermaids that I'm pretty excited 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 have a younger brother who is mentally disabled (full disclosure, I would normally just say retarded, but I'm not sure how that reads in print), and when I was 13 I accidentally cut his finger off when I slammed my bedroom door on him. It took us a long time to find the finger, because, as it turned out, it was stuck to the doorframe. The ER doctor commented that I must have slammed it really hard because he'd never seen a wooden door do such damage. They sewed it back on, thankfully. That's pretty much all you need to know about me.

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

A:  I was a dancer for a long time before I started writing, and I was often very frustrated by the lack of accessibility that I saw. I find the same thing to be true of theater in our country-- I often long for bigger audiences and broader dialogues about theater. And I don't mean that the work should be more accessible, I just mean that I would love to figure out how to make theater safer for more people to love and participate in. There's so much incredible work being done that stays in our very small theater circle, and I daydream about what it might be like to expand that bubble beyond major cities.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I get really excited when I find myself being challenged by what I'm seeing. Something that doesn't allow me to relax back in my seat and take a breath. Something that feels emotionally honest and makes me question myself and my choices for a few days afterward. Something that sticks to my ribs.

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

A:  You know, this is a ridiculous thing to say, but it's really important to write. I feel like I meet a lot of people who want to be writers or talk about writing a lot, but the most successful ones are the people who are sitting down every day and doing it. And then when they finish something, they put it aside and start again. It needs to be endless.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The Lesser America show runs Thursday - Sunday, October 10-27th at Theater for the New City. Tickets at lesseramerica.com. And the second season of Orange Is The New Black will be out sometime in 2014, which the most ambiguous and worst plug ever.

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I Interview Playwrights Part 608: Rosemary Moore

Rosemary Moore

Hometowns: Jersey City NJ, Indianapolis and Washington D.C.

Current Town:  I live in Brooklyn, New York

Q:  Tell me about your upcoming show.

A:  My play SIDE STREET, directed by Ian Morgan, is running now through October 12th at THEATERLAB. Tuesday through Sunday. We are sold out but DO have a waiting list. sidestreettheplay@gmail.com

remaining shows

Tuesday, October 8th at 8pm
Wednesday, October 9th at 8pm
Thursday, October 10th at 8pm
Friday, October 11th at 8pm
Saturday, October 12th at 8pm

In the bewitched parallel universe of my play SIDE STREET, the main character, 48 year old Meg, encounters her long dead mother, Dora, very much alive and on her way into the Upper East Side apartment building where Dora now lives. During their afternoon together in her mother’s apartment, apparently frozen in time, Meg witnesses her mother’s love affair with a Navy lieutenant, which occurred many years earlier, when Meg’s father was in the Marines, fighting in World War Two. As Meg nurses her dying mother for the second time, she discovers her own mortality and her capacity for forgiveness, coming of age at last in middle age.

This production of SIDE STREET at THEATERLAB is one of simplicity and intimacy. By the light of a couple of table lamps, a 22 person audience witnesses Meg and Dora’s strange and dreamlike afternoon together, sitting close enough to touch the fading chintz slipcover on the sofa and hear the sound of the martini being prepared in the cocktail shaker.

How did my production happen?

It’s important to say that I produced SIDE STREET myself! I could have waited to get more theaters to read the play and try to get a production but after sending it around for a few years I got the itch to self produce. My director Ian Morgan who had guided draft after draft and directed all the readings was game! So here is our team!!

PRODUCERS: Rosemary Moore and Lanie Zipoy

DIRECTOR Ian Morgan

NON PROFIT SPONSOR Fractured atlas!

CROWD SOURCING for rasing the money! Indiegogo

CAST and DESIGN TEAM:
Katherine Folk-Sullivan (These Seven Sicknesses, NYC premiere by Sean Graney THE FLEA THEATER), (Office Hours World Premiere by A.R.Gurney THE FLEA THEATER)
Jan Leslie Harding (Breaking the Silence, Edinburgh Fringe 2013, Lie of the Mind, Sam Shepard, PROMENADE, The Green Bird, Broadway).
Gayton Scott (Bunty Berman Presents, Abigail’s Party, THE NEW GROUP, Gypsy, Broadway)
Richard Thieriot (RogerandTom HERE, Clybourne Park, Broadway)

The designers:
sound: Katie Down as our sound designer (recently did extraordinary work in Golden Dragon dir. Ed Iskander THE NEW OHIO)

set designer: Stephen Dobay ( Realists, HERE, David Cromer’s Our Town. Huntington and the Broad Stage)

lighting designer, Paul Toben (The Story of My Life Broadway, with Ken Billington, Electra in a One Piece The Wild Project).
Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  Since I am playwright and producer of this production of SIDE STREET, at this moment, I am not able to do anything else! But soon I will be working to complete my play, Opium Wars; the bar play which takes place during one night in the 1840's when Talon, a sailor in flight from forced labor on a ship docked in New York, time travels forward to 1980, breaking through a brick wall into Maximus, an artist bar on Duane Street in Tribeca NYC. Ivy, Kitten, Pencil, and Informer all fall in love with Talon, who is only in love with opium. How does the sailor’s near slavery and opium addiction transform these ambitious artists and buzzing art flies’ view of themselves?

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 childhood story is about something I yelled to strangers when I was about three or four years old. I passed the time at the back window of our row house in Jersey City NJ watching the neighbors in their backyards, gardening, hanging their laundry on the clotheslines or just sitting enjoying the outdoors. I would lean out the window and try to converse with them. They were not very talkative. One day I got frustrated and yelled “Hey, you old rosebushers, the cat got your tongue?”

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

A:  I wish theater tickets were not so expensive.


Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Thornton Wilder, Adrienne Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Chekov, Harold Pinter, Maria Irene Fornes, Tony Kushner, August Wilson, Vaclav Havel.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I prefer to watch an original, interesting play with flaws, over a “well made” play with all the conventional ingredients. I like political theater when it’s done well.

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

A:  Keep an active relationship with other playwrights.

Don’t be afraid to take a break from a play.

Go to the edge.

Writing is a process and your writing might be horrible or beautiful at first but the rule is: many many drafts will be what makes your play good.

Take a class.

Teach a class.

Go to art museums.

Sit in a public place and listen and write down dialogue exactly as you hear it.

Don’t worry if a play doesn’t make sense at first.

When you are writing yet another draft of a play pick one thing to work on as a way to trick yourself into beginning this new draft.

Show your work to dozens of people. Your work will click with someone. Collect rejections proudly!

Make sure to have some sort of production early on, even if it’s one you put on. A play still on paper will only get you so far in knowledge about playwriting.

Keep a journal: just a few sentences a day. Observations…details…specifics.

Join or form a writing group.

Staged Readings of work are a great thing for listening to work and trying different types of actors for your characters. You will discover things. Have a man read a woman’s part, for instance!

You will get better at writing gradually. Don’t watch yourself. It adds up slowly…when you least expect it.

Use the buddy system. Find another writer with whom you can honestly share the joys and hardships of the writing life.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Go to my website.

Rosemarymoore.me

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I Interview Playwrights Part 607: Paul Cameron Hardy

Paul Cameron Hardy

Hometown: I spent my formative years in Wenatchee, Washington.

Current Town: Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me about feeling.

A: I wrote this play, feeling., about a woman who has her life upended by her live-in boyfriend of nine years' sudden departure from the relationship. In her shock and grief, she begins to hallucinate a friendship with long-deceased serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.

Q:  Tell me about Glass Bandits.

A: Glass Bandits are a group of kids who got a theater company together with the express purpose of making work that breaks from the stereotype of a fussy, outmoded form of entertainment. They want to make work that is engaging and accessible to a broad, non-traditional audience, while still making work that experienced theater-goers will find engrossing. They have been kind enough to let me work with them a couple of times, so far.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A: I've got this weird little play about solipsism that I am trying to get people interested in, and I am also working on a play about pornography.

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 five years old, my big sister walked into our garage and was shocked to see me practicing flipping people off. I would stand, casual, unassuming, then turn a rapid 180, feet barely off the ground, landing with the pop of both my feet on concrete and of my middle finger(s) from their fist(s) - a quick draw artist of sorts. I'm not sure that it is a direct metaphor, but I am probably still not much more than a little dipshit trying to be tough/cool in the garage, not as alone as he imagines.

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

A: It would be nice if it were easier to make some sort of living doing it. The continued goal of dehomogenization of both audience and 'theater makers' (w/r/t age, race, gender, et al.) is great, and should continue, and hopefully become more rapid.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, Caryl Churchill, Wallace Shawn, Richard Maxwell, loads and loads more....

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A: I like theater that doesn't feel the need to tell me just what it is or how to feel about it.

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

A: It is silly and kind of stupid and, by my mind, you should probably spend a fair amount of time feeling like it is frivolous and you are shirking some tangibly helpful-to-humanity vocation, not to mention the wild amount of rejection you will face, so: make sure you surround yourself with people who you love and trust, and who make you excited to allow the kind of vulnerability needed to make the kind of work that will affect whatever audience you can get. Find good people and keep them close.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Look out for anything by Clare Barron, Brendan Hill, Gail Bennington, Rady & Bloom, St. Fortune Collective, Eliza Bent, Sara Farrington, Frank Boudreaux, Alex Borinsky, The Internationalists. Go watch Zoe Winters and Lauren Blumenfeld in everything they are in. Always support Clubbed Thumb, and let's all start some sort of campaign to get Heidi Schreck's Constitution play up and at a big theater so everyone can go and get their minds blown.

Also come see my play feeling. that opens October 7 at The New Ohio! www.gbtheater.com

 

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I Interview Playwrights Part 606: Tony Meneses

Tony Meneses

Hometown: Dallas

Current Town: Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me about Guadalupe in the Guest Room.

A:  The play is about the titular Guadalupe, a Mexican mother who just lost her daughter and now has to deal with being in this country and not really knowing the language and then also having to deal with the grief-stricken American husband her daughter left behind too.

The inspiration for this play was basically how I grew up and seeing my own parents struggle with language barriers. I was raised within an immigrant family where the kids all spoke English (including with one another) and the only Spanish in the household was solely with my parents. Eventually I started to wonder if this ever made them feel isolated or even lonely. How did it feel to not have a literal voice in the world sometimes, even with those you love? This play is ultimately an attempt to give voice to that experience.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  The piece I’m working on currently (“School Play”) is a sort of treatise on how race, gender, and sexuality is treated in theatre. (Yes, I’m writing a play about theatre). I’ve been struck for a while about the arguments we have about representation (we aren’t producing enough writers of color or women, this play has characters whose identities are nothing more than stereotype). I wanted to tackle these issues not within one isolated group but within all of them, and hopefully broaden the discourse that sometimes isn’t had laterally with each population.

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 pretty much always a well-behaved kid, but apparently there was one night where I refused to take a bath and I kept rebelliously standing up in the tub. My mom got so frustrated with me that she grabbed onto my hair tightly and sternly told me to sit down. Without missing a beat I looked at her dead in the eye and a single tear came running down my cheek. She said she could never punish me again after that.

In short, I am one sensitive little bastard (even when I’m in the wrong…) And that sensitivity, for better or worse, really does kind of translate into how I operate and write plays.

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

A:  Oh man, I miss seeing big, ensemble casts. Like 10+ characters. Totally wish that happened more. Seeing shows now with like 6 characters, I’m like ‘oh my god, how did they do that!’

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Thornton Wilder- for his time, he was doing some truly innovative stuff, all the while preserving a sense of humanity we could all connect to. I also weep whenever I see those videos about Shakespeare programs in prisons. How can you not be moved by these men who find expression and even purpose by doing theatre? Isn’t that what this whole thing is all about?

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Ambitious plays. Plays where I really see writers take a risk with what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. I don’t think we talk about big ideas and even uneasy topics as much as we should. Also, I get very, very excited when I see a cast onstage that isn’t all white, halleloo!

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

A:  Never isolate yourself because you “have” to write. What the hell are you writing about if you deny yourself the company of people?

Q:  Plugs, please

A:  Guadalupe is part of LARK Playwrights Week next week, Thurs. Sept. 26th @7pm. It’s directed by Daniella Topol who is every kind of amazing.

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