I Interview Playwrights Part 222: Jonathan Blitstein

Jonathan Blitstein

Hometown: Lincolnshire, Illinois

Current Town: Brooklyn!

Q:  Tell me about your play going up at the Dream Up Festival:

A:  It's called Keep Your Baggage With You (at all times). It's about two young men who allow their friendship to fall apart as they transform into different people over time, struggling against some of the familiar difficulties of the digital age. It's told in seven scenes, each one advancing about five months into the future. Daniel Talbott ("Slipping", Rattlestick/Rising Phoenix Rep) is directing. And there are some very talented and dedicated actors/crew members on board. We're showing at Theater For the New City as part of the Dream Up Festival.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I recently bought a bike at the Brooklyn flea and I've been biking around. I freelance for an indie film company in Tribeca. I'm a script reader at Rattlestick. I go see a lot of old movies at Film Forum. I've also been trying to get some different film projects off the ground, too.

Q:  You also write film. Do you have to mentally adjust when writing film vs theater?

A:  Oh, absolutely. I have to mentally adjust to the fact that what I write for the theater won't pay my rent. Haha, but there are always the obvious differences, the formatting of scripts, remembering not to write INT/EXT. at the tops of scenes. Also, in film you can't get away with the silence that we love in theater. That tension-- you are forced to convey that with editing, and (hopefully) camera work, lensing.

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 fourteen I started at a high school with about 5000 students, the size of a small college campus. I was really depressed and I didn't see any of my junior high friends, anymore. There were gangs. The teachers were miserable. Everyone was miserable. My history teacher, a closet-punkrocker beneath a suit and tie, recognized my teen angst and gave me some Salinger and Camus to read. I devoured the books in a few days, and cried on and off after that, for a year. It was an awakening and turned my life in a different direction. I started to take the arts more seriously.

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

A:  I wish I could make the cost of renting a decent theater space 50 bucks a week instead of 5000 bucks.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I grew up watching musicals at a fantastic regional equity theater in the round, inside a Marriott hotel in the middle of a cornfield. I loved (and still love) Stephen Sondheim. That's how I fell in love with theater in the first place. I don't think I saw a straight play until I was 15. Around then, we moved and I started at a small public high school that had a theater program run by an inspired young Chicago playwright/actor. He introduced me to an eclectic group: Shakespeare, Eric Bogosian, Arthur Miller, Chekhov, Paula Vogel, David Mamet, Marsha Norman, Lanford Wilson and others. New heroes: Bruce Norris, Tracy Letts, Sarah Ruhl...there are too many to list, and I haven't even mentioned the directors, actors, Jimmy Slonina and Larry Yando in Chicago, Steppenwolf, The Hippocrites...right now my heroes are my contemporaries-- there are so many writers under 35 who are working their butts off and doing great work. They inspire me every day.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I'm excited when a show takes me out of myself, when the world offstage disappears, when the language is poetic, when the plot unfolds and I can't see where it's going, when the magical mixture of all the components of the play come together and create something unforgettable.

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

A:  Read everything, not just plays. Don't be afraid to start writing. Write everyday. Take care of yourself, your mind needs to be in a good place to create. Listen to criticism. Don't show anyone your first or second drafts. Know when to quit for the day. Patience, patience, patience!

Q:  Plugs, please:

A: 
Chicago Theater!!

Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park at Playwright's Horizons!

Sam Gold and Annie Baker - sooo good!

David Mamet's RACE

Rising Phoenix Rep!

Cromer's OUR TOWN

Anne Washburn's The Small!

Anna Kerrigan

Bryan Scary's new album "Daffy's Elixir"

Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play at Irondale Ctr was INCREDIBLE.

Philip Roth's "Indignation" and "The Humbling"

Please come see our show at Theater for the New City.
Tickets are here:
https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/758485

I Interview Playwrights Part 221: Dominique Morisseau

Dominique Morisseau

Hometown:  Detroit

Current Town:  New York City – Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me please about the play you're bringing to the O'Neill.

A:  My play that is being developed at the O’Neill this summer is called “Follow Me To Nellie’s”. It's partially based on my Aunt Nellie Jackson who was a legendary Madame in Natchez, Mississippi and who - during the Civil Rights Movement - used the brothel to assist the activists. I chose to focus on this aspect of my aunt's life, and create a story that centers on her brothel. Set during 1955 in Natchez, it tells the story of an aspiring blues singer who is looking for a way out, a voting rights activist looking for shelter, a brothel of wounded women looking for change, and what happens when their worlds collide during the reign of segregation and under the watchful eye of Miss Nellie Jackson.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  Oh lots! In the Emerging Writers Group at the Public, I am working on a 3-play cycle about Detroit, tentatively called “The Detroit Projects”- that focus on Detroit in three urgent eras. The first of my set (which is newly written) is called Detroit 67, based on the 1967 riots. The second is a play on Detroit’s Blackbottom section where the blues had its heyday in the 1940’s. The third and final will be on Detroit in the present in the aftermath of the auto-industry failures and the foreclosure crisis. I am compelled to examine the root causes of some of my hometown’s major contemporary concerns, and this cycle is one of my ways of doing so.

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

A:  Oooooo…okay….let’s see…. Well… I always wanted to tell stories. When I was 8 years old, in second grade, I would create little short, hand-written novellas to pass around to my friends. The best series was what I called, “The Cabbage Patch Mysteries”. That’s right. These were fashioned after my so beloved Cabbage Patch Kid baby dolls. And these were badass characters. Little girl doll babies that were solving crimes and taking back the neighborhood from kidnappers and drug dealers and whoever else. I was no joke. And neither were the Cabbage Patch Kids. I would force these stories on my classmates. Staple them together like little booklets – the whole nine. I was the story-pusher. And it never left me. By the time I got to college to study acting, I realized I was less-than-satisfied with the lack of diversity in casting, and the lack of work for the Black students. So that second grade story pusher came back and I decided to write plays and cast virtually every Black person on campus who was interested. Suddenly, my 3-person play had 20 cast members, and it was unforgettable. So I guess what this means about me as a writer is that I am and have always been interested in filling in the void, and addressing the issues of the marginalized. Be it through Cabbage Patch Kids or 1955 Natchez Mississippi whores…. if their stories are unknown… I’m looking to illuminate them J

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

A:  The Industry. Theatre is beautiful. The art - inspiring. But the industry of Theatre… the entity that worries about tickets sales and superstars and playing things safe and politics and who-you –know…that is what needs to go. I’d change the entire concept of industry, and make the art the thing that supercedes it all…

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Pearl Cleage is definitely one. The way she loves women in her work inspires me to love myself… and put that in my writing. Lorraine Hansbury. August Wilson. Ron Milner. Joe Papp. Woodie King Jr. And the pioneers of the Black Theatre Movement. They are most definitely my heroes.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I’m most excited by plays that tell stories of a pocket of people in a very specific community and can somehow find a way to make it connect to socio-political issues and be completely universal without me even knowing. When I’m connected to the humanity of a story…. And I’m laughing and crying and thinking all at once - I’m thrilled…

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

A:  Be fearless. Develop great understanding about WHO you’re writing about. Don’t just read about them or overhear them talking in public. Find them and learn from them and love them enough to do them justice. Find peers that you trust and share your work with them. Do not wait for permission from others to write. Do not wait until you know you won’t fail. Do not wait until some great theatre calls you and offers you a reading. Do not wait do not wait do not wait….

I Interview Playwrights Part 220: Fielding Edlow

Fielding Edlow

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: Los Angeles

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I'm remounting my newest one woman play, "Sugar Daddy" this Fall which debuted as a workshop production in the inaugural Hollywood Fringe Festival.  I'm working with the very seasoned and formidable director, Paul Stein, who runs the Comedy Central Space in Hollywood and it's been a very fruitful collaboration. It's my second one person play and I'm having a great time performing my own words. Having been involved in improv groups for over ten years, I've finally cast aside the noxious idea of pre-planning moments, and wanting to get it "right", and am simply just telling the story. There was a sign on the Atlantic Theatre that said something like "There is no such thing as good or bad acting but how strong a reason I have to stand on the stage". I'm also trying to find a team/theatre company for my newest play Admissions which has been workshopped with Naked Angels and NY Stage & Film and have an off-Broadway production in NYC.

Q:  How would you characterize the LA theater scene?

A:  The LA scene is a very accessible, if uneven, colorful nexus of theatre communities. It runs the gamut of the formalized and cozy Geffen to the Fake Gallery which showcases avant garde, messier works. It is full of pockets of reverent, disciplined artists who love the theatre and conversely actors who are desperate to put up showcases in order to ascend the ranks of Hollywood. The best part is its inherent accessibility in that it's devoid of the fairly classist infrastructure in NYC. It's financially easier to mount a production with limited resources in LA than in NYC. I produced and acted in an updated version of Miss Julie (dramaturg Craig Carlisle) in the middle of Hollywood with a live string quartet and simultaneously fell in love with my husband, actor-director Larry Clarke.

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'm going to tell a story from my late twenties since essentially I was still a child. I signed up to do the Montana AIDS ride in 2001. I had lost my Uncle Blair to AIDS and wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and ride 80 miles a day for a week in the beautiful sweeping plains of Montana. I basically did the minimal training rides and just hoped somebody or something would get me through the Continental Divide. One blazingly hot afternoon, I simply couldn't push another pedal, I got off my bike and started walking my bike up the seemingly sisyphean hill. Suddenly I heard a friendly yell from behind me. A sinewy, gorgeous antelope of a man rode up beside me and gave the warmest grin. I confessed, "I can't do it, I just can't do it, I mean, what the fuck, I'm still doing it, I'm just WALKING, not pedaling like a maniac!" Jeff introduced himself and it was then that I saw the little orange flag waving from the back spoke of his bike. My new friend was HIV positive and he wanted to walk too. Not only did we walk the rest of the way together and picked up some other exhausted riders, we stopped at a Houlihans and charged some burgers - thankfully avoiding Rest Stop #5 where we would only be served Cliff Bar # 8. I had one of the greatest afternoons of my life, laughing with Jeff in the midst of the sea of orange flags. And we gossiped and shared water bottles till our hearts desire. We were obviously the last riders to cross the finish where the banner shone up above us, CONGRATULATIONS RIDERS EVERY MILE MADE A DIFFERENCE. And I would usually cry every time I crossed that day's "finish line", but this time, I was laughing cause I was with Jeff. We said goodbye and I went off to shower and eat dinner. I realized later that night that I still had Jeff's windbreaker which he had lent me so I followed the green maze of tents until I found Jeff's. He wasn't there. HIs tentmate told me that he had gotten sick and was in the infirmary. I rushed to the infirmary and found Jeff shivering in a bathtub of ice surrounded by volunteers and medics. He had a fever of 105 and I was terrified for my friend who hours earlier looked like he could push a Toyota Tundra up a hill. I heard a medic yell out, "Somebody needs to take him to the hospital!!" And I yelled back "I'm taking him!" I rushed back to his tent and packed an overnight bag for my new friend and got his white tennis sneakers. And we rode in a minivan to the Livingston hospital and met doctors who had never treated an AIDS patient before. It was quiet, the hospital felt like the NYC public library and we checked Jeff in and got him into a private room. We talked till 2 in the morning interspersed with kind bearded doctors who looked like farmers, telling Jeff what he may or may not have. I took Jeff out for a cigarette, walking his IV with him and we smoked outside in the cool air. Then, he told me about the funeral he was planning for himself - he made a video to show at his funeral and he was going to publicly chastise some "friends", saying, "Why are you here, bitch? You never cared about me?" He finally dozed off and I slept in the chair facing him. I felt a purpose and a connection I had never experienced before. The motto of the AIDS ride was Humankind. 'Be both. Human and kind.' I didn't train, I gossiped, I had barrels of fear swimming in my veins. But I found something in Montana. I found my soul which had been buried under the rubble of New York City.

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

A:  I would make artistic directors as well paid as the CEO of Goldman Sachs or at least a quarter of their salary. I would assign brilliant dramaturgs like Jim Leonard to up and coming playwrights and tell new playwrights to stop writing by committee and find their trusted coterie of advisors. I would implore the NEA to siphon funding to all underprivileged schools and allow for theatre trips to NYC. And lastly I would make a rule that women playwrights be represented equally to their male counterparts and have the President include that mandate in his next Rose Garden address.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Larry Kramer and Karen Finley. To me, both are completely unapologetic, fearless, transcendent artists. They are political because they are so personal and they create seismic reverberations because of their passion, specificity and intent. They are all heart beneath the pulverizing rants. I also studied with my guru Jeffrey Tambor who changed the way I comport myself in the world. He helped me to see that my entire life is a work of art and if I get mired down in some low grade self-centered fear, I should get in my car and go drive to a new neighborhood and help a stranger in need.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I saw Toni Press-Coffman's "Touch" at the Women's Project some years back and I think about her play quite often.  It excited me that a playwright could create such beautifully raw, stripped, laid bare characters and see them wrestle out their grief in such an uncliched poignant way.

More recently, I loved the gut wrenching August: Osage County and was astounded by the amazing triumvirate of acting, writing and directing. What also excites me is when I feel a writer has gone on a personally excavating, uncensored ride and isn't trying to place a "message" or moral lesson at the end of the play. I want to feel as if the playwright risked her life to create her piece. This past Spring I saw a benefit anniversary reading of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart and it still remains one of the most exciting, significant pieces of theatre I have ever seen.

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

A:  Go out and see plays and find out who your heroes are and support the community. Get yourself in writer's groups and hear your pages read by actors. And remember, you become a writer, the minute your parents stop looking over your shoulder.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Theatre Planners and Lemonade productions present "Sugar Daddy"- Fielding Edlow's newest one-woman play about what happens when you take booze, cupcakes and drugs from a small angry Jewish woman leaving behind rude drummers, Freudian therapists and New York City in her wake. Opens October 21st - November 13th at the Lounge Theatre in Hollywood. Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm. Info on plays411.com coming soon . .

I Interview Playwrights Part 219: Joshua Allen

Joshua Allen

Hometown: Chicago, IL

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  My two current projects couldn't be more different. I'm revising a play I wrote called THE LAST PAIR OF EARLIES, which is inspired by the Great Migration of black Southerners that took place in the '20s, '30s, and '40s. Also, I'm working on a more contemporary play that's loosely inspired by an obscure Henry James novel entitled "The Other House."

Q:  Tell me about your experience working on a play at the Kennedy Center this summer.

A:  A play I wrote this past year at Juilliard, called THE LAST PAIR OF EARLIES, is going to be workshopped during the last week of July. I'll be working with a director and dramaturg from theatres in the National New Play Network, which is pretty cool. Also, they're putting me up in an apartment that's apparently within walking distance from a Trader Joe's, which is a major bonus.

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

A:  Before I begin this story, I just want to say that I realize how pathetically sad, nerdy, and embarrassing this story is. But I'm telling it anyway. I've always been a big history geek, a tendency that was only further encouraged when my mother, who used to work for Encyclopedia Britannica, came home one day with a full set of leather-bound encyclopedias. Inspired by what I read in those volumes about colonial America, I spent the summer after I turned 12 writing a novella in my grandmother's basement. It ended up being 126 pages long. It was intended to be the first in a trilogy, but wisely I abandoned the project when I quickly realized that the novella was ATROCIOUSLY BAD. However, I never lost my interest in re-imagining history through fictional eyes, which is something that's certainly influenced my last couple of plays.

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

A:  I would bring back rep companies. Having an artistic home is so invaluable to anybody working in theater, especially playwrights. I don't think it's a coincidence that Shakespeare wrote his greatest roles with specific actors in mind. More importantly, having an artistic home gives you the safety to fail, which is indescribably important.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I have way too many. Aside from my fellow Juilliard playwrights, who inspire and encourage me pretty much daily, I look up to Eugene O'Neill for his ambition and commitment to his art, and to William Inge for his willingness to write simple, closely observed plays that explore loneliness so bravely.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater always excites me most when it engages the mind and the heart simultaneously. There's really nobody better than Shakespeare when it comes to this. Read any soliloquy of Hamlet's, or Juliet's, or Lear's, and you can see the messiness and hugeness of their emotions butting up against the limitations of their language, and how they negotiate that. So cool.

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

A:  This is a tough one because in many respects, I feel like I'm just starting out, too. I would tell anyone who's starting out to go see as much theater as possible, and write your plays primarily to please yourself. Also, the old adage "write what you know" is helpful, but don't follow it too literally. Your imagination is the most exciting place to explore, and writing from your imagination is what's going to keep theatre alive.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Um...come see the awesome actors of Group 40 in the Playwrights' Festival at Juilliard, Sept. 9-12. Put that in your calendars 'cuz you're gonna wanna be there. And it's free! Also, go see NOTICE ME at the Wild Project, directed by my friend Sofia Alvarez. You've only got until August 1st!

I Interview Playwrights Part 218: Peter Gil-Sheridan

Peter Gil-Sheridan

Hometown: Rahway, New Jersey

Current Town: Brooklyn, New York (Sunset Park)

Q:  Tell me please about What May Fall and the Fordham Alumni Company.

A:  What May Fall is a play I wrote on commission for the Guthrie's BFA Actor's Showcase. It is loosely based on my experience of seeing a maintenance worker fall to his death at the IDS Tower in Minneapolis. I was living there while I was on a Jerome and I was doing a temp job to make some extra money. I was so so homesick and the event just left me feeling emotionally shattered. Later in the year when I was asked to write an ensemble piece for the Guthrie, I thought I'd write a bit about life in Minneapolis, not my life per se, or anyone I knew....but about life in that landscape. Minneapolis has many of the trappings and benefits of New York but everything happens in the most startling cold. What May Fall is about nine people living in that cold, nine people finding their way out of a tough winter.

I developed the play through the following year first with the actors, and later with Sarah Cameron Sunde who directed a wonderful production of the play with the actors I wrote it for.

What May Fall was then selected by Fordham, where I did my undergraduate degree, to be the third production the Fordham Alumni Theatre Company. Basically, the University is giving alums an opportunity to produce a large-scale production right here in New York. I teamed up with Morgan Gould, another Fordham alum and one of my favorite directors, to mount a new draft of the piece. The play features an all-star cast of Fordham alums who have graduated in the last 15 years, a cast that has gone on to work on Broadway and off. The entire production, including the designers, are from Fordham and everyone is doing the work for next to no pay. It's basically like coming back to my tribe. Both experiences of producing this play have been incredibly gratifying and warm.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just wrote a play called Ritu Comes Home for the InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia. It's about two persnickety gay guys who have "adopted" a daughter in Bangladesh by sending money through a Sally Struthers kind of thing. One night they get really drunk with their recently retired actress friend and they wake up to find their new "daughter" gnawing on a leftover lamb bone. Hilarity ensues.

I'm also working on my first television script. I finally have Final Draft, after all these years.

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 party house. My stepfather and mother were hairstylists in New Jersey in the 80's. My stepfather was a hairweaver actually so 40 year-old men entered my house bald and fat and left drunk, high, and looking like Poison. My stepdad was kind of a magician, among other less complimentary things. My aunt, who was a stripper at the French Maid, lived in the basement, my mother perpetually watched NBC soaps (which I also watched with the greatest of interest) while my real dad, who was a forklift mechanic from Havana, scratched his head and tried to figure out a way to make me a little more butch. As if the biography wasn't enough to foretell my future as a writer, one of the earliest signs of my forthcoming writing life is that when I was around 12 years old, I cut out all these little pieces of paper, wrote everyone's name I know on them, and put them in a fishbowl. From that fishbowl, I created stories based on random pairings and acted them out. I also created competitions, systems, pageants, and even acted out wrestling matches between whatever two names I drew from the bowl. This is what I did during the parties.

I still have all those little names on pieces of paper only now it's not a fishbowl but a box. A box of names

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

A:  The one thing I'd change is that the theatre would do more work by Peter Gil-Sheridan. Does everyone say that?

Oh, and it should be federally mandated that every theatre in America have a corporate sponsor that has no say over the content of the work made.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Caryl Churchill. Franz Xavier Kroetz. Fornes. I love Miller and Williams.
I have so many heroes who are within reach, writers I know, who are my friends, or writers who are floating about.

Some of my teachers: Dare Clubb and Sherry Kramer and Michael Weller and Elizabeth Margid.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  So much of the theatre I see is subtle, or stylish, or it's some dusty ass play that's ready for the museum. I'm excited by theater with lots of sex, and skin, and violence, and humor and strangeness and emotion. I want feel the way I feel when I watch a soccer match. I want to feel goose bumps. I want to desperately know how it will end. I like it messy! I love playwrights who are unafraid to bravely explore archetypes and cliches and familiar tropes. So many writers I love are doing just that.

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

A:  These are things that I tell myself ALL THE TIME:

Try not to fantasize too much about who or what you will become as a writer.
Don't be a dick to artists who aren't as good as you, don't hate on the ones who do it better.
Indulge your sick little obsessions.
Have a few friends that don't at all take the theatre seriously.
Drink with those friends.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:
Come see What May Fall in New York.
http://www.broadwayworld.com/printcolumn.php?id=147488

I Interview Playwrights Part 217: Tira Palmquist

Tira Palmquist

Hometown: It’s difficult to say that I have a hometown. I was born in Albert Lea, MN, but my family moved to Le Center, MN. (a very tiny town) when I was an infant. Since my father was a Lutheran minister, we moved fairly frequently (from Minnesota to Wisconsin, and from Wisconsin to Iowa). The short, non-specific, answer for where “home” is, then, is the Midwest.

Current Town: Irvine, CA. (And that’s another story.)

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’ve got a couple projects up my sleeve. First, I’ve recently finished (and had a couple readings of) a full-length that I’m hoping to continue to work on with [names of theatres redacted because I haven’t heard anything yet and I’m trying not to count chickens]. Then, I’m working on a new full-length (working title “The Unfortunates”) for which I’d like to have a complete draft by the end of the summer.

Q: You just attended the Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive. What was that like?

A: In a word, amazing.

But now for the longer answer:

Gary Garrison knew what he was doing when he called this an “Intensive,” and not just because you spend a lot of hours each day in workshops, and not just because you have a lot of homework at the end of the day. The truly intense part of the intensive is that you and your work are under scrutiny -- and, honestly, if you’re getting your money’s worth, you’re putting yourself under scrutiny. Lookit: we all have our own particular set of baggage as writers, and if you’re not willing to figure out why you’re doing that thing, or why you keep banging your head against one wall or another, then… what’s the point? I honestly was pretty surprised by this part of the intensive. It’s not just about learning skills, or learning about the technical particulars of writing for the stage. My biggest breakthrough in the intensive was learning that there’s a difference between going with your first impulse as a writer and going with what’s obvious and easy. That’s a fine line, and I didn’t see that until mid-way through the intensive.

The intensive becomes a bit like Top Chef, in that they just keep throwing challenges at you, and the real lesson is how you handle each challenge. I’ll admit, there were some exercises that I completely bombed or that I completely resisted. I think I would have failed myself if I didn’t ask myself…. “OK, Tira: so… what was THAT all about.” Each of us have to ask pretty tough questions about why we’re writing, what we’re writing, why we’re writing the stories we write – and if we’re not willing to interrogate that, then we’re just sailing along on auto pilot. SO: in a nutshell, the intensive provides an opportunity to figure out some fundamental questions about your work. In the end, we pay a chunk of change to be there, to get there, to have a place to sleep there – so I think a writer would be a very foolish writer not to take this experience with the appropriate sense of play (and, at the same time, playing it for real).

I fully expected the intensive to be difficult in some respects, and so I went into it leaning into the difficulty. I think the intensive was empowering for a lot of people, and I think that’s valuable…that just wasn’t my deal: I wanted to have my shit flipped. And I did. So… that was a win.

Finally, the intensive is just a hell of a lot of fun. I met some amazing people, laughed a lot, got far too little sleep, drank a bunch, and never felt so good and awake in my entire life.

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 had to think long and hard about this one.

But… here’s one I just remembered.

When I was small, we lived in this tiny town in Southern Minnesota. All good Minnesotans know that winter is no excuse to stay indoors, and we used to play outdoors all winter long, building amazing, extensive snow forts in the huge pile of snow dumped by snowplows from the driveway and parking lot of the church right next door into the space right behind our garage. So – I think I must have been about 4 or 5, playing out in the snow when I met two kids I had never met before. The girl didn’t have mittens, and her hands were red and chapped from the snow. I asked her where her mittens were, and she said she didn’t have any. I mean, she didn’t have any mittens – at all – and I thought that she needed to have a pair of mine. This wasn’t something I thought long and hard about. It was just that her hands looked like they hurt – and I had extra mittens, so… why not? I took her to my house, and announced to my mother that I was giving this girl a pair of my mittens. I remember the look on my mother’s face, and although she gave up a pair of my old mittens, I don’t think she was really very happy about that. I remember my father (the minister) talking to me about this later, and I remained steadfast – if someone didn’t have mittens, and I had a pair, well, darn it, I was going to do something about that. I realized, much later, that my parents were a little freaked out by the fact that I saw nothing dangerous about bringing home anyone and giving them anything. I still feel this way, though I try to be smarter, now, about my generosity.

This story applies in two ways: first, my mother has always said that I’m a very empathetic person (hence, the need to give away mittens willy nilly), and I think you have to be empathetic in order to inhabit your characters (or let them inhabit you); second, I still find myself compelled to write about people like the girl who didn’t have those mittens. I don’t often write about people of privilege, of power, and I think where I grew up and who I grew up with, has a lot to do with that.

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

A: Oh, dear. One thing? OK: here’s one: timidity. I know why theatres do revivals of shows – whether it’s the revival of American Buffalo, or the revival of Hair – but I worry that the impulse to do revivals is because those shows have been vetted and become a safe choice. I think this is why some people shy away from new work: because that work does not come with the imprimatur of someone else’s stamp of good taste (and really, how do we know if something’s good if Someone Important is not telling us so?). I think some theatres make pretty timid choices – though I think they’d be the last to say that what they’re doing is timid. I’ll grant you that anyone running a theatre these days is taking a gamble on any show, but I don’t think the answer is to do a season that looks, for all the world, like a “best of” hits of the 70s, 80s and 90s. I’m not trying to say that theatres should only do world premieres, or that I’m calling for a world in which playwrights only get one shot at a performance for each play, but I do think that it’s too easy to follow the lead of others.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Groups/Companies: Anne Bogart and the Siti Company. Elevator Repair Service. Wooster Group. Bread and Puppet Theater. Five Lesbian Brothers. Boston Court (in Pasadena). Burglars of Hamm. To name a wee few.

Playwrights: Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Martin McDonough, Tennessee Williams, Lynn Nottage, Constance Congdon, Sheila Callaghan, Mickey Birnbaum, Jacqueline Wright... And many others too numerous to name without boring the readers of this here interview.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I am always excited by theater that aims for the impossible, that is loud and bold and tries to expand our storytelling vocabulary. I love television and movies – don’t get me wrong. In fact, I love all sorts of TV and movies (just ask my husband). I even have pretty broad tastes when it comes to theatre (after all, Our Town is still one of my favorite plays, and I still can sit through endless productions of Hamlet or Much Ado, though I expect something smart and energetic out of those shows). But… if I’m gonna spend money on a show, I don’t want to see something that really meant to be on some kind of screen. I’d like something that is immediate, intimate – something that startles me, that makes me lean forward, and then gets its hands inside my ribcage and shakes me a little bit.

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

A: Read and watch everything. Go to as many shows as you can.

Then, stop sitting in the back of the theatre in the dark. Act, direct, stage manage, sew costumes, anything. Some of my favorite playwrights have also been actors, or started out as actors or directors. Take an improv class. Learn another language.

And write even when you don’t feel like it.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: Recent buzz:
THE FREQUENCY OF STARS AND OTHER MATTER (full-length)
Play Lab, Great Plains Theatre Conference
Semi-Finalist, PlayPenn new play development conference
Semi-Finalist, Seven Devils new play development conference

I Interview Playwrights Part 216: Sarah Hammond

Sarah Hammond

Hometown: Columbia, SC

Current town: Brooklyn, NY.

Q: What are you working on now?

A:  An original musical with Adam Gwon called String about the three Fates from Greek mythology - a trio of women who spin, measure, and cut the threads of our lives, transplanted to a modern metropolis. Adam and I met in the Dramatists Guild Fellows in 2006. He was just starting his show Ordinary Days and I was working on my play House on Stilts. We loved each others' quirky characters. It took about three months for us to get to "let's work together" (at the Vineyard, waiting for Mary Rose to start). Collaborating on a musical is very different than solo playwriting. I've never trained in it, and it's enormously hard. Equal parts scary and great. Adam at the piano is a beautiful thing to witness. I can't wait to hear people sing it.

Q:  Tell me about your relationship with Trustus Theater.

A:  In college, I spent 70% of my life down the street at Trustus, founded by Jim and Kay Thigpen in Columbia, South Carolina. Mostly, I stage managed, which taught me tons and got me valuable after-rehearsal talks with Jim Thigpen, his war stories about plays I hadn't read yet ("Brechtian what?"). Jon Tuttle, the playwright-in-residence, called me his Assistant Literary Manager. He told me what to read and where to send my work. Trustus has a playwriting contest, and every August they bring a playwright to town for a production of a new play. Stephen Belber’s Transparency of Val was one of my favorites. When I wrote a full-length my senior year in college, I submitted it to the festival, and they said yes. So Kudzu got produced a year after I finished it, which has got to be the most ideal timeline a playwright could ask for. We had actors in the show I’d watched for years from behind my stage manager checklists. Bob Hungerford, who had played our local Roy Cohn and does all of Jon Tuttle’s shows, anchored Kudzu as my agonized Confederate Reenactor. He was a force, very generous, and exacting with his performances, which I love. We sold out every night. He was the real thing, and I was lucky as hell to work with such an actor in my first production. Looking back, it seems important that I wasn’t writing for college students in that first go. My writing grew up because of that company and that theater. I’m the literary manager now. It’s the kind of place you never leave, even if you move to Brooklyn.

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

A:  Dad worked for the Wall Street Journal, so I lived overseas from ages two to ten – Hong Kong, then Belgium. In Hong Kong, I had a British accent and could say useful phrases in Cantonese like “look there is a fire,” “stranger don’t touch me,” and numbers one through ten. I had white blond hair that people were always trying to touch so I developed an early scowl. We lived on a small island off the mainland where people had golf carts instead of cars. There was no Christmas, so in December, they’d put all us foreign kids on the beach, and some ex-pat journalist would dress up as Santa in a tee-shirt and row across the bay in a boat. Mom hung ornaments on a houseplant. Cassette tapes came in the mail from Grandma Lydia, who read the Three Little Pigs to me in her old Virginia accent. I would turn green whenever we got on a plane, which was often. I’m still very confused.

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

A: Let’s have less plays that assume the world is made of wealthy families.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  There are so many heroes. Paula Vogel, Jose Rivera, Naomi Iizuka, Naomi Wallace, Joan Ackerman. Their plays taught me that you didn't need furniture. Recently, I’m obsessed with Lanford Wilson and John Guare, who reminded me that furniture can be a good thing after all. I read Burn This for the first time about a year ago. It’s my new favorite play. I re-read it thirty times and watched the Circle Rep production at the Lincoln Center archives. Okay it's one naturalistic set, but he builds the play so that one set is like a centrifuge. Puts his characters through the wringer, and it's electric because of the desire and you know there won't be any shortcuts. I miss long scenes in the theater, and this play really filled a gap that I've been feeling for a while. Some of his stage directions make me weep, and they’re all about afghans and pants and the way you drink your whiskey. Then there’s Guare saying throw out the kitchen sink and so he goes and puts some colossal ornate heirloom wardrobe on the front lawn (Lake Hollywood), and it’s gorgeous and hilarious and tragic, just like the play. So I’m writing plays with furniture again.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Character’s the whole reason to go to the theater. So when a writer renders something true about what it’s like to be that guy over there, and then carries it over the course of an evening, I’m sold. If the people in the story don’t grip me, then the play evaporates after I leave the theater, no matter how fluid the language or clever the structure, and I hate that. I want those characters to stay with me for days and catch me at odd moments in my own life. It’s best when you can tell that the writer loves the characters but hasn’t let them off the hook. Like Tracy Letts.


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

A:  a) Put time in backstage. Stage Manage or ASM. Work in the scene shop. Help focus the lights. Do the no-glory jobs and observe how the play gets made. That will teach you what the dramatic structure books leave out about theatricality, what a stage can do.

b) Stealing from Jose Rivera: “Write roles that actors you love would kill to play.” Yes!

c) Write about places that are not New York.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Adam Bock's A Small Fire at Playwrights Horizons this year is going to be extraordinary. I’m also excited about Adam Gwon’s musical adaptation of the Joe Meno novel The Boy Detective Fails, which will show up on a stage one day somewhere.

I Interview Playwrights Part 215: Charlotte Miller

Charlotte Miller

Hometown: Dallas, TX

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about the play you're working on at PlayPenn.

A:  I'm working on a play called Raising Jo. I started writing it about 2 and a half years ago. It's about love and family and what it means to really really really be a grown up. It centers around a young couple and their unplanned pregnancy. The baby doesn't figure into the play that heavily except that it forces the adults to come together and act like adults. It follows that journey without being about parenting. I'm still a fairly green writer so this play is the first that has received this kind of love and care, I feel like I'm growing up with it as a writer, learning how to rewrite.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I'll be back in Pennsylvania in a couple of months for this commission called The People's Light New Play Initiative at Longwood Gardens. They've commissioned a handful of playwrights to come out to the gardens, explore, and generally just let their imaginations run wild. They have lily-pads that can hold up to fifty pounds. So I only have to diet myself down to fifty pounds to realize my dream of living on a lily-pad.

Q:  You're one of the playwrights in Rising Phoenix's first season of Cino Nights. Can you explain what that is? Are you as excited as I am?

A:  Cino nights is modeled after this sort of raw, rapid, awesome seize the day(night) theater that Joe Cino pioneered in his Caffe in the 60s. One week of rehearsal, one performance, no rules, no expectations, very rock and roll. I am always jealous of my musician friends because they have the gig and the gig is a beautiful thing, it's practice and performance. Now I feel like I have a gig. So I am more excited than you are Adam (joking tone).

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 am a recovering people pleaser. It was sick sick bad bad. When I was in the first grade and I had a Nazi teacher named Mrs. Roberts. This was a woman who actually sent me to ESL because she didn't think I could speak english. So one afternoon she announced that her husband was coming to visit her and while they were talking I had to pee worse than anything I had ever felt before. It was that yellow eye-ball feeling. That terrified to move, terrified to stay, no way out of this, whoops I peed my pants thing. I peed my pants rather than interrupt an adult conversation. I don't know if this explains me as a writer except to say that I write characters who have a really hard time, almost impossible time asking for what they want.

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

A:  That's a big question. It's the money thing that sticks out to me. I wish playwrights could just be playwrights. I see a lot of awesome playwrights taking on more than they can handle because of finances. It's a problem I don't know how to address. It's just overwhelming. You've interviewed a bunch of amazing playwrights and if they all had the means to produce their theater, theater in america would be boom not bust, it would be the best. If you build it they will come, but we can't afford to build anything let alone live well. At least it's honest work, to an almost absurd degree.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Anyone who wants to do theater in this day and age is my hero.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Brave theater. Big brave theater. Long pauses, blood and guts, jazz hands... I like everything, can get excited by everything, so long as it's brave.

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

A:  Write a lot. Write every chance you get. Go to the theater. Show up for the theater. You can't be a part of it unless you show up for it. Oh, and don't be precious. That's the worst. Tattoo the end of that Beckett quote to your head "Fail Better".

Q:  Plugs, please:
A: 
www.playpenn.org
Raising Jo
By Charlotte Miller
Directed By Jackson Gay
Sunday July 25th @ 5pm
Adrienne Theater (Playground Space)
2030 Sansom Street
Philladelphia PA 19103

Cino Nights
Jimmy's no. 43
43 East 7th street
NYC
December 11, 2011
http://www.risingphoenixrep.org/