I Interview Playwrights Part 22: Rachel Shukert

Rachel Shukert

Hometown: Omaha, Ne

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  I'm sorry I didn't get to see the shows you and Nick Jones did in New York. I heard great things. Can you tell me a little about them?

A;  Thanks! They were a lot of fun, and I think we learned a lot about collaboration and the best ways to write together, which we plan to do more often. Nick and I have a really similar sense of humor and sensibility in a lot of ways, but we're also very different, and I think our strengths and weaknesses compliment each other well. The shows were part of our new theatrical venture, Terrible Baby Theater Co., a kind of inaugural project, if that doesn't sound too pretentious. The Nosemaker's Apprentice, which Nick and I wrote together, came out of this insane idea we had one night while drinking heavily and trying to come up with something to fill the slot that the Brick very kindly offered us in which to do something. Does it sound obscene, to use the word slot? I think I've been watching too much NYC Prep. Anyway. What we came up with was a sort of medieval adventure story/hagiography about the origins of plastic surgery, and through our grandiosity and kind of Monty Python slapsticky historical nonsense, I think (hope) raised some interesting questions about aesthetics, beauty, and self-image. The other show, The Colonists, was a puppet show that Nick conceived with Raj Azar. It was about bees. I didn't have anything to do with that creatively, but I loved watching it--the puppets, by Robin Frohardt and company, were gorgeous, and I'm always in awe of people who can make them come alive.

Q;  How many times have you and Nick collaborated now? How do you write together? Is one of you at the keyboard or do you pass it back and forth? What is the revision process like?

A:  We've written two plays together now, Nosemaker and another play called "The Sporting Life," a true story about a famous brothel in Chicago at the turn of the century, which we're still developing. Basically, when we write together, we come up with a sort of outline of the story--or at least, most of it, becaue obviously things change--and then pass it back and forth, scene by scene, and edit each others work. I find that you get a first draft much faster than when you write on your own, which is exciting, but then the revision process becomes more important...which can be good too--it can be really helpful to have someone to challenge you on things. But negotiating that is really the trick, I think. We learned a lot on this last project, so I'm feeling good about moving forward on future things.

Q:  When does your new book come out?

A;  As of now, they are thinking June of 2010

Q;  What are you working on next?

A:  Oh my God. A million things. I'm working on screenplay for a new production company in LA, which I can't talk too much about yet, but I'm enjoying. I'm also working on a play for Studio 42, which is a great theater company in New York. And I'm developing something else, apropos of nothing, that's an idea I've had rattling around for a while about exploring the relationships between sisters--it involves the Three Sisters (as in Chekov), and other famous sisterly combos throughout history, including the Shukert sisters: me, my sister Ariel, and a third fictional sister. I've been looking for ways in which I can kind of integrate the autobiographical prose writing I've been doing with my theater work--it seems such a shame to let these two elements be kind of disparate and not allow them to inspire each other. I think it could be really interesting.

Q:  How was that Jews and Comedy panel? Were you hilarious?

A:  What was probably most hilarious is that I later realized that my bra was showing the entire time. You're married to a non-theater person. Would you recommend that whole marrying a non-theater person as a good thing to do? Yes. But you'll have to find you own husband. Mine is busy. Seriously, it's great. But that's just me--I would hate to be married to someone who does the same thing as me, as I am competitive, insecure, and resentful, but for other people, it works out fine. I'm married to a non-theater person solely because of my own personality flaws.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  This may surprise you, but my favorite thing I saw last year was the stage version of "White Christmas," with all the Irving Berlin songs. And the Rockettes Christmas spectacular. I also like seeing school plays and community theater.

Q:  I'm not surprised. I think David Ives wrote that. What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Write a lot. It's the only way you figure anything out. And make sure you get some stuff up, even if you have to do it yourself for no money. Nothing will kill the creative mind faster than the traditional development process.

Q;  Plugs and links please for your columns and books and anything else.

A;  I'm writing a new column at the brand new web newspaper, The Faster Times, which is sort of a hip answer to the HuffPo. I'm doing an unsolicited advice column, telling various belabored celebrities how to live their lives. Here's the link to the latest: http://thefastertimes.com/unsolicitedadvice/2009/07/14/not-that-you-asked-ruth-madoff-edition/ Everyone who reads this should buy my book, "Have You No Shame?" http://www.amazon.com/Have-You-No-Shame-Regrettable/dp/0345498615/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233000479&sr=8-1 I need the royalties. Also, keep an eye out for my upcoming book, The Grand Tour, next summer. It's going to change everything.

Nice review of Nerve in St. Louis

http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Echo_Theatre_Company_Continues_Season_with_Adam_Szymkowiczs_Comedy_NERVE_20090712

I winter in Minneapolis and summer in Atlanta

Okay so I'm in Hotlanta now and I'll be here for the next three months. What am I doing here? Writing for an African American sitcom on TBS. No, really. I've had two days of work so far. So far it's a lot of fun. I'll let you know how it goes.

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

I Interview Playwrights Part 16: Callie Kimball

Callie Kimball  
 
Hometown: Daytona Beach, Florida

Current Town: New York

Q: Tell me a little, if you will, about your play going up in this summer's DC fringe.

A: I produced MAY 39th at DC Fringe in 2006, the first year there was a Fringe there. I wanted to write a play about how two people negotiate the emotional and physical give-and-take at the start of a relationship, so I set it the morning after a first date, 1,000 years in the future. After I wrote the play, I realized it was also about the ways we sometimes deliberately court pain. Last year I wrote a companion piece, MAY 40th, which is set in the same world, but with two new characters. These people are trying to figure out how to proceed after immeasurable damage has been done to one by the other.

Q: How much has it changed since its previous presentation?

A: I've never revised a play as much as I have MAY 39th. It was successful in '06, but I was never satisfied with it. Last year, Christy Denny, an up-and-coming director (she just AD'd David Adjmi's play "Stunning") asked if I wanted to do a pure workshop, with no goal in sight other than exploring the play. I know a lot of playwrights complain about being workshopped to death, but I had never had the chance, and I knew I was eager to pull the play apart and figure it out. It ended up having a reading at the Kennedy Center late last year, and people who had seen it in '06 couldn't tell what I had changed, when in fact I had completely torn it apart! I had cut a printout of the script into beats, and had laid it out on my bedroom floor, rearranging it to build a more deliberate arc into the play. Then I worked on the play further at a workshop that Electric Pear Productions gave me this spring here in NY. It's still the same story, with the same twist at the end, but it's been pared down to tell the story in what I hope is a much more compelling way. I cut a LOT of exposition and "future speak." It always feels good when you can cut a play down to the bones.

Q; Not that long ago you moved from the DC area to NYC. How has the move been? What do you notice most about the difference in day to day life in New York?

A: I. Love. NY. I love how the most intimate moments are lived in public here. DC was a great town to start writing plays in (I started there as an actor), but there kind of wasn't anything left for me there. I had self-produced three times in two years, and I'm sure I could have kept doing that, but eventually you want OTHER people to produce your plays. I had had a few commissions from smaller theaters, including two at Washington Shakespeare Company, a company I adore and who gave me complete freedom. Some of the larger theaters knew I existed, but there's that whole Backyard Syndrome, where you kind of have to go off and prove your mettle elsewhere for them to take a risk on you. I figured the time was right to try NY. I have a lot of non-theatre friends in NY, so I knew that even if nothing took off for me career-wise, I'd have a good time and enjoy consuming theater, if not making it. It's funny, people say it's so brave to move to NY, but really there's nothing to lose. I wasn't earning enough to live on as a teaching artist in DC, so it's not like I left some great money job. I've been very lucky so far. I landed a job in Social Media at NBC, which I'm very grateful for. I also volunteered to read scripts for Jesse Berger at Red Bull Theater, because we had known each other back in DC years before, and he made me Literary Manager. It's been helpful to be affiliated with such a respected outfit as Red Bull, and reading so many scripts is also helping me grow as a playwright. I highly recommend volunteering as a script-reader if you are a playwright! There's something so invigorating about pulling up stakes--it's a chance to find new approaches to the goals that are most important to you. I know it's stretched me in ways I can't even put into words. I'm enjoying seeing theater and meeting people as I try to find the places where my work might make sense. People have been very welcoming. I love it here!

Q: If I was moving to DC, what theaters would you recommend I check out?

A; DC is great because there's something for everyone on the menu. At any given time there are something like 65 theatres in town. When I was there, I sought out work at smaller venues, like Solas Nua, Longacre Lea, Rorschach and the now-NYC-based Project Y, but I also loved going to Woolly Mammoth and Theater J. I also deeply love classical plays, so The Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington Stage Guild, and Washington Shakespeare Company were also favorites of mine.

Q; What kind of theater excites you?

A: Oooh I love the dark stuff. I love plays that explore issues rigorously, refusing to reduce complexities to black-and-white. I can't stand plays that co-opt stories of "other" simply to assuage liberal guilt--that kind of self-loathing is so boring. It's dishonest to present a marginalized demographic as if it were no more than a tool for arty self-flagellation. Give me something difficult, something muddy and bloody and emotionally terrifying, that asks questions that make people uncomfortable. I'm hungry for that.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: I (gulp) am working on a solo piece with music that a friend from Minneapolis and I are planning on taking on the Fringe circuit next summer. She plays banjo. I started working on it in a two-day workshop at LAByrinth last year, and I'm really excited and really terrified, which is of course the best place to be! This character is hugely pregnant, but her husband has now left her. He was kidnapped and tortured abroad (nothing noble--a case of mistaken identity), and she's in the middle of converting to Judaism and finishing a ridiculously useless PhD. So how does she go on, how does she make sense of all this? She basically tries and fails to superimpose meaning on all this chaos. But there's this baby, this future, right there inside of her.

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

A: Read plays. Watch plays. Learn as much as you can about what's going on in the world. Find ways to contribute to your community. Ask questions. Don't be afraid to fail. You have to do something badly before you can do it well. Don't take the good reviews too seriously, because then you have to take the bad ones seriously, too.

Q: Link please for people who want to come see your show in DC.

A:   http://www.calliekimball.com/53940

I Interview Playwrights Part 15: Deborah Stein

Deborah Stein  

Hometown: New York, NY

Current Town: Minneapolis, MN

Q: You're headed to the Bay Area Playwrights Festival this summer. Tell me a little about the play you're working on there.

A: The play is called NATASHA AND THE COAT, and it's about the fashion industry and Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I actually started it five years ago and was overwhelmed by both the subject matter and the scope of it, and I shoved it in a drawer (literally) and only excavated it this past autumn. In a lot of ways, it's different from anything I've written before - a straightforward narrative about a family, clash between generations, based partially on personal experience. It's the first time when I need to figure out how old someone is, and where their parents were born, in order to fully develop and craft the characters - usually I work much more with allegory and archetypes. And I think it's going to be in two acts with an intermission - another first for me!

Q: Who are you working with on it?

A: Sean Daniels will be directing, with a stellar local cast including Corey Fischer and Naomi Newman, who founded the Traveling Jewish Theatre in San Francisco. They were in an earlier reading, in May, and were invaluable resources to discover the truth and nuance of the world I'm writing about.

Q: You are the new Bush fellow. Congratulations! Can you explain what that is? It's 50,000 dollars, right? How long does a playwright have to live in Minneapolis to be eligible to apply?

A: Thanks!! I'm pretty freaking excited. The Bush Foundation awards Artist Fellowship in a number of different disciplines. It's a total of $50,000 disbursed over 12 or 24 months, depending on how you want to use the fellowship. You need to be a resident of MN, ND, or SD for at least 12 months at the time of application.

Q: How did you come to start writing plays?

A: I acted in children's theatre when I was a kid, and started directing when I was in high school. In college I studied directing and creative writing, but mainly focused on poetry - I thought of those two creative pursuits as being decidedly different from each other. After college, I interned with the Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia, a physical theatre company making ensemble-based works. I was the assistant director, and part of my job was to transcribe rehearsal improvs to be shaped into performance text. Over the course of the rehearsal process, I became more and more involved in shaping the text, to the point of editing the transcriptions and providing additional writing that was based on gesture or character proposals from the acting ensemble or the director or even the designers. My credit on the production ended up being "writer" and I worked in this way with Pig Iron on six shows between 2000 and 2006. In the middle of it all I decided to go to grad school to try writing plays on my own, without the ensemble. I still do a mix of both processes - in fact, one of my other summer projects is to work with Pig Iron again, which will be like a sort of homecoming.

Q: What kind of theater do you want to make? / What kind of theater that other people make excites you?

A: Plays that are events, that capitalize on all that is vital and thrilling about live performance--raw and alive, all those people in a space together, having a communal experience which will happen exactly once. Plays that are like rock concerts, where your whole body is involved, whether you are artist or audience--where the line between those roles is blurred. Plays that recognize and embrace that we are in a specific place, in a specific moment of time. I dream of creating theatre on a massive scale, reaching audiences who don’t ordinarily go to see plays, sharing something unique in the collective present.

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

A: Go see lots of theatre. See it in both epic scales (Ariane Mnouchkine, Robert Lepage) and small, scrappy local companies doing it in the backyard. Identify like-minded collaborators, find your fellow travelers, work with them often. Pursue the big dreams and the large scale but also don't be afraid to do it yourself, don't wait for some large institution to give you a gold stamp, the only way to find and hone your voice by trying and failing and trying again. Theatre happens in three dimensions, in real time and space; what's on the page is the beginning, not the end.

Q: Link please for those in the Bay Area who want to see your play presentation:

http://www.playwrightsfoundation.org/index.php?p=182

I Interview Playwrights Part 14: Qui Nguyen

Qui Nguyen  

Hometown: El Dorado , Arkansas

Current Town : Brooklyn , NY


Q: You're remounting your show “Fight Girl Battle World” which I caught last year and loved. Can you tell us a bit about that? 

A:  Every year, my company, Vampire Cowboys, sets out to take on a different genre. With “Fight Girl Battle World”, we took on Sci-fi. This was our version of something like “BladeRunner”, except funnier, with a laughably small budget, and more kung fu. The outcome ended up becoming one of our most popular shows we’ve ever produced. After we closed it last year, we worked on finding the right opportunity to bring it back. We were offered slots in several different festivals but ended up choosing to go with HERE Arts Center’s Sublet Series for several reasons; HERE is definitely one of my favorite venues in the city, it gave us the luxury of being in the space for an entire week, and Vampire Cowboys just produced “Soul Samurai” this past winter there and we’re going to be producing our next show “Alice In Slasherland” there next Spring. It made for the perfect place for a remount.  

Q: Is it true it's your most popular show to date? Why do you think that is?

A:  Well, it’s definitely between that or our most recent “Soul Samurai”. Both shows sold out really quickly and both received a ton of love by both press and our audience. “Fight Girl Battle World” however sells more t’shirts than any of our other productions to date and, even after a whole year, we still get people who randomly email us about how much they loved the original run. I think “Fight Girl” just tickles people in that right way that makes them want to come back. It appeals to that little nerdy kid inside all of us who dug “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, or “Firefly”. I dig it because it makes me laugh a lot. It’s perhaps the same for everyone else.

Q: Your plays contain a great deal of exciting and acrobatic fight scenes. Besides being the playwright, you are also the fight choreographer for many of your shows. Is it hard to be both the playwright and the fight choreographer but not the director?

A: Not really. I love writing and I love making fights. I however suck at helping actors explore moments and nuance. It’s just not a skill I have. I’m a bit too impatient for it. Robert who directs all my Vampire Cowboys shows is a master at this stuff, he can manipulate a scene to give it not only tension but texture. He’s good at exploring situations with actors and figuring how it’s all going work onstage. That’s what he enjoys. I however like writing cool dialogue and making people hit each other. It’s just a uniquely different skill-set.

Q: How did you become a playwright?

A: I originally wanted to be a novelist or a comic book writer and was pretty sure I was going to be that throughout undergrad even though I was an acting major at that time. However I started getting really frustrated that I kept getting cast either as the “stereotypical Asian” or none at all because of my race. So I started writing my own plays, shows that weren’t race or gender specific so anyone could play any role they wanted. That same ethos exists still today with my Vampire Cowboys plays. With the exception of “Soul Samurai”, all the other roles in all our other productions have all been racially neutral and we’ve been very conscious to make sure our company is as diversely cast as possible. People of color need superheroes and action stars too, so that’s what keeps me making the shows that I do. I like making heroes.

Q: Where can people go to buy your published plays?

A: Amazon, Drama Book Shop, and Playscripts.com. FGBW MOS LDID BW

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: All sorts. Anything written by living breathing playwrights. I don’t dig on the dead guys. Not cause I don’t appreciate what they did, I’m just tired of seeing a dead fucker like Shakespeare get literally thousands of productions a year while my friends struggle to get even one. That’s bullshit. My friends are better writers than that. They too deserve mad kudos.

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

A: Eat three meals daily, workout at least one hour a day, drink plenty of water, and smile.

Q: Link please and info for people who want to see "Fight Girl Battle World": http://www.vampirecowboys.com/shows.htm

my remaining summer shows

May 28-June 28, Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, FL, my short play Snow. (production #12 or so of this play) July 10-26 Echo Theatre, St. Louis, MO, a production of Nerve (production #5) July 5-August 1, Essential Theatre, Atlanta, GA, a production of Food For Fish. (production #8) July 15-July 26, Doorway Arts Ensemble in the DC Fringe, Washington DC, a production Herbie: Poet of the Wild West. (production #1) Other summer shows: I don't have the dates but Lights Out Theater Company in Chicago is doing two short plays of mine soon. (Snow and Goldentown.) My short play Film Noir will be done most likely July 5 at Midnight at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in western Massachusetts by the some of the interns. My play Ambience Pizza may follow on another night. If you can't make any of those, but don't want to feel left out, my plays Deflowering Waldo, Nerve and Food For Fish are published here, here and here. Also found at Amazon and other fine online bookstores. Also, some of my short plays are on my website.

I Interview Playwrights Part 13: Victoria Stewart

Victoria Stewart  


Hometown: Beverly, MA

Current Town: Minneapolis, MN

Q:  You just had a show up at The Playwright's Center that Workhaus produced. Can you tell me a little about that?
A:  Workhaus Collective is a collective of playwrights that produce our own work. The play, "800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick" is an older play, I wrote it back in 2002. It had a nice production in Seattle in 2007 but since the Workhaus playwrights just choose which play to produce, I really wanted to see this play up with Luverne Siefert playing the lead and with Jeremy Wilhelm directing. (Jeremy directed a great version of the play in grad school and we had always talked about doing it again.) The play is about Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer who wrote the stories that became the movies "Blade Runner" and "Minority Report." In 1974, he had visions of God that obsessed him for the rest of his life. It's a trippy play with transformations, non-linear storytelling and puppets. What's nice about Workhaus is that you really have control over the production so no one's trying to make the play something it ain't (which is helpful with such a strange piece.)  

Q: How did you become interested in writing about Phillip K Dick?
A:  My brother owns a science fiction/fantasy bookstore so I always grew up with sf around the house but I didn't get into PKD until my 20s. A friend suggested I read Lawrence Sutin's "Divine Invasions," a biography about PKD, just because it was a good read. I got obsessed at that point but this was about 5 years before I started writing plays. So I just read a bunch of his books because they were great. Near the end of grad school, I just plunged in, thinking nothing would come of it. Most of my plays are very realistic and linear so here I was tryin' to be experimental and shit. (All my years stage-managing for avant-garde directors at the American Repertory Theatre served me well.)  

Q: What are you working on next?

A: I just finished a new play called "Rich Girl" which is a modern-day adaptation of "Washington Square/The Heiress." It's about women and their relationship with money. I developed it at the Tennessee Repertory Theater which was a great experience.

Q: Tell me about Workhaus. Basically you're a playwright run theater not unlike 13p in New York. How do you decide whose show goes up next? How does it work?

A:  Workhaus is completely modeled after 13P. The playwrights serve as artistic directors during their show. The playwrights end up doing more technical stuff and house-management, etc. than 13P does because we can't afford a tech crew! So during tech, you'll see one of us hanging lights; during the shows, we're the ones house-managing. Because of this, we've realized that the playwrights have to be Minneapolis-based because we really need boots on the ground to produce everyone else's shows. How we choose which shows go up is a little haphazard. We have a core group of producer/playwrights and then we have a few satellite playwrights. We have a three show season and we only have 10 members, so people cycle through more than once with preference going to the main producers. We tried to plan two or three seasons in advance last year and all that planning went out the window very quickly. So now we're planning a year at a time. At this point, we're in residence at the Playwrights Center which means we use their theater and rehearsal space which is so helpful.

Q: Like me, you are married to a playwright. Would you like to comment on the challenges or benefits of a wright union?
A:  I'm pro-wright union. It's great, right? The benefits are having a spouse who really understands your challenges ("What? Another rejection letter????") and having a brilliant in-house dramaturg at your beck and call ("Honey, wake up and read my scene!"). The challenge is getting frustrated when one person gets something the other wants. But luckily, you're also really happy for the other person and as long as you keep in mind that what's good for one person is actually good for the unit you've become, it evens out.  

Q: You and I have the same agent. Isn't Seth great?

A: LURVE him. Cory and I do have a pet name for him but I won't write it down....

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Good theater. That may sound obnoxious but there are so many different kinds of great theater out there. On one hand, I love bold, visual, experimental work but I'm also happy as a clam when I see Arthur Miller done well. I like work that's emotional, that makes me lean forward, that's intellectual but not abstract. Also, because I'm an ex-techie, I get very distracted by bad production (and sometimes by great production) so I'm thrilled when I am completely drawn into something, whatever form it takes.

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

A: Just keep trying. Get yourself out there. Find people you trust to read and hear your work. Have faith in yourself.

I Interview Playwrights Part 12: Malachy Walsh

Malachy Walsh  

Hometown: Chicago, IL

Current Town: Lafayette, CA

Q: You're headed to Minneapolis in July to present a play. Can you tell me about how this came about and a little bit about your play?

A:  The play “Beyond the Owing” is about two people trying to figure out how to get married and have a life despite the financial – and emotional – debts they owe to others. I got the idea for it in early 2005 when everyone was buying houses at exorbitant prices. I couldn’t figure out how they were doing it. All I could see was debt without any way to pay it back. I had also graduated from Columbia only the year before where (rightly or wrongly) debt was a huge and very real part of the commitment to the arts (it was even the subject of our commencement speaker’s keynote address). In a sense, this grad school debt was my exorbitantly priced house. But the burden of owning it was also starting to affect, even distort, my relationship with the dream that had inspired me to go for it in the first place. I figured I wasn’t alone. And artists wouldn’t be the only ones having money trouble in the near future. I finished the first draft in the spring of 2005 and sent it around, knowing it had problems but thinking it was timely enough that someone would help. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival did a reading in the spring of 2006, followed by a Clubbed Thumb Workshop in December at Playwrights Horizons. The PCPA Theatre Fest in California followed in 2007. Interest dried up. Then I won a lottery slot in a reading series at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. I couldn’t attend, but I asked a friend living in MPLS - Genevieve Bennett who’d read an early draft and was a believer - if she’d direct it. Afterwards, she said she wanted to do it. She found a great bunch of actors and workshopped it over the next year or so, sending me notes and cut suggestions – almost all of which were excellent and I took. Obviously, the play has only become more relevant since its early versions. Hopefully, people will find it more resonant as well.

Q:   I had a great time working with Genevieve earlier this year. Is this the first time you two have worked together since Columbia? (Malachy and I got our MFAs at Columbia together along with Genevieve in 2004.)

A:  We did the short musical “BLAM! I’m Lee Harvey Oswald!” at Dixon Place in NY sometime in early 2005. Though I like the Bay Area where we live now, I do wish I lived closer to Genevieve. She’s an incredibly talented and generous collaborator who directs for - and in - the moment. Musical, human, but also unafraid to search the dark corners in a play and work them. Finding people like her is hard. But it’s the kind of relationship I really live for and that I’ve always wanted to build theatre on.

Q: You have a new kid and a day job in advertising. When do you find time to work on plays?

A: I try to write in the mornings, before all the outside voices drown out the inside voices. Since my son has lately decided that 5 am is a good time to get up, this has been getting more difficult.

Q: Your wife is an actress (and a wonderful human being). Would you like to make an argument for playwrights and actresses coupling up?

A:  The great thing about being with someone in the arts is that you understand each other. You “get” it. So, when your significant other says, “Yes, I’ll marry you, but I have to go away for a year to do the Oregon Shakespeare Festival” as mine did, you don’t freak out. You also have someone who can look at what you’re doing and respond appropriately to things that may be quite embryonic and need nurturing rather than immediate critical precision – though that comes later, too. In my case, I’ll add that Heather’s been amazingly good for helping me get over the fear of never having enough money. Being the child of a fairly well-off middle class life, I’ve spent a lot of energy worrying over the next pay check. As an actor, Heather’s kept me focused on what I’m doing NOW – rather than a worst case scenario fear about things that may or may not happen tomorrow.  

Q: You used to be my roommate. Do you have any advice for my wife about living with me?

A: Don’t leave the sponge in the sink.

Q: If I came to San Francisco right now, what plays would you recommend that I go see or what theater companies should I check out?
A: Since everyone knows the Magic is here, I don’t think I need to mention them. Same goes for the Mime Troupe – still great after all these years. However, there are some less broadly known companies that I’d recommend to anyone, anytime: Encore (which just did Steven Yockey’s SKIN), The Shotgun Players, Impact, the Marin Theatre Company, Crowded Fire, FoolsFURY and Playground (which introduces the Bay Area to writers with a season of monthly 10 minute playwriting contests). Charlie Varon’s solo work at the Marsh shouldn’t be missed either (Rabbi Sam starts in October). Also, check out anything by Mark Jackson (his FAUST: Part 1 runs until the end of June with Shotgun) and anything at the EXIT – a place run by Christina Augello who has helped a ton of artists get stuff up with her annual SF Fringe. (If it weren’t for her….)

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I like gripping, visceral theatre. It’s gotta stick with me emotionally. It can be weird or funny or brutal – even unlikeable and hateful – but if it comes off when I get up from my seat, well, that’s not what I’m most hungry for. Generally, that’s meant emotionally dangerous and vulnerable work in plays that end on questions rather than statements. It’s not a bad thing necessarily for me to be leaving a show asking, “What the fuck just happened to me in there?” In New York, I looked for that kind of work at SPF, Clubbed Thumb, LAByrinth and Soho Rep.

Q: What advice do you have for other playwrights?

A: Find people you like, then work with them and hold on to them for dear life. If you give up, everyone else will too. Never confuse a budget for a play. Be good to your actors – always. Don’t worry about what the institutions are doing - ever. Listen to your characters before anyone else. Write every day for as long as you can. Write longhand whenever possible. Writing isn't a competitive sport, despite what the competitions and memberships and production credits suggest: Other writers are your friends, not people you're trying to demolish. Coffee is good, liquor is not. Ask for help. Get a day job (I don’t care what David Mamet says) and keep it until it's impossible not to. And, my favorite, from Anne Bogart: Don’t wait.

Q: Is there a link up for people to buy tickets to your show at the Red Eye?

A:  We have a “trailer” at www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFdQegUWWes Our website is www.beyondtheowing.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 11: Jessica Dickey

photo by Geoff Green.

Jessica Dickey

Hometown: Waynesboro, Pennsylvania

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q: I've heard a lot of great things about the Amish Project from various people. Can you tell me a little about the show?

A: The Amish Project is a fictional exploration of a true event, based on the Amish schoolhouse shooting that occurred in rural Pennsylvania on October 2nd, 2006. It is a solo show, with seven fictional characters, including the gunman and the gunman's widow, two Amish girls, and three townspeople... I was heartbroken by this gruesome event-- it struck a strong impulse to write, to just WRITE into that heartbreak and see what I could find -- but I did not want what I wrote to be tied in any way to the real people, so I basically took some of the givens of the tragedy and created my own characters around it. The New York Times recently likened this to writing "Stories From 9/11 That I Just Made Up", which I thought was a hilarious and great way to say it. I have a great respect for documentary theatre, but that was not what I was after when I started writing the play.

Q: How did you come to write it?

A:  I first researched a great deal about Amish culture. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, about an hour and half southwest of where the real crime occurred, and while I was not in the vicinity of an Amish community, I have always felt an affinity for "plain people" in general... I am very curious about people and communities that separate themselves in order to pursue their spiritual beliefs. There are many figures of this ilk that have fascinated me-- Saint Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, Julian of Norwich, Dr. James Cone... So I find the Amish intriguing because of their seclusion and spiritual discipline, and the ways in which they maintain their ethnic identity in our modern world. And when this sacred, quiet community came under attack in the schoolhouse that day in October, a fascinating series of events were set in motion, with shocking and awe-inspiring results... These things stayed with me, haunted me, and I wanted to go inward and explore what they evoked.  
 
Q: What does your writing process entail?
A:  Oh I don't know! LOL. Writing in my journal on the train, listening to a character riff... I usually need to do research of some kind--- I am currently working on a new play that had me researching the Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia (of the early 90's)... I like to let my characters monologue at first-- I like to just give them the mic, as it were, and see what they have to say, what they seem to be stuck on or circling around... Then at some point it becomes clear that this series of characters are all occupying the same psychic space, trying to inch toward one another, and then it becomes a matter of identifying what they are trying to do-- both to one another and as a collective whole. The play takes form from that void.  

Q: Do you change the play sometimes in performance or is it pretty well set?

A: Noooo, it's pretty well set. I love to improv, and I definitely spent a good portion of our tech riffing for the production team! LOL! I would improv from the characters while they were adjusting a light cue or working on something while I stood there on stage (I am a total slut for their laughter)... But when it comes to the performance, I keep pretty strictly to what we have set as much as possible. It's just the stage manager and I every night, and we need to trust each other to maintain the integrity of the piece as we cue one another through the play. I also find pleasure in the dance of a performance as much as anything else--- I attach myself to the subtle body anchors--- the weight shift, the focal point of the eyes, the breath. These are my tethers.

Q: This is not your first solo show is it?

A; Oh it definitely is.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  You know, more and more I am NOT interested in theatre with answers. I know this sounds elementary, but it apparently needs to be said. I also don't need art to be perfect or agreeable or for everyone. I feel like sometimes there is this pressure to make a piece of theatre thoroughly digestible and "clear" and linear. Who made this rule?!! I like it messy-- truthful-- theatre that is not afraid to go toward complex terrain and leave us with powerful questions. And I don't mind when theatre has a specific audience and isn't afraid to speak to that audience; like, you're a gay man and you want to speak to your community of gay men-- go for it! The rest of us can listen and learn and find ourselves in there if we wish. Do you know what I mean?!!? I'm just sick of watering things down to make them palatable. Fuck palatable. And while I'm bitching, I could do with a lot less irony and cleverness and cynicism. Okay, I'm done.  

Q: What advice would you give to any playwright who might read this who doesn't know some of the things you might know?

A: Oh boy. I'm sure I am totally UNQUALIFIED to be doling out advice. I feel like a messy toddler with playwriting. Um... I guess I can definitely say this: Don't wait for someone else to "discover you". Discover yourself! Don't be afraid to put your own work up on its feet. Use the festivals, the forums around the city, do it yourself. It's a self producing market now. Roll up your sleeves, raise the money, and present your own work. It's actually a thrilling thing to do. And it bears fruit-- externally and internally.

Q: What is the information for people who want to go see your play?

A:  Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 224 Waverly. Our schedule is Mondays at 8pm, Wednesdays thru Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays at 3pm. We're there 'til June 28th, and the show is only 65 minutes, so get your butts to the theatre! www.rattlestick.org and www.amishproject.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 10: Kara Lee Corthron

photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey 

Kara Lee Corthron

Hometown: Cumberland, Maryland

Current Town: New York, NY

Q: You’re coming to Minneapolis to work on a play with Penumbra next month. Tell me about this play.

A:  The play is called Julius by Design and if I were to consider all my plays my children, Julius would be the well-meaning, but difficult child that the school system desperately wants to put on meds. Its themes are about as universal as it gets: death, grief, forgiveness and letting go. At its center is an older couple—Jo and Laurel—whose son was murdered seven years before the play begins. Tired of their monotonous life of denial and shaky attempts to heal, Jo initiates contact with her son’s murderer and this leads to some craziness as you might imagine. The play is still early in its life cycle, but I’ve received such strange and disparate feedback on it so far, I’d put it away for a while, unsure of what I could do to make this child happy. So I was pretty surprised when Penumbra invited me out to work on it this summer. I’m really psyched and hoping this experience gives me some clues to crack the Julius code.  

Q: You wrote for NBC’s Kings this past season. What was that experience like?
A:   Kings was great, insane, enlightening, terrifying, and good. And probably a host of other adjectives I can’t think of right now. I joined the writing staff in September and by that point, the first four episodes had already been shot so I kind of jumped onto an already speeding train. And I had no prior TV experience at all. The immediate challenge I came up against was endurance. The seemingly simple act of sitting around a table everyday for eight and a half to nine hours brainstorming story points is not so simple. Imagine forcing your brain to do intense physical training after months of allowing it to just lounge around your skull eating chips. That’s the closest metaphor I can come up with to describe it. But after a few weeks, I adjusted. The hardest part by far was dealing with the intensity of life on set. And talk about endurance! One night, I got home around 2AM and was so tired I literally thought I was going blind. My longest continuous day on set was about sixteen and a half hours. This was hard for me; I’m a lazy person by nature. But despite the hours, stress, and sucker-punch to my brain, I’m really glad I had the opportunity to write for such a unique show and in a small amount of time—about five months—I learned WAY more than I ever imagined I would when I signed my contract. I was also really, really lucky that my first TV job was with an incredibly cool and wise writing staff. 

Q:  You were also the Princess Grace fellow at New Dramatists this past year. How did you participate in that community?

A:  The people that work at New Dramatists are some of the sweetest, smartest people around. Everyone there has been so supportive, even of the TV gig, which didn’t leave a lot of time for me to hang out at ND. But during the year, I was able to attend a few readings, the Christmas party, both all-writers meetings and just last week, I had my Princess Grace play read there with a phenomenal cast and director. So even though it’s an abbreviated version of the seven-year residency (and sadly, my time with them is just about over), I feel like I had a nice taste of the amazing benefits available to their playwrights.

Q: You were one of the few playwrights to have studied for 3 years at Juilliard. How helpful was that?
A:  Well, it was great to get an extra, pressure-free year just to play. And it was a joy to have additional access to Juilliard’s most precious resource: Mr. Joe Kraemer. I’m not sure I’d say it was necessary, as I’d had two full, productive years at the time of my graduation. But because the master class is run like a seminar, a large portion of the knowledge we gain there comes from reading plays by fellow playwrights and discussing them critically. I got to be a part of that process for sixteen playwrights (seventeen if I include myself) and that’s a lot of plays. For that aspect alone, I’m really grateful that I stayed that extra year. It’s funny you ask this question because I was just thinking about Juilliard. Chris and I recently exchanged some emails after I saw Why Torture is Wrong . . . and I just ran into Marsha at a Dramatists Guild event. They got me feeling all nostalgic for our Wednesday afternoons.  

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  When I go to the theatre, I love to be smacked out of my normal life and confronted with something I would never have thought/felt/imagined otherwise. I adore surprises! I like theatre that is bold. I like theatre that makes me laugh so hard it hurts. I like theatre that scares the shit out of me. I like to see honest, uncomfortable sexual tension. I like to see honesty of ANY kind. My favorite kind of play—regardless of the style, length, or subject matter—insists upon itself; it won’t let me dismiss it or forget about it the moment I hit the street for a drink and some gossip after the show. Nope! It forces me to make lasting space for it in my consciousness. Every time I go to a play, despite what I may have heard going in, I want to leave with the play still sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear. Maybe shouting. I don’t always experience this. But sometimes I do.  

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

A:  Uh well I don’t know if I’d label it “advice,” because it’s not that deep and I could probably use more advice than I can give, but all I’d say is write, write, write, and when you’re tired, keep going. The amount of time and effort we put into our actual work is probably the only thing we really have control over in this exciting, but often frustrating career. So take full advantage of your power and write like you’re addicted . . . even if you’re not.

I Interview Playwrights Part 9: Zayd Dohrn

Zayd Dohrn

Hometown: New York

Current Town: New York (I left for a while. But we all come back eventually)

Q:  So tell me about the play you have going up at SPF this summer.

A:  It's a play called REBORNING, and it's about a young woman who sculpts incredibly life-like baby dolls. Like this (scroll down a bit) Or this. Yikes. So she develops a twisted relationship with an older woman who wants to commission a doll to replace a child she lost. It's a pretty dark play, obviously, but kind of a comedy too. And I'm excited about the SPF production - awesome director (Kip Fagan) and incredible cast (Greg Keller, Ally Sheedy, Katherine Waterston), so I'm sure they'll do something fun with it.

Q:  Your play Sick has been done a bunch. It seems like I keep seeing it on various seasons. Can you tell me what that play is about and about the development process of that play and then where it's been produced and will be produced?

A:  Sure, it's about a family of allergy-sufferers in New York who never leave their house because they're terrified of the outside world. Basically I was trying to do A Doll's House meets Safe (great Todd Haynes/Julianne Moore movie from the mid-90's) with a little Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Glass Menagerie thrown in. It had its first reading at Woolly Mammoth last year as part of the National New Play Network Showcase, and then several theaters in the Network decided to do it based on that reading. It subsequently had productions in Dallas, New Orleans, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, and this summer it's going to be up in the Berkshires.

Q:  How's Juilliard been?

A:  It was a lovely experience. I can't imagine a better place for playwrights to meet and write and hang out.

Q:  I met you at the 24 SEVEN Lab in New York. You want to talk about that at all?

A:  About meeting you? Changed my life.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Oh, I don't know. Maybe once or twice a year I'll see something that really blows me away. But there's a lot more bad stuff than good out there. I guess if it were easy everybody would know how to do it. If it were easy I would know how to do it better.

Q:  I know you have a family. (one kid? Two kids?) How do you balance your artistic and family life?

A:  Yeah, two kids (baby girls), and it's pretty crazy. But probably easier than if I had a real job. My wife and I are both writers, so we're home a lot. And the kids are inspiring, which helps.

Q:  What advice would you give to the young upstart playwright who happens upon this blog post?

A:  Am I too old now to be a young upstart playwright? I don't know, I might try to discourage the person, because writing plays is obviously not for everybody. But bad writers can't be discouraged, and good writers wouldn't listen to me anyway.


Q:  Will you give the link please for those folks who want to go see your SPF show?

A:  Absolutely: http://www.spfnyc.com/festival/show.cfm?id=80 Tickets are 10 bucks, and I'd love it if other writers could come check it out.

Turned in a TV script this morning

Don't want to say much more about it now, but you may hear more once I hear the response. I can say I was paid to write an episode of a TV show and it's more money probably than I would be paid for an off broadway show and it's only like 25 minutes long and took less than 2 weeks of my time.