Hey, You want to read about 6 of my plays?

6 playwrights are reading 6 of my plays and writing about them. 

http://fluxtheatreensemble.blogspot.com/2010/07/playwrights-on-playwrights-adam.html

It starts today here:

http://fluxtheatreensemble.blogspot.com/2010/07/pop-larry-on-nerve.html

I Interview Playwrights Part 222: Jonathan Blitstein

Jonathan Blitstein

Hometown: Lincolnshire, Illinois

Current Town: Brooklyn!

Q:  Tell me about your play going up at the Dream Up Festival:

A:  It's called Keep Your Baggage With You (at all times). It's about two young men who allow their friendship to fall apart as they transform into different people over time, struggling against some of the familiar difficulties of the digital age. It's told in seven scenes, each one advancing about five months into the future. Daniel Talbott ("Slipping", Rattlestick/Rising Phoenix Rep) is directing. And there are some very talented and dedicated actors/crew members on board. We're showing at Theater For the New City as part of the Dream Up Festival.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I recently bought a bike at the Brooklyn flea and I've been biking around. I freelance for an indie film company in Tribeca. I'm a script reader at Rattlestick. I go see a lot of old movies at Film Forum. I've also been trying to get some different film projects off the ground, too.

Q:  You also write film. Do you have to mentally adjust when writing film vs theater?

A:  Oh, absolutely. I have to mentally adjust to the fact that what I write for the theater won't pay my rent. Haha, but there are always the obvious differences, the formatting of scripts, remembering not to write INT/EXT. at the tops of scenes. Also, in film you can't get away with the silence that we love in theater. That tension-- you are forced to convey that with editing, and (hopefully) camera work, lensing.

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 fourteen I started at a high school with about 5000 students, the size of a small college campus. I was really depressed and I didn't see any of my junior high friends, anymore. There were gangs. The teachers were miserable. Everyone was miserable. My history teacher, a closet-punkrocker beneath a suit and tie, recognized my teen angst and gave me some Salinger and Camus to read. I devoured the books in a few days, and cried on and off after that, for a year. It was an awakening and turned my life in a different direction. I started to take the arts more seriously.

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

A:  I wish I could make the cost of renting a decent theater space 50 bucks a week instead of 5000 bucks.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I grew up watching musicals at a fantastic regional equity theater in the round, inside a Marriott hotel in the middle of a cornfield. I loved (and still love) Stephen Sondheim. That's how I fell in love with theater in the first place. I don't think I saw a straight play until I was 15. Around then, we moved and I started at a small public high school that had a theater program run by an inspired young Chicago playwright/actor. He introduced me to an eclectic group: Shakespeare, Eric Bogosian, Arthur Miller, Chekhov, Paula Vogel, David Mamet, Marsha Norman, Lanford Wilson and others. New heroes: Bruce Norris, Tracy Letts, Sarah Ruhl...there are too many to list, and I haven't even mentioned the directors, actors, Jimmy Slonina and Larry Yando in Chicago, Steppenwolf, The Hippocrites...right now my heroes are my contemporaries-- there are so many writers under 35 who are working their butts off and doing great work. They inspire me every day.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I'm excited when a show takes me out of myself, when the world offstage disappears, when the language is poetic, when the plot unfolds and I can't see where it's going, when the magical mixture of all the components of the play come together and create something unforgettable.

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

A:  Read everything, not just plays. Don't be afraid to start writing. Write everyday. Take care of yourself, your mind needs to be in a good place to create. Listen to criticism. Don't show anyone your first or second drafts. Know when to quit for the day. Patience, patience, patience!

Q:  Plugs, please:

A: 
Chicago Theater!!

Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park at Playwright's Horizons!

Sam Gold and Annie Baker - sooo good!

David Mamet's RACE

Rising Phoenix Rep!

Cromer's OUR TOWN

Anne Washburn's The Small!

Anna Kerrigan

Bryan Scary's new album "Daffy's Elixir"

Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play at Irondale Ctr was INCREDIBLE.

Philip Roth's "Indignation" and "The Humbling"

Please come see our show at Theater for the New City.
Tickets are here:
https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/758485

I Interview Playwrights Part 221: Dominique Morisseau

Dominique Morisseau

Hometown:  Detroit

Current Town:  New York City – Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me please about the play you're bringing to the O'Neill.

A:  My play that is being developed at the O’Neill this summer is called “Follow Me To Nellie’s”. It's partially based on my Aunt Nellie Jackson who was a legendary Madame in Natchez, Mississippi and who - during the Civil Rights Movement - used the brothel to assist the activists. I chose to focus on this aspect of my aunt's life, and create a story that centers on her brothel. Set during 1955 in Natchez, it tells the story of an aspiring blues singer who is looking for a way out, a voting rights activist looking for shelter, a brothel of wounded women looking for change, and what happens when their worlds collide during the reign of segregation and under the watchful eye of Miss Nellie Jackson.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  Oh lots! In the Emerging Writers Group at the Public, I am working on a 3-play cycle about Detroit, tentatively called “The Detroit Projects”- that focus on Detroit in three urgent eras. The first of my set (which is newly written) is called Detroit 67, based on the 1967 riots. The second is a play on Detroit’s Blackbottom section where the blues had its heyday in the 1940’s. The third and final will be on Detroit in the present in the aftermath of the auto-industry failures and the foreclosure crisis. I am compelled to examine the root causes of some of my hometown’s major contemporary concerns, and this cycle is one of my ways of doing so.

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

A:  Oooooo…okay….let’s see…. Well… I always wanted to tell stories. When I was 8 years old, in second grade, I would create little short, hand-written novellas to pass around to my friends. The best series was what I called, “The Cabbage Patch Mysteries”. That’s right. These were fashioned after my so beloved Cabbage Patch Kid baby dolls. And these were badass characters. Little girl doll babies that were solving crimes and taking back the neighborhood from kidnappers and drug dealers and whoever else. I was no joke. And neither were the Cabbage Patch Kids. I would force these stories on my classmates. Staple them together like little booklets – the whole nine. I was the story-pusher. And it never left me. By the time I got to college to study acting, I realized I was less-than-satisfied with the lack of diversity in casting, and the lack of work for the Black students. So that second grade story pusher came back and I decided to write plays and cast virtually every Black person on campus who was interested. Suddenly, my 3-person play had 20 cast members, and it was unforgettable. So I guess what this means about me as a writer is that I am and have always been interested in filling in the void, and addressing the issues of the marginalized. Be it through Cabbage Patch Kids or 1955 Natchez Mississippi whores…. if their stories are unknown… I’m looking to illuminate them J

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

A:  The Industry. Theatre is beautiful. The art - inspiring. But the industry of Theatre… the entity that worries about tickets sales and superstars and playing things safe and politics and who-you –know…that is what needs to go. I’d change the entire concept of industry, and make the art the thing that supercedes it all…

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Pearl Cleage is definitely one. The way she loves women in her work inspires me to love myself… and put that in my writing. Lorraine Hansbury. August Wilson. Ron Milner. Joe Papp. Woodie King Jr. And the pioneers of the Black Theatre Movement. They are most definitely my heroes.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I’m most excited by plays that tell stories of a pocket of people in a very specific community and can somehow find a way to make it connect to socio-political issues and be completely universal without me even knowing. When I’m connected to the humanity of a story…. And I’m laughing and crying and thinking all at once - I’m thrilled…

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

A:  Be fearless. Develop great understanding about WHO you’re writing about. Don’t just read about them or overhear them talking in public. Find them and learn from them and love them enough to do them justice. Find peers that you trust and share your work with them. Do not wait for permission from others to write. Do not wait until you know you won’t fail. Do not wait until some great theatre calls you and offers you a reading. Do not wait do not wait do not wait….

I Interview Playwrights Part 220: Fielding Edlow

Fielding Edlow

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: Los Angeles

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I'm remounting my newest one woman play, "Sugar Daddy" this Fall which debuted as a workshop production in the inaugural Hollywood Fringe Festival.  I'm working with the very seasoned and formidable director, Paul Stein, who runs the Comedy Central Space in Hollywood and it's been a very fruitful collaboration. It's my second one person play and I'm having a great time performing my own words. Having been involved in improv groups for over ten years, I've finally cast aside the noxious idea of pre-planning moments, and wanting to get it "right", and am simply just telling the story. There was a sign on the Atlantic Theatre that said something like "There is no such thing as good or bad acting but how strong a reason I have to stand on the stage". I'm also trying to find a team/theatre company for my newest play Admissions which has been workshopped with Naked Angels and NY Stage & Film and have an off-Broadway production in NYC.

Q:  How would you characterize the LA theater scene?

A:  The LA scene is a very accessible, if uneven, colorful nexus of theatre communities. It runs the gamut of the formalized and cozy Geffen to the Fake Gallery which showcases avant garde, messier works. It is full of pockets of reverent, disciplined artists who love the theatre and conversely actors who are desperate to put up showcases in order to ascend the ranks of Hollywood. The best part is its inherent accessibility in that it's devoid of the fairly classist infrastructure in NYC. It's financially easier to mount a production with limited resources in LA than in NYC. I produced and acted in an updated version of Miss Julie (dramaturg Craig Carlisle) in the middle of Hollywood with a live string quartet and simultaneously fell in love with my husband, actor-director Larry Clarke.

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'm going to tell a story from my late twenties since essentially I was still a child. I signed up to do the Montana AIDS ride in 2001. I had lost my Uncle Blair to AIDS and wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and ride 80 miles a day for a week in the beautiful sweeping plains of Montana. I basically did the minimal training rides and just hoped somebody or something would get me through the Continental Divide. One blazingly hot afternoon, I simply couldn't push another pedal, I got off my bike and started walking my bike up the seemingly sisyphean hill. Suddenly I heard a friendly yell from behind me. A sinewy, gorgeous antelope of a man rode up beside me and gave the warmest grin. I confessed, "I can't do it, I just can't do it, I mean, what the fuck, I'm still doing it, I'm just WALKING, not pedaling like a maniac!" Jeff introduced himself and it was then that I saw the little orange flag waving from the back spoke of his bike. My new friend was HIV positive and he wanted to walk too. Not only did we walk the rest of the way together and picked up some other exhausted riders, we stopped at a Houlihans and charged some burgers - thankfully avoiding Rest Stop #5 where we would only be served Cliff Bar # 8. I had one of the greatest afternoons of my life, laughing with Jeff in the midst of the sea of orange flags. And we gossiped and shared water bottles till our hearts desire. We were obviously the last riders to cross the finish where the banner shone up above us, CONGRATULATIONS RIDERS EVERY MILE MADE A DIFFERENCE. And I would usually cry every time I crossed that day's "finish line", but this time, I was laughing cause I was with Jeff. We said goodbye and I went off to shower and eat dinner. I realized later that night that I still had Jeff's windbreaker which he had lent me so I followed the green maze of tents until I found Jeff's. He wasn't there. HIs tentmate told me that he had gotten sick and was in the infirmary. I rushed to the infirmary and found Jeff shivering in a bathtub of ice surrounded by volunteers and medics. He had a fever of 105 and I was terrified for my friend who hours earlier looked like he could push a Toyota Tundra up a hill. I heard a medic yell out, "Somebody needs to take him to the hospital!!" And I yelled back "I'm taking him!" I rushed back to his tent and packed an overnight bag for my new friend and got his white tennis sneakers. And we rode in a minivan to the Livingston hospital and met doctors who had never treated an AIDS patient before. It was quiet, the hospital felt like the NYC public library and we checked Jeff in and got him into a private room. We talked till 2 in the morning interspersed with kind bearded doctors who looked like farmers, telling Jeff what he may or may not have. I took Jeff out for a cigarette, walking his IV with him and we smoked outside in the cool air. Then, he told me about the funeral he was planning for himself - he made a video to show at his funeral and he was going to publicly chastise some "friends", saying, "Why are you here, bitch? You never cared about me?" He finally dozed off and I slept in the chair facing him. I felt a purpose and a connection I had never experienced before. The motto of the AIDS ride was Humankind. 'Be both. Human and kind.' I didn't train, I gossiped, I had barrels of fear swimming in my veins. But I found something in Montana. I found my soul which had been buried under the rubble of New York City.

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

A:  I would make artistic directors as well paid as the CEO of Goldman Sachs or at least a quarter of their salary. I would assign brilliant dramaturgs like Jim Leonard to up and coming playwrights and tell new playwrights to stop writing by committee and find their trusted coterie of advisors. I would implore the NEA to siphon funding to all underprivileged schools and allow for theatre trips to NYC. And lastly I would make a rule that women playwrights be represented equally to their male counterparts and have the President include that mandate in his next Rose Garden address.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Larry Kramer and Karen Finley. To me, both are completely unapologetic, fearless, transcendent artists. They are political because they are so personal and they create seismic reverberations because of their passion, specificity and intent. They are all heart beneath the pulverizing rants. I also studied with my guru Jeffrey Tambor who changed the way I comport myself in the world. He helped me to see that my entire life is a work of art and if I get mired down in some low grade self-centered fear, I should get in my car and go drive to a new neighborhood and help a stranger in need.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I saw Toni Press-Coffman's "Touch" at the Women's Project some years back and I think about her play quite often.  It excited me that a playwright could create such beautifully raw, stripped, laid bare characters and see them wrestle out their grief in such an uncliched poignant way.

More recently, I loved the gut wrenching August: Osage County and was astounded by the amazing triumvirate of acting, writing and directing. What also excites me is when I feel a writer has gone on a personally excavating, uncensored ride and isn't trying to place a "message" or moral lesson at the end of the play. I want to feel as if the playwright risked her life to create her piece. This past Spring I saw a benefit anniversary reading of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart and it still remains one of the most exciting, significant pieces of theatre I have ever seen.

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

A:  Go out and see plays and find out who your heroes are and support the community. Get yourself in writer's groups and hear your pages read by actors. And remember, you become a writer, the minute your parents stop looking over your shoulder.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Theatre Planners and Lemonade productions present "Sugar Daddy"- Fielding Edlow's newest one-woman play about what happens when you take booze, cupcakes and drugs from a small angry Jewish woman leaving behind rude drummers, Freudian therapists and New York City in her wake. Opens October 21st - November 13th at the Lounge Theatre in Hollywood. Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm. Info on plays411.com coming soon . .

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!

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