I Interview Playwrights Part 21: Kristoffer Diaz

Kristoffer Diaz  
 
Hometown: Yonkers, NY

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Future Town: Minneapolis in five days.

Q; Tell me about the play you took up to the Orchard Project. What was that experience like?

A; I actually took two plays up there, both tangentially related to baseball. One was Rebecca Oaxaca Lays Down a Bunt, a three-act old-school farce about a young extreme sports star from Southern California who shoots a video of herself practicing bunting in her backyard, posts it on youtube, and inspires a bidding war between the Yankees and Red Sox for her services. It's ridiculous. I worked with Orchard Project Artistic Director Ari Edelson and their amazing apprentice acting company to do a bunch of pre-writing character research, including some Gmail chat-based improv projects that opened my eyes to the possibilites of using technology in all new ways to create pieces. The second piece was VORP: Value Over Replacement Player, a play about baseball statistics and statisticians. I realized while I was at the OP that VORP actually wanted to be a musical, so the apprentices and I wrote a ten minute, three-song musical piece in about twenty hours. Incredibly exciting, seat of your pants stuff -- and super helpful.

Q; Can you tell me a little about the thing you were just doing in Nebraska?

A: Every year, I go to Nebraska to teach at the International Thespian Festival -- a massive high school theater conference and competition. Usually, I'm there as a dramaturg on a student one-act. This year, I helped create a short performance piece written and performed by five high school actor/writers. It was a remarkable experience for me. Most of the high school theater that gets to national recognition at this festival is big and broad, usually musicals, rarely concerned with the lives of the students themselves. My kinds wrote about themselves and their issues, and it was all deep and passionate and beautiful. Looks like this is what we're going to do every year from now on.

Q: Now, you did the Ars Nova group this past year. How was that?

A: I love Ars Nova. Emily Shooltz is an amazing and tireless advocate for new playwriting voices, and she's put together a really exciting team of up-and-coming writers to share work. The other members of the group are Annie Baker, Bekah Brunstetter, Dylan Dawson, Zayd Dohrn, Tasha Gordon-Solomon, Amy Herzog, Samuel D. Hunter, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Steven Levenson, Matthew Lopez, Janine Nabers, and Samuel Brett Williams. They're uniformly strong writers with unique voices, and I'm thrilled to be a part of them (although I'm leaving the group now for my move to Minneapolis).

Q: Right, you're headed to a Jerome Fellowship in Minneapolis. Do you have plans for what you're going to work on during that long long winter? Have you bought long underwear yet?

A: I've got way too many plans for my Jerome year. It's probably not realistic. I've got a commission or two lined up, so those will probably take precedence. I'm also thinking about a one-man show/lecture that I'd write and perform myself about my complicated relationship to hip-hop music; it's kind of the play I've wanted to write all my life. In the short-term though, I plan on cooking everyday and learning to ride a bike. And of course, shopping for long underwear. And a North Face. Everyone says I need a North Face.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I love theater that is about something -- it doesn't have to be didactic or preachy, but it has to feel like it comes from a writer who needs to get something out into the world. I love theater that interacts with an audience, not in terms of audience participation necessarily, but in terms of acknowledging their presence and energy. I love theater that avoids being about rich people sitting in a room complaining about tiny problems, or about a playwright showing off how smart and well-read he or she is.. I want to see plays that speak to young people (and in theater, under 40 is young), people of color, people who consider live performance something thrilling and exciting, not something you go to either out of responsibility or to show off how cultured you are. Exciting theater, to me, celebrates community. That's the only thing theater can do better than film and TV. If you can't create community in your work, go write for the screen.

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

A; Write things that you care deeply about. One playwright once told me that "everything you write should be as urgent as a suicide note." I believe that. Don't write for what you think the big mainstream theaters want; they'll come around to you eventually if you're doing great stuff. Learn your business -- the writing part of being a writer is actually pretty small.



Q: Any plugs for anything?

A: My show The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is having its world premiere at Victory Gardens in Chicago in September, followed by productions in Philadelphia (InterAct) and Minneapolis (Mixed Blood). Another play, Welcome to Arroyo's, debuts in April at American Theater Company, also in Chicago.

Food For Fish in Atlanta

The director there, also the artistic director of the company talks about the play and production.

http://essentialtheatre.blogspot.com/2009/07/food-for-fish-i-wanted-to-direct-it.html

I Interview Playwrights Part 20: Jason Grote

Jason Grote  
 
Hometown: All over New Jersey (seriously)

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  I know you have some more productions of 1001 coming up. Could you tell a little about the play, for those who don't know? Are you going to be able to go see them?

A:  Sure! It's a sort of deconstruction of the Arabian Nights stories, viewed through the lens of Edward Said's Orientalism; Scherezade's tales contain gradually-increasing anachronisms, and we get stories based on Hitchcock's Vertigo, and about Flaubert, Borges, and Alan Dershowitz. One of the stories takes place in a near-future (or alternate-universe) NY, and takes over the play; a love affair between two Americans, one Palestinian and one Jewish, when a dirty bomb attack hits NYC. The bomb also shatters narrative certainties and the alternate realities run together, and things get really crazy. It's a story about the power of narrative, for good or ill -- our reality is shaped by the theories and stories with which we view the world. So far I've only missed two 1001 productions, in Minneapolis and San Diego, and have seen all the others, though I'm no longer directly involved in rehearsals.


Q: You've been on WFMU for a while now. Can you tell me a little about your show and give a link for people who'd like to listen in?

A:  Sure! It's basically a radio play show, but we're sort of reinventing what radio plays can be in the 21st century, more out of necessity than anything else -- the old-time radio play is pretty much defunct, and we have to fill a show every week. In addition to bringing a lot of theater artists or companies onto the radio, we play a lot of stuff that could be classified as performance art, audio art, found audio, home recordings, spoken word, poetry, and ambient, hip-hop, or electronic music. There are often surprising overlaps: for example, the Velvet Underground song "The Gift" is actually a perfect radio play, and performance poet Caroline Bergvall has a following among electronic music artists. People can listen to every show at http://wfmu.org/playlists/am.

Q:  You're teaching now. Can you tell me about that? Are you teaching playwriting? I know you were teaching English courses at Fordham for the past few years.

A:  Actually Rutgers, and I'm still there. The benefits are great. At the moment I'm teaching Radio Playwriting and Advanced Playwriting in the MFA Program at Hollins University in Virginia, and it's really nice to be teaching at the graduate level. During the school year, teaching can get really exhausting -- I have a pretty heavy courseload-- but as day jobs go it's a good one. I get lots of time off, and I don't have to rely on erratic writing income to pay rent. I'm also always learning from my students. If I don't bail and go into comedy writing, I could see myself developing a curriculum a la Paula Vogel or Mac Wellman.

Q:  Can you talk a little about the development support you've had, with Soho Rep and with others? How has it shaped who you are as a theater artist?

A:  Sure -- my feeling about play development is that it's great, except when it's not. No doubt lots of big regional theaters "develop" new plays but only put revivals or hits on stage, but thankfully I haven't had to deal with a lot of this. I still think that the Soho Rep Lab was the best development venue I've ever participated in, for a variety of reasons. I think it shaped me by encouraging me to write smart, challenging work, plays that were only plays and not TV shows on stage. Many other play development venues try to shape a play into something more palatable or "commercial" or whatever, which never works, at least not for me. Interestingly, regional theaters have been much more interested in my Soho Rep plays than they have in plays they've commissioned from me -- a lot of what they assume my "voice" is was probably shaped by my presence in the Lab. I'm trying to figure out how to recapture that, to forget that I'm writing for a regional theater.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Right now I'm mostly interested in "generative" work -- work built by an ensemble or a director working with a team. I tend to think that this is the future of the art form, and feels much more alive to me than the assembly-line method of getting a script, hiring a director, etc. Though I really enjoyed David Adjmi's Stunning at LCT3 and Madeline George's Precious Little at Clubbed Thumb, and both were more traditional in their execution. But usually I like to be challenged, and I'm interested in details. Going to theater, even for free or cheap, is a pain in the ass, so I want it to be worth my time in terms of meaning. If it's only going to be entertainment, then it's got to be really, really entertaining, and frankly comedy and music deliver much more on that front. Most Broadway (and a lot of Off-Broadway) is about as entertaining as a made-for-TV-movie, and I don't want to have to leave my home, slog into Manhattan, and cram into a tiny seat next to some jerk who wants to fight me for the armrest for three hours for that, let alone pay $200 for the privilege. I want something I can't get anywhere else (which is one of the reasons I frequently enjoy musicals).

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

A:  Why do you want to write in this medium? Can it be in any other medium? If it can, it probably should be. If you've thought about it, and it has to be live, on stage, then go for it.

Q:  Plug here for 1001 in DC and elsewhere and any other plugs you might have:

A:  1001 is running at Rorschach Theater until July 3, and will probably be over by the time you read this! But you can get info about that, and the rest of the season (featuring work by Jose Rivera, Sheila Callaghan, and Qui Nguyen) at http://rorschachtheatre.org. Next up for 1001 is DePaul University in Chicago in October 2009, and Montclair State University in NJ in 2010. It's also published by Samuel French. Maria/Stuart will have a staged reading at Dog & Pony in Chicago on August 17. People can also hear The Acousmatic Theater Hour on WFMU Monday nights at 5pm at 91.1FM or anytime/anyplace at wfmu.org.

What's going on

Kristen and I moved out of Minneapolis to my late grandmother's cottage on a lake in CT. We're there now with limited internet access and a beautiful view. Our cat is almost done freaking out and our stuff has yet to arrive.

I Interview Playwrights Part 19: Dan Trujillo

Dan Trujillo

Hometown: Portland, OR

Current Town: Brooklyn

Q: Tell me about your play in the DC fringe. You guys did it in NYC last year, didn't you?

A: The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist. It's a vaudeville about an atheist that steals a plastic baby Jesus from an airport nativity scene in order to disprove the existence of God, and the miracles that follow. It features cheap jokes, songs and dances, and mole people. I wrote the play during the first National Playwrights Month. Isaac Butler (the director) and his partner Anne Love's company elsewhere did a low-key production in June at Under St. Marks in Manhattan, with the intention of remounting it after a test drive. From a very early point I worked on the play with the notion that it would tour easily -- three actors and a musician, a few props, no set. A fringe show is a logical next step.

Q: How much has changed since the previous production?

A: About 20% new material. The major changes were the addition of a new song, a rewrite of another song, and a rewrite of one of the late scenes. Everything else is tweaks. I hear some of your rehearsals are open to the public. Tell me about that? That was Isaac's idea. The play has a lot of audience interaction -- not audience participation, but the actors are responding to the audience directly a lot. So it's good to get audience in there as part of rehearsal.

Q; What's it like working with Isaac?

A: Isaac and I met on the internet, as it seems everyone meets now. We were both writing theatre blogs. He's kept his up and I didn't, but we found we had a great rapport. There was never that odd formality that most writer-director relationships have. And he never told me to change a scene, or rewrite a character. He'll tell me when he thinks something isn't working, but he never suggests changes, or insists on them. He lets me do my job, and I really appreciate that.

Q: What are you working on next?

A; I'm trying to get a production in my home town of Portland OR. Writing-wise, I'm working on a treasure-hunt play called Mine, and a play for my daughters (to see, not to act in).

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I love theatre that's transgressive in smart ways. That doesn't mean offensive necessarily, though it can. I saw a marionnette show of Aladdin at Puppetworks (http://www.puppetworks.org/) where the genie -- played by a human -- jumped on the stage with the marionettes to smash Aladdin's palace. It completely destroyed the puppet illusion, and it was perfect. I love plays that I couldn't possibly completely understand in one sitting. I love Sheila Callaghan's plays. I love outlandish use of language.

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

A: I don't have any career advice, which is what I wish I could give. My eldest daughter just had her 1st grade art show where she made this really great bird. She had three options for what project she could have done, and she chose to do the bird. I asked her why, and she told me she chose the bird because it was the hardest. So my advice is: choose the bird.

Q: Link please for people to buy tix to your show in DC.

http://www.honestatheist.com/

I Interview Playwrights Part 18: Marisa Wegrzyn

Marisa Wegrzyn 

Hometown: Wilmette, IL  

Current Town: Chicago, IL  

Q: You have two shows coming up in California. Can you tell me about the plays and about the productions?

A:  The Butcher of Baraboo is a black comedy set in Baraboo, Wisconsin and it's about a women (the town butcher) whose husband is missing, presumed dead, and everybody suspects she chopped him up and dumped him in Devil's Lake. Ten Cent Night is a dark family comedy/drama set in 1973 Texas about a woman who is a failed, alcoholic musician who returns home after stealing money from her mute, criminal boyfriend to pay for her little sister's heart surgery.  



Q: Are you going to be able to go to the rehearsals and/or performances?

A;  I went to a few days of rehearsal for Ten Cent Night, about two weeks into their rehearsal process. Crammed four weeks worth of my notes into a few days and made cuts and revisions. Don't know when I'll see the production. For The Butcher of Baraboo, I had a two hour phone conversation with the director a few weeks before she cast the show, and that was it for my direct involvement. I'm going to see it this weekend.  


Q: I have heard that Chicago is an amazing theater town. If I dropped in there tomorrow, what shows would you recommend I go see or what theater companies should I check out?

A:  Go see Graceland at Profiles Theatre, Oedipus produced by The Hypocrites, and Poseidon! An Upsidedown Musical produced by Hell in a Handbag . You can stay on my couch, Adam. When are you going to take me up on that offer?

Q:   Do you think Chicago's theater has a certain aesthetic and if so what is that aesthetic?

A;  I suppose when people think "Chicago theatre" they think about something with great acting, probably produced in a small, charmingly dumpy space, but there isn't a unifying aesthetic for all Chicago theater other than geography. There are a few different scenes. The storefront/fringe scene, a mid-level scene with a tiny subscriber base, an upper-level scene with a large subscriber base (Goodman/Steppenwolf/Chicago Shakespeare, etc), and the Broadway touring shows. Also there's the comedy scene (improv and sketch) which doesn't have much crossover with the theatre scene. It's rare to find people who are regularly active in both the comedy and theater scenes. It's like finding a unicorn.

Q: You've managed to base yourself out of Chicago while getting shows up in lots of other places. Do you have any tips on how you did that or recommendations for other playwrights?

A;  Luck. Right place right time. I did a lot of playwriting in college and had a few full length plays in good shape by the time I graduated. I found my agent through one of my friends from college. My friend Erica Nagle was interning in the Literary Department at the McCarter Theatre, and she struck up a conversation with an agent who was transitioning agencies and looking to take on new writers. Erica pitched my writing to her so well that my now-Agent Morgan Jenness e-mailed me and asked to read my stuff, and she took me on, introduced me to some people in New York and elsewhere. I had a few teachers at Washington University in St Louis who recommended my work to theatre friends. One of those people was Ed Sobel the director of New Play Development at Steppenwolf, and he read a couple of my plays, gave me a table reading at the theatre to introduce me and my work to Artistic Director Martha Lavey. Steppenwolf commissioned me, and produced that commissioned play. Ed really supported Chicago writers at Steppenwolf. I've been fortunate to meet people who believe in me and my writing. They've recommended my work to others. Just do good work that makes people want to meet you. And when you meet, be yourself and be the person who plays well with others -- hopefully they're the same person.  

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A;  I like serious stuff that's a little funny, and funny stuff that's a little serious.  

Q: What advice would you give to a playwright just starting out?

 A:  Somebody told me during my first workshop experience: "Your play is your baby. Everybody thinks they know how to raise your baby. But only you know how to raise your baby." I'm not sure if that's helpful. I'm not really into babies. Especially crying babies. Especially crying babies in Starbucks. If your baby will not stop crying in Starbucks, you need to take your baby home, please.

Q:  Plugs:
 
A;  The Butcher of Baraboo at MOXIE Theatre in San Diego, CA: http://www.moxietheatre.com/ Ten Cent Night at The Victory Theatre Center in Burbank, CA: http://www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org/ Hickorydickory at Chicago Dramatists (staged reading July 11): http://www.chicagodramatists.org/events/satseries.html

I Interview Playwrights Part 17: Ken Urban

Ken Urban

Hometown: New Jersey, The Garden State

Current Town: Cambridge, MA and New York

Q: Tell me a little about your SPF show that's coming up.

A: THE HAPPY SAD is about a group of seven people in an east coast city with subways and irony, all trying to figure out how to make relationships work in a world of too many options. The play starts with a straight couple breaking up and another couple, a gay couple, negotiating the monogamy question. Since cities are like villages, we see how their lives of these different people end up connecting. And sometimes when things get difficult, they break out into song. It’s my ode to bisexuals. Not really. Actually, the play has a really clear origin. I was on Amtrak heading back to Boston from New York, right before Thanksgiving in 2007, and I ran into a friend. We sat and talked for a long time. She told me how a guy she was dating broke up with her that weekend, but she was also seeing someone else. Then the next day another friend told me how he and his boyfriend were thinking of “opening” things up. And I kept thinking: wow, there are so many options and possibilities now. We aren’t confined in the way our parents were – get married, buy a house, have kids, get old, die. We can try something else. But having lots of options doesn’t necessarily guarantee happiness. I wanted to write about that excitement and confusion. I like to give myself rules when I write. Keeps me focused. For this play, I had two: one, to write about the subject matter with utter honestly, even when it cut very close to home; and two, the characters would sing, but that the play was in no way a musical (i.e. the songs did not advance the plot in the way they do in a musicals). I am excited for the SPF workshop. Trip Cullman is directing and we have a great cast, which includes many of my favorite actors. I’m touched they are giving up their July to do the show and to do a pretty revealing play with two weeks of rehearsal. There is a fair amount of nudity in this show and everyone is so brave about it.

Q: Who wrote the songs?

A: My band wrote all the songs in the show. We’re called The Avon Barksdale -- we all love the TV show The Wire. We’ve been playing together for over a year and writing lots of songs. We have a rehearsal space up here where we write and record. For the songs in HAPPY SAD, I wrote the lyrics and melodies, basic chord structures sometimes, and then brought them to the rest of the band. They were really game, so we dove in and made some indie rock. Our recordings of the songs will be used in the production. Right now, they are being mastered and soon will be available on iTunes and Amazon, so people can get their hands on them.

Q: Now, the last time I talked to you, you were trying to figure out what to do next year. Do you know where you're living and what you're doing now? Can you talk about what decisions you had to make, or not?

A: I will be living in Cambridge, MA, still teaching at Harvard, and going back and forth to New York, where I am working on a couple of projects. So everything is the same as it has been the past 3 years. It was a strange year. I thought I wanted certain things and then I got them and realized that I didn't want those things. There was something else I thought I wanted and then didn’t get, then I realized I didn't actually want it all that much either. Is that vague enough? Sorry to be cryptic. It's a weird thing to talk about -- knowing you are beyond certain things, that you are have reached a certain place in your career and that those things are not really what you want anymore, or even what you need. There is no road map for being a playwright so we all sort of pretend we know what we are doing. I do know that there is no grad school in my future. I will never be a master of fine arts, but I’m already a doctor, so that’s OK.

Q: You have your own theater company, do you not? How do you manage to juggle a theater company, your writing and a full time job teaching?

A: Um, I don’t anymore. I am no longer the AD of The Committee, the company in New York I founded. I handed the company over to director Dylan McCullough and he is making plans for the company’s next stage. I am excited to see what he does. I found running a company exciting but draining, especially now that I live in Cambridge. It feels good to spend most of my time writing and teaching, and not waking up at 2am anymore, thinking, “Oh crap, I forgot to revise that mission statement or finish that budget or whatever.” I look back at what we did with The Committee, and still I’m amazed, how the hell did we do that? Still, not much has changed. I’m basically a workaholic. I work all the time.

Q; What kind of theater excites you?

A: I’m pretty old-fashioned actually. I like interesting stories told in unfamiliar ways. I want to be moved viscerally and intellectually. I do not like safety or irony that’s too cool for school. There are so many fantastic writers writing for the theatre right now. It is an exciting time to be an American playwright. We’re all poor as fuck but still, it’s great.

Q: I was thinking about questions to ask you and I realized I don't really know how to describe your work. Are there ways your plays have been described that you liked and would like to share? Or even better, how would you describe it?

A; Yikes. I know I should have a good answer for this one and I don’t. If I had to say what all my plays share, it’s that my characters all have a need to understand the world. In THE HAPPY SAD, the characters want to understand their desires. In SENSE OF AN ENDING, the journalist Charles wants to understand what happened in Rwanda during the genocide. But in both cases, it’s not a facile knowledge, but a knowledge that’s felt on the body. While in terms of subject matter and style, my plays can seem, at first glance, wildly different, what they share is that need. They fail, but they keep trying. Maybe true understanding is an impossibility. An actor once said to me that she could always tell a Ken Urban play because they have a specific sound. That pleased me to no end. I work hard to sound like no one else. In a strange way, I think the trajectory of my writing is akin to the career of some bands I like. Animal Collective’s early records are so difficult and interesting, and while the new one is ostensibly a pop album, those songs have a weirdness to them that carries over from the early stuff. My early plays are so obtuse and weird, and even though now I want to connect more to a larger audience, the new work carries the traces of those earlier experiments.

Q: What sort of advice do you have for playwrights starting out or even other kinds of playwrights?

A: Write a lot. See lots of plays. Meet lots of directors and actors. Develop a really strong bullshit detector. Figure out whose comments to trust and whose not to trust. Get a thick skin because you will need it. Don’t go into debt to get an MFA. Have lots of safe sex. Never forget why you love doing it. Don’t listen to playwrights who give advice.

Q: May I have a link please for those who want to go see your show?

A: http://www.spfnyc.com/festival/show.cfm?id=79 http://www.kenurban.org

Q: Any other upcoming shows?

A: I have a reading of SENSE OF AN ENDING at Williamstown this summer to celebrate the play winning the 2008 L. Arnold Weissberger Prize, then in November, my play NIBBLER is getting a production at Theatre of NOTE in Los Angeles. NIBBLER is my ode to growing up in South Jersey. That production will feature original music from Xiu Xiu and The Avon Barksdale. Mark Seldis is directing that. We’ve worked together before and I am excited to start rehearsals in August.

wow

Gender study --playwrights

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/theater/24play.html