Peter Bellamy's portraits

http://pswbportaiture.blogspot.com/

Playwrights and others

I Interview Playwrights Part 133: Derek Ahonen

Derek Ahonen

Hometown:  Chicago

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about your show Happy In The Poorhouse now playing.

A:  It's a huge Coney Island love story with loose women, meek men, and a belly full of dreamers, optimists, gangsters, and MMA fighters. It's really a throw back play our company wanted to do out of love for works like, THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES and A HATFUL OF RAIN. It's a big love letter to another era but it's set in the current day. Both press and audience are responding very strongly to it in ways we never expected. I guess there's a lot of untapped need for more plays like this. It's been an amazing run so far!

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  My play, AMERISSIAH, is opening in June at the same space with a lot of familiar faces. I'm also directing that baby. It's a beast of a play that after HAPPY IN THE POORHOUSE I feel like i need to physically get myself in way better shape to direct it. But it's also very fun and explores the boundaries of people with Messiah Complexes.

Q:  Your theater company is called the Amoralists. Are you all amoral?

A:  No! We all have a very strong moral infrastructure and we love people more than anybody else we know. That's why we're called the Amoralists, because we love humans too much to trivialize their complexities in our work. Hey man, the pedophile, abusive drunk, prostitute, police officer, and man-hating lesbian all have wants, needs, and childhoods full of unfulfilled dreams like anybody else. I leave the teaching of morality to the Priests. I'm for the teaching of humanity baby!

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 was a Children's Theatre Director and she put me in all of her plays as a kid... God bless her. I loved being on stage, but what i really loved was being in a theatre with a bunch of people all working together for a unified goal. I loved just sitting backstage and seeing everyone get along and crack jokes. People need extended families. I write about families and the individual's primitive need to connect and feel appreciated. All my characters would be super happy if a theatre company took them in and told them they were special.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  First, it has to be funny. I don't like anything that goes more than a few minutes without a laugh. Second, it has to have emotional substance. I hate irony and too cool for school shit. Fucking feel something ya bitch! Third, it has to move. I can sit through a 5 hour play that moves like a racehorse ten times easier than a 20 minute one act that moves like a snail in the dirt. Outside of those three things, i'll go on any journey a team of artists wants to take me on. Oh yeah... and i love great acting. I like talented and skilled wounded people playing normal wounded people.

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

A:  Write stuff you want to see. That's it. This business if full of empty promises and useless smiles. Just write shit you can read on the subway that makes you feel like your life is worth a damn. Also, listen to actors during the rehearsal process. Always trust them when they want to dirty their character. Never trust them when they want to clean up their character.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I don't have them yet. I'm the only one in my company not losing my hair. 

I Interview Playwrights Part 132: Francine Volpe

Francine Volpe



Hometown:   Queens. Home of the badass. Joey Ramone, Donald Trump, Johnny Thunders, John McEnroe, Salt N Pepa, and Bob and Harvey Weinstein.

Current Town:   Brooklyn. About two and a half miles from where I grew up.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Turgor. It’s the rigidity that gives a plant its shape. A backbone, if you will. The play is about Larissa, a young-ish woman with a special needs child. She goes on a date, her first in a long time, and has a teenage boy babysit the little girl.

We learn that the boy is the son of Larissa’s former counselor - a man rumored to be a cad and with whom Larissa was infatuated with as a teenager.  The next day, Larissa confronts the boy, claiming that her autistic child communicated to her, non-verbally, that she was molested.  The boy’s father, her former counselor, then shows up to talk Larissa out of pressing charges.

During the course of the play one should change their mind about what happened during the night in question and whether the mess is the fault of the angry teenager, his emotionally irresponsible father, Larissa’s one-night stand who turns out to have a murky past, or Larissa herself who may or may not suffer from a form of Munchhausen’s.

The play is called Turgor, because I think when you behave in a way that is immature (and by immature I mean evil) I think it feels like you are protecting who you are. And you are. You are protecting yourself from changing. So, for example, a man will justify cheating on his spouse because he had to “listen to his heart”. Or a woman will drive her family into the ground with some form of addiction and later explain that her domestic life just wasn’t “who she was”. I’ve been around enough two-year-olds to know that grabbing another kid’s toy must feel like a matter of life or death to them. I don’t think they negotiate between wanting to please their mother and wanting the toy. I think it is between wanting to please their mother and wanting to retain a semblance of autonomy, a sense of self.

Hopefully audiences will vacillate with Larissa between the feeling that she must be unbending against forces that conspire to destroy her and the fear that her rigidity, her unwillingness to grow is, and has always been, the source of her anguish.

Q:  You were the Lit Mgr for the very cool Off Broadway theater Studio Dante. What was that like?

A:  It was a privilege. An invaluable experience. For a long time I was the only staff member so I got to be involved in all aspects of bringing a play to fruition from development through opening night which informed my own work tremendously. We only produced new plays so there was a hell of a learning curve. Plus Victoria and Michael Imperioli (The Artistic Directors of SD) are the two most generous people I know. I learned from them.

Q:  What else are you up to? Are you teaching?

A:  I am teaching. I teach playwriting and screenwriting at Space On White (a very pleasant studio). I’m especially excited about the screenwriting classes. Every week I ask students to watch a brilliant film and a bad film. In class I show samples from the great film to demonstrate technique. Then I show comparable samples from the bad film. This demonstration makes it very difficult to write bad dialogue or flimsy characters.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Plays that demonstrate what we don’t have the vocabulary to explain.

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

A:  Learn how to write an old-fashioned story. I spent a decade working very hard to avoid this step. That was a mistake.  Also, love your peers. Be as generous and supportive to the playwrights around you as you possibly can. When things go badly for you they’re the only ones who return your phone calls.

I Interview Playwrights Part 131: Julie Marie Myatt

Julie Marie Myatt

Hometown:
I don't really have a hometown. My dad was in the Marine Corps, so I moved around the country growing up. The apartment I live in now is the longest I've ever lived in one space: 6 years.

Current Town:
Los Angeles. Los Feliz neighborhood. It's a great place to live.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I'm working on a new play commission for the Roundabout Theatre.

Q:  Tell me about The Ted Schmitt Award and the play you won it with.

A:  The Ted Schmitt Award is given by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for what they considered an "outstanding new play." They kindly gave it to me for my play, THE HAPPY ONES that was commissioned by and premiered at South Coast Repertory in October.

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

A:  Hmm...let's see..I think rather than one story, I have a series of images...and the most common or clear image is me sitting in the back seat of the car with my sister, and my parents up front, and we are moving to some new place...we'd probably been to McDonalds for lunch (that was special then) and eaten it in the car, as my dad always had to stay on schedule...and the car was quiet. My sister would be reading something. My dad would be smoking. My mother would be cleaning up all our lunch trash we handed her...and I would be staring out the window...This quiet seemed to last for hours, as we all became good at creating our own private space in that car. I would never read or doing anything else but stare out my window. I'd watch every farm, every kid on a bike, every old woman on a porch, every dog or horse on the run, every road sign and tractor, every field of corn, every lake or mountain...I studied the landscape of this country, mile by mile...and I think that collection of images, has became the palette for my life as a writer.

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

A:  The price.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind of of theater that makes me forget where I am and opens up my chest. I want to be transformed by an emotional experience.

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

A:  Read everything. Not just plays. Read novels. Read a lot of poetry. The imagery and conservation of language in poetry, is wonderful for playwriting. And keep writing, no matter what. Trust your voice is worth being heard.

I Interview Playwrights Part 130: Lauren Yee

Lauren Yee

Hometown:
San Francisco. Home of everyone else in my family. My grandfather had six siblings. My grandmother had six siblings. They all ended up in San Francisco. Do the math.

Current Town:
La Jolla, CA

Q:  Ching Chong Chinaman is coming up at Pan Asian Rep and SIS Productions while Sleepwalkers Theater is doing The Life and Death of Joshua Zweig. Tell me about these plays. How many of these shows are you able to see?

A:  By the end of March, I will have seen all these plays! Playwriting is kind of my excuse to travel, and luckily, my UCSD spring break falls directly onto CCC's openings at SIS and Pan Asian. When I can't get out to rehearsals, it's hugely important to me that I work with directors that I trust. It also helps if I've done a little bit of development work with the director and actors before rehearsals start so I can give input into how the script is read.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I'm currently finishing up Samsara, a new play on a childless American couple and their hired Indian surrogate. It delves into a fantastical world of expectations, fantasies, and motherhood. And the current draft contains pineapple sex (which makes complete sense within the play, I promise).

I'm also in rehearsals for In a Word, which is my piece in UCSD's Baldwin New Play Festival. The play deals with how one woman's world disintegrates, literally and linguistically, after her son's kidnapping. It's got a lot of fractured language and jumps in time and memory that hopefully should be messy, fun, and full of wordplay, which I love.

The Kennedy Center has commissioned me to write a couple treatments for its Heritage Project, which means I need to remember what being eight years old was like and what interested me then. I actually went back home and dug up my favorite childhood book in hopes of getting some ideas.

And once the school year ends, I'll start working on a new commission from AlterTheater, up in Northern California. It's slated to go up fall 2011, which is a real luxury, because it's pretty common for plays to be commissioned without any specific plans to produce them later on. AlterTheater is also a theater I admire for its ability to make the most of limited resources--recycled props and costumes, alternative performance spaces, and a company of really, really talented local actors. It's actually kind of intimidating, especially since they've put so much faith in me to turn out something cool.

(I would love to write a musical. Or a magic show. Just putting it out there.)

Q:  You're studying playwriting at UCSD right now. What's that like?

A:  I love my cohorts at UCSD. There are four or five playwrights in the program total (depending on the year), and my department a really good job of finding people who jive with each other. Studying with and learning from my fellow classmates has been such a huge part of my education here and is something I didn't expect at all. It's taught me to be a bit more generous as a playwright.

And our chair Naomi Iizuka is such a smart, generous writer and teacher herself. I like to think of her mind as a toolbox. She gives you various instruments with which you just might open up your play in a compelling new way.

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

A:  Growing up in San Francisco, I hated Chinatown. Dirty. Spitty. Crowded. Old people literally pushing you out of their way on Stockton Street. As a Chinese-American, I totally felt out of place in a place I should have felt at home in. Now I go back and I revel in the noise and trash. I'm like, "Rotten bok choy on the curb: yeah! Jam-packed 30 Stockton bus that closes the door on you: yeah!" I don't know if it's the playwright in me that wants to find some sense of authenticity, but it's an interesting change.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that reinvents how you tell a story on stage but still allows you to follow the story. Theater that teaches me something in a sly way.

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

A:  Sleep with everyone. No, really. Sleep with everyone in as responsible and reasonable a way as possible. And by sleep, I mean: meet with them, work with them, see their shows, and be a nice, reasonable, creative person. Even seemingly small opportunities can turn into larger things, and your future collaborators will come from the weirdest and most random of all places.

You'll never know where your favorite collaborators will come from. Desdemona Chiang, a director I love and seem to just happen to work with again and again, came to me via a tiny one act I wrote and she staged. No budget, etc, but five years later, we're still working together.

I once heard that it takes ten years to gain traction as a playwright, and I actually agree with that. Even if you get good fast, you still need to develop relationships with theaters, artistic directors, other artists. Being a playwright is not just about writing a good play; it's about finding a good home for your work and finding good collaborators, too.

When I was in high school, I ran a theater company, which was basically me corralling/cornering my friends into acting in my plays. We did everything and thought we were pretty cool (though VHS evidence somewhat contradicts that). But the experience really helped me see theater from a producer's/administrative perspective, and today gives me a much better appreciation for what production teams do and helps me to respect the limitations they face.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  ... and jesus moonwalks the mississippi by Marcus Gardley. I saw an early reading of it at cutting ball and his recent show at Shotgun Players in Berkeley, and I find it crazy that he's not done more. (March-April, San Francisco)

Lu Shen the Mad workshop at Fluid Motion by Christopher Chen. I have read/seen close to every play of his, and he is always dark, funny, and smart. (April, New York)

On the Nature of Dust by fellow UCSD playwright and soon-to-be-Seattle-based superstar writer Stephanie Timm, produced by New Century Theatre Company (May, Seattle)

Forever Never Comes by Enrique Urueta. "A psycho-Southern queer country dance tragedy." How can you not go to that? (June, San Francisco)

See? Something for every month, if you happen to be in all of those cities.

(And fInd me at www.laurenyee.com!)

I Interview Playwrights Part 129: Richard Martin Hirsch

Richard Martin Hirsch

Hometown: Pacific Palisades, California

Current Town: Pacific Palisades, California

Q:  You just won the Stanley award. Can you tell me about that?

A:  A pleasing, gratifying, surprising turn of events to be sure! I had submitted to the competition several times before and once was a Semi-Finalist, but did not remotely expect to win. The play, The Restoration of Sight, is something I’ve been working on for several years. It is about a real, living person, World-renown ophthalmologist Doctor Perry Rosenthal…which is a major departure for me and difficult as hell to write, because fictional theatrics needed to be kept to a minimum. But well worth the effort. Doctor Rosenthal has developed a very special kind of contact lens that works miracles on some patients suffering from certain kinds of cornea-related disease. I spent many hours during a number of trips to his clinic in Boston and found a huge reservoir of emotion and drama to draw from, as patients who were in some cases blind and/or in excrutiating pain for decades, were instantly relieved of their pain and able to see.

Getting back to the Stanley Drama Award itself…I am preparing now to leave for New York and the presentaion at the Players Club in Grammercy Park on March 15. The award is given out yearly by the theatre department of Wagner College. Once you have won it, you may not enter the competition again. If one looks at the history of the award, some very heavy hitters have won it in the past. I am definitely humbled and, as I said, gratified, because I do work very hard at the craft and am constantly trying to do better. I am also pleased to be able to say I know three of the previous winners. I just chatted with Josh Greenfeld last night at a reading. And I recently saw Ann Noble’s new play, Sidhe, which was superbly directed by Darin Anthony, who will also be directing my play London’s Scars in May. And I also have become friends with Mary Fengar Gail, another former Stanley Award winner who has been super supportive of my work.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  The shorter answer is what else I’m NOT working on! :- )) I have four or five plays that are approaching stage-worthiness and that I hope to see produced in the near future. All of them require further tweaking and feedback, but they are getting close. Those are: Apogee + 26; The Restoration of Sight; Memorizing Rome; Beach in Winter; and House of Stone.

I am also working very hard on a new play – essentially a one-woman show – for brilliant actress Salli Saffioti, who has acted in several of my plays and who has a GREAT story to tell about being raised on a public bus. (Salli can be seen briefly in a scene with Nicole Kidman in The Rabbit Hole and on an upcoming episode of In Plain Sight).

And I have three or four plays that have had very successful first productions that I’d love to see produced again, especially in New York.

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 think, in some ways, the best illustration of who I am and how I came to be a writer is encapsulated in my new play, Apogee + 26, even though it is a work of fiction, wink, wink. Apart from that, I can’t think of a specific story at the moment. Suffice to say I was a lover of sports, but not a great athlete; a lover of stories and especially humor, but not at all articulate or outgoing; a lover of music, but not a musician or singer; a lover of women, but not particularly attractive. Probably because of all those things, I ended up being very shy and spending a lot of time inside my own head. But for my troubles, I was blessed in that I became quite adept at objectively observing the behavior of others, along with developing a pretty good ear for dialogue, if I do say so myself.

Q:  What is the purpose of theater?

A:  To entertain and/or stimluate thought, always. To inform, sometimes. But more specifically, to display and evoke emotion -- in one form or another -- in all those attending the event.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  All kinds if it’s well-done and fresh. I love drama and comedy equally. Musicals if, well, the music is good. Though I seem to learn something from everything I see. But I am most thrilled by theatre that somehow manages to create an emotional response in me; theatre that presents material with which I can relate and identify. Though there are many fine upcoming writers who are endlessly innovative and clever, very few really impress me because they either don’t have the emtional history to draw from, or because they simply aren’t willing to go to that place in their gut to explore what is truly important to them. I may listen and laugh with/at their characters, but I seldom care about those characters. This is where an MFA or even PHD in theatre or playwriting can’t help. It’s more of a act of will and sometimes great courage that I’m not sure can even be taught.

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

A:  Don’t fall in love with your words. If you have a growth in your body that is impacting the health of your body, you have it removed. Likewise, if you have a piece of writing that is hurting the health of your play, it needs to be removed -- no matter how precious it might be to you.

Don’t take constructive criticism personally.

Don’t edit yourself on your first draft. Don’t NOT edit yourself on all the other drafts (and there should be many – this is not a weakness, it’s just part of the process).

Write from your gut! Most playwrights write from some combination of three sources: the head, the heart, and the genitals. The great ones write from one or more of those, but also from the gut. If it don’t matter to you, it ain’t gonna matter to your audience.

Most of all, don’t give up …unless you find something you are far more passionate about. Then, don’t give up on that.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  If you are in Los Angeles from May 15 through June 27, please come see my play, London’s Scars, at the Odyssey Theatre in WLA. I’m quite proud of it and it definitely represents the power of editing and developing a play based on learned feedback. And on April 24, the Stanley Drama Award winner, The Restoration of Sight, will have a staged reading at the Long Beach Playhouse, in Long Beach, California.

I Interview Playwrights Part 128: Ed Cardona, Jr.

Ed Cardona, Jr.

Hometown: Meriden, Connecticut

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about American Jornalero now in production at the Working Theater.

A:  American Jornalero takes a humorous and poignant look at a group of day laborers waiting to be picked up for work and their collision with two rather inept citizen vigilantes fashioning themselves on the Minuteman Project, on a street corner in Queens, New York. The inspiration for the play came to me in 2006, when immigration issues where again frothing to the top of the American consciousness/conscience and was making the front pages. I dabbled with it over the years but really didn’t focus on it until last year. The play is currently running as a 1st stage production as part of the Working Theater’s 25th anniversary season. It opened last Thursday, 3/4/10 and runs through Sunday, March 14 (weekdays at 7pm, Saturday 2pm & 7pm, Sunday 3pm) at the Abingdon Theater Complex, Strelsin Theater on West 36th Street. We’ve had great houses and engaged audiences. I’m extremely proud of the play and the production. The cast is great.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m currently working on a play about a female Iraqi war veteran and her battle with post-traumatic stress disorder and its affect on her marriage and friendships. I’ve been deliberately holding off on my Iraq play, wasn’t sure what to write about but I think my current inspiration, Lychee Martini (the title of the play) has been worth the wait for me.

Q:  You got your MFA from Columbia. How was that?

A:  I got my M.F.A. from Columbia in 2006. It was an overall positive experience. It was exactly what I need at the time, two and a half years of surrounding myself with intelligent, talented people who shared the same passion for theater. I really needed that time just to focus on my writing. I met some great collaborators through Columbia and it helped me network greatly with the theater industry. The program I believe helped me develop immensely as a playwright.

Q:  Was Eduardo your professor the whole time?

A:  Yes, Machado was my professor for my whole program.

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

A:  Wow…uhh, so many. But one that stands out is how I reacted toward my sister when she told me that she was pregnant at eighteen – I was fourteen. Let’s just say that I was not supportive or kind – rather vicious. I regret that moment till this day. But that moment helped me find soon after and later through reflection who I wanted to be and who I didn’t want to be; a grounding that has fueled my personal relationships, my professional endeavors, and my passion for playwriting and what I wanted to write about.

Q:  What is the purpose of theater?

A:  The purpose of theater is to entertain, inform, provoke, and inspire.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The theater that really excites me is theater that is willing to take on the broader issues that affects us all, and Theater that tells the stories of those who are not that often represented on the American Stage.

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

A:  Well my bits of wisdom are:
Theater is a collaborative art form - protect your work but be open to collaboration. Nothing is too precious. A play solely on page is yet unborn. The best dramaturgy for a play is a director, actors, and an audience. Somebody once said to me something like, “Don’t be scared of the audience – they’re supposed to be scared of us.”

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  
http://www.theworkingtheater.org/
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=324934293003&ref=mf

The first 125 playwrights

Here are playwrights 101-125

Gabriel Jason Dean

Sharr White

Michael Lew

Craig Wright

Laura Jacqmin

Stanton Wood

Jamie Pachino

Boo Killebrew

Daniel Reitz

Alan Berks

Erik Ehn

Krista Knight

Steve Yockey

Desi Moreno-Penson

Andrea Stolowitz

Clay McLeod Chapman

Kelly Younger

Lisa Dillman

Ellen Margolis

Claire Willett

Lucy Alibar

Nick Jones

Dylan Dawson

Pia Wilson

Theresa Rebeck



And you can read the first 100 here.