I Interview Playwrights Part 163: David Caudle

photo by Laura Marie Duncan of LMD Photography

David Caudle

Hometown: Miami, FL

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I'm working on a new comedy about the world of Yoga called DOWNWARD FACING DEBBIE, commissioned by Outcast Productions. I'm also really close to completion of a screenplay adapted from the book, MAJOR CONFLICT, by retired US Army Major Jeffrey McGowan. It's a great story, honestly told, about a gay officer's experiences in the military before and during Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Q:  You have an MFA in set design and set painting is your day job. How does your
design work inform your playwriting and vice-versa?

A: I automatically think of the setting as virtually another character. In THE SUNKEN LIVING ROOM, the set is the title character. Hopefully, being so sensitive to the physical world of the play helps me specify the mood and deepen the content of a piece. Technical knowledge gives me the confidence to commit to a setting, already knowing at least one way to achieve it. In production, I don't step on the designer's toes, though. I love seeing their interpretations of the world. Only on a couple of occasions I gave a tiny note to the director about a visual cue that might be misleading. By the way I also painted the costumes for all the shows at Lincoln Center for the last six years. I distressed the peasants on the Coast of Utopia, rusted armor for Henry V, sweatied up the Seabees in South Pacific, and most recently mucked up the Scottsboro Boys. It's great being able to support my writing with another art form I love. You can see some of my set designs and paintings on my website. www.davidcaudle.org

Q:  Are there any themes you tend to explore over and over?

A:  For me, it's almost always about human connection. Our impact on one another and the earth by virtue of our existence. One thing I've felt strongly about is telling the stories of gay characters whose sexuality is incidental to the conflict. I guess it's a newly-identified trend, but I've been putting gay characters in universal situations since I started writing plays. SUNKEN's main character is a gay teen who on this particular night is dealing with his older brother's drug-induced melt-down after his girlfriend's abortion. VISITING HOURS is about a longtime Lesbian couple whose adult son is in trouble with the law. They're parents, going through a nightmare all parents dread. They make mistakes, blame themselves and one another, but try desperately to hold their family together. They're not exemplary in a way that paints an unrealistically rosy picture of a gay family to a doubting straight world. VISITING HOURS was a finalist at Premiere Stages last year. I hope somebody picks it up, I feel it's a story that anyone can really take in. The hope isn't necessarily in the outcome, but in the compassion the audience would feel for the family.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Tennessee Williams is up there. And Oscar Wilde. And the late great Jose Quintero. I acted in a scene from Equus in a directing workshop he led at FSU. I played Alan. Jose assumed the role of the horse to coax some semblance of a performance out of me. He'd had a tracheotomy due to cancer, so he spoke utterly monotone, through a voice box held to his throat. But he was so brilliantly expressive, that I remember his words full of intonation and power. It was the only time I think I really was an actor. The world premiere of SUNKEN introduced me to a few personal heroes. Ryan Rilette had cast the premiere at Southern Rep in New Orleans when he was a/d there. Then Katrina hit. The production was cancelled, but Rem Cabrera, in Miami's Bureau of Cultural Affairs, contacted the a/d at the time of New Theatre, Rafael de Acha. He gave the show a slot in New Theatre's season. Ryan went down to my hometown to direct the show, then worked tirelessly to get Southern Rep back up and running, then brought the show to New Orleans nine months later. And his wife Christy had adorable twin girls opening weekend. That was amazing. Another hero would be Ricky J. Martinez at New Theatre, who succeeded Rafael, and produced and directed two other of my plays, LIKENESS and IN DEVELOPMENT. Ricky has kept up New Theatre's mission to produce world premieres of sometimes unknown writers despite the abysmal economy. The New Harmony Project, Sewanee Writers' Conference and Primary Stages' Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers' Group are heroes. Their support has kept me going and growing in my voice and career in a field that can sometimes feel really lonely. Gary Garrison of the Dramatists Guild is a  dear friend and a personal hero, for his fierce honesty and generosity of spirit.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that surprises me, that gives the audience work to do, that lets us live in the world onstage and feel the characters' heartbeats. Theater that doesn't assume everyone has a short attention span. Theater I can't stop thinking about. Theater that makes me feel like a total schlub. I know that sounds general but any genre of theatre can achieve those things.

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

A:  There's no one path. Find people who believe in your voice and take all the help you're offered. Take praise and criticism both with a grain of salt. I've heard people say we shouldn't be too grateful, but I don't know why not. I guess, also, get into a good grad school if you can. My play IN DEVELOPMENT is a dark comic ghost story set at a playwright's conference for young hopefuls being mentored by a brilliant but eccentric playwriting legend. It explores a lot of the ideas everyone's talking about these days, about development and nurturing of new plays and new writers, and which writers are nurtured and why. It's like a dramatized nightmare version of Todd London's book Outrageous Fortune. The play might seem fairly cynical but the common link between all the characters is a real passion for playwriting and love of the audience. And the mentor gives some great craft lectures. I'd advise newer playwrights to keep their passion alive and their wits about them.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  THE SECOND HOUSE is coming up this summer in FringeNYC, directed by Michelle Bossy (Assoc. Artistic Director of Primary Stages); THE SUNKEN LIVING ROOM (Samuel French) will be presented in the HOWL! Festival in September, directed by a terrific Italian director, Enrico LaManna. If all goes well, he'll be taking the play to Rome, in Italian afterward. Samuel French and Smith & Kraus both recently published monologues from the play as well. This will be the first performance of SUNKEN in NYC, though it has been a Play of the Week at the Drama Bookshop. The talented Toybox Theatre Company is planning a production of THE SHORT FALL in Spring 2011. And anyone who's curious can read THE COMMON SWALLOW in the online literary journal, Blackbird. http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n2/

I Interview Playwrights Part 162: Jacqueline Goldfinger

Jacqueline Goldfinger

Hometown: Tallahassee, FL

Current Town: Philadelphia, PA

Q:  Tell me please about the play of yours Azuka is producing next year.

A:  "the terrible girls" is a wicked dark comedy set in the deep South. Three friends work in a bar off the interstate and end-up "accidentally" killing men and burying them in the walls. When one attempts to hide a murder from the other two, everything begins to unravel.

"the terrible girls" began as a short one-act play in the New York Fringe. Over the past year, I've developed it with Azuka into a full-length play.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just finished a new drama, "Slip/Shot," and I am developing a new dark comedy, "Skin & Bone," as part of the Playwrights Forum at InterAct Theatre Company.

"Slip/Shot" is a Southern drama about two families who become inextricably linked when a party devolves into a terrible shooting, and everyone has a different opinion about what happened. "Slip/Shot" is about how we shape the truth behind the stories we tell, and re-imagine history to protect the ones we love.

"Skin & Bone" is a Southern Gothic Horror play about two elderly cannibals living in rural Florida.

Also, two of my adaptations, "Little Women" and "The Ghost's Bargain," are being published by Playscripts this fall.

You can always see what I'm up to on my website: www.jacquelinegoldfinger.com

Q:  You are the Lit Mgr at the Philadelphia Theater Company. You probably read a lot of scripts. How has that affected your writing?

A:  As a Literary Manager I have the opportunity to read a wide range of scripts - both published and unpublished. I get to see first-hand how the art of play writing is evolving and how playwrights are pushing the limits of theatrical imagination.

I see my own writing as a constantly evolving creature - and reading plays has always affected the evolutionary process. For example, one reason I love "Beauty Queen of Leenane" is because it has such great moment-to-moment emotional clarity. At the time I read "Beauty," I was working on an emotional mother-daughter scene in my own play so I kept this example constantly in mind to make the emotional moments stronger and clearer in my writing. Before I became a Literary Manager, however, I was limited to reading what was published which, at least for American publishers, is generally limited to scripts the publishers predict will make royalty money, and not necessarily the scripts that are testing artistic boundaries or forwarding the art form. The access to unpublished material is definitely a benefit of being a Literary Manager.

Q:  What theaters in Philly should I check out?

A:  There are so many great theaters in Philly! The first that come to mind are: PTC (http://philadelphiatheatrecompany.org), Azuka (http://www.azukatheatre.org), Theatre Exile (http://www.theatreexile.org), Pig Iron (http://www.pigiron.org), Applied Mechanics (http://appliedmechanics.blogspot.com), InterAct (http://www.interacttheatre.org), Inis Nua (http://www.inisnuatheatre.org), Arden (http://www.ardentheatre.org), Nice People (http://www.nicepeopletheatre.org/), and the Wilma (http://www.wilmatheater.org).

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

A:  We had these huge wooden kitchen cabinets when I was really young and I used to like to climb inside with the pots and pans and all my miniature plastic musical instruments then close the door and make "magic" music for people in the house (the people were supposed to pretend that they didn't know where the music was coming from, that it just magically existed). I think it was probably my first impulse to create something but be invisible - which is sort of what we do as playwrights, we get to be unseen gods presiding over the universes of our plays.

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

A:  I have two things, but can I count them as one and call it a tie?

Pay all working artists a living wage, and get more brave, new scripts into the hands of young playwrights to read and study.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Lillian Hellman. Sam Shepard. Paula Vogel. Martin McDonagh. Joe Papp. Sarah Bernhardt. Tina Landau. Phyllinda Lloyd.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre that makes me look at something in a new or deeper way.

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

A:  Read and see as much theater as you can.

Q:  What plays are you recommending to friends right now - either to see or read?

A:  "Lydia" by Octavio Solis, "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" by Rajiv Joseph, "The Language Archive" by Julia Cho

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Katie Clark Gray is having her new play, "516," produced this spring at Philadelphia Theatre Workshop (http://www.katharineclarkgray.com/blog/).

Theatre Exile still has two staged readings left in their spring new play series: Bruce Walsh's "Williams Weathersby" and Seth Bauer's "Over the Line" (http://www.theatreexile.org/season.php?sea=-1&mnu=sea).

Philly's annual summer new play festival, Play Penn (http://www.playpenn.org/), is ramping up.

I Interview Playwrights Part 161: Christopher Chen

Christopher Chen

Hometown: San Francisco

Current Town: San Francisco

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A big surrealist epic about a group of theater artists working on a play about Mao Tse-Tung. I know, the play-within-a-play thing has been done to death, but I think I have a unique spin on it. I hope to make this an Asian Marat/Sade.

Q:  You're a Resident Playwright at the Playwright's Foundation. Can you tell me what that's like?

A:  It’s really great. I’m really inspired by this diverse and brilliant group. I am inspired by their writing and feedback, and we also give each other practical support, like keeping each other on top of deadlines, etc. So it’s a really nurturing environment- a refuge from the normally heartless, competitive, cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, uber-capitalist world of playwriting.

Q:  If I came to SF tomorrow, what plays or theaters would you suggest i check out?

A:  Marcus Gardley’s Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi was amazing. It was Shakespearean. But I think it just closed. Anything by Cutting Ball Theater, Crowded Fire, and Berkeley Rep.

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

A:  When I was a child, I would put on extravagant puppet shows for my parents, and also write short stories that always ended with someone dying. I definitely have not grown past these impulses. All of my plays seem to be spectacles of mortality.

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

A:  I would want lots more money pumped into it. Yes, there is the magic of the homegrown, but if you look at what someone like Robert LePage can do with a large budget, then you realize that infinite resources sometimes does mean infinite innovation.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I am always excited by theater that experiments with new ways of exploring the subconscious. If a writer has to invent new forms of language to get at more hidden parts of the psyche, or if a director needs to have actors move slowly in meditative silence for 5 unbroken minutes in order to put the audience in a trance-like, vulnerable state that unlocks hidden nostalgic emotions, then I’m all for that. I think theater has the unique potential of truly displacing people from their normal ways of thinking and feeling, so I’m always inspired by theater artists who have that as their goal.

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

A:  I think the trick is to commit fully and rigorously to your instincts. If you have a wisp of a creative idea you think might be cool, run with it to the finish line before you get a lot of feedback and other ideas muddying the waters. I think you’ll find the more you trust in yourself, and really take yourself seriously, the more rewards you will reap.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I was just in New York and saw the Marina Abramovic exhibit at the MOMA. If her work doesn’t qualify as theater, I don’t know what does. Incredibly powerful and incredibly transcendental. I also saw the Big Art Group there, a group that fellow playwright Mr. Enrique Urueta enthusiastically introduced me to some time ago. They seem to travel a lot, so I urge anyone who has a chance to catch their brilliant insanity to do so.

I Interview Playwrights Part 160: Craig Pospisil

Craig Pospisil

Hometown: New York

Current Town: New York. I'm a born-and-bred New Yorker and I love it here, through and through.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I'm working on a commission for a musical comedy called DOT COMET, which is about the Dot Com boom of the late 90s. Mike Ogborn, who wrote BABY CASE and CAFE PUTANESCA, is writing the music and lyrics, and I'm writing the book. Mike's a great composer, and I love his music. It's really varied and smart. He lives here in New York, but he works a lot in Philadelphia, and he just won his second Barrymore award. We just had a reading of the first draft of the show down in DC at the Wooly Mammoth, which good to hear. It really showed us what aspect of the script were going in the right direction, and what areas we need to dive back into and re-work.

I'm also doing some work on a new musical I've had kicking around in my head for a while. This past winter I challenged myself to write a scene a day before going to work, and ended up with a first draft in two weeks. Then I put it aside for a while and now I'm doing some revisions before I show it to one or two composers I have in mind to find someone who wants to come on board. I also recently wrote a short play inspired by a Tennesee Williams poem for Blue Roses Theatre Company. We had a reading of that last month here in New York, and they're looking at a production for all the short plays they comissioned.

Q:  You work for DPS. Has working for a play publisher affected the way you write plays or think about theater?

A:  Yes, absolutely. Working at Dramatists hasn't changed what I write, but understanding the various theater markets is definitely a tool I use when I'm working. It makes me look at the style of the play or the type of story I'm telling, and forces me to ask myself some questions. For instance my play MONTHS ON END has ten characters, making it pretty large by today's standards - especially for professional companies. So I looked long and hard at the play to determine if I really needed all those people. In the end I felt that the story I was telling did need them, but I knew it might limit some options for the play. It premiered at Purple Rose and had a couple of small pro productions, but it's had more than 60 nonprofessional productions in the last six years. There have been other plays where I have deliberately kept things simpler, knowing that it would allow the possibility for a play to be produced with a small budget as well as a larger one.

I see so many plays for work that I'm always analysing them for both artistic merit and how commercial they might be. There are many plays and playwrights, for example, who are well respected and keep getting work here in New York that the rest of the country laregly ignores. Conversely there's a lot of theater going on elsewhere that gets produced by professional and nonprofessional theater groups of all kinds that never finds its way to the city.

Q:  I think I met you through the A Train plays. Is that still happening? Can you explain to my readers what that is?

A:  theAtrainplays is a 24 hour theater project/company that was conceived by Larry Feeney, and further developed by me, David Riedy (a terrific writer), Drew Donavan and Michael Pemberton. What makes it different from other 24 hour groups is that every piece is set in the subway, and all the plays and musicals are written while riding the A train from one end of the line, 207th Street, to the other in Far Rockaway. That's a trip of less than two hours. We'd have six writers, and the production style is bare bones, no lighting or sound cues. Each play starts with the characters entering and ends with them leaving. So for the audience it's like taking a ride on the train and seeing all these different stories.

And on top of that we threw pure chance into the equation. Before getting on the train every playwright pulls a number from a bag, 2 - 4, and that's the number of characters you have in your play. Then you pull that many headshots of actors at random from another bag, and that's your cast. So you can't pre-plan anything. You might have an idea for something, but you're likely to pull a number of characters or actors that make that idea impossible. That happened to me once. I had this idea for a two character piece with a man and woman, and I pulled four actors, three women and one man. And I totally froze for the first several stops of the train, my mind was so fixed on my first idea, despite the fact that I couldn't use it. Until I approached it from completely different angle, and ended up with my play IT'S NOT YOU, which has gone on to be produced almost 70 times now around the US, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Hong Kong, Germany and Samoa, and translated into Mandarin, French and Danish.

theAtrainplays was a real pressure cooker, and the more we did it the harder it got because we were always trying to do something we hadn't done before. There was some really fun and healthy competition between us too, which pushed us all to really shine. And we always tried to change things. The first time was something of a lark, to see if we could do it. The second time we actually produced two separate nights, while the first show was going up, another group was on the train writing something for the following night. The next time we did musicals, writing the book one way on the train, and songs on the trip back. The next time we rode the Staten Island Ferry and did two shows, plays the first night and musicals the second. Then we started to extend the runs, and on like that. After a couple of years, we produced a best of, theAtrain(re)plays, at the Peter Sharp Theatre at Playwrights, and it was really hard to choose between all the plays. As of today, I think we produced close to 150 short plays and musicals. Playscripts Inc. came to one of our early shows and loved it, and they now publish two volumes of theAtrainplays, which have had good sales and productions.

In the first three years we did probably 15 separate volumes of the show, and that was a really fantastic time. We had a really strong company of writers, actors and directors. I met some amazing people, and we all still work together of each others shows all the time. It got really expensive to produce, though, and so we had to scale back and so in the last few years the shows have all been done as benefits. We did three of them at New World Stages for the Off-Broadway Brainstormers. The last show we did was a little over a year ago, and it was in Los Angeles actually! Larry had moved out there, and I picked five other writers and the six of us rode the train and did our writing, and then we emailed the scripts to Los Angeles, where they were done the next night. I'm sure there will be another one eventually - especially since Larry just moved back to New York. So if you see someone hunched over a pad of paper or a laptop on the A train, sweating and furiously writing . . . give them some space.

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

A:  The funny thing is that both of my parents are writers, but I never thought about doing it myself. I grew up wanting to act. Literally from the time I was in kindergarten that's what I wanted to do. And I acted all through high school and college, and didn't really do any creative writing until my senior year at Wesleyan when I wrote and directed a play as my thesis project. And that was a great experience and the play really poured out of me, but I didn't see it as a turning point. I came back to New York after college and started doing showcases, and spent a while finding an actor teacher I really liked, but when he went on vaction for the summer I decided to take a scene writing class at HB Studios. There I had to write something new every week, and I was literally walking home one day when the thought popped into my head "I'm a storyteller." And I turned all my attention to writing, and went to New York University's Dramatic Writing Department for my masters, and I've never looked back. (Although I do still act from time to time, and I think acting was one of the most important learning tools that a playwright can have.)

There's one story, though, from when I was very young. Virginia Hamilton, a pretty well known young adult fiction writer, lived in my building, and her daughter was my age and we played together a lot. She took us to the park one day and I apparently told her about this broken piece of sidewalk along the street, and how you could stand on it and rock back and forth, and I showed it to her when we got there. When my mother collected me later, Hamilton told her that she thought I would grow up to be a writer because of how observant I was of details like that and the way I told her about the broken sidewalk.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Most of the writers whose work I really admire are completely different from my own work, which is mostly comedic. Eugene O'Neill, for example. I find his attention to detail amazing. And there was a ten year period where I re-read WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? every year because it always took me on such a journey. I think David Ives is brilliant. Richard Greenberg's THREE DAYS OF RAIN is an amazing play. And this last season I really liked Annie Baker's CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION. I think Tom Stoppard is one of the smartest playwrights I've ever seen or read. He was one of my best celebrity sightings ever in New York. I was seeing PROOF, and at intermission Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were at the back of the house, and everyone was staring and pointing, and I did my best New-York-seen-it-all attitude, but when I got back to my seat I turned around and virutally lost it because I saw Stoppard just ten feet away. And no one else knew who he was.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I'm pretty simple about this: I like a good story that's well told. It's not any one style of theater - I like absurdist plays, naturalism, farce, musicals, whatever - but want a story and characters that I get to see develop, a stuggle for something that gets fleshed out. A play that fully inhabits its own world and rules. I really don't care about theater that's trying to be shocking. I find that to be pretty boring, but I very much want to be surprised. I love a story that seems to be going in one direction, but then turns another way and makes you really sit up and pay attention.

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

A:  Be stubborn. Unless you are tremendously lucky early on, you will have to provide a lot of your own motivation and affirmation. You will get plays back in the mail. You may not get that fellowship, etc. But be stubborn and keep writing, because it's a big world and you will find people who respond to your work, and it can grow from there.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I would put in a plug for my play SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN, which is scheduled to open the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Alaska next month, but I just got an email from the director saying the lead actor has come down with shingles and the lead actress has never had chicken pox, and could be infected by any skin-to-skin contact. It's pretty hard to have a romantic comedy where your leads can't touch, much less kiss. So, I have no idea how we're going to get around that. Ah, the theater!

A new collection of my short plays, CHOOSING SIDES, came out last fall, and the plays in that are getting done. Plus I edited two new collections of monologues books, OUTSTANDING MEN'S and OUTSTANDING WOMEN'S MONOLOGUES, Vol. II, that just got published by DPS this month.

I Interview Playwrights Part 159: Jessica Provenz

 
Jessica Provenz

Hometown: Merrick, NY

Current Town: NYC and Princeton, NJ (my husband and I have yet to move in together)

Q: Didn't you recently have a short film screened? Can you tell me about that?

A: I wanted to *make* something. Last year, I wrote a screenplay and a pilot, but I wanted the words to go from my computer screen to the big screen - not in 1 year or 2 or 10 - but now! So I wrote the short NOTHING HAPPENED, a comedy about the one conversation girlfriends should never have... I co-produced it with Jessica Henson and Sarah Louise Lilley, and we wore a ton of hats from fundraising to hiring the team to learning about color correction and editing and sound mixing. After the movie was locked, we applied to festivals (which is like applying to college - equally as lengthy, competitive and expensive). We premiered at Cinequest in San Jose, played in LA, and have a half-dozen festivals coming up this summer.

The big difference between seeing your play performed vs. your movie is that the movie is fixed. There's no question of whether a moment will work or if the pace will be right; you press "play" and go on the same ride every time. I also learned the importance of telling a story with visuals. I initially set the film in a cafe (that's my theatre background at work for you), but director Julia Kots's first request was for a more visually stimulating location like an art gallery, which I turned into an erotic art gallery. Third, I caught the bug. I'm writing/directing a feature for our next indy venture. We hope to apply everything we learned on the short tenfold.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I'm writing the book for a musical, MATCHBOOK, for The Araca Group. Dan Lipton and David Rossmer are writing lyrics/music. It's based on a book by Samantha Daniels about her life as a divorce lawyer turned matchmaker. It's sexy and romantic and fun, a "Sex and the City" for the stage. A musical is a whole new ballgame for me, so I'm grateful that Marsha Norman spent so many hours at Juilliard talking to us about writing musicals and things like "how to lead into a song."

I'm also writing a feature called ONE NIGHT IN BERGDORFS for Alicia Keys' company, Big Pita Lil Pita, and a pilot, TOWN & COUNTRY - about the fact that I live in Manhattan and my husband lives in Princeton (which seems to fascinate a lot of people). And this week, I wrote my favorite three words ever: "End of Play" on TRUE ART, a new work about the underbelly of the art world.

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

A: When I was 11, my parents shipped me off to Stagedoor Manor for 9 weeks. I remember 2 things: unlimited grape soda and directing. I got to direct a one-act in a competition called "Festival." I selected William Inge's "The Rainy Afternoon," and I loved every second of it - casting, creating the set, the costumes. I'd spend hours in my bunkbed moving my shoes around, pretending I was blocking the actors. At Stagedoor, they gave out replica Oscars on "Award's Night", and I won the award for Best Director; I was so excited, I slept with it for a week. I was this awkward, 4'5" kid with glasses, braces, oversized sweaters, and a perm?! I was average in school, terrible in sports, the worst in my tap class - but when I directed this play, I knew I'd found my home.



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

A: I would love the possibility of a livable wage in playwriting. I don't have to earn it, I just want to know it's out there somewhere.



Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I love being blown away emotionally. Often a line or a moment will sucker-punch me, and I'll turn into a sobbing mess. I have some of my most honest moments watching theatre, because it can articulate what is so often left unsaid. I found the Off Broadway production of "Our Town" profound - I bought tickets for everyone I know. I love the emotion of plays by Wendy Wasserstein, Lee Blessing, A.R. Gurney, and musicals like "A Chorus Line" and "The Fantasticks."


Also love playwrights that perfect the twists-and-turns like Neil LaBute and Craig Wright. For a great laugh, I'll take Alan Ayckbourn any day.

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

A: Save money when you have it (I'm still grappling with this).

Be tenacious. Don't give up. A "no" is rarely firm. With grad school. With agents. With theaters. Send your material, and if there's any interest at all, send reinforcements - have someone make a call on your behalf - preferably someone they know and respect, or forward some press on the play, or about the source material, anything to keep you and your play in the reader's vision.

Finally, surround yourself with people who believe in you even more than you do. Whether it's parents, friends, a partner, or a mentor, having people who can remind you that you are on the right path is huge.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: NOTHING HAPPENED will screen in June at Berkshire International, New Jersey International, and New Fest in Manhattan with more festivals following in July and August. For details, go to our Facebook page. My play BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE will be workshopped by the Berkshire Playwrights Lab this summer. Details at www.berkshireplaywrightslab.org

John Logan was my first playwriting professor at Northwestern. His play RED is thrilling

I Interview Playwrights Part 158: Deron Bos

Deron Bos

Hometown: Stafford, VA

Current Town: Culver City, CA

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I just finished a very crude first draft of a new play titled The City She Wants Me. My blurb for it currently reads like this: "Durn wants to become a Lego superstar, Jack has been called by God, Faye is proposing to rebuild 1930's L.A. in an unmarked warehouse, and Claudia Turnkey is going to die ... soon." I have two other ideas kicking around and I want to start them in between revising City.

Q:  You recently moved to LA from New York. How are you finding the change? Should everyone in New York move to LA?

A:  Well, my reasons for moving to LA were mostly family driven -- my wife is a SoCal native, her family is here, and our two boys are surely benefiting from that close proximity to her family. (As are their parents.) And we were all ready to move away from the NY winters. But it was really important for me to stay in a city with a cultural/arts/entertainment scene and the mythology of L.A. has fascinated me for the past ten years. I also have ambitions of writing for TV, but my focus at the moment is mostly on raising my two young sons and I'm finding if I can find the time to write something in the midst of that it's going to be a play for the STAGE.

A few months after moving here I was lucky enough to become one of the founding members of The Playwrights Union, "a network of Los Angeles theater artists writing for stage, theater, and film." Jennifer Hayley, who I knew from my Seattle days, founded it and it's a great roster of talented and experienced playwrights who call L.A. their home. I thought I would have to search and be here for a while to find a supportive artistic community like this one and then it just fell into my lap. It's nice when things happen like that, because you know ... often they don't.

Ha! I can't help but think that last question is to support your own campaign to move to L.A., Adam. Personally, I do miss NYC, Brooklyn, and the theater community there. However, this is now my third city since college and I do love how much overlap happens with the communities you make in each city.

Q:  What was your experience like studying playwriting at Brooklyn College under Mac Wellman?

A:  Overall, I thought it was a great experience because:

1) The tuition is dirt cheap for a graduate program if you're a New York resident.

2) It's in Brooklyn.

3) Mac is incredibly well read, darkly hilarious, and a gifted teacher.

4) I made some great friends.

5) I wrote a play a semester.

There were times when I questioned if I was in the right place because my writing seemed traditional compared to many of my classmates, but then I learned: A) My writing is much weirder than I originally thought. B) I'm much happier being the square in the midst of experimentation that I am being the revolutionary amongst squares. I think it speaks well of the program too that its recent graduates have produced both highly regarded theater both uptown and downtown.

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

A:  It was Revolutionary War day in kindergarten and my mom borrowed a felt George Washington costume from my best friend and neighbor Greg Froio's mom so I could get all dressed up. When I arrived to class I discovered that the only other kids who were dressed up were a few girls in Betsy Ross hats. I loved costumes as a kid, but because I was a shy kid, I loved the kind with a substantial mask. George Washington offered no such shelter. I burst into tears and wouldn't stop crying. I remember my teacher (who was missing one hand) scolding me in the bathroom and saying, "Stop crying! Do you want to be a crybaby?! No one likes a crybaby!" I stopped crying.

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

A:  I think every LORT A house in the country should be required to hire a resident playwright and give them a modest but livable salary for at least three years. I'm sure that there are managing directors across the country preparing an email right now to tell me how naive this proposal is, but until that time it sounds like the right move to me. It would be a shot at creating some true regional theater.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Fred Franklin (my high school drama teacher), Marshall W. Mason, and the Mighty Twelve Company Members of Printer's Devil Theatre during the 97-2000 era.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The thrilling, the original, and the heart felt. I find that I want to see something that has LIFE to it and that comes in a lot of different shapes and genres. And it's impossible to do, but so satisfying when it happens.

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

A:  I'm an advice junkie and especially a sucker for writing advice. Reading Anne Lamott's essay "Shitty First Drafts" was a revelation for me and it's something I reread often for courage and comfort. This advice from the author of my favorite cheerleading movie, Bring It On has given me a lot of fuel over the years. Recently, I found this essay from Merlin Mann on the danger of advice speaks to my many of my writing challenges. And of course, the wealth of advice given by the 150+ interviewees of this project has been fantastic, it's its own course on playwriting. So, following Mann's lead I would say indulge in some advice, but then get down to the task at hand: write. (I'm continually telling myself this very instruction.)

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My new play, The City She Wants Me, will have its first public reading on May 8 at 6:30 pm as part of the Playwrights Union's first public event, The Playwrights Union Reading Festival. There's a weekend of great work from our playwrights and it's free so if you're in LA please come out and check it out!

My director (and good friend) for that reading, Paul Willis directed an exceptional production of my friend Sheila Callaghan's play, Lascivious Something for the excellent theater L.A. theatre company, Circle X. It closes May 1st.

Finally I was very excited to hear that Clubbed Thumb in NYC will produce my friend Kate E. Ryan’s play Dot this June as part of their Summerworks festival. I read Dot right before I left NYC and was knocked out by how hilarious and original it is -- it was my favorite script I read that year.

I Interview Playwrights Part 157: Sarah Sander

 

Sarah Sander

Hometown:  Kansas City, Kansas

Current Town:  Sarasota, Florida

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A couple different things. I’m doing rewrites on a play called Channel 3 which tells the story of a 16 year old girl who is visiting her estranged uncle in LA after her mother’s suicide. The girl, Adelaide, uses television as a refuge and as a means to filter her own experience. The narration is intercut with commercials, ideally fracturing what is “real” and what is scripted.

I’m also in the beginning stages of a full-length tentatively titled Copier Jam. It’s a play set in a corporate office where corn begins to grow out of the floor tiles, the copier spits out raw meat, and one of the characters turns into a chicken.

Q:  What's it like to be the NNPN Playwright in Residence at Florida Studio Theatre?
 

A:  It’s an incredible post. The fellowship is 10 months long and I have ample time to work on my own plays while also reading for the lit office, teaching with FST’s Write-A-Play program, and house managing. I came to playwriting relatively late and the opportunity to participate in the “business side” of the arts has proved tremendously enlightening. Witnessing the number of beautiful, original authentic plays our lit department rejects simply because they do not fit into our season makes the numerous “Dear Playwright” letters I receive much easier to swallow.

I’d also like to add that NNPN is a brilliant, BRILLIANT organization. In addition to the Playwright-in-Residence Program they also have the Continued Life of New Plays Fund where three theatres mount the same new play and share “world-premier” status. Essentially it’s a group of theatres who rally together to support and encourage new work. They also throw great parties.

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 bite other children.

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

A:  Money.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
 

A:  Albee, Churchill and Pinter: brutally elegant all.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  It depends on my mood. For the most part I want theatre that challenges, provokes and inspires me to think above and beyond my own petty concerns. Other times, I’m happy to be coddled.

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

A:  Follow your instincts. Embrace failure. Enjoy the ride.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:   P73 is putting up Sam Hunter's Jack's Precious Moment beginning May 21 at 59E59. If it's anything like Sam's other work, it'll be gorgeous and revelatory and barbed. Also, Andrew Rosendorf's Cane is opening Florida Stage's new space on October 27th. It's gutting. It's worth the journey.

I Interview Playwrights Part 156: Zakiyyah Alexander

Zakiyyah Alexander

Hometown: Brooklyn, NY

Current Town: NY, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  All new stuff which is both exciting and nerve wracking. I've got 2 plays that I'm working on. 'The Itch' is a satire that deals with the idea of exploiting your race to be successful in America. 'The day after tomorrow' involves a couple who adopt and bring 2 children from an area that has had a natural disaster. There are probably 2 or 3 other projects on the back burner, including a musical that Matt Schatz and Lucas Papelias will be collaborators on. This is very much a writing year after a few years of production, workshops, etc. This pretty much means writing until my hands hurt on a regular basis.

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

A:  When I was 17 I won the Young Playwrights Inc. contest, and my play was to receive a production at the Public Theater. This was a huge turning moment, and the first time I thought of playwriting as a career. I had grown up as an actor, but this was my first time on the other side of the stage. We held equity auditions, and I had my first design model presented to me - it was actually going to rain on the stage! I contemplated taking a semester off from college in order to prepare, but then got word that due to some budgeting issues the production was off. This was devastating at the time, but it really gave me an introduction into what the theater world was like. It taught me to be prepared for any outcome. In some ways my naivete began to dissolve right then and there. That moment was an education in itself.

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

A:  There are many things I would change if I could including the cost of tickets and who actually comes to see theater - one day look around and notice just who's in the room, or rather who's not in the room. But, the most tangible (and simplest) thing I would change is diversity in casting and the way the world is conceived. When a play takes place in an urban setting (and is clearly not about race) but everyone on the stage is white, I don't believe this is an accurate perception of today. There is a sense that a neutral world and story is also a white story. There is definitely a time and place for color specific casting, but at times it would be nice to think outside of that narrow box. It would be nice to see people of color in stories that are not about race, but stories that are simply about people. Produced stories that include people of color are often about race as opposed to plays that are just about people. In my opinion the responsibility of diversifying theater should not rest solely in the hands of playwrights of color, but on the theater community as a whole. What you produce is your vision of the world, and in 2010, I hope the vision can begin to expand.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Not sure if I have heroes, but there are writers who inspire me based on their structure, themes, and content. Sam Shepard, Susan Lori Parks, Brecht, and Adrienne Kennedy are writers who for constantly excite me in terms of form and style. There is something accessible and dangerous about their work that keeps me going back for more. They also remind me about the kind of writing that is about more than the well-made play or 'kitchen-sink' drama. Writers like Lynn Nottage, Naomi Izuka, and Naomi Wallace also inspire me, and not just for their work, but their stamina - they remind me that a female playwright's career does not always come so quickly. These women have been creating brilliant work for years, but it took a long time for them to get the recognition they deserve. These are writers who I'd love to see get produced on a more frequent basis in NYC.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Honestly, I'm bored by theater a lot, most of the time, in fact. I feel like the work that gets produced is often small, contained, annoyingly ironic and could just as easily be made into a film or television show. I'm interested in work with a strong sense of theatricality. I'm looking for theater that raises questions and is about something bigger than the audience in the room. I like for theater to be bold and loud and to push buttons and to evoke visceral reactions from the audience. I would rather be angry than bored.

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

A:  Find yourself a community, whether that is a professional one, or a group of friends who are supportive. If you don't have one, create one. Having a home base is crucial, especially since so much of a writers work takes place alone on a computer. Apply to every possible opportunity, and don't worry if you get it or not. The most important thing is to get your work out there and you never know who is reading your submission. See as much theater as possible, the theater world is impossibly small, so know what's going on. Keep writing; I have found that writing is a muscle that atrophies without constant use. You also can't expect for this profession to validate you - so keep your ego in check when you can; and, although that can be scary there is also something very liberating about it. And, remember, if you hate what's being produced, or feel like no one is taking a chance on your work - produce your work yourself.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  This summer you can catch 'The Etymology of Bird' which is being produced as part of Summerstage. It's the first time I will have a production in a park. And most importantly, it's free!