I Interview Playwrights Part 134: Kirsten Greenidge

Kirsten Greenidge

Hometown: Arlington, MA

Current Town: West Medford, MA

Q:  What are you working on right now?

A:  Currently I am working on a play called THE LUCK OF THE IRISH, which was originally commissioned by South Coast, but it passed on it. It's been recommissioned by the Huntington Theatre Company here in Boston and I am thrilled--and grateful to Lisa Timmel and Peter Dubois and Charles Haugland at the Huntington-- about that. I am also working on a short adaptation of a Brothers Grimm fairytale for a theatre company here called CompanyOne, as well as a commission from La Jolla called MILK LIKE SUGAR.

Q:  What was it like to be playwright in residence at Woolly Mammoth?

A:  I loved living in DC and going in to Woolly every day. The experience was only odd because one of the grant's guidelines was that the playwright had to spend a set number of hours at the theatre itself. Most plays aren't written this way. You write your play, a theatre is into it, they have you do a reading or workshop and if they still like it and have money and have a slot, they produce it, and THAT is when you lurk around the theatre. Instead, I was being asked to be in the theatre each day which was wonderful on paper--as in AHHH the PLAYWRIGHT is here with us--but a little strange for me because I found it very hard to write there. At first my desk was in the main office with everyone, but then I asked to have my desk in the basement, in the green room. This was much better, but not very inspirational. I would go in to the theatre from 10-6, travel back out to Oakton, Virginia where I was living, and then write at night. I tried to see as much theatre as I could, but I was pretty strict with myself about writing and reading every day, even if the pages were crappy, so basically I was in front of a computer all day, every day the whole six months I was there. If I was not in front of a computer I was reading scripts for Woolly and I absolutely loved this part of my time there. I wish I could do it with every theatre. I am quite proud I got to point to Noah Haidle's play VIGILS and say DO THIS! And the next season, there it was. I'm not naive enough to think it was all my doing, but I do remember coming in with two or three of his plays and saying to Howard and the rest of the readers "Woolly has to know this writer." Howard was really committed to reading all the work that was coming in, so he devised a kind of insane reading schedule where a bunch of us read a play a day every day, then came in each week and reported on them. I got to meet Rebecca Taichman this way and that relationship has been wonderful. In addition to all that, I liked sitting in on rehearsals of other new plays being done there. I love watching rehearsals because for a playwright they are kind of these secret things. You only go to yours and see how yours work, and to be honest, mine don't always go the way I would like, or how I'd hoped. So I like to see how other people work and by going to rehearsals that aren't mine, I can relax and breathe in the process in a way I can't if I am rewriting and nervous the thing is gonna sink like its got a thousand holes.

Q:  Can you tell me about your grad school experience?

A:  I went to Iowa. The first year I applied I got rejected from everywhere but the second year I reapplied to Iowa because it had said "We like you but you're too young, you need more experience." So I thought, well, I will reapply for the next few years and maybe in six they will let me in. It took only a year. I was so convinced I had to go there, I didn't even realize it was a three year program. I also needed health insurance and they had a good plan with all those university hospitals around there. I loved it (both the program and the coverage). I can't imagine going anywhere else. There were times I was lonely, cause basically Iowa City is in the middle of nowhere, if you are used to say Boston, but I got a ton of writing done and I think there is a cohesiveness to the writers there in terms of personal bonding because it is so isolated. One huge obstacle though was having enough actors of color to do my work who were able to embrace plays that were not Realist dramas. That was hard. But to this day I consider my Iowa friends to be some of the best writers and best theatre people I 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:  I used to be a gymnast. My friend, playwright David Adjmi, says all my gymnastics training helps with my writing because I can be disciplined and can sometimes let failures spur me on. I remember when I was eight I began to get kinda good at gymnastics and I started winning things. One day my coach was trying to get us to do dismounts off the beam. They were not hard, she just wanted us to stick them a certain way. She knew I could do it the way she was asking, and I knew I could do it the way she was asking. So she asked me to do it and I was very proud, and I got up there and did it, and kinda fell on purpose. I have no idea why. She excused everyone and had me go over to her and she said "Why'd you do that?" And I said "I don't know" and she said "You're good, you're one of the best on this team, but you give up easily. You don't always try hard enough. You can't do that or you won't be the best anymore." Or something to that effect. I was mortified. I was terribly embarrassed. But I got it. And it is something I think of often, even if I don't practice it. I can be a lazy writer. I hate traveling. I like rewriting but have to psych myself up to do it. Instead of printing stuff and proofreading it I will make excuses like I have to go to Staples and buy more ink and paper before I touch a word. I hate the phone so I am horrible at setting up meetings and keeping in touch and I self sabotage a lot. When I feel myself slacking, I think of my eight year old self doing stupid stuff to get attention when I should have been doing the work to get better. It's the same now. I need to remind myself to hunker down and do the damn thing, or else what is the point? If I really want to "fall on purpose" I should just get a day job with health insurance and stop all this crazy playwrighting stuff right now.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I am an easy audience member. I love a good story. I also like to laugh. I actually don't see very much theatre so I just get excited to see something, no matter what it is. But I particularly love plays that make me lean forward, that challenge me to look inside myself, even if what my inside self is thinking is "I wish I'd written that."

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

A:  Keep writing no matter how often you get rejected. Embrace the work. It will always be there, unlike the praise or the criticism.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Mmm....Next up is the GRIMM adaptation here in Boston this July. Then will be BOSSA NOVA at Yale Rep, and then MILK LIKE SUGAR next summer...just enough to keep this new mama hopping.

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.

I Interview Playwrights Part 127: Terence Anthony

Terence Anthony

Hometown:

Vancouver, British Columbia. 

 

Current Town:

Los Angeles, California. 

 

Q:  Tell me about your play Blood and Thunder now up at Moving Arts.

 

A:  About three years ago I started thinking about the script that would become Blood and Thunder. Like a lot of people, I was outraged about the indifference and incompetence of the Bush administration in how they handled the situation in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. What happened in New Orleans really was a man-made disaster. I'd been researching the crazy things that happened in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, and there were so many unbelievable stories. But I didn't want to write a typical "oh, the poor victims of this tragedy" kind of play. I came across a testimonial of a man who chose to stay for the storm -- he was actually looking forward to the challenge. And that's when the story clicked for me and the characters started to form. Blood and Thunder is about three con-artists trapped by their past. who are unwillingly brought together because of Hurricane Katrina.

This is the first production of one of my full-length plays and I feel very lucky. Because it was produced by my home theatre Moving Arts, we were able to workshop it and have a long rehearsal process. There were a few bumps, but the most important elements came together just right. I shake my head at all the crazy-talented people working on this production. Sara Wagner is the smartest director I know, and Keith Bolden, Tony Williams and Candice Afia are so amazing, I couldn't ask for a better cast. It's paid off -- we've had good reviews and the show's been extended four times now, I think.

 

Q:  What else are you working on?

 

A:  I'm always working on something. I'm sending out two other plays I've written. One takes place in a dive bar, the other in Cuba. And I'm currently writing a sci-fi play. I'm also developing a comic book series. And in all my spare time, I'm working on season two of my animated web series Orlando's Joint.

 

Q:  Tell me about Orlando's Joint.  Where can I see it?

 

A:  Watch it at www.orlandosjoint.com! It's an animated series I created. It's pretty edgy, and real incorrect in its humor. It's about a slacker pothead and his crazy homies who run a coffee shop in south L.A. I learned to animate just to do this project, and it's great what you can get away with when it's cartoons doing outrageous shit. Orlando's Joint has built up a pretty good online cult following, and there's some possibilities hovering around that may allow me to take it a bigger audience. But it's very cool to put something out online that can be seen by people all over the world. More people have seen Orlando's Joint than will ever see my plays. 

 

Q:  What theaters or shows would you recommend someone new to LA check out?

 

A:  Moving Arts, of course! Especially if Blood and Thunder is still running. I love the Fountain Theatre. Always good stuff going on there, and they consistently do plays with actual black folk in them! I keep up with what's going on at The Blank, and Elephant Theatre Company. Shout out to the Robey Theatre and Company of Angels, yo! There's a lot more good theatre in L.A. than most people realize. 

 

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

 

A:  Anything that takes a chance. I like plays that are PLAYS -- stories that are crafted in a way that embraces the possibilities of what can be done on a stage with flesh-and-blood actors performing in front of a room full of people. 

 

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

 

A:  Stick to writing children's musicals, that's where all the cash is. And, find a good smart group of writers to learn the craft with. Emphasis on GOOD and SMART. There's too many writer's groups and classes that don't fit that description. I've been a part of Lee Wochner's Words That Speak workshop since I started writing plays, and the feedack and support I've gotten from Lee and the other playwrights who are part of it has been invaluable.

 

Q:  Plugs please:

A:  Blood and Thunder has been extended again, it's running until March 28th. For info check out the Moving Arts site www.movingarts.org. After that we're hoping to take the production to other cities, especially New Orleans.

I Interview Playwrights Part 126: Alena Smith

Alena Smith

Hometown: Millbrook, NY

Current Town: Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me about It Or Her and Plucker, both being presented right now.

A:  PLUCKER is my attempt to write an old-fashioned farce about a new generation.  Farce has traditionally been a dramatic form used to talk about the failures of marriage and fidelity; to make fun of society’s inability to live up to its own strict moral codes.  (For example, I read a Feydeau play where a man hypnotizes his wife to prevent her from figuring out that he’s cheating on her.)  Yet today, we (at least, those in my demographic) live in a culture where these codes are not so clear: we no longer insist upon marriage before sex or before living together; we do not prohibit same-sex love affairs; and, in many ways, we don’t make much of a distinction anymore between the man’s role and the woman’s role in a heterosexual union.  When so many of the traditional barriers to happiness have been lifted, or decayed to a point of irrelevance, what are the new sources of conflict that might generate the antic dramaturgy of a farce?  (What I found, of course, is that it’s the very absence of strict rules and codes that makes committed relationships today so difficult to sustain.)  I should also mention that PLUCKER involves a toy piano, bedbugs, a truth serum, a dinner party, and a parrot with a severe anxiety disorder.

IT OR HER is a play I originally conceived with my former theater company Dead Genius Productions, and it was first performed by DGP in the 2007 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.  Now the play is getting a brand-new production with a totally different team of artists: an actor, director, and group of designers, all of whom I went to grad school with at Yale.  A solo show for one man, one box, and a bunch of little toys, IT OR HER is a kind of minimalist thriller.  It’s the story of an obsessive collector who has locked himself up in his basement with his weird coterie of female figurines.  Like a mad scientist, he plays with his objects, fervently searching for what he calls their “ultimate arrangement” – hoping to discover this mysterious pattern before his hideout is invaded, and his own dark secret is revealed.  (A friend described this show as a Pinteresque episode of Law and Order, and I’d be happy with that!)

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m about to start working on a new play, my first play written for an all-male cast.  All I can say right now is that there's going to be a sweat lodge.

Q:  Who is in the Public's Emerging Writer group right now?  You all are having readings Mondays in March and April.

A:  The Public Emerging Writers Group is an incredible circle of talented, passionate, and diverse playwrights.  All of their plays are fantastic and I believe great things lie in the future for everyone in the group!  I recommend coming to see any of the remaining readings in our Spotlight Series, now through April.

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

A:  In 1991, when I was eleven years old, I saw an ad in the back of the New York Times Magazine for a summer program called Peace Child where you could go to England and make a musical about world peace with young people of many nations.  I insisted that my parents sign me up, and off I went to Eastbourne (which is kind of like the Miami of England, not in that there are exciting clubs and beaches but in that there are mostly retired old people living there), where I created and performed a musical along with kids from Israel, Jordan, Bulgaria, etc., etc., that focused mainly on the Middle East and the military industrial complex.  We had an enormous audience of old British people weeping as we enacted a scene where all the world’s children die in a nuclear explosion. 

Also while I was there I got kicked out of my host family house because I helped their daughter dye her hair red and we got hair dye all over their bathroom.  I then got to live in the flat with all the older counselors which was way more fun anyway.  I think that was when I started drinking coffee.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Any kind that allows the actors to give big, hungry, bold, hilarious, glittering performances.  And it’s even better if this is happening in a play or performance that somehow speaks directly to the concerns of how we live in the world today.

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

A:  Don’t try to copy anyone or “follow the rules.”  There are no rules.  Write the most dangerous work that you can.  And say yes to pretty much everything.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, my fellow Emerging Writers Group member, just had his wonderful play NEIGHBORS extended at the Public – go see it if you can!

And I’d like to make a plug for all theater people to go see more dance and music.  I think it would be good for us!

I Interview Playwrights Part 125: Gabriel Jason Dean

Gabriel Jason Dean

Hometown:  I claim two hometowns: the small one where I was born and raised and generations of my family have resided-- Chatsworth, Georgia; and the big one where I spent my late teens and pretty much all of my twenties--Atlanta, Georgia.

Current Town:   Austin, Texas

Q:  You won Essential Theater's annual contest. (They did a play of mine last year) Tell me about the play of yours they're doing this year.

A:  The Essential Theatre is a champion for emerging writers from Georgia. They chose my play Qualities of Starlight for the 2010 Essential Theatre Prize and it's going up this summer during their festival. It's running in rep with two other plays, Sally and Glen at the Palace by Essential Theatre AD, Peter Hardy and Darker Face of the Earth by Rita Dove.

Here's what happens in the play (no spoilers, I promise):

A young astronomer and his wife travel from California to Appalachia to visit his parents. This is the first time the wife's seen his homestead. Plus, they're bringing good news: after struggling to conceive, they've finally been approved for adoption. When they get there, they discover that his aging parents are both addicted to meth.

The play dwells in disparities—science vs. God, light vs. dark, rural vs. urban, book smarts vs. common sense, barren vs. fertile, the unseen vs. the seen, etc. I began writing this script in 2008 after randomly hearing a recording of comedian, Steven Wright. He made a provocative joke about dead starlight, and even though I can’t remember the specifics of the joke, I couldn’t get the idea— dead starlight traveling light years to meet our small eyes— out of my mind. At the time, I was aware of the cosmological phenomena of dead starlight, but for some reason when these words came out of Steven Wright’s mouth, they hit me in a very different way—a much more organic, spiritual kind of way. Ideas of ghostlight, origins, distance, and the holy concept of grace and how these intangibles put pressure on a modern family dynamic haunted me.

Starlight's a story with a big scope. Expect some cool spectacle (what budgets will allow, of course). There are lizard puppets, Elvis impersonations, grown men in baby diapers. The story's framed by a cosmological theory about the origins of the universe the protagonist's struggling to develop. Ultimately, he realizes that his theory about the macro also applies to the micro. The theory's not mine. I adapted it from Steinhardt and Turok’s “Cyclic Universe Theory” published in 2002. The fundamental question posed in Steinhardt’s and Turok’s theory is the fundamental question that resonates throughout my play: “How did we begin and how does that relate to where we are now?”

Starlight's also a personal play for me. Like the parents in the play, both my parents have had life-long struggles with various addictions. This play's my quest to illuminate and understand what I think is the root of self-abusive behavior: suppressed grief. The loss that we try to shed by ignoring always finds us and ultimately imprisons us. It definitely won't be the last play I write on the subject. It's also not the first.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I'm writing four things at the same time right now. I DON'T recommend doing this. Two is the best. At least for me. It's only out of necessity that I'm writing four. I'm in grad school.

I'm working on a commission for the University of Texas Dept. of Theatre and Dance with choreographer David Justin called Br'er Wood. It's a meta-theatrical piece for kids inspired by the Joel Chandler Harris stories. It's a lot of dance and puppetry and music...hip hop meets country. That sort of thing. It's going on tour in the fall of 2010.

I'm working on another children's play called The Transition of Doodle Pequeno (that's a working title). It's about a third grade boy who wants to wear a tutu with his devil costume on Halloween. It's a pretty political piece, but a comedy nonetheless. I've been workshopping it with some fifth and sixth graders here in Austin.

I'm pretty far into a ghost-story tragedy called Easy With Me. It also takes place in the South and is told from the perspective of mentally-handicapped, dead girl from a lower middle-class family. It's told through poetic synesthesiatic language. It's a mystery that unfolds the complicated path that led to the little girl's grave. It's political and asks us to consider the consequences ignoring the need for nationalized health care.

And lastly, I'm working on my first screenplay. It's a straight up romantic comedy about a stubborn, headstrong 50-something workaholic. It's called Knowing Agnes,

And I'm going to be in Mac Wellman and David Lang's opera, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field at UT-Austin in April and May of this year.

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

A:  I guess I kinda answered that in the last question. It's busy. Busy good, though. Not busy bad.

I was fortunate to receive a James A Michener fellowship to study for three years at the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin. I'll have an MFA when I'm done. I'm in my first year. The fellowship is amazing and I am going to leave this place spoiled rotten! The Michener Center brings in the world's best writers to teach. I'm in class with poets, fiction writers, fellow playwrights and screenwriters. It's a very interdisciplinary program. The playwriting program is headed up by Suzan Zeder. Steven Dietz and Kirk Lynn are on faculty here. There are ample production opportunities at UT. Next week, my play For Closure is being mounted by a student group on campus. And aside from all that, Austin, Texas is kick ass. SXSW is here, the Austin film festival, the live music scene is amazing (so I hear...I don't get out much when writing four plays at once). The vibe in this city is infectious. The one downside to being in Texas--my partner and the love of my life, actress and director, Jessie Dean, is getting her MFA in acting at Illinois State University. 17 hours away. Thank god for Skype. Her dad's a retiree from Delta Airlines, so we're lucky that air travel's a lot cheaper for us than most.

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 loved magicians as a little boy. At about four years old, I truly believed in magic. I had no ideas about slight of hand or the trickery involved in stage acts. I simply believed that if you possessed the magic power, then you could make anything happen. One day, I had a cup and a marble and I was playing on my grandma's front porch. I don't know where I'd seen the cup/marble trick done--probably television--but I knew its choreography back and forth. Place the cup over the marble. Utter the Abracadabra Hocus Pocus and lift the cup to reveal the marble had disappeared. I practiced over and over and of course, it didn't work. I didn't know the secret information. I decided that what I was missing was an audience. So I summoned my grandma forth. She obliged my every whim, so this was a delight for her. I placed the cup over the marble, uttered the magic words and absolutely believed in my tiny heart that the marble would be gone once I lifted the cup. I slowly lifted the cup. The marble was gone. Vanished into thin air. Man, did I feel powerful! My grandma applauded feverishly, thinking I was going to be the next David Copperfield. She told people that story for years. I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE THE MARBLE WENT!!!! I looked everywhere for it. I never found it.

So, that's my little allegory for playwriting: the only thing you need to make magic occur is an audience. That's way oversimplified, but it has a good ring to it, doesn't it? Now, I know things about my craft. I employ tools and tricks to get the results I want. But I still haven't lost that child's belief that magic can occur when you share a story or idea with a room full of people.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The answer to this question is always changing. My aesthetic is growing.

The easy answer is: I'm excited by responsibly provocative storytelling--writing that's aware it's being absorbed in the theatre and that unashamedly embraces that fact, writing that leaves space for the audience, that challenges us to ask questions.

The most interesting answer I can give you maybe comes out of my journal from a couple weeks back.

February 12, 2010

This is what I should ask myself after I've seen a play:

"What comes forth?"

I’m not interested in being comfortable in the theatre.

Theatre=witnessed transformation.

The audience is the final piece of the puzzle in our creative process. Push it a step further. The conversations, those silent rides home or affable coffees consumed afterward (the artists rarely witnesses these) are the final piece of the puzzle.

Theatre is not a place for passivity.

Art is meant for the individual within the mass. It’s not meant to be passively consumed—which is the fate of all things nowadays—and disregarded like a manufactured plastic container to finding its way to sea, floating vaguely and uselessly for centuries. It’s meant to transform the individual, to get under the skin and gnaw at your bones, to ache you and to astonish the miraculous (and maybe bored) synapses firing in your brain.

Some people are offended by what isn’t easily understood. Entitlement to a legacy of questionable morality locks brainfolds and hardens hearts. This rigidity is the enemy of art. Good viable theatre keeps even the rigid folks in their seats to the end—it mixes their offense with enough intrigue so that a perfect chemical concoction explodes like 4th of July firecrackers. Observing explosions is dangerous. You could ignite. In a good play those fires are internal and last a lot longer. If someone spontaneously combusted while seeing a play, then I don’t think that writer should ever write again. Both for the safety of the consumer and also because, well…really, there’s no point thereafter.

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

A:  -First of all, I consider myself to be a writer just starting out. Everyday, new worlds open with new words, right? I think maybe I'll try to keep that perspective my whole life.

-Writing is re-writing. I have plays I wrote ten years ago that I'm still revising.
-Learn to be your best editor. I have plays that were once 98 pages long that I cut down to the quintessential, smolderingly good 10 pages that really yearned to be heard in the first place. But write the 98 page play first.
-Surround yourself with talent. Good actors, good directors, good editors, good emotionally intuitive interpreters.
-Patience with yourself is the key to your success as a writer. Writing is a lifelong pursuit. Just keep doing it everyday and take pride in every word you write. I meticulously rewrite my emails.
-I keep a a little card taped to the wall near my writing desk. It says "Impress or Empower?" It reminds me to strive to write powerful theatrical moments that will empower an audience for a lifetime, not impress them for a few minutes.
-Keep a file of your rejection letters and bad reviews. Read them once a year. Write a paragraph about how much you've learned in the past year and put it back in the folder. Have a drink afterward with a group of friends.
-Keep your body healthy. Writing is a physical endeavor, especially writing for theatre.
-Don't read plays before you experience them if you can help it. Do you read song lyrics before you listen to a new tune by your favorite musician? Theatre lives in the body. Let it be the first to experience it.
-Approach other people's plays with questions, not answers.
-Follow the advice you give to others. This one's the hardest for me.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I think I managed to plug everything in the other responses. One day soon, I will finish my website: www.GabrielJasonDean.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 124: Sharr White

Sharr White

Hometown:  I grew up in Orange County, California until I was twelve, then Boulder, Colorado through high school.

Current Town:  I now live in Cold Spring, New York, which is an almost unbearably quaint little village on the Hudson River, an hour north of Manhattan.

Q:  Tell me about Sunlight, the play going up as a National New Play Network "rolling world premiere." What does that mean? Where are the productions and what is the play about?

A:  On the surface Sunlight is about an epic ideological power struggle between a liberal but abusive university president, and his conservative former protégé who is now dean of the university’s law school, and whom performed work during the Bush administration focusing on interrogation policy. The play unfolds in real time, and depicts the last hour and a half of the president’s tenure at the university. Word has come to Matthew (the president) that that Vincent (the protégé) is under investigation by the Defense Department for permissions given in 2002 that inadvertently resulted in the beating death of a teenager in Afghanistan. Matthew has stormed across campus and, in an impotent rage, has destroyed Vincent’s office. This is the last straw for the school faculty who have been abused by Matthew for years, and, on the night of the play, are across campus casting a vote of no confidence against him. The play takes place in Matthew’s residence where his daughter, Charlotte—who is married to Vincent—and Matt’s longtime assistant, Maryanne, are preparing for Matt’s exit from the university. What the play really is, though, is a kind of mourning piece for what we lost on the morning of September 11, both against our will, and willingly. And how the choices we made as a nation marked a tragic turning point for us. It’s really about the fact that nothing will ever be the same for us again.

The National New Play Network is a coalition of theatres who’s goal is to give new plays as wide a premiere as possible. Every year they select a handful of scripts for consideration, each of which comes with a small stipend for any Network theatres interested in producing. It’s a really, really wonderful way to launch a play. You don’t have to fear the property being killed by a New York launch you may not be ready for, and it allows you to modify the script right after its initial production and see how it plays immediately following. Sunlight premiered at Marin Theatre Company, and is in rehearsal at Phoenix Theatre Company in Indianapolis and ArtsWest in Seattle, and will be performed again this summer at New Jersey Rep. All because Marin Theatre Company introduced the play to NNPN.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m workshopping a new play in New York called The Other Place, which is about a medical researcher whose sudden appearance of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease allows her missing daughter to suddenly come back to her. It’s told in the first-person, and as the play unfolds we realize at the same time as the main character that nothing she says can be trusted.

I’m also writing a new play, which is a commission for South Coast Repertory—I’m not yet exactly sure what it’s about.

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

A:  I grew up in a very chaotic household. I’ve got a brother and four sisters, and my parents divorced when I was twelve, and I was relentlessly bullied when I was in grade school. When my mother moved us to Colorado I was able to reinvent myself, escape the bullying, even fit in a little. I think all my plays have central characters who are both a part of their surroundings and yet because of what they’ve been through, also quite lost. An acquaintance of mine told me a few years ago that my plays are about people who become found by others. And in many ways I think that’s true.

Q:  In your opinion, what is the purpose of theater?

A:  Human beings have a deep need not just to experience catharsis, but to experience catharsis together. On some level this is what has powered the building of group identity, of societies. Haiti, the China earthquakes, New Orleans, all the way down to local news stories that cause outpourings of emotion. Without minimizing the true depth of the human suffering that is actually happening, there is a reason for this secondary reaction, the reaction of those of us hearing about the news which creates subsets of societal identity. And what theatre does is allow for this catharsis and this identity to be experienced and tapped into without the experience of actual tragedy. For me, privately experiencing catharsis within a group of people, each of whom is privately experiencing exactly the same thing as me, is what makes that rare breathless silence in a good night of theatre so stunning; we’ve all agreed on some profound emotional level to stop breathing at the same time, and it’s glorious. And then someone in the audience chokes on their gum and ruins everything. And that’s life.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I’m really excited by anything experimental, with a lot of risk, a lot of humor and really big stakes. With one caveat, which is that I want to see it work. I’m not saying I won’t like a new piece if it doesn’t work, but I’m mystified by really tough pieces that actually do work. It’s like a really good magic trick; years later I want to be able to say “How did they do that”?

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

A: 
1. On output: Slow and steady wins the race. It doesn’t matter how much you write in one sitting, it only matters that you write every single day. A page; an hour; a half hour. Don’t bother with saving up your ideas for the few times in a year you can escape for long periods of binge writing; you’ll just procrastinate, and plays take time to develop properly. And I’m not talking about “writing time”, I’m talking about calendar time. You have to live with a play, make it a part of your life, before you begin to understand what it’s really about.

2. On Money: Don’t ever count on making any as a playwright, so find something else to do for money, and let yourself truly understand that you will be doing that something else for a long, long time. Make sure it’s something that lets you live and have a life—a good life—and that also lets you write. In my money life I’m an advertising copywriter. I didn’t think I could do this and be productive, but I’m more productive now than I’ve ever been, plus I can get my teeth cleaned for free. When I landed my first corporate job, my life got better. And my writing got better. I think of it as a sort of personal corporate subsidy of the arts.

3. On the savior myth: I think so many artists operate under a savior myth, which is that one day their lucky break will come—always in the form of some life-changing chunk of money or some incredible benefactor—and that everything in their lives will change. And so we wind up waiting and waiting for our windfall, until our lives are over. Here is the cold truth: There is no savior. There is no cavalry. You are your cavalry. Even when your plays become good enough to get a fantastic agent, or a few very good producer contacts, none of that matters unless you are writing, writing all the time, and writing well. And even then a good play will take years to reach market, and the payoff from a single property will be small, so you must have many, many good properties in order to even flirt with making a living. Which means write, write, write, write, write. This is a fact and must be added into the equation of your life as a playwright.

Q:  Plugs:

A:  If you’re in New York, plan on seeing Yank!. http://www.yankthemusical.com/

David Zellnik is a genius writer and a wonderful person, and he does deeply imaginative, connected work that I as a writer try to study.

I Interview Playwrights Part 123: Michael Lew

Michael Lew

Hometown: La Jolla, CA

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about microcrisis.

A:  microcrisis is a play about the next financial crisis. It's about what happens when bankers exploit microcredit, the small charitable loans to Third World entrepreneurs meant to alleviate global poverty. It's about bankers lumping microcredit into complex financial instruments that ravage the international economy. It's also a bonkers comedy. Stylistically, I'm trying to reconcile the wacky, senseless style of my short plays with the more serious intent of my full-lengths. I'm hoping to take the sensibilities I've honed in my shorts and use comedy as a weapon. I've also been thinking for the past several years about how to write an effective political play - how to do theater that reflects what's going on in the world without falling into the usual traps of preaching to the choir, defanging the truth, or making "expendable art" that's ripped from the headlines but forgotten tomorrow.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  microcrisis has been occupying most of my brain space lately. This is a workshop production, so I've been rewriting throughout the process. But after this ends I'm hoping to start up a new play for a couple of actresses that I like, and collaborate on a new musical with former Youngblooder Matt Schatz.

Q:  Tell us about Youngblood. Who are they what do they do, etc.

A:  Youngblood is an incredible incubator of emerging talent, housed at Ensemble Studio Theatre. It's a writers' group for playwrights under 30. We meet weekly to go over drafts in progress, do workshops like the one microcrisis is getting, produce a ton of short plays, go on artist retreats, and we do a monthly Sunday brunch series where the audience watches a series of new short plays all written on the same topic (while eating pancakes and drinking Bloody Marys). Youngblood and the Ma-Yi Writers' Lab have been my greatest fronts of support over the past several years as I continue trudging through emerging writer hell.

Q:  You had a short in Humana. What was that experience like?

A:  Yeah, I had a short last year (Roanoke, about re-enactors at the Roanoke Living Museum) and the year before that (In Paris You Will Find Many Baguettes But Only One True Love, about a sad sack and her best girlfriend who falls in love with a Parisian street mime). Both of those shorts actually got their start in Youngblood and premiered at Humana. Being at Actors Theatre of Louisville was incredible. The theaters there are so gorgeous, and the support system is astounding. To see these ridiculous plays getting fully produced was joyful and a little surreal. For instance, Roanoke had a huge teepee and an arrowhead display as part of the set, and one of the girls wore a breakaway skirt that she shed for the final dance number (which Matt Schatz composed). When Roanoke was first done at Youngblood, there was no set and I think the actors had to hunt through their closets for costumes. The Humana Festival itself is also quite fascinating. The plays themselves are really solid, but I'm also interested in how the machine of it works: the way the apprentice company does round the clock set changeovers to cram 10 different shows into 3 theater spaces. Or the way the entire theatre industry descends onto Louisville. It was really interesting being a gnome among giants and watching this whirlwind of drama onstage and off.

Q:  You're engaged to be married to another playwright. I'm married to another playwright and know a few other playwright couples, but we're rare. What are advantages of being a playwright couple?

A:  I am engaged to Rehana Mirza, whom I met in the Ma-Yi Writers' Lab. What's funny is that we want to accomplish VERY different things in our writing and yet we have a profound respect for the other person's work and a deep understanding of their writing mechanics. Oftentimes we'll suggest edits or lines that are absolutely in the other person's voice -- things that we'd never dream of putting into our own writing. I think the biggest advantage of being a playwright couple is always having an advocate - someone who knows your work inside and out and who's always willing to engage with you and keep pushing you to get better as a writer. I think another major advantage is an innate understanding of the difficulty of this career path. We're able to celebrate the small victories together and weather the many challenges. For instance, this is the second year in a row that I've been in rehearsal over Valentine's Day. Rehana didn't even blink. She gets that when we're in production it's a rare and lucky moment, and so what might seem like an obstacle or an inconvenience to anyone else is actually a cause for celebration to us.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  As I said early, lately I've been hunting for plays that attack the political world in a way that's nuanced, honest, and longlasting. I also like plays that transport me to other worlds, either through the language or through the writer's unique logic. I love plays with a good sense of humor. My favorite writers are Steve Belber, David Lindsay-Abiare, Julia Cho, Julia Jordan, Lloyd Suh, Qui Nguyen, and my fiancee Rehana. My favorite productions over the past few seasons have been Passing Strange, Blasted, and Princes of Waco (by fellow Youngblooder Rob Askins). I'll tell you what really excites me: plays that reflect our multicultural world and that depict a unique perspective. So often I see plays that portray the same kinds of people, that offer the same viewpoint, and that speak to the same kind of audience. It's as though year in and year out the titles change but I'm seeing the exact same play over and over again. I think that if this art form is going to be viable against other forms, we need to mount work that is vital and immediate. We need storytelling done in a form that's unavailable anywhere else. But above all, we need to hear stories from diverse artists, told from a different perspective.

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

A:  1) Surround yourself with a talented peer group (actors, directors, designers, and especially other writers). Talented peers will motivate you to sharpen your craft and step up to their level. 2) Learn the business side of theatre - definitely fight for what the theatre should be. But take a good, hard look at what the theatre is. 3) There's a limit to how far internships and schooling will take you. There's no shortcut for getting your hands dirty. 4) Aw, what the hell do I know about starting out, Adam? I've never even had a major full-length production. Nobody ever taught me anything that made this slog substantially easier. Some people love theatre so much that they're willing to slog on, and some people don't. It's all just an endurance game, no?

Q:  Plugs:

A:  last 2 performances of microcrisis at EST (52nd betw 10th and 11th) Thurs 2/25 and Fri 2/26. 7pm.

I Interview Playwrights Part 122: Craig Wright

Craig Wright

Q:  Tell me about Blind, the show you have going up at Rattlestick.

A:  It’s a play about Oedipus and Jocasta. It takes place in the period of time during which they’re both offstage in Sophocles’ play, and it assumes that the story Oedipus eventually tells the people of Thebes — that he found the queen dead and put out his eyes — isn’t the truth. It uses Oedipus’ relationship to Jocasta and the kingship as a metaphor for our culture’s relationship to economic privilege, and the economic and social crisis in ancient Thebes mirrors the crisis in our own land and time.

Q:  What else are you working on right now?

A:  I have a few pilots in process in the world of television and my new play THE GRAY SISTERS, which deals with four sisters handling the fallout from prolonged sexual abuse by their stepfather, premieres at Third Rail Rep in Portland, OR in April. They commissioned it.

Q:  You have had success both in TV and theater.  How do you find the time to continue to do  both?

A:  My son’s all grown up and in college. There isn’t much else to do besides work.

Q:  You most recently worked with, among other people, my friend and theatrical darling Sheila Callaghan on the Showtime show the United States of Tara.  What was that experience like and doesn't Sheila rock?

A:  Sheila is an immensely talented writer and a lot of fun to work with. Alan Ball, when I started at SIX FEET UNDER, told me I could have a future in television if I wanted one. I told Sheila the same thing about herself. What she chooses to do next remains to be seen, but whatever it is, it’ll be funny, provocative, and amazing. That’s just what she does.

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

A:  There was a street the kids called Bloody Lane about three blocks from where I lived when I was five. It was called Bloody Lane because the man who owned the house at the end of the street — it was really just a very long driveway — poisoned the squirrels in the trees, so there were always dead, run-over squirrels laying around in the rocks. Some 7th-graders on my street decided one day to ride their bikes down to the end of Bloody Lane and see what was there. I asked if I could come along. A gun came into play over the course of the adventure and I ended up with a badly broken leg, a good story, and the kind of protracted convalescence that tends to turns people into writers.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  My taste runs to the avant-garde: the Wooster Group, ZT Hollandia, Teatr Zar — these are companies that make work that inspires me.  At the same time, David Cromer’s perfect production of OUR TOWN was the best thing I’ve seen in a long while. I also just saw a show in Los Angeles called AN OAK TREE by Tim Crouch that was amazing. I like theater that doesn’t pretend to be simulating reality, theatre whose primary mechanism is what I would call “ceremonial” or “invocative.”

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

A:  Endeavor to be the most intrepid and honest person in the process when it comes to making the play itself better. Don’t settle for what other people will let you get away with. Don’t blame the actors. Make it better.