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Feb 8, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 116: Alan Berks





Alan Berks

Hometown: Chicago, Illinois

Current Town: Minneapolis, MN

Q:  Tell me about Music Lovers coming up in March.

A:  It's a love-triangle, romantic comedy thing about two musicians and a record executive, and the Workhaus Collective is producing at the Playwrights Center in March. I get to direct it too with an incredible cast and a set that will transform the rectangle that is the theater into a bar/coffee shop/art gallery/stage. I'm very excited. Come see it.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I started writing a novel. Seriously. (I think you and I had a conversation about novels when you were in Minnesota. Branching out.) I just felt like I wanted to deal with a wider range of subjects, more characters, bigger picture, and – as we all pretty much know – considering the economics of theater – you can't do that in theater.

Q:  Tell me about Minnesota Playlist.

A:  MinnesotaPlaylist.com is the website that my wife, Leah Cooper, and a friend, Matthew Foster, started in October of 2008 to fill the void in the Twin Cities for a more comprehensive source for information on Twin Cities performing arts. For such a large cultural scene, we thought there should be a trade publication of some kind. Also, we thought it would be fun. Sometimes, it's fun. Sometimes, it's a lot more work than we bargained for. But we're a central source for audition notices and a comprehensive performance calendar. We aggregate all the critic's reviews on the site and also provide a searchable database of talent in the Twin Cities. We also do monthly issues on various topics in the performing arts and get artists and arts journalists to write thought-provoking, or how-to, or memoir essays over the course of the month. . . What does it say that I can write more about this publication than I can about the show I'm so excited to be doing in March? It frightens me a little.

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

A:  I would actually fire every Artistic Director at every non-profit regional theater across the country, whether they were thought to be doing a good job or not, and replace them with someone fifteen years younger who has been running a completely independent but successful small theater in the same town.

Why the hell not? People keep talking about theater dying; maybe it's because theater leaders have bad taste, or are too set in their ways, or too isolated, or something. Seems to me we should do something more dramatic than have another conference about how we can improve our social networking marketing. Let's change something real and dramatic, something about the content that gets produced. In a way, I don't care what one thing it is as long as it's big.

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

A:  This is a great question. I think that if this were the question on grant applications that I was asked – instead of the describe-your-vision-as-an-artist question (Answer: depends on the time of day. . . ) – I might get more grants. . . And yet, now that I sit down to write about it, I go blank. . .

Here's one: The first script I ever wrote was a three-part sketch for the variety show in my high school. It was a parody of old-fashioned noir films, working on which I met the guy who would quickly become my best friend. Then, on opening night, I stepped out on stage in a trench-coat with a bubble gum cigarette dangling from my mouth and a fedora on my head and before I even opened my mouth to speak I heard a girl in the front row say, "He's cute." Then I started the monologue, and everyone started laughing, and kept laughing at all the right places. . . I think theater people are sometimes idealists because sometimes life in the theater is ideal.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like anything that is done well in any style on any subject though generally I enjoy active stories about adult people who actually do stuff in the world more than I like miniscule psychological analysis about people overwhelmed by their lives or archetypal abstraction that aren't about people at all. I like both language and very physical styles of theater. I like dance a lot these days. I like when theater makers remember that the theater is three-dimensional, that actors have bodies, and people – even in script-based plays - communicate with more than their tongues, teeth, and the location of their feet in relation to the fourth wall.

I get excited by plays where the playwright thinks that people other than him or herself are dumb, by plays that substitute clever for compassionate, or think that compassion is actually discovering that other people actually exist and they suffer. But that's a negative kind of excitement.

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

A:  I'd like to say, don't do it, but that's clearly not going to stop anyone really. Instead, I'd say that you shouldn't expect to make a living at it, and you should see that as allowing you the freedom to make the kind of theater you really like rather than the kind of theater that other people tell you is supposedly more commercially viable. No one, even the big regional theaters, is making commercially viable theater, so fuck 'em. There's always a bunch of serious or committed other theater artists to collaborate with. Find them and do what you want. . . Unless you're into musical theater. Then I don't know what you should do. Your theater is apparently commercially viable.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Looks like a play I wrote a few years back called "Almost Exactly Like Us" will be produced by an off-off Broadway theater company called Theater of the Expendable. I wrote it for a theater company in the Twin Cities called Gremlin Theater, and it came in wild and woolly and just barely in time for opening, so I'm happy that I'll get another chance to see it done. I actually became pretty proud of it in the end. (That's a plug for Gremlin Theater too.)

A bunch of Workhaus playwrights are doing a show at the Humana Festival this year with Dominique Serrand, formerly of Theatre de la Jeune Lune. I'm happy to plug them. They're friends.

Send us topic suggestions for MinnesotaPlaylist.com. That's also a plug.

if you're in Minnesota for the Fringe Festival in August, I'll probably be doing an ensemble-created, site-specific piece called "Ringtone." Come check that out.

Feb 6, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 115: Erik Ehn


Photo Credit Kagami 

Erik Ehn

Hometown: Dallas

Current Town: Providence

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  15 play cycle on the history of 20th century America through the lens of genocide. Soulographie.

Q:  Can you talk a little about "Arts in the One World"?

A:  Fifth iteration. Follow up to rat. Building an ensemble/conversation around art for social change in international community. Draft (draft!) agenda attached.

Draft Agenda 12/30/09
ARTS IN THE ONE WORLD 2010

Home: Composing the Rooted Local in the Rapid Global Environment

How the arts and social services compose, consider, and translate community

We are looking at how the sense of home – the ways it is defined and enacted – is useful as a political and esthetic argument for fidelity, trust, immanence, the safe store of memory and the reconstitution of identity. (As against? in dialogue with? industry and the nation-state.)

AOW is an annual gathering; this is our fifth convening. We pull together students, faculty, practitioners and activists across disciplines, from immediate and international communities, framing presentations and conversations open to the school and the general public. We explore various ways artistic, political, and historical purposes intersect (through reconciliation, the recovery of historical memory, and advocacy for justice).

Our partner in hosting the conference is the Interdisciplinary Genocide Study Center (Rwanda) – where the Tutsi Genocide is researched, testimony is gathered, negationism is resisted, and social space for survivors is afforded.

Wednesday, March 17
2-5 Keynote presentation: Chinua Achebe in Conversation (R+R)
5-6 Conference introductions: History and overview
6-7:30 Dinner
7:30 Performance

Thursday, March 18 – Rwanda/Uganda: The Current Scene
8-8:30 Coffee
8:30-9 Reflections and Forecasts
9-10:30 IGSC Report
10:30-11 Break
11-12:30 IGSC Session 2
12:30-2 Lunch
2-4 Keynote Speakers: Hope Azeda, Carole Karemera
4-4:30 Break
4:30-6 Panel: Arts, service initiatives: Africa/Africa-US
4:30-6 Film: Jen Marlowe – Rebuilding Hope
6-7:30 Dinner
7:30-10 Performances, Presentations:
Jill Pribylova: Okulamba Dance Company
Colleen Wagner: The Monument
Film: Abigail Disney – Pray the Devil Back to Hell

Friday, March 19 – Palestine, Israel, The Mid-East: Conversations
8-8:30 Coffee
8:30-9 Reflections and Forecasts
9-12:30 Workshop: BoxWhatBox (Part A)
9-12:30 Panel: Becoming a Diasporic Cluster
12:30-1:30 Lunch
1:30-3:30 Presentations, with Q+A:
A: Lisa Schelssinger, Ed Mast, Laura Zam: from Collaterally Damaged
B: Guitta Tahmassebi: Operation Blackout, Michael Devine: Divided Territories: Making Theatre in Kosovo, Joanna Sherman, Michael McGuigan: Bond Street projects
C: Story Circle, facilitated by Devorah Neumark
3:30-4 Break
4-5:30 Conversation:
Rula Awwad-Rafferty, Neery E. Melkonian, Dorit Cypis: on Zochrot and the Nakba, incl. Norma Musih: on the town of Sumeil
5:30-7:30 Dinner
7:30-10 Performances:
Michael Anthony Reyes Benavides, Luis Rosa: Crime Against Humanity
Lauren Weedman: Bust (tent.)

Saturday, March 20: Opening out
[All day: Film Festival – shown on a rolling basis throughout the day.]
8-8:30 Coffee
8:30-9 Reflections and Forecasts – Yesterday, today
9-12:30 Performance Workshops:
Elaine Avila, Kate Weiss
Michael Devine – BoxWhatBox (Part B)
9-10:30 Concurrent Roundtables:
Systems (Theaters, Collectives, Social Initiatives)
Groups A and B
Special Topics:
A: Actions for the Individual Artist
B: Art and Personal Identity/Healing
C: Art and the Living Archive
10:30-11 Break
11-12:30 Concurrent Roundtables:
Systems (Theaters, Collectives, Social Initiatives)
Groups A and B
Special Topics:
A: Students and Activism
B: Cultural Diplomacy
12:30-2 Lunch
2-4 Concurrent Roundtables:
The Local and International in Continuum
Groups A, B, C, D
Performance/Conversation:
The Generations Project
4-4:30 Break
4:30-6:30 Concurrent Panels:
A: Art and Peacebuilding
B: The Visual Arts
Presentation:  Lili Bernard: Ceiba De Cuba
6:30-8 COMMUNAL DINNER
8-10 Performances:
Hector Aristizabal
Sandeep Bagwati: Transience
Paula Cizmar, Carol Mack: Seven, and Cklara Moradian: Tamam
Laura Zam: Collaterally Damaged

Sunday, March 21
8-8:30 Coffee
8:30-9 Reflections and Forecast
9-10:30 Panel: Storytelling Now
10:30-11 Break
11-1 Panel: Home and Homelessness
1-2:30 Lunch, Review, and Planning


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

A:  I was seven, I was fat. I dove into a life preserver at a public pool, got stuck. Drowning, upside down - pulled out and the only way to get the preserver off was to take my shorts off in plain view. Art!

Q:  You are now the head of the playwriting program at Brown.  What are your plans for the playwrights who will be studying there?

A:  Have them write a lot. Write with an awareness of the whole U, the town, the region, etc. - To accept responsiblity as community organizers. To advocate for joy, even the joy of outrage.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind that happens. What Abdoh was; community theater, anything that involves terrified people doing terrible things, or delighted people infecting the unsuspecting with delight. So, I guess, contagion.

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

A:  Get sleep, watch nutrition, stay strong and stay in trouble otherwise. Writing is a license to intrude, anywhere.

Q:  Any plugs?:

A:  Arts in the One World. Come on by!

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Theatre_Speech_Dance/about/oneworld.html

Resources for playwrights

Places in New York to go read new plays by contemporary playwrights. 

The New Dramatists Library:

http://newdramatists.org/Library_Hours.htm

The Drama Book Shop:

http://www.dramabookshop.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts


http://www.nypl.org/locations/lpa

(You can also watch films here of plays and musicals from the recent and not so recent past, though I think you may have to reserve them ahead of time.)

Feb 4, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 114: Krista Knight


Krista Knight

Hometown: Portola Valley, CA

Current Town: La Jolla, CA

Q: What are you working on now?

A: We are about to start rehearsals for my play PHANTOM BAND in March (for the Baldwin New Play Festival here at UCSD) and there’s lots afoot with casting and designer meetings and the like. I’m starting something new so I won’t prematurely metabolize that play before we get into the rehearsal room. I’m alternating between a silent opera about a house painter obsessed with the family of a house he used to paint, and a play called SALAMANDER LEVIATHAN about a farmer named Salamander Leviathan who is being successively bled by the town schoolteacher in 19th century Wisconsin. I’m going to hear both tomorrow so I’m hoping one will float to the surface and make itself apparent as a play worth pursuit.

Q: You're getting an MFA at UCSD right now. What's that program like?

A: I love it. Naomi Iizuka (who runs the Playwriting program) is freaking fantastic. I really can’t say enough about how much she’s done for my writing and the way I approach theater. She makes me scared and excited and totally over-enthused about writing and play-making in discussion. Scared in a good way. In a – UH OH we’re going to create something and who the hell knows what it’s going to look like and if it’s going to escape and raze townships or bring people to a greater understanding of humanity– kind of way. I sweat a lot in workshop. Mostly I am grateful to be here.

The program itself is an exciting intersection of the theatrical arts – there are graduate designers, directors, actors, stage managers, choreographers, scholars, and playwrights all working in conjunction. In my second year I’ve taken greater advantage of the opportunities for interdisciplinarity. I took a sound design/telematics class in the fall, and I wrote new text for a production of LOVES LABORS LOST hybridized with a fictional Darwinian study of Sexual Selection. I also wrote the new text for an Enron-esque adaptation of Machiavelli’s play LA MANDRAGOLA.

San Diego sometimes drives me crazy. There is a gallery in La Jolla that only has sculptures of whales. Expensive glass whales. I think the door handles of the gallery are whale tales.

BUT the natural landscape here is beautiful and my German nanobiologist friend is teaching me how to surf. Also having The La Jolla Playhouse across the street is an asset. Their literary manager Gabriel Greene is dramaturging my Baldwin Play and we get tickets to some great theater.

Q: You were the fellow at P73 a few years back. How was that?

A: Despite the possibility of sounding entirely over-enthused, I loved that too. I think it’s the best career thing that’s ever happened to me. Asher and Liz took a risk on me. I proposed to write something about Intelligent Design and Evolution and came back with that piece about swarming teenagers and a molting grandmother I think they were like WHAT? But it worked out. It was such a rare and beautiful thing to have these intelligent, nurturing artistic advocates so soon out of undergrad. I would spend afternoons working on the play in their office in Brooklyn. They connected me with brilliant collaborators. That year is very special to me.

Q: You also were the impetus for P73 starting their writing group, Interstate 73. Can you tell me about that?

A: Sure! I had just moved to New York the year before and I thought it might be a good way of building an artistic community. When I first got the P73 Fellowship, Asher made a speech about making the fellowship what you wanted it to be—and they really facilitated that. I love responding to other writers and being part of a greater dialogue than what’s happening in my head and on my page.

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

A: Oh dear. Let’s see. When I was in kindergarten, or pre-kindergarten, and I would get hungry sitting at my tiny desk in class, I would reach my arms out as wide as they would go and pretend I had a large sandwich or slice of cake. I would munch this victual from side to side, recessing my hands closer and closer towards my face as the imaginary sandwich or cake was consumed. My classmates thought I was very strange. I don’t know what this explains though other than I have a vivid imagination and I am hungry.

I also don’t know anyone who could beat me at tag.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I like theater that kicks ass. I like theater where you get all tingly and know that SOMETHING is HAPPENING. I like theater that has something naked in it—and something raw, because I think that is hard for me.

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

A: Call me, we’ll get coffee and talk shop. And I really feel like it’s an art of attrition. If you want to do it, and you love to do it, and you keep doing it, you’ll be able to do it.

Q: Any plugs?

A: If you’re in San Diego, you should see my play PHANTOM BAND April 14-24th. If you’re in LA you should see Ronald McCants’ play THE PEACOCK MEN at Company of Angels Feb 5th-March 7th. If you’re in NY you should see Lauren Yee’s play CHING CHONG CHINAMAN at Pan Asian Rep March 19th-April 11th. Go UCSD Playwrights!!

Jan 30, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 113: Steve Yockey


Steve Yockey

Hometown: Atlanta, GA

Current Town: San Francisco, CA

Q:  Tell me about Large Animal Games.

A:  It’s an irreverent little play that looks at the version of ourselves we present vs. the truths that our actions betray. And big game hunting. It opened last November in a co-world premiere between Dad’s Garage in Atlanta, GA and Impact Theatre in Berkeley, CA. Both companies enjoy taking risks and sometimes, maybe, let me get away with a bit of murder. It’s the closest thing to a true comedy that I’ve ever written. And people laughed, so that’s encouraging.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  A three-hander revenge play for Jasson Minadakis at Marin called The Thrush & The Woodpecker. Also, a commission for South Coast Rep that fuses a Japanese-American woman’s affair with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. They might not believe I’m working on it, but I really am. Cross my heart.

Q:  Tell me about Out of Hand Theatre.

A:  OOH is an amazing company of artists deeply committed to creating theatrical events and new works that provoke and involve an audience. Never passive. Always thoughtful. Very physical. I worked collaboratively with OOH on the touring self-help seminar send-up HELP! and a commedia-inspired look at the coalescing roles of corporations, government and the media, Cartoon. The worst part of being a roaming company member is missing the intensive collaborative work. The best part is missing the chunk of regular boot camp rehearsals called “physical hell.”

Q:  You're also Playwright in Residence at Marin right now. What is it like to have a theatrical home or two?

A:  I’m at Marin on a residency through the National New Play Network. It’s a fantastic program where playwrights are integrated into the artistic staff of a theatre for one season. Whoever invented the concept of the “residency” is tops in my book. It does feel like the Bay Area has become a new kind of artistic home, especially being so close to San Francisco’s Encore Theatre where producer Lisa Steindler loudly champions my work. Back in Atlanta, theatres like Dad’s Garage and Actor’s Express continue to be the places willing to take big chances on launching my new work.

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

A:  When I was in the sixth grade, I wrote this melodramatic poem where the main character felt so alone that he stole a bunch of fireworks, watched them burn and then shot himself. All very serious. The next day, I was summoned to the guidance counselor’s office to find my English teacher comforting my anxious Father and my Mother on the verge of tears. I refused to apologize.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Primarily, anything that’s ambitious in form, storytelling or theatricality. Anything that’s rough and raw on an audience because it knows that they can take it. Anything that’s written with a confident voice so I can trust, even if I disagree or dislike something, that I’m in good hands. Also, I’m a sucker for well-done chamber musicals.

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

A:  Write as many plays as you can. Write until your head is empty and then fill it up and write again. The more you exercise those muscles, the further you can push yourself and your ideas. This is purely my experience, but I’d also say stay true to the artistic relationships you find inspiring and exciting. A big piece of unlocking the kind of resources necessary in getting your plays up will be inevitably be fueled by these sustained artistic commitments.

Q;  Plugs, please:

A:  Artistic Director Kate Warner is directing a public reading of afterlife at New Rep in Boston on Feb 8. Heavier than... opens at Insurgo Theatre Movement in Las Vegas on March 19. And in early March, a group of NYU grad actors is tackling a twisted, over-the-top one act called Wolves as a part of their Free Play festival with Kerry Whigham at the helm. That one should be fun.

Jan 29, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 112: Desi Moreno-Penson


Desi Moreno-Penson

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: New York City!!!! Why live anywhere else?

Q:  Tell me about this one person show you're writing.  How did this come about?

A:  It was so weird and beautifully sudden, like so many things in this business...my friend, Jose Yenque is a very talented Latino actor who's been featured in a lot of wonderful films and television shows like, TRAFFIC, THE X-FILES, NIP/TUCK, HEROES, SIX FEET UNDER, among others...we've known each other since the mid-90s when we were both just starting out as actors and we performed in quite a few showcases together here in the city.

Anyway, he was approached by a children's theatre organization out in Los Angeles called Enrichment Works about playing the role of well-known baseball player Roberto Clemente. Enrichment Works specializes in creating one-person shows for kids that are based on the lives of famous, historical figures. Jose really liked the idea of playing such a beloved Latino figure, but there was one snag...the piece hadn't been written yet. When they asked Jose if he knew of any Latino/a playwrights who might be interested in the project, he immediately gave them my name and contact info. The next day, the artistic director for Enrichment Works, Abby Tetenbaum, contacted me by phone...we had a nice, long chat, and that was pretty much it...thanks to the generous referral of my friend, I suddenly had a lovely commission on my hands!

I've been working on the piece since last summer and am now busy with the rewrites on the first draft. Once it's done, and if Jose’s not busy with a film or television show, he will go into rehearsals with a director and then it will be ready to tour...primarily in middle schools and libraries in and around Los Angeles and the Glen Valley region. I'll admit, since I'm not a huge fan of one-person shows, this has been a difficult process for me as a writer, but a great learning experience nonetheless.

Q:  What else are you working on? 

A:  It’s been a great year; my short play, Spirit Sex was produced as part of the 2009 Going to the River Festival at Ensemble Studio Theatre and the same piece has been selected for the next annual short plays anthology published by Smith and Kraus, THE BEST 10-MINUTE PLAYS OF 2010. Then in October, my play, Ghost Light was produced at 59E59 Theatre for a limited run, directed by Jose Zayas. Currently, I've started work on a new play, The Gift Shop of Touch and Roses, and as part of my New Year's resolutions, I'm being much tougher on myself as far as imposing deadlines. So, I'm hoping to be done with the first draft of the play by the end of May. In addition, I am writing two other short plays, as well as trying to turn another play, Screwing Rachel into a fun musical, and another, Devil Land into a novel. Also, I won the BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) Fellowship for Live Performance this past year sponsored by the Bronx Council on the Arts and as part of my final requirement for the very generous grant I received, I will be performing my two monologues, A Latina Prepares and Don’t Knock It Till You Try It at the Bruckner Bar and Grill in the Bronx on Wednesday, February 3rd at 7pm. You can check out the BCA website for all the info, http://www.bronxarts.org/ . I’ve never been there before, but I hear that there’s a lovely performance space in the back AND an art gallery…plus, I hear that the grub in this place is pretty darn good -- I guess we’ll see!

Q:  What kind of theater excites you? 

A:  I like theatre that is neither pretentious nor elitist, but is immediate, visceral, and deals with the darker issues of the human experience…anger, jealousy, greed, fear, lust, etc. I love stories that will borrow from myths and legends, the supernatural and the paranormal, urban legends…when all’s said and done, I just want an interesting story that features interesting, three-dimensional characters. And I’d prefer that they be in some sort of trouble -- big, big trouble.

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

A:  This is a difficult one for me…I started out as an actor and then went back to grad school and became a playwright, so I’ve really only been writing for about ten years now. In other words, I still feel like I’m actively working towards finding my ‘voice’ as a writer. I think the best and most practical way to answer this question would be to work hard towards finding your ‘thing’ as a playwright and then, just go for it. According to Jason Zinoman’s review of Ghost Light in the New York Times, he wrote, “The playwright Desi Moreno-Penson belongs to a new generation of theater artists reared on a diet of vampires, zombies and charming serial killers. Call this movement the Theater of Blood.”  Now, I personally LOVED being called out like that (I thought it was cool)…but at the same time, it was weird for me, too, since it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I started as a playwright…but so what? If my ‘process’ appears to be moving me into creepier dramatic territory, I’m not going to fight it. In fact, as a writer, I’m genuinely curious and very excited to see where it takes me. Fact is, I’m a huge horror film buff and I LOVE a good scary story!

Q:  Plugs please: 

A:  I’ve just recently seen Sexual Healing by Jonathan Leaf over at the Mint Theatre and I enjoyed it very much, and I’m now very much looking forward to seeing Teaser Cow by Clay McLeod Chapman.

Jan 28, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 111: Andrea Stolowitz





Hometown: NYC

Current Town: Portland

Q:  Tell me about Memory Water that's up now in the Fertile Ground Festival.

A:  Memory Water started out when the director Samantha asked me to do an adaptation of the folk tale La Llorona. After doing much research I decided in my version to tie her story to the historical figure of Cortes' translator Malinalli. Samantha was already working with Chisao Hata for the piece and the idea was to tell a new story with text, movement and image.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  About to start a new play--not sure about exact story yet but I intend to start working in earnest in Feb. when I go to Port Townsend. I have another play (TALES OF DOOMED LOVE) being included in a theater festival there at Key City Public theater and will go for a few extra days and treat it like a writing retreat. Then I have another week at Soapstone Residency to work some more.

Q:  You are a Dramatists Guild Rep.  What does that mean and what do your duties entail?

A:  It means that I (and Steve Patterson my co-rep) try to provide guild services, support, and outreach to dramatists in Oregon. This basically means maintaining a list serve, creating a community, and answering legal questions. My personal campaign is to help playwrights, directors and other collaborators understand their rights and responsibilities. I am particularly interested in helping directors understand what is legal in terms of deconstructing text. Too many directors play "fast and loose" with a text without understanding the very real legal implications they face.

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 16 (in 1989) I decided to do a volunteer environmental work camp in Siberia. The wall had just come down, I had taken a few years of high school Russian, and there I was in Siberia.

I am always on a quest "to know".

Q:   What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like Ann Bogart's (Siti company's) work a lot. I like how the visual and other theatrical elements tell the story along with the text.

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

A:  Write,  seek out professionals you admire and work with and learn from them, and find your tribe.

Q:   Plugs, please.

A:
Playwrights West
http://www.playwrightswest.org/

Jan 27, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 110: Clay McLeod Chapman







Clay McLeod Chapman

Hometown: Richmond, Virginia

Current Town: Brooklyn, New York

Q: Tell me about your play Teaser Cow that's up right now. How did this come about?

A: teaser cow came about as a commissioned work from the company One Year Lease. They split their year between New York and the mountains of Greece, which isn't such a bad way to live -- and they invited me to craft a script around their acting ensemble, picking a myth that tickled my fancy and catering it to their crew. I'd been reading Fast Food Nation at the time, total fluke -- only to start thinking about the Minotaur as a possible starting point for the project. The two elements just adhered themselves together in my head until I couldn't separate them. Chalk it up to fortuitous timing, but reading through Schlosser's book was all it took. It was fun drawing parallels between ancient Greece and our modern day beef industry... And surprisingly simple.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: 2009 was the year of saying yes to everything. Anything that came my way, I took it. Writer-for-hire gigs, commissioned gigs, you name it. From there, it's up to me to try and find myself in these projects. See if there's a way to subtly instill my own sense of storytelling into work where I'm not the genesis-point. I've been juggling a bunch of different projects, either my own or others -- and it's been a blast so far. Challenging, but fun. I've been writing the book for a new musical with soft rocker Bruce Hornsby, so my mom's really happy with that one. We've been developing it for a few years now and we're finally moving onto the regional theatre phase, hoping to bring it back to New York in 2011. Fingers crossed. I've been developing this one-man musical with this band called the Venn Diagrams, titled JULIAN. We just got a residency at Dixon Place, which has been a great help furthering it along. Dixon Place is downright amazing. I've also been on the creative team for this mondo-crazy project called The Ride -- which is essentially is us taking a fleet of tour buses here in New York and renovating them into these theatres on wheels. Literally -- a theatre on wheels. Basically, it's going to be a musical that takes place on a tour bus through Manhattan, with all the action taking place on the streets. Crazy.

Q: Can you talk a little about the Pumpkin Pie Show, what it is and how it came to be?

A: The Pumpkin Pie Show is my baby. It's my protective blanket, it's my stamp collection. Whenever someone asks what's it about, I always tell people it's a rigorous storytelling session -- which makes it kind of sound like a bunch of ol' bubbas sitting on the front porch spinning yarns, but it's really an opportunity for me and my friends to connect with an audience on a level that a lot of fourth-wall theatre doesn't allow us to do. When I'm performing in something, I want to really see the whites of the audiences eyes. I want to achieve a level of intimacy and personal connectivity that the fourth wall tends to shut down. So the Pumpkin Pie Show is a series of short stories that I've written, all within the first person narrative -- handed over to a group of actors, namely me and my best friend (and amazing performer) Hanna Cheek. Rather than disregard the audience, we go through these stories as if they were direct-address monologues, performing a set-list of however many pieces each night based on a certain theme or whatnot. It's more like going to a rock concert, in my mind -- where the band interacts with the audience as they go through their set-list of songs. Bands, some bands, the bands I like, don't shirk off the audience. They tend to play to the audience, which was always something I wished theatre did more of -- so that's what we try to do with the Pumpkin Pie Show. Every year we have a new one, complete with new stories. We've been performing for over ten years now and I really hope I can keep doing it until the day I die. It's a super-small endeavor, where we're performing to thirty or fifty people a night. That intimacy is something we've grown dependent on. That's the value of the show. This isn't Broadway bound because the performance is contingent upon a personal connection between the audience and the performer. All we need is that link and the evening feels like something special. Something singular in its experience. Theatrical snow-flakes, you know?

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

A: My mother always told me this story about myself when I was about two. I was just learning to walk, saddled up into one of those walker-stroller thingies. It's like a plastic donut on wheels with a diaper harnessed directly in the center. You slip your kid in and the diaper holds them up enough that their feet are just touching the floor, allowing them to walk along on their own while they're being wheeled around by this protective barrier. Or so I've been told. Well -- when I was two, we lived in this house where the door to our basement was situated inside our kitchen. Mom's doing the dishes while I'm strolling around in my walker. She's got her back to me, doing her thing while I'm doing mine. Somehow, the door to the basement was open. Just a crack. I'm rolling around -- only to make a bee-line for the basement door. My walker pushes up against it, opening it up even further -- and I take a header down fifteen or twenty wooden steps, taking the tumble while I'm still straddling this plastic doughnut. I land, walker included, on the concrete floor of our basement. Fractured my skull. My mom turns, hear's me screaming -- runs down the steps, finds me bleeding all along the basement floor. She panics. Must've gone crazy in that moment. She scoops me up with her hands, cradling my body in one hand and my head in the other -- and rushes out the door. She runs straight out into the street, screaming her head off. The first car the drives by stops and mom gets right in and demands they take her and me to the hospital. Turns out there's nothing to be done in regards to setting bone, considering it was my skull. I think I had to wear some kind of radar-dish like a dog wears whenever they're not allowed to nibble on themselves, just to keep me from scratching at my own fractured skull. The story would've ended there had it not been for the fact that when I was five -- I fractured my head all over again. This time at the county fair. Mom took me -- and here I am, running through the crowd, all fives years of myself going nutty because we're at the fair having fun. I'm not looking where I'm going, only to get clothes-lined by this young couple holding hands. I totally try to red-rover them, their linked-hands hooking me in the chin and sending me over backwards. I landed on a tent spike. The tent spike cracks open my skull. Again -- mom freaks. We're off to the hospital. Same story. And now -- now there's this ridge along the back slope of my skull. You can totally take your finger and run it down the length of my head and feel the indentation there. It's probably about three inches long and a half-inch wide. No lie.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I might sound like a bit of a broken record here, but I really do get into theatre that makes me feel valuable as an audience member. When I go see a show, I want to believe I'm not watching a movie or a television show. I want to be engaged in such a way that I know in my heart this experience will never be replicated ever again. No matter how many times the actors performer the exact same text, this given performance, our performance, will never ever be duplicated -- and that's because the audience changes. That gives value to them. I don't like it when theatre disregards what's beyond the fourth wall. It's not that I need actors jumping into my lap or anything, but I just want to feel like we're all regarding the sacred-qualities to theatre, which is two disparate elements (the audience and the performers) coming together in this one particular instance and forging a dynamic between each other, communicating with each other in very subtle ways. So, when I leave the theatre, I as an audience member feel special because I now know that this experience I had in the theatre will never ever be conjured up again -- at least not in the same way -- because tomorrow night it'll be a different group of audience members who will bring something altogether different than what I did.

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

A: Produce your own work. Do as much of the behind-the-scenes stuff yourself. Make it a labor of love more than anything else. The best way, I believe, to get your work out there is to just do it yourself.

Q: Plugs, please:

A:

The Pumpkin Pie Show! www.pumpkinpieshow.com

Teaser Cow! www.oneyearlease.org

Julian! http://dixonplace.org/html/artistinresidence.html

Bruce Hornsby! http://www.playbill.com/news/article/136184-Bruce-Hornsby-Musical-Will-Premiere-in-Virginia-in-January-2011

Jan 26, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 109: Kelly Younger




Kelly Younger


Hometown: Los Angeles, CA

Current Town: Los Angeles, CA

Q:  You adapted a novel for the stage.  Can you tell me about the project and what that was like?  What are the special challenges associated with adaptation?   

A:  Irish Repertory Theatre in NY commissioned me to adapt the novel Banished Children of Eve by Peter Quinn.  It's a massive Civil War novel set in the Lower East Side of NY where Irish-American and African-American tensions erupted in the bloody Draft Riots.  Like most historical novels, there are loads of characters (some fictional and some real), multiple locations, and lengthy-backstories.  To be honest, when I was flying out for the meeting and reading it on the plane, I kept thinking, "There's just no way I can adapt this!  It's a great novel but I can’t pinpoint a single dramatic line to connect all the different stories."  So about a half-hour before my meeting I was having a coffee near the theatre and starting to panic about what I was going to tell them.  Then it hit me. There are two characters -- an Irish man and an African-American woman -- who are both actors in a shoddy production of Uncle Tom's Cabin.  He is a minstrel actor and she is a mulatto actress who lightens her skin with stage make-up.  In other words, he plays in black face and she plays in white face.  They are lovers.  That's when I figured out it is essentially a Romeo and Juliet story with two warring families (in this case, newly arrived Irish and newly emancipated African-Americans) all living on top of one another in the Bowery district and violently competing for the bottom rung on the social ladder.  I decided to set the play in the theatre where these actors perform and live.  
And of course while all hell is breaking loose on the streets of NY, they need to decide who they really are once the make-up comes off.  Well, Irish Rep loved the idea and set me to work immediately.  

As far as special challenges go, the one that I found most difficult was balancing what was faithful to the novel and what was necessary for the play.  Audiences who are familiar with the book will recognize a scene here and there, but I had to take characters who never once cross paths in the novel and put them on stage together, and even in complicated relationships with one another.  So there was a certain amount of guilt.  I kept hearing a little voice saying, “But that’s not what happens in the book!”  Luckily, the novelist Peter Quinn has been enormously encouraging and generous.  In fact, he came to the workshop reading last summer, pulled me aside and said, "A novel can be very forgiving.  You can hide your mistakes.  But in a play, you can't hide.  These characters are now yours as well as mine, so do whatever you need to make it a play."  Talk about generous.  It also helped that we had incredibly talented actors like Tracie Thoms, David Wilson Barnes, Fred Applegate and Michelle Hurst, as well as an incredibly smart dramaturg in Kara Manning.  Ciaran O’Reilly, who just directed “Emperor Jones,” will direct the production later this fall.  He’s been an amazing guide since the very beginning of the commission.         

Q:  Can you tell me about Rorschach?  

A:   A little while back there was an article in the LA Times about the Rorschach inkblot test.  What caught my eye was the beautiful color plate of one of the inkblots.  And below it was this photograph of a guy from the 1920s named Hermann Rorschach.  It never occurred to me that there was an actual guy named Rorschach (other than Watchmen comics, ha!).  I asked myself, who is this guy who one day decided to paint some smudges and ask someone what they thought they saw in it?  I started to do a little research.  Turns out Hermann Rorschach was this brilliant Swiss psychologist who worked with schizophrenics.  When he was a kid, he loved playing this old parlor game called klecks where you would look at inkblots and talk about what you saw.  He decided to play it with his patients, and based on his experiences, wrote his entire dissertation on the experiment.  I started to nerd out on this stuff, and found a beat-up old copy of his book on eBay.  Long story short, Rorschach was sure this book would be a major contribution to the field of psychology, but instead, he ended up in the laughing stock.  No one took him or his test seriously, and before he could even defend himself, he died suddenly.  When I learned this fact, I felt totally heartbroken.  Here was a young guy who desperately wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist, but instead, was really an artist.  He just didn’t know it.  So I started writing about a character from the present who is obsessed with Rorschach from the past.  It’s a six-character play with both time-periods on stage at the same time.  It’s been described so far as funny, romantic, and moving, and even a little in the style of a Tom Stoppard play.  We just had a fancy backers reading of Rorschach here in LA with Jason Ritter in the lead.  There’s an amazing director attached (Cameron Watson) and my manager is handling all the details, so hopefully we’ll have an announcement soon. 

Q:  What else are you working on now? 

A:   New Repertory Theatre in Boston is developing my full-length play Tender.  They contacted me last fall to be part of their New Voices series and asked if I had a new play for them.  I said, “Sure.”  Then realized I had to write a new play in about four weeks!  After writing Banished Children of Eve (eight characters) and Rorschach (six) I really wanted to write a drama for a small cast in a single set that took place only in the present.  So, Tender is about a working mom realtor and her stay-at-home husband who are on the verge of foreclosure.  They’ve got to reappraise their assets, including her aging truck driver father and his new motorhome.  He’s spent his life driving what’s called a “yard goat” (a semi that moves trailers back and forth in the same warehouse yard, never leaving or going out on the open road).  Now that he’s too old to work, he blows his savings on a motorhome and wants to drive across country.  But when his daughter and son-in-law have to take away his keys, the shit hits the fan and they’ve got to learn that love is not some kind of loan that can be repaid.  I think it’s a play about the debt we owe our parents, the interest we charge our children, and the price of forgiveness.  I’m really interested in the idea of foreclosure, not just on something like a house or a car, but on a person, especially a family member.  I’m also being “groomed” (which makes me sound like a poodle) for television by CAA and going on meetings for some one-hour tv pilots I’ve written.  Even though I was born and raised in Los Angeles, “the industry” is a whole other world.

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 third generation Los Angelino.  In fact, I have a great great aunt who was married to a Sepulveda.  I’m also a distant relative of the outlaw Younger Brothers who rode with their cousins Frank and Jessie James.  This ancestry only means I sometimes feel entitled to run red lights on Sepulveda Boulevard, or on occasion, I have the urge to rob a bank.  Let me assure I have done neither.  I do, however, have a deep interest in Los Angeles history, the myth of California and the American West, etc.  My family has always been blue collar Irish-Catholic.  My dad is a truck driver and, unlike the character in my new play, really a tender guy.  He has a speech impediment.  I never knew this until grade school when I started going to friends’ houses and hearing their dads talk.  I just thought all dads spoke like mine.  Like most Irish homes, language was very important.  Often witty and lyrical, also sarcastic and dangerous, but important nonetheless.  It’s just that in my home, language was also very difficult.  Hard to get out.  My dad literally had to choose certain words over others because some would come out, others would not, especially when they were most needed.  I think growing up in this environment taught me three things.   First, to choose words carefully because they are these physical things that sometimes get stuck in your throat.  It also taught me to listen.  I’d have to wait and hear what word was struggling to get out.  Finally, it taught me empathy.  For me, there’s nothing harder than watching someone trying to say a word, unable to get it out, then seeing them choose a different word that is not actually what they wanted to say.  I guess that’s why I tend to write characters who struggle to say what they mean with the words they want to use.  But I also hope they show enormous courage and perseverance to do so. 

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?  

A:   Well, clearly language based plays.  I lived and studied in Dublin for about three years, so my education is rooted in writers like Synge and O’Casey and Wilde (as well as the local characters I met in pubs).  I can appreciate "physical theatre" and really progressive performance art and mixed media, etc. but really I’m a Friel, Miller, Wilder, Kushner, Guare kind of guy.  I want good story-telling.  I want to be entertained and moved and provoked to think and well as feel.  Wit by Margaret Edson is a beautiful play.  I’d love to have dinner with Lynn Nottage.  I think Rajiv Joseph is about the coolest guy I know, and Mike Vukadinovich is going to be a household name soon.  And I’m probably most jealous of having not written Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg.  I have moments when I wish I could write like Martin McDonagh, Sarah Kane, or Matt Pelfrey, but truth be told, if I had a time-machine I’d just go back and get drunk with Eugene O’Neill.     

Q:  What shows or theaters would you suggest I check out if I came to LA tomorrow?   

A:  As a playwright, I would suggest getting to know the LA branch of E.S.T. (I’m in their playwrights unit), the Road Theatre, the Echo Theatre, Theatre Tribe, and the Blank Theatre.  They’re all very supportive of new work.  I personally love seeing plays at the Furious Theatre and the Black Dahlia.  Both small venues, but always thrilling, smart and ambitious.  There’s also high quality work at larger stages like the Geffen, the Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre, A Noise Within, and the Theatre at Boston Court.  I’m most proud, however, of having started the LA Stage Alliance Ovation Fellows program to get students and recent alumni connected to LA performing arts (www.lastageblog.com/ovation-fellows).  So if you’ve just graduated and are moving to LA, consider applying for a fellowship.

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

A:  Don’t do talk-backs after a staged reading. The director wants a Q&A after a performance? That’s different because the play has been through rehearsals, rewrites, and is now in production. (Even then, try to avoid. Eric Bogosian says "Q&As are so popular in the regional theatres [because] everyone wants to know what the play is 'about.' It's a great way of avoiding what a play is.") But seriously, a talk-back after a reading? Refuse. Artistic Directors and Literary Managers will try and convince you it is good for the playwright, but really, they are trying to appease their audiences. Nothing can be more damaging to a new play (or an emerging playwright) than a well-meaning stranger offering ways to fix your work. A play is not written by committee. Also, do not let a director talk you into blocking a staged reading. Keep the actors seated. If they get up and move around, they become too self-conscious and the reading becomes about the acting and directing (not the play). It also raises audiences’ expectations in an unnecessary way. So, have the reading, keep the actors on their asses, then pour the wine.

Q:  Plugs please:  

A:  If you’re in Boston on March 1, New Repertory Theatre will produce the first staged reading of Tender.  Irish Repertory Theatre will produce Banished Children of Eve off-Broadway this Fall, but the exact dates are not being announced yet.  And I have some new publications, so visit www.KellyYounger.com.

Jan 23, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 108: Lisa Dillman





Hometown: Kalamazoo, Michigan 



Current Town: Chicago



Q:  Tell me about the play you have coming up at Humana.

A: It’s called Ground. It was originally commissioned and developed at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre. The play looks at issues of disrupted family and community in a small town at the U.S.-Mexico border in southernmost New Mexico. The play’s characters include, among others, a border patrolman and a leading member of a citizen-run border surveillance group, but essentially it’s a story about a once cohesive community—and the families within it—that has been fractured by changes in U.S. immigration policy. 



Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  
I’m writing a play about two people who lose their jobs and are forced to reshape their lives when the economy tanks. They each take a very different path to climbing back into the workforce and creating some version of a Plan B. One becomes a full-time guinea pig for pharmaceutical trials; the other starts selling sex toys on commission. Their stories become intertwined as the play examines what it takes to re-envision the future in the face of total uncertainty.

I’m also in the early stages of a play about women and war, which  I’m writing with my longtime collaborators at Chicago’s Rivendell Theatre Ensemble.

Q:  If I went to Chicago tomorrow, what shows or theaters would you suggest I check out?

A:  Well, you’d be in luck because Tina Landau’s production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s BROTHER/SISTER PLAYS is starting previews at Steppenwolf. There’s also a brilliant production of THE PILLOWMAN running right now at the tiny Red Twist Theatre, directed by Kimberly Senior, where the audience sits pretty much inside the action. It’s terrifying and hugely compelling. As a general rule of thumb, I’d also recommend just about anything at A Red Orchid Theatre and Timeline Theatre Company.



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 thirteen, my family moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, for a year. I was a sullen, hormonal mess of newly minted teenagerness at the time; I missed my friends back home, and I was keenly aware of being an outsider (complete with very blond hair and lots of pimples) in this foreign place. My sister and I took classes at a local school, and my parents also home-schooled us in the areas of their particular expertise--visual art and creative writing. As part of the home curriculum, we had a three-hour writing class three times a week with my stepfather, Ken Macrorie, who was a longtime professor of creative writing. I’d been writing stories on my own for several years by that point, but up until that class my writing tended to reflect (or, more accurately, shamelessly imitate) whatever authors I was reading at the time. Ken was a great teacher—incredibly supportive and enthusiastic—and he never shied away from pointing out when we were ladling on the bullshit or dodging around honesty into trite phrases and soupy sentimentality. He loved words, and he was rigorous about emotional truth. During these intensives around the dining room table of our apartment at 13 Calle M. Bravo, all the work was read aloud. Hearing my stories spoken, something shifted in me. I began writing pieces almost completely based in dialogue. And it was as if a whole new creative universe opened up. The thrill of hearing my characters speak. I was so excited by that—I couldn’t get enough. I began to write the world as I saw and heard it, creating fictionalized worlds full of things I really believed, questioned, found hilarious. I felt so powerful! And all of a sudden I was really there—all of me, not just the displaced kid of me—in this amazing city in this fascinating country, exploring and meeting new people who were like and unlike me, and finding out about things I’d never experienced or thought about before. And writing it all down. In dialogue.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  
I’m drawn to work with strong characters and a strong narrative drive, no matter what shape that narrative might take. I tend to like work that assumes the audience is smart enough to fill in a few blanks. I’ve inherited my stepfather’s aversion to soupy emotionalism, but I’m always looking to be moved by what I see in the theatre.

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

A:  Do whatever it takes to find your tribe.
Stay open, keep learning.
Be generous with your colleagues.
Cultivate enthusiasm.
Be patient.

Q:  Any plugs:

A:  Humana, Humana, Humana

Jan 22, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 107: Ellen Margolis






Hometown:  Westbury, New York.  Or San Francisco.

Current Town:  Portland, Oregon.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Current project is seven plays about the afterlife.  Another--further out--is inspired by the history and values and skills of Parkour, the crazy Frenchy free-running, obstacle-vaulting, running-from-the-gendarmes sport.

Q:  Tell me about "The Politics of American Actor Training."

A:  In 2004, I convened a panel for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (in my other life, I'm a college professor) with that title.  Then, with a partner, I spent four years pursuing and editing articles from people invested in the future of the theatre, and now it's a book.  There are fourteen pieces, far-ranging and diverse.  The Indian director Chandradasan wrote a brilliant piece for us on the colonization of Indian theatre as manifest in training.  Victoria Lewis, a documentarian and activist for actors with disabilities, wrote a manifesto for access.  I'm very proud of the people and ideas we've brought together.  The book is far from comprehensive, of course; it's very much intended to be part of an ongoing, often uncomfortable, conversation. 

Q:  How would you characterize the theater scene in Portland?

A:  Hmm.  Small.  Supportive.  Strapped.  Sometimes sublime. 

There's definitely a community here, which is hugely important.  I'm part of a new new-works company here, Playwrights West, along with seven other writers.  As a company we are just coming out of the gate, but the two big Equity Houses--Artists Rep and Portland Center Stage--have already supported us with donated space.  Amazing.

Also, last week I audited the regional auditions for the company, and I have never seen a general audition handled with such care.  Beyond being well organized, there was respect evident in every detail--love, even.  And a real sense of wanting to educate young performers and raise the bar for all of us.  This all reflects the marvelous volunteers (artists and administrators) who work with the Portland Area Theatre Alliance.  I walked away from two days of auditions feeling uplifted.

There aren't too many nice spaces here.  If I got three wishes, one would be to create a beautiful Theatre Row for Portland.  On the other hand, there's good work happening in funky spaces, and good site-specific work as well.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  So much theatre excites me!  I still get teary-eyed when the house lights come down.  I always want and expect to see something great, and very often I do. 

One of my students, Ted Gold, may have summed things up best the other day when he said, "I like to leave the theatre Not Done."

I do love theatre that's wildly ambitious.  Last May I saw a cycle of 14 plays at Tricycle Theatre that covered 250 years of the political and social life of Afghanistan.  I feel like it was one of the gifts of my life that I got to spend that Sunday in that theatre.

I also find that very recently my taste is shifting back to story more than spectacle.  Don't know why, or if it's permanent or just a phase. 

There are so many playwrights whose work regularly makes me throw my hands up in delight and admiration and astonishment.  Martin McDonagh, Gina Gionfriddo, Jose Rivera.   Richard Greenberg.  Bruce Norris. A student of mine named Case Middleton.  All my Playwrights West colleagues.  I won't name them here, so you will go to our website: www.playwrightswest.org.  Pinter, Kushner, Shakespare, Craig Lucas, Suzan-Lori Parks.  I can't stop thinking of people!  Will Eno--brilliant. 

I guess I'm sort of playwright-oriented.  Then again, don't get me started on actors.  I love them.

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

A:  Don't be like me.  Get a lot of words on paper.

Q:  Any plugs:

A:  Go see David Greenspan do Plays at the Atlantic Theater because I can't. 

Jan 21, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 106: Claire Willett





Hometown: Portland, Oregon

Current Town: Portland, Oregon

Q:  You have a reading of your play How the Light Gets In coming up at Fertile Ground Festival. Can you tell me about the play and festival?

A:  Well, here's the synopsis:

-----------------------

“There is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.”

After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Molly Fowler flees her past life for the only safe place she knows – Saint Gabriel Abbey, home of the Benedictine monks who once sheltered her mother. Reckless, self-destructive, with a knack for causing trouble, Molly is an unlikely monastery guest. She quickly makes an enemy of the ambitious Father John, who makes it a project to save her soul. Befriended by the monks who knew her mother, Molly learns some unsettling truths about her parents’ dark history . . . while finding herself drawn into a deep and unsettling intimacy with Brother Magnus, the monastery librarian. But when her past, and her mother’s, finally catch up with her, Molly’s struggle to discover who she is – and who she might become – are violently threatened. This is a story of redemption, and one lost girl’s winding and complex journey out of the darkness and into the light.

-----------------------

For me, a new idea for a play comes when a handful of the millions of random disconnected things bouncing around in my brain bump into each other and stick together. So, for this play, the threads that first got it started were:

--Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem”

--monastic celibacy

--the death of my mother in March 2008

--Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show

--a group of early Roman female saints collectively known as the Virgin Martyrs

--a line in a book I first read ten years ago

--a Benedictine priest named Father Paschal Cheline

--the clash within 21st-century American Catholicism between the political right and left

--working with teenage girls at my church

-- Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose

So that’s the play.


The Fertile Ground Festival – you can check out the whole lineup here, and read the festival blog here (featuring a recurring guest-blogger stint by yours truly) – is really, really exciting. It’s a ten-day festival of new work by Portland artists. It’s completely different from any other new-work festival we’ve had, because it’s completely uncurated and open to anyone. You pay your fee, you’re in the festival. Everyone does their own thing. What makes it really special, and VERY Portland, is that it both gives emerging artists a voice on the same scale as the big companies, and gives those big companies an added financial stake in programming world premieres. As a participating artist, the most exciting thing about it is that it puts me in front of an audience who have already bought into the notion that new work needs to be supported, but who I might not have the resources to reach on my own.

I wrote some grants for the festival way back when it was but a glimmer in the eye of Festival Chair Trisha Mead, but no one would give us any money because it was way too speculative. No one knew what it was. But the first year was a huge success, and we have high hopes for Year 2. We’ve got over 50 works in the festival, and we’re branching out of straight theatre into some cross-discipline pieces – there’s a lot of dance, there’s a performance/visual arts collaboration, and a really exciting ballet/spoken-word fusion piece. That’s all new from last year. We’re hoping to get to a place where next year we can build some donor support, write some grants, and get a base of contributed income to maybe start paying some part-time staff. It’s totally volunteer-driven right now.

Q:  You're working with Mead Hunter on this reading. What do you like most about working with him? How did you get hooked up with him?

A:  The whole saga of my love affair with Mead Hunter can be found here, on the Fertile Ground Festival blog; they asked me to do a regular guest-blog series documenting my process of working with Mead, who I always tell people is the Tim Gunn of the Portland theatre world. He is amazing. He can fix everything. He's helped me cut my play nearly in half, from a ponderous, wordy, over-two-and-a-half-hour tome to a zippy little 90-minute-no-intermission play that is fully 65 pages shorter now than in the first draft. (Which makes me die a little inside. God, can you imagine if I had actually let people SEE that? Shudder.)

I have known Mead, mostly by reputation, for a long time; he was the literary director at Portland Center Stage and widely reputed as The Guy for new work in town. The best in the business. When he went freelance after leaving PCS, I met with him once or twice along with festival chair Trisha Mead to talk about finding a more significant role for him within the festival, and we got to know each other through that. On a whim, I e-mailed him for advice about whether or not this online playwriting class I was looking into was worth paying $400 for, and he basically said, "There's nothing you'll get from those classes that you can't get from smart, informed feedback from artists here." Which got the wheels a-turnin'. So I e-mailed him and was like, "Okay, let's do it."

I think working with Mead was the first "I'm a grownup playwright" thing that I did differently with this play than the last one. One of the things we still feel like Fertile Ground is missing is a way for writers to receive informed critical feedback. Because it's not curated or adjudicated, there are no mechanisms for us as writers to figure out what to fix or what to do differently next time unless we find them ourselves. So I decided I needed to man up and get a professional, with both an editor's and a literary director's brain, to go to town on my script so I'd know where I was.

The best thing about working with Mead is that he's incredibly perceptive. Never once did I feel like he was trying to push me in a certain direction with the script; on the contrary, I felt like he saw exactly where I was going, and all the advice, revisions, cuts, analysis and discussion in our process was specifically geared to help me get there. If the point you want to make is made but the scene continues for a page and a half afterwards, do we lose the point? Does this character detract from the main themes of the story more than he/she adds to it? It was like adjusting the focus on an old-school camera . . . every revision of the script made the picture click into focus a little more clearly.

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

A:  All my life I’ve been insanely terrified of snakes. We had the complete World Book Encyclopedia set when I was a kid, and if you looked up the entry for Snakes, it had like this huge, page-sized, horror-tastic photo of a cobra about to strike, and it scared the shit out of me. Big wide mouth, giant gleaming fangs, creepy-ass cobra hood all flared out . . . it could have been captioned, "The Last Thing You Will See Before You Die." But, for some demented reason, I was OBSESSED with it. I would sneak down to the basement and sit there and look at the snake pictures to scare myself on purpose. If Death Cobra wasn’t doing it for me, I would occasionally mix it up with either A) a lurid full-color illustration from my favorite dinosaur book depicting an archaeopteryx swooping down from the sky to grab a tiny, terrified prehistoric mammal in its talons; or B) the gruesome picture in my Children’s Book of Saints of Saint Sebastian on the rack. All three were a quick and efficient means of guaranteeing traumatic nightmares, but I could not stop. It was like crack for six-year-olds. I was addicted to the fear rush. So, so weird.

Q:  How would you describe the Portland theater scene?

A:  Portland is Portland . . . half Major U.S. Metropolitan Center and half Weird Little Town. I’m a native, so I’ve seen companies and artistic directors come and go over the years and have watched the theatre scene here change as the city has changed.

The two big guys in town are Portland Center Stage and Artists Repertory Theatre. I’ve worked at both and know them pretty well. They’re very different artistically, although they both do high-quality productions of whatever’s, like, the new hotness – the stuff coming out of Steppenwolf or MTC or South Coast Rep. Obviously, that’s vital to a healthy theatre ecology – you can’t not do Tracy Letts, you can’t not do Itamar Moses, and still call yourself a town that’s in touch with the pulse of the American theatre. But two healthy companies do not a theatre town make, and it’s important that we remember not to put all our eggs in their baskets.

That’s why the ever-growing number of small- and mid-sized companies is so exciting. Like, I’m smitten with Third Rail Rep; they’re SO Portland. A bunch of Portland’s top actors – they’re either all, or mostly all, Equity, I believe – got together and started their own theatre company, and from the moment they arrived on the scene they’ve forced every other company in town to up their game, even the big guys. Because it’s all actor-driven – no bells and whistles, no splashy production values, just cool smart interesting plays and phenomenal artists doing their thing. Every once in awhile I’ll read about a show another company is doing, and they’ll cast some of those actors and pick a really edgy show, and it’s like, “Oh, you wish you were Third Rail.” This year with Fertile Ground, something similar is happening with a group of Portland’s top playwrights, who got together and started their own company called Playwrights West. We’re all really excited to see what they do at the festival, since, like, every one of them are effing brilliant.

I think Portland is full of people who are locavores with our art just like we are with our organic veggies. We like the grown-right-here version of everything, we want to know where it comes from and who made it. We like knowing where our tomatoes were grown, we like independent bookstores and microbrews and small local coffee roasters (I hear there’s a Stumptown in New York now. YOU’RE WELCOME). I’ll tell you, every Portland theatre person I know watches that TNT show Leverage with Timothy Hutton, because they’re filming it here, and every episode I recognize someone and get a little rush of hometown-girl pride. I think one of the real joys of stuff like Fertile Ground is that it holds our theatre scene to the same standards Portlanders use for everything else. We like to celebrate stuff that connects us to a sense of place here, because we’re so head-over-heels crazy in love with this city.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I'm a sucker for anything that feels larger-than-life –I’m a Euripides girl at heart. I love plays about science and math (I have a little grantwriter-crush on the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation), like Arcadia and Proof. I love Moises Kaufman. I love smart plays about faith for smart people, like Doubt, A Man For All Seasons, and W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being. I’m crazy for Frank McGuiness (Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me is AMAZING), and Tracy Letts (marry me, August: Osage County). I love Angels In America, Pentecost, Metamorphoses, The Crucible, Take Me Out, Assassins, and Frost/Nixon.

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

A:  I AM a playwright just starting out. I mean, I've been writing forever, but only producing in Portland for a couple years, and that's just been staged readings. So I can't tell anyone how to become a working professional playwright. (And actually, if someone could tell ME, that would be great.) But I’m happy to share some of the things I’ve learned that have made me a better writer.

#1) The more you write, the better you write. I'm a grantwriter by profession, and I swear to God it's made me a better playwright. This play, How the Light Gets In, took me three months to write - well, to finish a first draft, anyway. The one before that took me five years. I’m a stronger writer all around now – I write clearer, I edit better, I make my points more strongly, I know my own habits as a writer (first draft is always way too long, must fight tendency to do everything at 2 a.m., can’t have it totally quiet, think way faster lying on my stomach than sitting at a desk, need to revise by working tiny little chunks at a time, basically useless before noon).

#2) Say something. I tried way too hard to be trendy when I was first starting out writing plays, and they were uniformly terrible. I had this preconceived notion of, like, what all the cool kids were doing, and I too wanted to write ludicrously over-complicated surrealist magical realism dramas, or biting commentaries on sexual politics among witty 30-something urbanites. So of course what I wrote was terrible. I still have those old scripts on my hard drive and refer back to them when I need an exercise in humility. They sucked because I was trying to create a story that fit within the framework I had already decided I was going to slavishly imitate, but I wasn’t saying anything. It turns out I don’t give a shit about sexual politics among witty 30-something urbanites. But I do care about lots of things that are worth writing about. And I write better when I really care.

#3) Use an editor. Mead Hunter has changed my life. Like OMG. I can’t even tell you.

#4) Find a director you like and stick with her. Workshopping a new play sometimes feels a little bit like inviting strangers into your home to make fun of your children. I always feel a little twitchy and vulnerable, and need someone to walk that fine line between pushing me and holding my hand. I work with the same director on everything, and she manages me like a pro. After so many years, we have a shorthand with each other, and can read each other’s minds in the audition room. She gets how I write so she catches all the little stuff (“You said X here but I think you really meant Y"), and she’s right every time.

#5) Find smart actors. The first play I ever workshopped was in college, for my senior thesis, and I basically cast my smartest actor friends and gave them permission to say anything they wanted. It was a little like being flayed alive, and I went home and cried after a lot of rehearsals, but the play was a hundred times better by the end of it. That’s still how I like to work – get a bunch of really smart people in my living room, with lots of coffee and wine, and let them talk.

Q:  Plugs please:

A:  If you're in or near Portland between Jan. 22 and Feb. 2, come see Fertile Ground! Here are some links to a couple shows I'm really, really excited about.

I belong to PG2, a playwright's group in Portland, and a couple of my colleagues have shows in the festival. The list for all of them is HERE.
I'm also really excited about Incorporamento, a dance/spoken-word collaboration featuring one of my colleagues from Oregon Ballet Theatre, principal dancer Gavin Larsen; and Playwrights West, who I mentioned above. They rock.

Jan 20, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 105: Lucy Alibar



Lucy Alibar

Hometown:  Monticello, FL/Thomasville, GA

Current Town:  New York

Q:  Tell me about Too Little Too Late coming up at Here.

A:  It will be so much FUN!  The other plays are funny and sweet and dazzling.  I am so thrilled to be working with the other playwrights, and I've wanted to work with Portia Krieger for so long.  So I'm greatful and very happy about all of it.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  Benh Zeitlin and I adapted my play, "Juicy and Delicious", into a Southern Apocolyptic kid's comedy movie.  We're up for this really amazing grant/award through Sundance called NHK that gives your movie Japanese distribution rights and some money.  So we're headed to Sundance in a few days for that and pre-production meetings.

And I'm starting a new play about kids in a little school in south Georgia in the 1970's on the eve of Jimmy Carter's space program.

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

A:  My dad and my brother are amazing bluegrass banjo players, and that kind of music had a big effect on my own work.   What I love about bluegrass is you have to do it with total sincerity. There's no irony or trying to pretend like you don't care.  And the subject matter is so great and all over the place.  There are songs that are just about how you're happy to be walking around outside, and songs about food, and songs about how you've killed somebody, even though you really loved them, but they just couldn't act right.  They're so heartfelt that they're beautiful, no matter what they're about.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I love anything that goes balls to the wall.  I bet there's a classier way of saying that--"fully realized"?  I think "balls-to-the-wall" is closer, though. 

So, Wooster Group, Justin Bond, Dolly Parton, Radiohole, ERS...Charles Mee, I love him.  Sibyl Kempson is a total genius.  I could keep going!

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

A:  As theatre-makers, we all need for each other's work to succeed.  It proves that theatre is alive and multifaceted and engaging.  So be supportive!