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1100 Playwright Interviews

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Jul 24, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 219: Joshua Allen



Joshua Allen

Hometown: Chicago, IL

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  My two current projects couldn't be more different. I'm revising a play I wrote called THE LAST PAIR OF EARLIES, which is inspired by the Great Migration of black Southerners that took place in the '20s, '30s, and '40s. Also, I'm working on a more contemporary play that's loosely inspired by an obscure Henry James novel entitled "The Other House."

Q:  Tell me about your experience working on a play at the Kennedy Center this summer.

A:  A play I wrote this past year at Juilliard, called THE LAST PAIR OF EARLIES, is going to be workshopped during the last week of July. I'll be working with a director and dramaturg from theatres in the National New Play Network, which is pretty cool. Also, they're putting me up in an apartment that's apparently within walking distance from a Trader Joe's, which is a major bonus.

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

A:  Before I begin this story, I just want to say that I realize how pathetically sad, nerdy, and embarrassing this story is. But I'm telling it anyway. I've always been a big history geek, a tendency that was only further encouraged when my mother, who used to work for Encyclopedia Britannica, came home one day with a full set of leather-bound encyclopedias. Inspired by what I read in those volumes about colonial America, I spent the summer after I turned 12 writing a novella in my grandmother's basement. It ended up being 126 pages long. It was intended to be the first in a trilogy, but wisely I abandoned the project when I quickly realized that the novella was ATROCIOUSLY BAD. However, I never lost my interest in re-imagining history through fictional eyes, which is something that's certainly influenced my last couple of plays.

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

A:  I would bring back rep companies. Having an artistic home is so invaluable to anybody working in theater, especially playwrights. I don't think it's a coincidence that Shakespeare wrote his greatest roles with specific actors in mind. More importantly, having an artistic home gives you the safety to fail, which is indescribably important.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I have way too many. Aside from my fellow Juilliard playwrights, who inspire and encourage me pretty much daily, I look up to Eugene O'Neill for his ambition and commitment to his art, and to William Inge for his willingness to write simple, closely observed plays that explore loneliness so bravely.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater always excites me most when it engages the mind and the heart simultaneously. There's really nobody better than Shakespeare when it comes to this. Read any soliloquy of Hamlet's, or Juliet's, or Lear's, and you can see the messiness and hugeness of their emotions butting up against the limitations of their language, and how they negotiate that. So cool.

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

A:  This is a tough one because in many respects, I feel like I'm just starting out, too. I would tell anyone who's starting out to go see as much theater as possible, and write your plays primarily to please yourself. Also, the old adage "write what you know" is helpful, but don't follow it too literally. Your imagination is the most exciting place to explore, and writing from your imagination is what's going to keep theatre alive.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Um...come see the awesome actors of Group 40 in the Playwrights' Festival at Juilliard, Sept. 9-12. Put that in your calendars 'cuz you're gonna wanna be there. And it's free! Also, go see NOTICE ME at the Wild Project, directed by my friend Sofia Alvarez. You've only got until August 1st!

Jul 23, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 218: Peter Gil-Sheridan


Peter Gil-Sheridan

Hometown: Rahway, New Jersey

Current Town: Brooklyn, New York (Sunset Park)

Q:  Tell me please about What May Fall and the Fordham Alumni Company.

A:  What May Fall is a play I wrote on commission for the Guthrie's BFA Actor's Showcase. It is loosely based on my experience of seeing a maintenance worker fall to his death at the IDS Tower in Minneapolis. I was living there while I was on a Jerome and I was doing a temp job to make some extra money. I was so so homesick and the event just left me feeling emotionally shattered. Later in the year when I was asked to write an ensemble piece for the Guthrie, I thought I'd write a bit about life in Minneapolis, not my life per se, or anyone I knew....but about life in that landscape. Minneapolis has many of the trappings and benefits of New York but everything happens in the most startling cold. What May Fall is about nine people living in that cold, nine people finding their way out of a tough winter.

I developed the play through the following year first with the actors, and later with Sarah Cameron Sunde who directed a wonderful production of the play with the actors I wrote it for.

What May Fall was then selected by Fordham, where I did my undergraduate degree, to be the third production the Fordham Alumni Theatre Company. Basically, the University is giving alums an opportunity to produce a large-scale production right here in New York. I teamed up with Morgan Gould, another Fordham alum and one of my favorite directors, to mount a new draft of the piece. The play features an all-star cast of Fordham alums who have graduated in the last 15 years, a cast that has gone on to work on Broadway and off. The entire production, including the designers, are from Fordham and everyone is doing the work for next to no pay. It's basically like coming back to my tribe. Both experiences of producing this play have been incredibly gratifying and warm.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just wrote a play called Ritu Comes Home for the InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia. It's about two persnickety gay guys who have "adopted" a daughter in Bangladesh by sending money through a Sally Struthers kind of thing. One night they get really drunk with their recently retired actress friend and they wake up to find their new "daughter" gnawing on a leftover lamb bone. Hilarity ensues.

I'm also working on my first television script. I finally have Final Draft, after all these years.

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 party house. My stepfather and mother were hairstylists in New Jersey in the 80's. My stepfather was a hairweaver actually so 40 year-old men entered my house bald and fat and left drunk, high, and looking like Poison. My stepdad was kind of a magician, among other less complimentary things. My aunt, who was a stripper at the French Maid, lived in the basement, my mother perpetually watched NBC soaps (which I also watched with the greatest of interest) while my real dad, who was a forklift mechanic from Havana, scratched his head and tried to figure out a way to make me a little more butch. As if the biography wasn't enough to foretell my future as a writer, one of the earliest signs of my forthcoming writing life is that when I was around 12 years old, I cut out all these little pieces of paper, wrote everyone's name I know on them, and put them in a fishbowl. From that fishbowl, I created stories based on random pairings and acted them out. I also created competitions, systems, pageants, and even acted out wrestling matches between whatever two names I drew from the bowl. This is what I did during the parties.

I still have all those little names on pieces of paper only now it's not a fishbowl but a box. A box of names

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

A:  The one thing I'd change is that the theatre would do more work by Peter Gil-Sheridan. Does everyone say that?

Oh, and it should be federally mandated that every theatre in America have a corporate sponsor that has no say over the content of the work made.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Caryl Churchill. Franz Xavier Kroetz. Fornes. I love Miller and Williams.
I have so many heroes who are within reach, writers I know, who are my friends, or writers who are floating about.

Some of my teachers: Dare Clubb and Sherry Kramer and Michael Weller and Elizabeth Margid.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  So much of the theatre I see is subtle, or stylish, or it's some dusty ass play that's ready for the museum. I'm excited by theater with lots of sex, and skin, and violence, and humor and strangeness and emotion. I want feel the way I feel when I watch a soccer match. I want to feel goose bumps. I want to desperately know how it will end. I like it messy! I love playwrights who are unafraid to bravely explore archetypes and cliches and familiar tropes. So many writers I love are doing just that.

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

A:  These are things that I tell myself ALL THE TIME:

Try not to fantasize too much about who or what you will become as a writer.
Don't be a dick to artists who aren't as good as you, don't hate on the ones who do it better.
Indulge your sick little obsessions.
Have a few friends that don't at all take the theatre seriously.
Drink with those friends.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:
Come see What May Fall in New York.
http://www.broadwayworld.com/printcolumn.php?id=147488

Jul 22, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 217: Tira Palmquist


Tira Palmquist

Hometown: It’s difficult to say that I have a hometown. I was born in Albert Lea, MN, but my family moved to Le Center, MN. (a very tiny town) when I was an infant. Since my father was a Lutheran minister, we moved fairly frequently (from Minnesota to Wisconsin, and from Wisconsin to Iowa). The short, non-specific, answer for where “home” is, then, is the Midwest.

Current Town: Irvine, CA. (And that’s another story.)

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’ve got a couple projects up my sleeve. First, I’ve recently finished (and had a couple readings of) a full-length that I’m hoping to continue to work on with [names of theatres redacted because I haven’t heard anything yet and I’m trying not to count chickens]. Then, I’m working on a new full-length (working title “The Unfortunates”) for which I’d like to have a complete draft by the end of the summer.

Q: You just attended the Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive. What was that like?

A: In a word, amazing.

But now for the longer answer:

Gary Garrison knew what he was doing when he called this an “Intensive,” and not just because you spend a lot of hours each day in workshops, and not just because you have a lot of homework at the end of the day. The truly intense part of the intensive is that you and your work are under scrutiny -- and, honestly, if you’re getting your money’s worth, you’re putting yourself under scrutiny. Lookit: we all have our own particular set of baggage as writers, and if you’re not willing to figure out why you’re doing that thing, or why you keep banging your head against one wall or another, then… what’s the point? I honestly was pretty surprised by this part of the intensive. It’s not just about learning skills, or learning about the technical particulars of writing for the stage. My biggest breakthrough in the intensive was learning that there’s a difference between going with your first impulse as a writer and going with what’s obvious and easy. That’s a fine line, and I didn’t see that until mid-way through the intensive.

The intensive becomes a bit like Top Chef, in that they just keep throwing challenges at you, and the real lesson is how you handle each challenge. I’ll admit, there were some exercises that I completely bombed or that I completely resisted. I think I would have failed myself if I didn’t ask myself…. “OK, Tira: so… what was THAT all about.” Each of us have to ask pretty tough questions about why we’re writing, what we’re writing, why we’re writing the stories we write – and if we’re not willing to interrogate that, then we’re just sailing along on auto pilot. SO: in a nutshell, the intensive provides an opportunity to figure out some fundamental questions about your work. In the end, we pay a chunk of change to be there, to get there, to have a place to sleep there – so I think a writer would be a very foolish writer not to take this experience with the appropriate sense of play (and, at the same time, playing it for real).

I fully expected the intensive to be difficult in some respects, and so I went into it leaning into the difficulty. I think the intensive was empowering for a lot of people, and I think that’s valuable…that just wasn’t my deal: I wanted to have my shit flipped. And I did. So… that was a win.

Finally, the intensive is just a hell of a lot of fun. I met some amazing people, laughed a lot, got far too little sleep, drank a bunch, and never felt so good and awake in my entire life.

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 had to think long and hard about this one.

But… here’s one I just remembered.

When I was small, we lived in this tiny town in Southern Minnesota. All good Minnesotans know that winter is no excuse to stay indoors, and we used to play outdoors all winter long, building amazing, extensive snow forts in the huge pile of snow dumped by snowplows from the driveway and parking lot of the church right next door into the space right behind our garage. So – I think I must have been about 4 or 5, playing out in the snow when I met two kids I had never met before. The girl didn’t have mittens, and her hands were red and chapped from the snow. I asked her where her mittens were, and she said she didn’t have any. I mean, she didn’t have any mittens – at all – and I thought that she needed to have a pair of mine. This wasn’t something I thought long and hard about. It was just that her hands looked like they hurt – and I had extra mittens, so… why not? I took her to my house, and announced to my mother that I was giving this girl a pair of my mittens. I remember the look on my mother’s face, and although she gave up a pair of my old mittens, I don’t think she was really very happy about that. I remember my father (the minister) talking to me about this later, and I remained steadfast – if someone didn’t have mittens, and I had a pair, well, darn it, I was going to do something about that. I realized, much later, that my parents were a little freaked out by the fact that I saw nothing dangerous about bringing home anyone and giving them anything. I still feel this way, though I try to be smarter, now, about my generosity.

This story applies in two ways: first, my mother has always said that I’m a very empathetic person (hence, the need to give away mittens willy nilly), and I think you have to be empathetic in order to inhabit your characters (or let them inhabit you); second, I still find myself compelled to write about people like the girl who didn’t have those mittens. I don’t often write about people of privilege, of power, and I think where I grew up and who I grew up with, has a lot to do with that.

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

A: Oh, dear. One thing? OK: here’s one: timidity. I know why theatres do revivals of shows – whether it’s the revival of American Buffalo, or the revival of Hair – but I worry that the impulse to do revivals is because those shows have been vetted and become a safe choice. I think this is why some people shy away from new work: because that work does not come with the imprimatur of someone else’s stamp of good taste (and really, how do we know if something’s good if Someone Important is not telling us so?). I think some theatres make pretty timid choices – though I think they’d be the last to say that what they’re doing is timid. I’ll grant you that anyone running a theatre these days is taking a gamble on any show, but I don’t think the answer is to do a season that looks, for all the world, like a “best of” hits of the 70s, 80s and 90s. I’m not trying to say that theatres should only do world premieres, or that I’m calling for a world in which playwrights only get one shot at a performance for each play, but I do think that it’s too easy to follow the lead of others.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Groups/Companies: Anne Bogart and the Siti Company. Elevator Repair Service. Wooster Group. Bread and Puppet Theater. Five Lesbian Brothers. Boston Court (in Pasadena). Burglars of Hamm. To name a wee few.

Playwrights: Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Martin McDonough, Tennessee Williams, Lynn Nottage, Constance Congdon, Sheila Callaghan, Mickey Birnbaum, Jacqueline Wright... And many others too numerous to name without boring the readers of this here interview.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I am always excited by theater that aims for the impossible, that is loud and bold and tries to expand our storytelling vocabulary. I love television and movies – don’t get me wrong. In fact, I love all sorts of TV and movies (just ask my husband). I even have pretty broad tastes when it comes to theatre (after all, Our Town is still one of my favorite plays, and I still can sit through endless productions of Hamlet or Much Ado, though I expect something smart and energetic out of those shows). But… if I’m gonna spend money on a show, I don’t want to see something that really meant to be on some kind of screen. I’d like something that is immediate, intimate – something that startles me, that makes me lean forward, and then gets its hands inside my ribcage and shakes me a little bit.

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

A: Read and watch everything. Go to as many shows as you can.

Then, stop sitting in the back of the theatre in the dark. Act, direct, stage manage, sew costumes, anything. Some of my favorite playwrights have also been actors, or started out as actors or directors. Take an improv class. Learn another language.

And write even when you don’t feel like it.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: Recent buzz:
THE FREQUENCY OF STARS AND OTHER MATTER (full-length)
Play Lab, Great Plains Theatre Conference
Semi-Finalist, PlayPenn new play development conference
Semi-Finalist, Seven Devils new play development conference

Jul 21, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 216: Sarah Hammond




Sarah Hammond

Hometown: Columbia, SC

Current town: Brooklyn, NY.

Q: What are you working on now?

A:  An original musical with Adam Gwon called String about the three Fates from Greek mythology - a trio of women who spin, measure, and cut the threads of our lives, transplanted to a modern metropolis. Adam and I met in the Dramatists Guild Fellows in 2006. He was just starting his show Ordinary Days and I was working on my play House on Stilts. We loved each others' quirky characters. It took about three months for us to get to "let's work together" (at the Vineyard, waiting for Mary Rose to start). Collaborating on a musical is very different than solo playwriting. I've never trained in it, and it's enormously hard. Equal parts scary and great. Adam at the piano is a beautiful thing to witness. I can't wait to hear people sing it.

Q:  Tell me about your relationship with Trustus Theater.

A:  In college, I spent 70% of my life down the street at Trustus, founded by Jim and Kay Thigpen in Columbia, South Carolina. Mostly, I stage managed, which taught me tons and got me valuable after-rehearsal talks with Jim Thigpen, his war stories about plays I hadn't read yet ("Brechtian what?"). Jon Tuttle, the playwright-in-residence, called me his Assistant Literary Manager. He told me what to read and where to send my work. Trustus has a playwriting contest, and every August they bring a playwright to town for a production of a new play. Stephen Belber’s Transparency of Val was one of my favorites. When I wrote a full-length my senior year in college, I submitted it to the festival, and they said yes. So Kudzu got produced a year after I finished it, which has got to be the most ideal timeline a playwright could ask for. We had actors in the show I’d watched for years from behind my stage manager checklists. Bob Hungerford, who had played our local Roy Cohn and does all of Jon Tuttle’s shows, anchored Kudzu as my agonized Confederate Reenactor. He was a force, very generous, and exacting with his performances, which I love. We sold out every night. He was the real thing, and I was lucky as hell to work with such an actor in my first production. Looking back, it seems important that I wasn’t writing for college students in that first go. My writing grew up because of that company and that theater. I’m the literary manager now. It’s the kind of place you never leave, even if you move to Brooklyn.

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

A:  Dad worked for the Wall Street Journal, so I lived overseas from ages two to ten – Hong Kong, then Belgium. In Hong Kong, I had a British accent and could say useful phrases in Cantonese like “look there is a fire,” “stranger don’t touch me,” and numbers one through ten. I had white blond hair that people were always trying to touch so I developed an early scowl. We lived on a small island off the mainland where people had golf carts instead of cars. There was no Christmas, so in December, they’d put all us foreign kids on the beach, and some ex-pat journalist would dress up as Santa in a tee-shirt and row across the bay in a boat. Mom hung ornaments on a houseplant. Cassette tapes came in the mail from Grandma Lydia, who read the Three Little Pigs to me in her old Virginia accent. I would turn green whenever we got on a plane, which was often. I’m still very confused.

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

A: Let’s have less plays that assume the world is made of wealthy families.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  There are so many heroes. Paula Vogel, Jose Rivera, Naomi Iizuka, Naomi Wallace, Joan Ackerman. Their plays taught me that you didn't need furniture. Recently, I’m obsessed with Lanford Wilson and John Guare, who reminded me that furniture can be a good thing after all. I read Burn This for the first time about a year ago. It’s my new favorite play. I re-read it thirty times and watched the Circle Rep production at the Lincoln Center archives. Okay it's one naturalistic set, but he builds the play so that one set is like a centrifuge. Puts his characters through the wringer, and it's electric because of the desire and you know there won't be any shortcuts. I miss long scenes in the theater, and this play really filled a gap that I've been feeling for a while. Some of his stage directions make me weep, and they’re all about afghans and pants and the way you drink your whiskey. Then there’s Guare saying throw out the kitchen sink and so he goes and puts some colossal ornate heirloom wardrobe on the front lawn (Lake Hollywood), and it’s gorgeous and hilarious and tragic, just like the play. So I’m writing plays with furniture again.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Character’s the whole reason to go to the theater. So when a writer renders something true about what it’s like to be that guy over there, and then carries it over the course of an evening, I’m sold. If the people in the story don’t grip me, then the play evaporates after I leave the theater, no matter how fluid the language or clever the structure, and I hate that. I want those characters to stay with me for days and catch me at odd moments in my own life. It’s best when you can tell that the writer loves the characters but hasn’t let them off the hook. Like Tracy Letts.


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

A:  a) Put time in backstage. Stage Manage or ASM. Work in the scene shop. Help focus the lights. Do the no-glory jobs and observe how the play gets made. That will teach you what the dramatic structure books leave out about theatricality, what a stage can do.

b) Stealing from Jose Rivera: “Write roles that actors you love would kill to play.” Yes!

c) Write about places that are not New York.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Adam Bock's A Small Fire at Playwrights Horizons this year is going to be extraordinary. I’m also excited about Adam Gwon’s musical adaptation of the Joe Meno novel The Boy Detective Fails, which will show up on a stage one day somewhere.

Jul 20, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 215: Charlotte Miller




Charlotte Miller

Hometown: Dallas, TX

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about the play you're working on at PlayPenn.

A:  I'm working on a play called Raising Jo. I started writing it about 2 and a half years ago. It's about love and family and what it means to really really really be a grown up. It centers around a young couple and their unplanned pregnancy. The baby doesn't figure into the play that heavily except that it forces the adults to come together and act like adults. It follows that journey without being about parenting. I'm still a fairly green writer so this play is the first that has received this kind of love and care, I feel like I'm growing up with it as a writer, learning how to rewrite.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I'll be back in Pennsylvania in a couple of months for this commission called The People's Light New Play Initiative at Longwood Gardens. They've commissioned a handful of playwrights to come out to the gardens, explore, and generally just let their imaginations run wild. They have lily-pads that can hold up to fifty pounds. So I only have to diet myself down to fifty pounds to realize my dream of living on a lily-pad.

Q:  You're one of the playwrights in Rising Phoenix's first season of Cino Nights. Can you explain what that is? Are you as excited as I am?

A:  Cino nights is modeled after this sort of raw, rapid, awesome seize the day(night) theater that Joe Cino pioneered in his Caffe in the 60s. One week of rehearsal, one performance, no rules, no expectations, very rock and roll. I am always jealous of my musician friends because they have the gig and the gig is a beautiful thing, it's practice and performance. Now I feel like I have a gig. So I am more excited than you are Adam (joking tone).

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

A:  I am a recovering people pleaser. It was sick sick bad bad. When I was in the first grade and I had a Nazi teacher named Mrs. Roberts. This was a woman who actually sent me to ESL because she didn't think I could speak english. So one afternoon she announced that her husband was coming to visit her and while they were talking I had to pee worse than anything I had ever felt before. It was that yellow eye-ball feeling. That terrified to move, terrified to stay, no way out of this, whoops I peed my pants thing. I peed my pants rather than interrupt an adult conversation. I don't know if this explains me as a writer except to say that I write characters who have a really hard time, almost impossible time asking for what they want.

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

A:  That's a big question. It's the money thing that sticks out to me. I wish playwrights could just be playwrights. I see a lot of awesome playwrights taking on more than they can handle because of finances. It's a problem I don't know how to address. It's just overwhelming. You've interviewed a bunch of amazing playwrights and if they all had the means to produce their theater, theater in america would be boom not bust, it would be the best. If you build it they will come, but we can't afford to build anything let alone live well. At least it's honest work, to an almost absurd degree.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Anyone who wants to do theater in this day and age is my hero.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Brave theater. Big brave theater. Long pauses, blood and guts, jazz hands... I like everything, can get excited by everything, so long as it's brave.

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

A:  Write a lot. Write every chance you get. Go to the theater. Show up for the theater. You can't be a part of it unless you show up for it. Oh, and don't be precious. That's the worst. Tattoo the end of that Beckett quote to your head "Fail Better".

Q:  Plugs, please:
A: 
www.playpenn.org
Raising Jo
By Charlotte Miller
Directed By Jackson Gay
Sunday July 25th @ 5pm
Adrienne Theater (Playground Space)
2030 Sansom Street
Philladelphia PA 19103

Cino Nights
Jimmy's no. 43
43 East 7th street
NYC
December 11, 2011
http://www.risingphoenixrep.org/

Jul 19, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 214: Deborah Yarchun


Deborah Yarchun

Hometown: Austin, TX.

Current Town: Harlem, NYC until July 28th then Iowa City.

Q: Tell me please about Next Year in Jerusalem.

A: Next Year in Jerusalem is an intimate two-hander that actually works far better in an immersive space like a café or bar than on a stage. We’ve been describing it on our facebook page as “A site-specific, anti-romantic one-act play in three cerebral battles.” It’s basically about two young people building up walls between each other while simultaneously trying to scale them. It starts as a dating-site date gone wrong, moves into a second attempt a year later and ends in a final confrontation. It’s sort of a comedy of neurosis. I co-produced it with my friend Kacey Stamats, a really talented hypomanic kindred spirit. She’s directing. This is our debut experiment as Rogue Theater, which is more of a theater entity and an idea than an actual company. We had two goals:
1) To produce a play in NYC for under $50 and offer it up to audiences for free.
2) To explore Next Year in Jerusalem in permutations. Meaning— we cast two different actors who both brought something different to the role of Nat. And because it’s being performed in two very different spaces—I tweaked the show to fit into each space. So, it’s actually one play and four different shows.

We held auditions in Bryant Park and rehearsed in public spaces, cafes, apartments and rooftops across NYC. On St. Marks Place we found a bar (Holiday Cocktail Lounge) and a café (The Crooked Tree) that both agreed to let us produce our show in their space. We also found a fantastic team of volunteer artists—Amanda McHugh, David Rysdahl, and Max Wolkowitz,. The whole process has been a blast. One of the best parts of this experience has been working with people who aren’t afraid to fail and who are doing this for the sheer joy of the experience.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I’m working on once more uprooting myself as I’m about to move to Iowa City. I’ll be renting a car and driving across country on the 29th. And for the next three years, I’ll be pursuing my MFA at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. When I arrive on the 30th, it’ll be the first time I’ve ever stepped foot in Iowa in my life.

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

A: This is hardly definitive and I’m never good at telling just one story—how about one in the form of several?

As an Air Force brat, I spent three years of my childhood in Germany. We lived in a small German town in Kaiserslautern. One time my sister and I were digging for buried treasure in our neighborhood playground, which was built in a church-yard. We scratched our nails into the dirt and to our surprise, our fingers brushed against something cold and smooth. We kept digging— until we uncovered a shiny marble stone with an engraving on it. It doesn’t just happen in horror movies; our childhood playground was apparently built over a cemetery.

Behind our apartment complex, there was a large backyard with a wire fence separating us from a small farmhouse with a plum tree that reached onto our side. Plums used to fall onto our lawn, but the old farmer who owned the property, used to hand-pick us the best ones straight from the tree and hand it to us over the fence. When he passed away, we inherited a bag of walnuts.

Between kindergarten, first and second grade my parents road-tripped us across Europe through France, Spain, The Czech Republic and all across Germany where we toured subterranean salt-mines, castles and ruins. And in every friend’s home that I ever visited in Germany, I searched for secret passageways. Once, at a sleepover in the second grade, I found one. If I remember correctly, it led through a small crack in the wall in the basement into an entire other room with a door leading to the space between two brick walls that divided my friend’s home from her neighbors. When I reconnected with my friend a few years ago, she told me she had researched it and discovered her home had once been a Nazi headquarters. I’m the granddaughter of holocaust survivors.

I guess if I try to tie this together— I learned pretty early that the pursuit of the fantastical often reveals deeper darker truths. But perhaps the world is also filled with people who out of nothing more than legitimate kindness will occasionally hand-pick you a plum. It’s still mysterious to me why he left us a bag of walnuts. I like to think this Schrödinger cat type of questioning and analyzing people’s mysterious motivations pushed me towards becoming a playwright.

I also think all of these experiences sparked my imagination and an urgent wanderlust in both my life and my plays. I tend, at this point in my playwriting—to wander across styles that range from wild-lyrical worlds that demand a stage to a play like “Next Year in Jerusalem,” which is extremely naturalistic. I am not sure if I’ll ever find a place to settle, partially because each play seems to require its own aesthetic.

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

A: I’m going to pick the obvious and selfish one— from an early early / almost-not-even-a- career-yet standpoint-- from standing at age 24, staring ahead, I have a lot of “holy shit, if I keep pursuing this, how am I ever going to have babies one day?” moments. It would be nice if it was easier to see how to eventually sustain oneself financially as a playwright. It would be nice to not have to have those moments where you feel like eventually you might have to pick between having your next play or one day having an actual child. It doesn’t mean it’s true. That’s obviously ridiculous. It can’t possibly be true. So many wonderful playwrights have children and one I know right now is due, but I just have no idea how they do it.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Wow. Okay. As somebody who started as a young playwright, I have a lot
of theatrical heroes. Peter Shaffer! I used to read a play each day in high school and pulling Equus off the library shelf was one of my earliest playwriting revelations. My theatrical heroes include anyone who has shaken up the way I view playwriting at some point. The short list right now: Sheila Callaghan and Jason Grote, Eisa Davis, lately Erik Ehn and the entire RAT conference concept (http://www.ratconference.com/), which I just recently discovered.

But the more personal theatrical heroes in my life:
Playwright John Walch literally rescued me in high school by standing up for me. My junior year, I won this Texas wide High-School playwriting competition and as part of the prize, my school produced my play. This would have been great, except I had this High School theater teacher, who told me “The best playwright is a dead playwright” and informed the college student who had been hired to direct it, not to let me into the rehearsal room. He really believed that playwrights have no role there. I had to hide under a blanket during rehearsals so my theater teacher wouldn’t see me, and I was terrified he would blacklist me from participating in any future productions if I was caught. I was on total edge. Fortunately, I had just become acquainted with Austin Script Works, which John Walch was helming and I timidly asked him if this was right. He wrote a 1.5 page single-spaced letter to the college student directing my play spelling out my role as a playwright and cc’d me. I still have it. It scared the crap out of the young director who immediately let me have more of a role in the production. Knowing my actual role as a playwright, really empowered me at that age.

Crystal Skillman dramaturged my play "FreezeFrame" for the 2006 Young Playwrights Festival and has remained a great friend and cheerleader ever since.

I’m sure many do for different reasons, but I consider Paula Vogel one of my theatrical heroes for this random night when I was a sophomore in college and I took a train from Philly to hear her speak at Bryn Mawr’s campus. She invited me and the last five students in line at the book signing session to sit down with her and talk about theater—Over a period of what must have been two hours, she filled my head with all kinds of crazy ideas, like self-producing instead of waiting for somebody to produce your play for you. I’m sure this didn’t start with her, but at the time- she was the messenger.

And I consider Todd London my theatrical hero because in the time that I interned for him at New Dramatist and have subsequently worked as his research assistant, I’ve learned an enormous amount about the way our theater currently ticks just from witnessing his day to day playwright activism. Also, the project I’ve been helping out on is about the founding visions of influential theaters across American history, and working on it has really brought to light all the potholes in my contemporary theatre history knowledge. It also made me realize that at some point, for every major theater company—somebody once sat down and dreamed it up.

My theatrical heroes are also anyone who I have read or seen who has inspired something in my own work—anything from a new concept of structure, to inventing an entirely new language on the stage. I have spent a lot of time in NYC and Philadelphia seeing readings and productions of new plays; I’d be really embarrassed to even begin listing out the bulk of my theatrical heroes, I will inevitably miss somebody, and there are just too many.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Theater that makes you feel like everything in the theater is about to explode or collapse around you. Theater that punches you in the gut or, even better, in a place that you didn’t even know existed in yourself. I guess, theater that leaves you with a feeling you don’t understand and in a way that you don’t know what actually hit you. That’s vague—but the theater that excites me, excites me for reasons that I am still trying to pinpoint. Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More,” which I saw through A.R.T, Dan Dietz “TempOdyssey” which I saw back in the day at Salvage Vanguard Theater, “Ruined” by Lynn Nottage and reading Sarah Hammond’s “Green Girl” and “Hum of the Arctic” and Gregory Moss’s “PunkPlay.” Lucy Thurber’s “Scarcity.” Most of Greg Romero’s plays I’ve seen. The list pretty much continues and continues and continues…You would think this effect would be impossible, but I find a lot of plays excite me this way. I think this a really promising time for the theater.

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

A: That’s funny because I consider myself really just starting out. This is possibly too specific, but if somebody wanted to take my fun and somewhat circuitous route to starting out:

Read a lot of plays, particularly contemporary plays. And if you haven’t yet-- don’t forget to read the major playwrights: Christopher Durang, David Henry Hwang, Wendy Wasserstein, John Guare, Paula Vogel, Peter Shaffer, Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, August Wilson, etc…there are actually a hell of a lot of them…It’ll shock you how many of them there are. Keep going. Or at least, read a range of styles. Eventually, start to see everything as a continuous conversation. If you’re in NYC, read across the shelves at the New Dramatists library. It’s open to the public during the weekdays usually from 10-6 (hours vary in the summer). This is by no means a complete picture of the most exciting new work out there right now, but it’s a great starting point. Eventually, also read the book “Outrageous Fortune: The Life and times of the New American Play” (available from TCG). Believe if you stare at it long enough, you can begin to see it as a roadmap instead of a thousand roadblocks. If you have time, read “The American Theater Reader” (also available from TCG) from front to back. That book is like an entry point into every important issue in the American Theater in the past 25 years – at least for a relative newcomer. Intern at a theater or two, ideally as a literary assistant—it’ll give you another perspective on the field and you’ll get to evaluate a lot of plays. If you’re lucky, you’ll also realize how subjective that evaluation process actually is. See plays—usher for as many as possible, doctor your student ID if you have to, but see a lot of plays. But also don’t forget to keep writing your own. And when you’re ready to submit your plays out, don’t ever take the Dramatists Sourcebook or the Dramatists Guild Resource Directory for granted. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” – it’ll validate your playwriting obsession.

But the most direct path I’ve found so far: if something screams from your gut—don’t hesitate even for a minute to write it.

P.S.
If you’re 18 and under— submit every year to the Young Playwrights Festival. Even if you lose, with every rejection, they send you a very thoughtful evaluation. Read it. It’s free feedback from professional writers who want you to succeed.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: Shameless plug for Next Year in Jerusalem (hopefully you will have
read this in time.) We have six performances. We open Monday, July 19th at 5:30 pm at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge (75 St. Marks Place) and close at 3 pm on Thursday, July 22nd at the Crooked Tree Café (110 St. Marks Place). Reserve tickets at: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/119014.
It’s free. No, really- free! Also, there is no ticket service charge through brownpapertickets. More information about our times and locations can be found on the site.

Also, from my one year and eight months in NYC, here are three groups  that I think are doing really exciting work:
Woodshed Collective (http://www.woodshedcollective.com/).
Heidi Handelsman’s Potluck Series is just an all around great idea.
(http://www.potluckplays.com/who-potlucks.html)
I haven’t seen this yet, but I hope to catch anna&meredith’s production of Gormanzee and Other Stories by Anna Moench at the Flea Theater.
http://www.theflea.org/show_detail.php?page_type=0&page_id=1&show_id=67

Jul 18, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 213: Anna Kerrigan



photo by Amy Wadsworth

Anna Kerrigan

Hometown: I was born in San Francisco but moved to Los Angeles when I was one.

Current Town: New York City

Q: Tell me about The Talls.

A: The Talls is a play about the Clarkes, an extremely tall family living in the Oakland Hills in 1970. Just as the family patriarch, Mr. Clarke, launches his campaign for City Comptroller, the family receives news that Mrs. Clarke’s best friend has been severely injured in an automobile accident. Isabelle, the eldest sister, and Mr. Clarke’s new campaign manager, Russell, are left to take care of the house and the three younger siblings while their parents sit at the hospital. A Brown University bound graduating senior and hopeless hippy, Isabelle maximizes her brief freedom by seducing Russell. The Talls takes place over 24 hours.

The Talls was inspired by my mother’s enormously tall family. She’s the eldest and shortest of seven kids who range in height from 5’9” to 6’11”. I have this one aunt who’s 6’2” who worked at Saks Fifth Avenue when I was a kid and at the time I just thought that was the most awesome thing ever – but as I got older and started looking around I realized that most women never get that tall and it must be pretty hard. I am fascinated with the idea of this gargantuan and physically freaky family attempting to fit in and gain acceptance in a community where everyone wants to be normal. Apart from the height issue, the fact that they live in the same place that my family did, and that they’re Catholic – well, apart from all that the family doesn’t really resemble my actual family that much.

My wonderful friend Peter Cook directed a reading of The Talls recently for Bloodworks, Youngblood’s reading series. We were both pretty psyched afterwards and people seemed to really dig it.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  The big thing that has been monopolizing my life in a wonderful way for the past year, is my first feature film, Roost – which just wrapped in late May.

Here’s the blurb from my website about it:
“Camden is thrilled to meet Alice, the half sister she never knew. In an effort to bond, the sisters and their significant others take a trip to Lionshead, the family estate in Massachusetts. Tensions build and ultimately explode over a week in the country.”

I wrote and directed the film as well as played one of the four leads. We shot in the Berkshires at this amazing two hundred year old estate that was donated to the production by my wonderful friend Cathy Deely. We had a tremendous amount of support up there – it was a low budget production and everyone was really generous with us. Bar owners would literally just hand us the keys to their establishments and walk away – the Red Lion Inn donated a cottage for our actors – everyone was cutting us deals right and left. It was a real contrast to working in New York where if you’re a film crew everyone’s first impulse is to hate you.

Our crew was amazing, our cast was amazing (Austin Lysy, Brooke Bloom, Sam Rosen, Darren Goldstein, Ned Noyes, Peter Cook…) - now that I’m editing and looking at all these peoples faces every day I am really appreciating their performances.

I’m also working on another play called Paradigm from California - it’s set in Berkeley, California in 1984. It’s about a half baked but well-meaning, amateur philosopher in his forties and his relationships with his teenage protégés. During a brief stint as a high school teacher, he met these two lost kids who look to him as a sort of father figure. When the play picks up they’ve been living together for quite some time and have written a 500 page political/philosophical/bullshit manifesto and are waiting to hear back from publishing companies. His sexual relationship with one of the kids begins to fracture their small “family” – while his world falls apart, the teenage kids have a real coming of age.

I’m also working on a TV Pilot set in Los Angeles where I grew up and incubating another play set in Asheville, North Carolina.

Q:  Tell me about Jack Fish Films.

A:  Jack Fish Films is my production company.

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

A:  This is a personal story that I find funny, tragic and compelling.

When I was in Kindergarten my Dad was working in Germany on a movie and my mom, my sister and I were living in my paternal Grandmother’s house in Reseda, California. Even though my grandmother was a bit of a grouch and I’m sure my mother had quite a time dealing with her, my sister and I loved living there because there was this huge yard with eucalyptus trees where we would find salamanders and play with rabbits and chickens that escaped from our neighbors’ places. Another joy of the backyard was Uncle Harold’s house – he literally lived in a shack that he furnished with a lot of Army Navy Surplus stuff. He was a vet, loved to watch Bonanza and basically just sat in his little shack smoking and drinking all day long and watching television. For a kid, it was a fun place to hang out because it was like a miniature house and Uncle Hal kept root beer in the fridge for our visits. My sister Lily and I would go to his place, open a root beer and then draw on his bare back. He’d sit watching TV shirtless, we drew a line down the center of his back, I took one side and Lily took the other and we’d draw cartoon dogs and funny faces and landscapes and whatever we wanted to. This was always the highlight of our day.

Eventually, we moved out of Grandma’s house – she developed Alzheimer’s and turned into a completely different person – and we moved into our own house in Chatsworth, which was even deeper into the San Fernando valley. A year or so into living there, my Uncle Hal came over to hang out with us and I found myself very shy around him. It suddenly struck me that he was a pretty sad dude. He sat down on one of our lawn chairs – he was extremely heavy and unhealthy at this point - and complained about his feet aching. One of my parents suggested that I massage his feet (I was really into massages as a child) and I blurted out “No!”. He looked at me with such hurt and rejection – I felt terrible but stubbornly refused to change my mind.

This memory nicely distills a few things that my writing tends to include: lonely, and misunderstood characters, strange families, perverted sweetness and the push and pull between empathy and repulsion for the people and places a character comes from.

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

A:  I would make it cheaper.

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

A:  I feel like I’m just starting out! Be patient, open but not dependent on feedback, and get a low stakes day job.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  If you want updates about Roost you can go to my website www.jackfishfilms.com or join my Roost facebook page.

Also, if you’re out in Martha’s Vineyard this summer, go see my boyfriend Sam Forman’s play “The Rise and Fall of Annie Hall” at Vineyard Playhouse (July 22nd-August 7th). Sam, who has seen the play performed twice now (once in DC and once in New York) is playing the lead role himself this time. When I was running lines with him, he kept freaking me out with his good acting. There’s really no one like that guy …

Jul 17, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 212: Luis Alfaro


Luis Alfaro

Hometown: Pico/Union, Downtown Los Angeles, California

Current Town: Little Ethiopia, Los Angeles, California

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A pageant play about Pentecostalism in California and a commission for Hartford Stage about the Puerto Rican and Ethiopian communities. I am dramaturging a lot these days for a group of emerging playwrights and directing for a young theatre company, East L.A. Repertory and an older one, Company of Angels. I am working on a presentation about Art and Spirituality for Loyola Marymount College. I was hired by a nun so I am a bit terrified at the moment. I am also preparing an acknowledgment ceremony for the Durfee Foundation, which funds leadership in the non-profit sector.

Q:  I heard great things about Oedipus El Rey. Can you tell me about that?

A:  Sure, it’s been an amazing ride. I started at Homeboy Industries, a gang prevention network in L.A. and happy to have it produced through support from the National New Play Network. I wrote the first draft at the Getty Villa in Malibu working with a Greeks scholar, Mary Hart. I had one scene and seven actors waiting for me, so everyday I brought in a scene until my ten days were up! Went on to the Magic Theatre in San Francisco with Loretta Greco, then Boston Court in L.A. with Jon Rivera and next year at Wooly Mammoth with Michael John Garces. I started by writing about where I thought the new kingdoms were - the fast growing California State Prison system and its alternate societies. I was thinking a lot about young Latino men, gang culture and our ability to defy these destinies. But I ended up with a love story! What happens when your passion is larger than the world you live in?

Q:  How do you manage to balance your teaching life at USC with your playwriting life?

A:  Well, one thing about my career is that I have always been compartmentalized. One part is professional/regional theatre and the other is community work; community-based theatre, volunteer service and a multitude of other notions of giving like sitting on boards, panels, advisory councils, etc. I was raised super Catholic and super Pentecostal, so the idea of service is central to what I do. I believe most in mentorship and that is what I think I do best at USC. I started as a poet, then in the avant-garde performance scene, both of which rely on the experimental, so coming to professional theatre felt like a natural progression with my activism. One thing I have done in the last few years is to work for the theatre that is producing my play. I spent a year at Borderlands in Tucson doing workshops, a year at Hartford Stage interviewing people, I did a one-man show fundraiser for the Magic, and three amazing months at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival giving speeches, community interactions, meeting doctors, migrant workers, etc. The balance is not always easy or successful, but the attempt has been extraordinary.

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

A:  Well, I don’t think you are going to like this one, I don’t, but it’s the necessary one. I was born and raised in what was considered the poorest and most violent neighborhood in L.A. – Pico/Union – an area of downtown that is unique in that it is territory to two notorious gangs. One night my brother and I were baby-sitting my two younger siblings, I must have been ten, my mother was at prayer service and my father was at the racetrack, when a man came running down our street with a piece of a pool cue sticking out of his chest! He fell on his back in front of our house. Our dog, Lobo, pounced on the poor dead body and my brother took my siblings and ran for cover, but I couldn’t look away, I was mesmerized. It was truly awful and not the worst thing I had seen in that neighborhood, but it was the first time that something clicked about image, story and that I might be poor. It was an awakening to say the least. It was opera (although I didn’t know what that meant yet). That night I wrote a five-page essay and I gave it to my teacher, who gave it to my principal, who expelled me for a week. Now, both of my parents were farm-workers and associated with the United Farm Workers Movement, so we helped at a lot of protests and demonstrations, and I knew that if powerful people wanted you to shut up – I was onto something. I never stopped writing after that day.

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

A:  The lack of access. I go see a lot of plays at small theatres in L.A. and I work my ass off to be able to afford it, I don’t know how a young artist does it. It’s essential to find your tribe and to get someone to see your work, criticize it and celebrate it, but it’s hard to afford it!

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I don’t have a formal education but I was mentored by some amazing people - Maria Irene Fornes gave me discipline, C. Bernard Jackson at the Inner-City Cultural Center gave me consciousness, Scott Kelman at the Wallenboyd gave me the freedom to risk and fail. Gordon Davidson and my ten years at the Mark Taper Forum, although intense, gave me a computer, printer and money to produce and pretty much let me fail and succeed my way. My time with Paula Vogel, Mac Wellman, Luis Valdez, Len Jenkins and John Steppling was short but profound. I love so many people in the theatre that it would be crazy to try and name them all, but the heroes in my head right now are Chay Yew, Lisa Peterson, Brian Bauman, Rachel Hauck, Chris Acebo, Annie Weisman, Jessica Goldberg, Lui Douthit, Tracy Young, Raquel Guttierez and the beautiful Julie Marie Myatt.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  These days I look for virtuosity anywhere I can find it; in the language, direction, acting, lighting design, etc. I just saw a modern opera by the great O-Lan Jones in a dilapidated old car showroom in Culver City, California. 11 librettists, 18 singers, 32 scenes and that kept me awake with wonder. I went to the Hollywood Fringe Festival and saw a small beautiful site-specific piece in a park that took place at a hopscotch court surrounded by all of these Latino kids that were stealing focus and thrilled to see something in their environment. That really excited me.

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

A:  Hm, well the rewards of writing are so personal and require great risk. Writing from a place of passion, desire and welcoming failure will yield a different reward than what you might think. Write in spite of…

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Truly excited for the career that Tanya Saracho is having in Chicago and at The Goodman. I just saw Brett Neveau (I never know how to spell his name) at the DePaul showcase and he told me about the Royal Court, so kudos to him. I’ve been mentoring a young Indian director, Nathan Singh, a go-getter who is directing an opera with Oliver Mayer. I also mentored a young Indian playwright, Shane Sakhrani, who has a fantastic comedy about India today. He is back in Hong Kong and I can’t wait to see what happens to that play. I have been working with two emerging playwrights Julie Taiwo Oni, a young Nigerian-American writer and Donald Jolly, a Gay Black writer who both write experimental plays about race, I want them to not get beaten down by the lack of risk theatres are taking these days. And someone in New York give Brian Bauman a job, I love him. His work scares and excites me.

Jul 16, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 211: Jonathan Caren


Jonathan Caren

Hometown: Los Angeles

Current Town: New York

Q: Tell me about Three.

A: It’s a play about a couple having a baby, dealing with fears of the unknown, and a spiritual healer who tries to right their ship. I just read it at The Partial Comfort Retreat and it’s being done at the PTP/NYC AFTER DARK SERIES at the Atlantic Theater’s 2nd Stage Tuesday July 20th at 10:30PM, directed by Kate Pines. I’ve never had a baby, but I’ve certainly been afraid of birthing things, like plays for instance.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: Evan Cabnet will be directing my play Friends In Transient Places this fall at Juilliard. It’s a series of interwoven stories that take place on an airplane journey from one terminal to another. It’s an experiment in theatricality, something I tend to usually shy away from, but I’m excited for the ride.


Q: You have a background in TV. Most people usually transition the other way.

A: I tend to do things backwards, though I don't see TV as the end-all. I co-wrote a pilot in 2008 and worked on a CW show before coming to Juilliard. But I was still doing local theater in LA for years (in fact, I produced one of YOUR plays, Adam) and my play Catch The Fish, won Best Play at the NY Fringe in 2007. Writing for TV is hard as hell and requires a different skill set. I admire TV writers' abilities to re-write and try to carry over that mentality to playwriting.

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

A: In an ideal world, going to the theater would be like going to group therapy. You watch a play, talk about it after, hang out, and decompress from your daily grind. I think Ars Nova does that best.

The thing I’m loving most about theater in New York is the sense of community here. A lot of people seem to know each other and “hanging out” means “working on a play.” That doesn’t happen as much in Los Angeles. For me, doing a reading, or putting on a production is an excuse to socialize in a creative environment. So I guess if I were in charge, I’d slash ticket prices in half, and turn every lobby into a bar that offers free Eugene O’Neill Jello Shots, whatever that means. And if you don’t feel like you’re a part of the community, put your ego aside and go volunteer somewhere. Everyone needs help. Trust me, you’re needed—as long as you’re not creepy and trying to force your agenda onto the people you’re helping.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Winnie Holzman, taught me everything I know. She wrote Wicked, and created My So-Called Life. I was her assistant for two and a half years. I’m pretty enamored with my class at Juilliard. Josh Allen, Nick Jones, Fia Alvarez and Fernanda Coppel.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Stuff that makes me want to call my ex-girlfriends and apologize for being an douche bag. Also, Greg Keller’s Dutch Masters’ blew me away.

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

A: I’m just starting out! I spent years afraid of being a playwright. So my advice is, don’t do anything I do, like worry about how much your play sucks and waste time comparing yourself to everyone else.

There are two caps to wear, the business cap and the creative cap. You can’t wear them both at the same time. If you wear your creative cap while doing business, you get too emotional over all the rejection you’re going to face. If you wear your business cap while being creative, your writing will sound like you’re trying to sell it and you won’t write what you love. So literally, imagine you’re wearing different caps. I will say from a practical standpoint, I recommend getting involved at ANY level you can and trying to find the people who you fall in love with and to have creative babies with. Then get yourself a healer.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: Go see the play Fia is directing, Notice Me! Come to my play Friends in Transient Places in the fall. And read Adam Szymkowicz’s blog!

Jul 13, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 210: Jennifer Haley


Jennifer Haley

Hometown: San Antonio, TX

Current Town: Los Angeles, CA

Q:  Tell me about Breadcrumbs coming up at CATF.

A:  Breadcrumbs opened this past weekend at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, which is a gem of an event that came to my attention only a couple of years ago. The Festival, under the leadership of Artistic Director, Ed Herendeen, produces five new plays every summer in a beautiful, civil-war era town in West Virginia, just outside of Washington DC. Over twenty years, Ed has developed an amazingly loyal audience, who often come over a weekend to see all the plays (and once again - all new plays); by the time I showed up for opening, Breadcrumbs in its 199 seat theatre was almost sold out for all of its 16 performances!

Laura Kepley, a super talented colleague of mine from graduate school, brought my play to Ed’s attention and directed it for the Festival. The play is about a reclusive writer of modern fairy tales who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and must rely on this somewhat untrustworthy younger woman to tell her final story - an autobiography. Laura and I were lucky to score a couple of amazing actresses, Helen Jean Arthur and Eva Kaminsky, both based in New York City, to play the roles. I spent the first week of rehearsal with them, doing some final re-writes, then came back three weeks later for the production, which I loved.

It was also a rare celebrity-fest for us playwrights, who are made to stand and show our faces at all events, including right before our own shows. I normally prefer to lurk anonymously in the audience, listening to unfiltered feedback and melting away if the show falls flat, but realized the value when one theatre-goer after another approached me to talk about the show, talk about their family members suffering from dementia, and share how touched they were by the play. As I found myself saying over and over again what an important part of the play they are, I realized how fervently I believe it.

Q:  Tell me please about Neighborhood 3!

A:  I unwittingly hit a nerve with this play, which gave my career a long-prayed-for bump. (Heh heh, when I found out it was going to be produced by the 2008 Humana Festival, I was most tangibly thrilled by the fact that I would not have to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of marketing it on my own . . . printing it out, writing targeted cover letters, shlepping armfuls of heavy envelopes to the post office, etc.) It began as ten minute play about a boy addicted to a disturbing video game, and a mother’s schizophrenic attempt to pry him away. This was stuck to the end of a series of meditations between suburban parents and adults, written in the doldrums of my first year out of graduate school. Over two years, through development opportunities, readings, a bout of my own World of Warcraft addiction, and the help of many generous artists, I managed to turn this Frankensteinian collection into a single story, and was ultimately thrilled with Kip Fagan’s direction of the Humana premiere on Michael Raiford’s terrifying, shiny black set!

The play is still being produced by local theatre companies around the country, and, most gratifyingly, by high schools. This past Spring there was a student-produced production at the East Brunswick School of the Arts in New Jersey; one of the teenagers involved sent me production photos on Facebook, a couple of which are now featured on my web site, www.jenniferhaley.com. What I have found most exciting about this play is the conversation it has sparked between generations.

I am currently working with a young film production company in Los Angeles on ideas for turning it into a screenplay. It’s been fascinating to twist the story around, to explore it as a single-protagonist piece as well as an ensemble piece, to cast it in different genres . . . horror, psychological drama, thriller, etc. I like this company because their main interest in the script has to do with the disconnect between parents and children, which is the heart of the piece. Neighborhood is one of a handful of possibilities for their next film to produce - but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I am heading to New Haven for a week to work with Page 73 on a new play called Froggy. I wrote the first draft a couple summers ago, and am glad someone wanted to do some development on it, as that’s often the kick in the ass I need to continue a project.

Froggy came about because I wanted to write a play in the style of a graphic novel . . . I had no idea what that even meant before I sat down to write it . . . but what came out is the noirish tale of a woman determined to track down her vanished ex-lover when she sees him as a character in a video game. She plays the game and goes in search of him while also exploring through memory the roots of addiction and obsession that bound her to him in the first place.

I wrote the play in InDesign using “panels” of action that denote memory or scenes from the video game. The main character is played by three different actresses - one who tells the story in voiceover, one who plays the woman, Froggy, as an adult, and one who plays her as a twelve-year old girl. I have often been asked by those who have read the piece how I actually see it staged, and although I can say it would involve projections, microphones, killer lighting design, and music, I myself do not know how how some of what I’ve written would actually work. That is what we’re going to be playing with in New Haven. Thanks to Liz Jones and Asher Richelli at p73, I’ll be working with a wonderful director named Matt Morrow, a lighting designer, and several actors to start figuring this out.

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, one story jumps to mind . . . I was sitting on my front porch, a little girl about five years old, playing with a big, plastic race car. An army caterpillar came rippling along, and out of sheer curiosity about whether its blood was yellow or iridescent green (it was usually one of the two), I ran him over with the car. Just then, my mother came out the front door and recoiled. She asked me, “How could you do that?” And I suddenly felt a flood of shame and confusion for taking that small creature’s life so casually. I think writing has become a way to satiate my curiosity about the way life works without committing acts of violence . . .

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

A;  Well I could make lists of things like wanting more inspired theatre spaces and for the regional theaters to produce more new plays; however, I’m a pretty firm believer that creating great things in spite of adversity and trusting that the rare, perfect alignment of resources will arrive with work and faith and patience are key to inspired art and an inspired life.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My current theatrical hero is playwright Luis Alfaro, whose play, Oedipus El Rey, I recently saw at the Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena. He’s my hero because he gave me the kind of theater that excites me, which is:

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind that causes some kind of paradigm shift within me. In this case, it was taking a Greek play that’s always felt a little musty to me - a textbook piece - and reworking it so that I got its heart. Luis was aided by an inspired production and wonderful actors who brought to life the passion between Oedipus and his mother (I’m often a little repulsed by love scenes on stage - they feel strained - but these were something else), and sparked my deeper understanding of a young man’s hubris.

(Luis is also approachable, kind, and a teacher of young playwrights . . . I always admire the person within the artist.)

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

A:  Write only what interests you, try new things with every play you write, produce your own work in the beginning (get your favorite peeps involved), and prepare for years of investigation . . .

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I've got to plug my writers group, The Playwrights Union (www.playwrightsunion.com).  These folks are amazing writers and generous people - they are a huge reason I find it fulfilling to be a playwright in Los Angeles.

Alas, no shows on the immediate horizon, but someone do a second production of Breadcrumbs, okay? Don’t let it fade away just because it’s had its world premiere, okay??