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Aug 19, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 239: Leslye Headland


Leslye Headland

Current Town - Los Angeles, CA

Q:  Tell me about your play that is at Second Stage and just got extended

A;  Bachelorette is a play about the in-between space. The place you are when you're reconciling who you thought you were gonna be when you grew up with who you've become. The place when partying starts to look a lot like addiction. The moment you used to pass off as a bad night of drinking, sex and mistakes has suddenly extended into a bad life of drinking, sex and mistakes.

This production was produced by the Second Stage Uptown series which is an incredible program that gives younger, less-established playwrights a chance to see their work on its feet professionally. It was directed by Trip Cullman. It stars an incredible group of young actors: Tracee Chimo, Carmen M. Herlihy, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Fran Kranz, Eddie Kaye Thomas, and Katherine Waterston.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I'm in the middle of writing a play called The Accidental Blonde in which the two lead characters live out their frustrations on either side of the stage. It's like a split-screen play. So there are two stories going on at once. In my Seven Deadly Play series, this is the sin of "Envy".

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 was always planning productions that never happened. I would just decide one day that me and my friends would do "Peter Pan" and then I would enlist all of them to help me make posters, hold auditions, try to find a public space to perform in... all before dinner. Then I would have to let go of the whole idea because it was never gonna happen and I'd eat my dinner sad that I wasn't old enough to direct and produce plays.

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

A:  I wish some sort of Federal Theatre Project-type thing that could exist and employ thousands of theater artists. But that's impossible to do without government censorship or interference. So I guess I would just outlaw musicals based on old movies or an artist's catalogue of songs.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  John Cassavetes, Sarah Kane, Hallie Flanagan, Brian Wilson, Charles M. Schulz,

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The complete opposite of what I write. I love stuff that takes risks narratively especially non-linear re-magining of classics. My favorite theater is directed and produced by Janicza Bravo, a brilliant artist living in LA.

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

A;  You need to get your heart broken. Otherwise, what you're writing is bullshit. Also, quit your day job as soon as possible.

UPDATE from Leslye:  a better way to put it is Quit the Job You Think You Need. obviously you gotta pay the bills. but I'm always encouraging other writers to make writing their full time job and do whatever you need to do to pay rent. If you have to work 50... hours a week to make rent, THEN MAKE YOUR RENT LOWER! I lived on a couch for two years so I could write Mon-Thurs from 9-5 and work 14-hours at minimum wage Fri-Sun. I saved money by not getting a car in LA. And any LA-native will tell you is NOT a public transportation/walking city. But I did it for years. Even after I started getting paid for writing.

I'm not flippantly suggesting that people quit their jobs because i'm some sort of trust-fund case without any grasp of what living in the real world is like. I did it! I quit my job, wrote full-time and I survived. It paid off! I got an agent and a young theatre company started producing my plays. I can't promise that'll happen to everyone but I know it never would've happened if I'd stayed answering phones 50 hours a week, writing on the side, and trying to get my theatre companies/agencies to read my unsolicited submissions.


Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Tune in to TERRIERS, a show I wrote on this year, premiering Sept. 8 on FX. Created by Ted Griffin (Ocean's 11). Produced by Shawn Ryan (The Shield).

The Accidental Blonde will premiere Oct. 8 in LA. Go to www.iamatheatre.com for details.

Aug 9, 2010

You will have to wait a week or so

for the next interview.  I am going out of town on a silent and unplugged writing retreat so there will be blog silence. 

I Interview Playwrights Part 238: Kate Tarker


Kate Tarker

Hometown:
I am bits and pieces of lots of places – but I lived in a small town in Germany for what really felt like forever. No offense, small town in Germany.

Current Town:
Brooklyntown. Crown Heights edition.

Q:  Tell me about The Green.

A:  In brief:
Leeann has lucked into her dream job: She’s managing a chimpanzee sanctuary in the wilds of Africa. Surrounded by poachers, antagonistic adolescent chimps and an eccentric boss, she finds it difficult to balance caring for people and caring for animals. With human allegiances unraveling and chimps running a wild mock, the line between humans and animals dissolves under the canopy of the African jungle.

In very brief:
The line between humans and animals dissolves under the canopy of the African jungle.

It was/is being developed at ESPA, which is an incredibly supportive place for emerging playwrights. You want to go to there.

The seed of this play came from my own experiences volunteering at a chimpanzee sanctuary in Africa. It’s a play of course – so of necessity, it has abandoned real things as they were – but the emotional core of it is centered around my own memories and feelings of a place and situation, and I think it’s all the richer for that.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  This weekend I am going on a silent playwriting retreat, devised by Erik Ehn. I am mad excited to start something from silence and without any preconceived play ideas.

And then in the fall I am going on a pilgrimage to Berlin for a week, and I want to wrap a play around that. My basic impulse is to write something about some expat US Army employees on vacation in Berlin. So we’ll see how that goes. Vacation behavior is much more interesting to me than living room behavior.

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

A:  When I was a little girl, I was sick all the time in the hospital and I day dreamed a lot in the forest by the castle ruins where the men yodeled and my uncle’s dog attacked me so my uncle died of leukemia and my parents divorced and I read a lot of feminist theory and at times thought I was descended from royalty until that was a lie but we lost my toy poodle out there and I read the Brothers Karamazov and so I had to get 200 stitches.

Also-
I was a painter for a while
Until I was in a strange situation where I couldn’t get my paints
Due to the customs office and some lies here and there
And so I listened to things instead
And became a writer.

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

A:  I think it is a huge problem that theatre actors have a union but playwrights just have a guild (lovely as that guild may be). On a practical level we’re just not on the same economic playing field. The number of characters we write is directly influenced by the expenses imposed on us by equity -- which means fewer actors in plays, fewer roles for actors, and smaller stories. I’m not sure anyone’s winning here. I think there should really be a way to make it possible for playwrights to have a union without taking away their copyright on their material. Or else the actors’ union needs to compromise more, at the very least on the off-off-Broadway level; they’re making it harder and more expensive than it should be to play around and experiment.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Pinter. Albee. Churchill. Orton. Tessa LaNeve.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I enjoy plays in which you are pitched somewhere between hilarity and despair, and sometimes don’t know the difference between the two.

I also enjoy all other plays, if they surprise me.

I love it when plays become huge cross-disciplinary collaborations between visual artists and musicians and dancers and writers.

I rarely enjoy new plays about middle-aged married couples being angry, unless they are angry about something strange and exciting and unrelated to their marriage.

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

A:  I will share some advice given to me by others.

New York City is the place to be, if you have a little money and you want to be free.

- homeless man on the street

It will never be harder than in the beginning.

- Mac Wellman

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Reading of THE GREEN, directed by Glynis Rigsby: August 22 @ 12 PM, 59E59 Theater, FREE but RSVP to espa@primarystages.org AND why stop there when you can come see all four plays in the reading series:
http://www.primarystages.org/sites/default/files/ESPA%20Drills.pdf

Aug 8, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 237: David Holstein




David Holstein

Hometown: New York

Current Town: Los Angeles

Q;  Tell me about your show in Chicago.

A:  About a year and half ago Chicago Shakespeare commissioned my good friend (and brilliant composer) Alan Schmuckler and I to write a musical for their summer family series. We decided to take on a readaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes. In the original fable, there's this kid at the end who's the only one who sees the Emperor for who he is (really naked). So we thought it would be sort of fun to take that kid and essentially make that character into the Emperor's daughter and write a show about how kids can see what their parents can't (and visa versa). I don't really know how to write a children's show. So we set out to write a story that worked at eye level for adults, but that kids could also enjoy.

Q:  What is it like to write for Weeds? Isn't Carly the bomb?

A:  Carly (Mensch) is the bomb. Our offices were across the hall from each other. We thought about stringing some soup cans together so we could talk to each other. Instead we bought Nerf guns and shot them at each other's doors. We even got to write an episode together (ep 9, it's the only episode with a Chekov reference in the title). But yeah, writing for Weeds is awesome. We have a license to kill when it comes to storytelling. That is, there's not a lot of things we can't do or stories we're verboten to tell. Part of that comes from writing on premium cable, but mainly we just have these great actors and ballsy writers who equally encourage us to make dark dark drama as well as slappy happy broad comedy.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  Between Weeds seasons I wrote on a new show coming out in October called Gigantic. It's a dramedy for TeenNick about kids of famous actors who run amuck in LA. The network said we could lean towards the edgier side, so I tried to insert the phrase "rickety slut" into the dialogue a lot. It appears in episode 9. I'm also working on a new play that deals with alien abductions and divorce. I'd really like to finish that.

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 15 I had a crush on a girl I was in a community musical with. I thought if I wrote her a screenplay she would fall in love with me. It didn't work.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My senior year at Northwestern, I was told we would have a guest lecturer in our creative writing program for the winter semester. His name was Tracy Letts. I'm not sure if he ever taught another class. Anywhere. He's such a fucking animal. He cursed a lot in class. Killer Joe teaches me so much every time I read it. Same with Martin McDonagh's stuff. It's funny because I don't write those types of plays, but I wish I could. Rolin Jones might be my favorite living writer.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I get excited by theater when I know that what I'm watching couldn't be anything else but a play. Or rather that it needs to be a play. Television is too often about reality, and so I really appreciate when I'm watching something on stage that has created its own reality, with its own rules that couldn't exist in any other medium.

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

A:  Keep writing. Work with your friends. Don't listen to people who yell. Keep some lemon candy in your pocket. And remember that you're never as bad as your worst reviews and never as good as your best.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  A play of mine called The B-Team was recently published. Check it out!
http://www.originalworksonline.com/b-team.htm

And if you're in Chicago this summer, The Emperor's New Clothes is playing at Chicago Shakes on Navy Pier until Aug 29.

Aug 7, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 236: Trav S.D.




Photo by Joe Silva

Trav S.D.

Hometown: Wakefield, Rhode Island

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I am collaborating on an opera with an extremely talented young composer named David Mallamud. It's a cross between Gilbert & Sullivan and Universal horror pictures I call The Curse of the Rat-man.

Q:  Tell me about "No Applause--Just Throw Money"

A:  It's a very personal history of vaudeville and its legacies within show business and American culture in general. It came out at the end of 2005 and required four years of very fun research. The book strives to be entertaining as it delivers information (ironically, most books on this topic just aren't). I would say 98% of its readers (including, thankfully some important critics) prize it on that basis. 2% seem to be old sticks in the mud who only believe something is serious if it's boring.

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

A:  When I was a very small child there was an incident where I got a lot of mirthful attention from a roomful of grown-ups by repeatedly falling on my bottom, bouncing back up, and falling down again. This was my first arena, my first applause. Most of the time I was a quiet, almost silent child. I spent most of my time alone, dreaming. But the materializing of those dreams into concrete action, even foolishness, to be shared with others in order to communicate...this was an entirely distinct phenomenon. When I write, I write for myself, but I write for the room, too. The goal ultimately is universal pleasure. This is why so many people in the theatre go insane.

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

A:  Something to do with the broadness of access. To over-simply, the audience for theatre continues to skew "rich", "white" and "old". When I was in school, they used to bus hundreds of us to the local regional theatre several times a year. There's far less of that now, and if anything there needs to be far more. Theatre (I think) is the one place besides houses of worship where you go and are immersed in lessons of tolerance and empathy, whether its through the play you're seeing...or the very fact of sharing space with other, live, smelly humans. It's absolutely vital to the survival of our democracy that we learn to be civil and listen to each other across all the lines that supposedly divide us. Technology is taking us drastically, horribly in the other direction and it bodes ill. Whether its funded privately or publicly I don't care, but everyone needs to be exposed to the theatre.

There's another side of the coin, of course. One is education and outreach. Kids (and nowadays plenty of adults) need to be taught to sit still for two hours and open themselves to classics. The other side is that producers need to stay in tune with the culture at large. It needs to reflect, or at least incorporate the values and concerns but above all the aesthetics of the broader (i.e., popular) culture. I think Indie theatre does a very good job of this. Off-Broadway and Broadway not so much, although they are getting better, and I am getting more and more encouraged all the time.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Oh the list is so long,but here are a few: Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde, Charles Ludlam, Joe Orton, Sam Shepard...

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Poetry, but it's so bloody rare. It used to be considered mandatory, now almost no one ever "goes there". Among contemporaries I like Kirk Wood Bromley. And Young Jean Lee gets very interesting, very intoxicating affects by purposefully doing things "wrong". Sometimes editors mistakenly think (because I'm a "vaudeville fan") that I'll automatically enjoy light theater, but as a general rule I hate it. I'm looking for a complex experience...laughter and tears, and with lots and lots of levels. A child should get it, but it should challenge us, too. (I might add to my "seminal theatrical experiences" a production of "Waiting for Godot" I saw at Trinity Rep when I was 13. Burlesque clown Bert Lahr had starred in it several decades before. The emotional reality was completely accessible to me at 13, and since no one EVER knows the answers to its questions, the 13 years old's experience of the play is just as valid as a philosophers. To me, that's the best kind of theatre. Light on the outside, heavy at the center. Just like a Tootsie Pop).

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

A:  Have rich parents and attend Yale.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My next play will be produced at LaMama ETC, but that's not until March of next year. Until then, you can see me act in Ian W. Hill's Spacemen from Space at the Brick Theatre in late August, and perform some of my pop songs with some of my downtown cohorts at Dixon Place in Trav S.D.'s Last Chance Saloon, Sept 24.

I Interview Playwrights Part 235: Chad Beckim





Hometown: Monmouth, Maine

Current Town: Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me about Cookie.

A:  “Cookie” examines a down-on-his-luck writer (fiction, not playwright!) who enters into a green-card-marriage-for-money via the assistance of his only friend. The piece explores racial and sexual stereotypes, hopefully getting some laughs while challenging audience members to examine their own misconceptions about identity, race and culture.

I wrote half of this play in February over the course of two days, and finished the other half two weeks ago at my grandmother’s cabin in Maine. Last week the cast and director blew the second half apart and I rewrote it into the shape it’s in now, which I hope is a good one. It feels good, anyway.

The first inklings of the play came when I overheard a high school kid utter a really horrible offhand slur to an Asian classmate. The comment stuck with me all day and I wondered if it would have been dismissed as quickly if it had been dished out to someone from another ethnic group. Later, when I reached out to a number of friends of Asian descent for their stories, I was shocked by their experiences with what amounts to blatant racism. I’ve since come to believe – generally, mind you – that racism is more widely tolerated against Asians (any disbelievers watch “Family Guy” or find me ANY movie where the Asian guy kisses the anything-but-Asian woman).

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I have another play in this year’s Fringe, “…a matter of choice.” Originally produced in 2005, it helped serve as a stepping-stone for a few up and coming careers, including Chris Chalk, Jeremy Strong, Nyambi Nyambi and Sarah Nina Hayon. I’m excited to see what another team is going to do with it.

I’m also working on a bunch of writing projects: “Good Winter,” an adaptation of “The Main(e) Play” for Table Ten Films; a pilot script about NYC almost-40-somethings with the writer/director Robert O’Hara; and have been going back and forth with an L.A. based friends about some “Creepshow” style-webisodes.

I also just started tinkering with a new play about a Lindsey Lohan-esque celebutante who shacks up with an average Joe type guy who helps her fix her career. I think it’s going to play with “Access Hollywood” style mixed media (cell phone/flip cam recordings that could be made by anyone in the street), and explore the long-standing idea that fame really does corrupt.

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

A:  As a kid I read everything I could get my hands on – I was sickly and always had bronchitis and asthma attacks, and was constantly bedridden. We didn’t get cable until I was 13 and it forced me to read. I think that shaped me tremendously. (Interestingly enough, I still won’t have cable in my home to this day.) My youngest brother, his friend and I used to play this game called “Middle of Midnight,” where we’d be in their rec room, doing normal life things, and suddenly one of us would should out, “Middle of Midnight!” and we’d all race to the sofa and cover our heads with an old blanket. We were writing scary things without even realizing it.

I didn’t start “playwrighting” until I was 30 (I only dared to start calling myself a playwright a couple of years ago). My friend – the writer/director Robert O’Hara – read a short story I’d written and asked me why I didn’t write plays. When I told him I wasn’t sure if I knew how (six plays later and the process is still as mystifying and exhilarating as ever), he put me through a writer’s boot camp, where I started with a monologue, wrote around that until it turned into a scene, then wrote around that until it turned into a play – which turned out to be “…a matter of choice.”

Prior to that, I remember writing a lot, just for me. I didn’t show it or share it with anyone. There’s this poem that I love that talks about loving something in secret, between the shadow and the soul. That was my early writing – something I loved doing in secret.

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

A:  The notion that a play lives or dies based on reviews is just unacceptable. Careers can be derailed by bad – or just plain negative – reviews, and the glee with which some of these critics eviscerate plays and playwrights is morally unacceptable.

Earlier this spring, some playwright friends and I were discussing the new offerings of the season, lamenting the fact that we couldn’t afford most of them (the consensus was that $20 was the most we could afford). This is a group of established writers who know the NYC theater landscape who can’t afford to see the work that’s being produced. And if we – real aficionados – can’t go because we can’t afford it, then who’s going?!? Most theater is unaffordable. (And producing theater is increasingly unaffordable, but that would be a third thing to change about theater, and I’m already over my limit.)

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  The first NYC play that I ever saw that made me catch my breath was “Our Lady of 121st Street” by Stephen Adley Guirgis. I remember leaving the theater and living in it for the next couple of weeks… I could NOT stop talking about the play. To this day I teach it in my Brooklyn College English 2 course.

So many…Robert O’Hara…Conor McPherson (I didn’t see “Shining City” or “The Weir” but read them on the same night and didn’t sleep afterwards)… early McDonaugh…Guirgis…Shanley… Edward Bond’s “Saved”…so SO many.

And then there are the newbies: Sam Hunter and Tom Bradshaw and Sheila Callaghan and Kris Diaz and Annie Baker and Brendan Jacobs-Jenkins…there are so many up and comers out there who are bringing it, and it makes me happy to be coming up alongside them now. (I could name names forever; I’m going to submit this interview and remember someone important and curse myself.)

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like theater with heart and claws – that is, theater that makes you feel and theater that takes a bite out of you. I want to leave the theater feeling like I have a little bit of slime on my hand – you know, like when you shake someone’s hand and there’s something that just doesn’t feel right that you’re not able to immediately wash off? That’s my shit, man – that’s the good stuff.

If I leave a play and immediately forget about it, you know, the whole, “Good play, let’s get some pudding,” thing, then what was the point? I WANT to be moved…I WANT to be affected…I WANT to have a play shake me to my core and make me feel a little different and think a little different and make me question myself or take me back to those halcyon days of youth and my first few years in New York City.

Make me feel something. Make me think something. Love me hate me hurt me break me.

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

A:  My Brooklyn College syllabus reads, “Reading and writing begets improved reading and writing.” A lot of writers that I know don’t read, and I don’t get that. Also, you have to be kind to yourself – there’s a legion of people out there - and I’m not even talking about critics – who will gladly tear you down. You have to be kind and patient and take care of yourself.

(When I was an actor I had a teacher tell me, “If there’s anything else in the world that you can do and be happy doing, you should do that instead.” When she said it, I thought, “Who the fuck are you?” But I get it, and it’s something that I tell some of my students to this day. Because in the end, if my miniscule opinion is enough to shake your belief in yourself and your work, this might not be the thing for you.)

More importantly, you have to work harder than everyone else. As strange as it may sound, I get myself to write by imagining that someone else whose work I respect is writing at that very moment and that they’re going to write something brilliant and I’ll be left in the dust. The way I look at it, the actual writing (the work!) – particularly the focus and time commitment – is the one thing in this business that I have control over.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  
www.cookietheplay.com - Entry #1 into this year’s FringeNYC.

www.freedpurplemonkeytheatrics.com - Entry #2 into this year’s FringeNYC.

www.partialcomfort.org - soon presenting the World Premiere of Sam Hunter’s “A Bright New Boise.”

www.tabletenfilms.com - Eventual producer of “Good Winter,” my adaptation of “The Main(e) Play.”

www.adoveonfire.com - This is the Bill Brittelle, a close friend who’s doing some pretty amazing things to the Contemporary-Classical music scene.

Aug 6, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 234: Ruben Carbajal




Ruben Carbajal

Hometown: Racine, Wisconsin

Current Town: Jersey City, NJ

Q:  Tell me about Subdivision.

A:  It's a play I developed with the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and director Laramie Dennis. A decade after the first draft, it is at last being produced by Chicago’s Gorilla Tango Theater starting August 4th. It’s about a single mother and her two young sons who invent and converse with imaginary versions of their absent, hard-drinking Father. When he finally does show up, all hell breaks loose. It’s kind of a menacing comedy.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I'm kind of like a dog that buries bones and forgets where he hid them. I always have several scripts going at once. I lose track, rediscover them and pick up where I left off. Right now I'm extending this one-minute piece into a play made up entirely of death scenes. I’m midway through a holiday story, putting the finishing touches on a short that involves the last living man to have read a book. There’s also a screenplay.

Q:  Tell me about your day job(s). What is it like to work for the NBA?

A:  I've been freelancing for eleven years. One of my continuing gigs has been working in the script department at NBA Entertainment. I’m part of the team that produces the live elements of The All Star Games, exhibition matches in Europe/China, and other events. Entering an empty stadium and watching it gradually transform into a full-blown stage for performers like Beyoncé and Alicia Keys never fails to astound me. The job’s given me the opportunity to live in Athens for the Olympics, write a monologue for Arnold Schwarzenegger, script dozens of commercials for network TV, and know my way around Shanghai pretty well. I also love the people I work with—it’s really an all-around great gig. The only problem is that in the downturn of 08' I lost almost all of my other clients, and it’s been tough in this economic climate to find new ones.

Q:  Your bio describes you as "spending the first nineteen years of your life praying to get out of your hometown of Racine, Wisconsin" but goes on to say that you now spend much of your time "talking, writing and thinking about Racine, Wisconsin."

A:  You can leave Racine, but it never leaves you. It's a small city on Lake Michigan between Milwaukee and Chicago, probably best known for cornering the market on kringle, a delicious Danish pastry. The New York Times recently referred to Racine as “The Hamptons of the Midwest”--which made many familiar with the city ponder the question: Was the reporter on street or prescription drugs? It’s also the prom capital of the world. If you don't believe me, you can check out The World’s Best Prom, a documentary I co-produced, on Netflix Instant or here for free. My first published play, The Gifted Program is set in my hometown circa 1986, and is about the last remaining members of Washington High's Dungeons & Dragons club.

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

A:  During a parent-teacher conference in grade school, my Mom was assured that I was a good student, but that whenever I had a book report or an assignment due, I would insist on creating a skit at the last minute as a substitute.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  In the early 90’s I saw some of David Bucci's work in Providence. He’s the reason I started writing plays. Keith Johnstone’s book Impro was and is a great influence. My original plan was to move to a mid-sized city and start a theatre company. I took what I thought would be a six-month detour to visit New York. I’ve been here fifteen years. So I have tremendous respect for Matt Slaybaugh, who is living out my dream with Available Light in Columbus-- he's also someone who really understands the contemporary landscape and has found a way for theatre to fit into it. I'd be lying if I didn't mention your plays and your blog (a resource I would’ve killed for starting out) as a kick in the ass.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Blame my Midwestern background, but I write mostly conventional, naturalistic plays. Personally, though, I love stuff that pushes boundaries. I like being placed off-center, challenged, scared. Stuff like Albee's Tiny Alice, Pinter's The Dwarfs. Young Jean Lee's The Shipment is one of the most daring and satisfying things I've seen in a while. Really loved Clubbed Thumb’s recent production of Anne Washburn’s The Small.

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

A:  Listen. Pay attention. If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist.

Everyone says this, but it’s true: make your own theatre. Lately I’ve been too exhausted to follow my own advice, but in the past this has paid off for me.

One of my favorite quotes on writing: “Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.” – Henry Miller

Q: What are some writing tools you can't live without?


A:  When I'm on my laptop, I keep a Notezilla sticky pad open to capture quick notes/brainstorms in the moment.

In my back pocket, you'll find this cheap but reliable index card holder, which is perfect for keeping lists and jotting down quick notes. No batteries or wifi required.

Another lo-fi item I can't do without is a padfolio, which I use for meeting notes and writing offline. You can go high-end with these things, but I like the fact that this model is durable, easy to care for and if lost, easily replaceable.

Q:  Plugs, please:


A: 
Subdivision, Directed by Kara Beth Karstedt at Gorilla Tango Theatre in Chicago opening August 4th

My short play Car & Carriage Collide will be in the August issue of Instigatorzine.

Adam and I both have a monologue in the recently-published DPS anthology Outstanding Men’s Monologues, Volume 2, edited by Craig Pospisil, another playwright you should most definitely check out.

A film adaptation of David Bucci’s explosive and hilarious play, Altamont Now is now out on DVD.

I’m looking forward to Daniel McCoy’s play GROUP, directed by Heidi Handlesman.

Heidi’s the founder of Potluck Plays, a reading series where I recently caught Larry Kunofsky’s Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary. I was blown away with the script’s deft mix of humor and underlying sadness. If there’s a company out there full of ambitious twentysomethings looking for a play that feels like a party, but also has a lot going on, look no further. I’m dying to see this on its feet.


PLAYS BY RUBEN


Essays on Nerve

 

Four playwrights write essays on my play Nerve.

Gus Schulenburg, whose came up with this project, writes, "I feel like this kind of deep reading is missing from our discourse, and when it does occur, it's usually lavished on dead people. I want us to talk meaningfully about plays that are being written now."

They started with Nerve, a play written in 2003/04, my thesis play at Columbia for my MFA.  It was workshopped in 2005 and produced in NYC by Packawallop in 2006.  The 8th and 9th productions of the play will take place this fall in London and Los Angeles.  I hope many more will follow.

Larry Kunofsky:  Some Nerve
Brian Pracht --  On Nerve
Crystal Skillman: Nerve: The Teeny Little Corners of Fears and Longing
August Schulenburg --Under the hood of Nerve

I Interview Playwrights Part 233: Martyna Majok



Martyna Majok

Hometown: Bytom, Poland and later, Kearny, (North) NJ and Chicago, IL

Current Town: New Haven, CT

Q:  Tell me about Mouse in a Jar.

A:  Mouse in a Jar is my curiosity about our defense and protection of the things and people that harm us. And the notion of saving someone – what lives a little deeper under the surface of that desire. In its marketing, the LIDA Project in Denver called it subterranean punk – a horror story about underground life forms, Stockholm Syndrome and the grace of bondage. Things are darkly magical and personified. The house breathes. Or it heaves, rather. A man’s leather belt turns into a whip, then a snake, then gauze. Cicadas and coughs are music. I wanted to tell the story of this immigrant family living in the basement, under domestic violence and illegality, the mother’s unwillingness to leave and her children’s determination to change that. But I have issue with the way a lot of “domestic violence stories” are told onstage and in film – which is alienating, for the most part, and melodramatic. So Mouse in a Jar is expressionistic, with mystery and (I hope) humor and dark magic. And there were to be no victims. Everyone would have agency and ferocity and conviction.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just finished a draft of a play. I think it’s about self-fulfilling prophecies and our relationships with our enablers. Oh no… I just discovered a pattern…eh, fine. At the play’s center is a newly-orphaned skeptic who has just inherited a fortune-telling business, an unconventional street performer that founds a new art that stimulates senses we didn’t know we had, and the people of their crumbling neighborhood that seek things from them both. It may also be about sex and desperation. And loss and storytelling. And the magic of danger. And the currency of punishment. Pardon the excitement and conjunctions – it was just born last week. I haven’t named it yet.

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

A:  One day, I came home from school to find a dismembered pig in the living room. There were raw pieces of it separated on plates on the floor. And those plates were lining the hallway that led to my room. The first piece I saw was a pinkish hoof. Second, a pinkish leg. A thigh, third. The second thigh. Intestines. The segments, I realized, their placement, had a logic. A progression. I remember understanding I’d eventually find the head. This terrified me. But I had to be in my bedroom, locked, by 4:30. There was no other way. As I walked down the corridor of meat, I remember feeling scared at first, then nervous, then anxious and finally eager. By the time I found the head, I was disappointed. It was pretty much exactly as I’d imagined it. Bugged eyes. Little teeth. Skin like one big scab.

I remember my mother asking me later if I wanted to know why there was a dismembered pig in our house. I told her at that point, I didn’t care.

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

A:  Health insurance. With dental.

Also, less characters communicating in well-read references and psychotherapeutic parlance. Less commenting, more drama. Less manufactured quirk. More live, simple music onstage like humming or whistling, voices untrained but trying, sounds born from unpredicted parents. More unpredictability and subversion all ‘round.

But to each one’s own.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Sarah Kane.

I have never felt more intimate with a writer for the stage. I think the fourth scene of Phaedra’s Love between Phaedra and Hippolytus is the most perfect scene ever written. Her boldness to present the truths she saw is flooring. And a call, I feel. A challenge to present the heights and depths of things – baldly and disturbingly, if need be, however feels honest. She dared to be intense and naked; she communicated by peopling her plays with primal, fractured, hungry, hunting characters going to the ends with everything they have until there’s nothing left. Her language is able to boil down the densest, most complicated notions and translate them economically into bitingly poetic, active dialogue. She pushes me to dare.

And then there are the unpublished, unproduced gestures of theatrical heroism. People that read drafts and attend shows, all with their own past and present struggles and limited time in existence, gifting the writers of those drafts and the creators of those shows with their attention. I respect those that believe in a thing enough to work its offices and clean its toilets. Then read your draft.

The mentors. Paula Vogel, Ken Prestininzi, Aaron Carter and others, past, present, future.

Also, the city of Chicago is my theatrical hero.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre that makes my body react. Makes me gasp or tense. Shiver, laugh, weep. If a show makes me weep, it stays with me always. I think what does it are gestures of striving and rawness. I remember some point in Anne Bogart’s Hotel Cassiopeia just broke me. I think it had to do with offering. I remember feeling this sense of communal loneliness and finding it so achingly beautiful and acceptable. I’d witnessed the kindness of offering and so kindness, in the world, I understood, was available. Recently, Ivo van Hove’s Teorema unstitched me. That was a show of blazing, vulnerable, violent lust co-existing with simple kindnesses – a young, able man adjusted an older, tired man’s leg to facilitate his more comfortable rest and I lost it. But, for me, that gesture had to be paired with the intense, familiar ugliness of those characters’ raging desires. That made me see the kindness. “Thank you” at the end of Sarah Kane’s Blasted is catastrophically kind. It’s real – we’re all actually still children. I see goodness best amongst a lot of cruel. I love a theatre that gropes for beauty in the dark. I love to leave ravaged, carrying something that will gnaw me until I look at it.

So, one that recognizes our fears and desires. Or that we fear and desire.

I’ve been especially excited about the urgency and liveness of devised work/performance art lately. Its drama of deceptive simplicity. Its inventiveness. But I still get genuine satisfaction from a well-wrought story with complicated characters. I’d love a marriage of the two. And I don’t think that has to be relegated to the directorial necessarily; I think it can be in the play.

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

A:  I’m humbled by this question. So from one striver-seeker to others:

Respect yourself. Your time and your solitude. Your choices. Decide you are a playwright. Own it. Do the work. Funnel yourself as completely as you can into the task of becoming an honest storyteller (or conjurer of things). Understand it takes time and effort. But attack it, nonetheless. Read things, see things, step away and live in the world. Save some energy to also just be a person (or burn out, be a person for a while, return, repeat). Take yourself seriously enough to get your work read but not so seriously you close yourself to improving. Or become a jerk.

Be good to people. In general.

Don’t blame. Fix.

Question the surfaces of things. Where’s the beauty under ugly. The terror under peace.

In writing/crafting, remember the wealth of human responses you potentially have at your mercy. Our emotions and psychologies are vast and absurd. We’re capable of being frightened, elated, titillated, worried, elevated, seduced…oftentimes, in seemingly nonsensical combinations. And writers/makers can cause them. Burrow deeply in dark places. Endeavor to conjure all kinds of things in us. You have us for a few hours. Wring us.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I’ll soon begin working with The Satori Group, an exciting experimental theatre ensemble in Seattle, on a yet-to-be-titled play. Also, watch out for another devised theatre ensemble called Overhead Projector. If you’re around New Haven, please do stop by the Yale School of Drama – I’ll have a play up in November. By then, it too shall have a name.

Aug 5, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 232: Sam Marks


Sam Marks

Hometown: Manhattan, NYC

Current Town: Brooklyn NYC

Q:  Tell me about the Old Masters going up at Steppenwolf's First Look Repertory of New Work.

A:  I’m really excited about Old Masters at Steppenwolf. I’m very lucky to be working with the director, Daniel Aukin. I’m really looking forward seeing the other plays in the series. And, most importantly I’m thrilled and honored that Steppenwolf—a theater that I have long admired and followed-- is producing the play as part of First Look.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just finished a new play that I wrote as part of the p73 writers group. I’m developing two TV series and working on a short film and a feature length adaptation.

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

A:  My parents met as actors so I spent a lot of time backstage as a child both with them (no babysitters) and also because I appeared in some plays they did (I was on Broadway at age 5, BAM at age 8). Backstage is one of my favorite places in the world (the light, the jokes, the actors) and being there is probably one of the reasons I got (back) into the theater. My entry point to playwriting (like a lot of us) was acting. One of the reasons I started writing was that I remember being on stage in a new play and thinking “I could write something like this”. And so I did. But now I really, really miss backstage.

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

A:  I’m not sure how I would change this, but the fact that so few people make their living (let alone get benefits) from writing plays is a huge problem.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I learned a tremendous amount from Paula Vogel, Erin Wilson, and the other writers I met at Brown’s Graduate program. I’m continually impressed by many of the incredibly talented and imaginative playwrights in NYC. I love Chekhov, Churchill and Pinter. But in terms of theatrical influence, I have—for better or worse-- a slightly Oedipal relationship with David Mamet. (Not that I want to sleep with Rebecca Pigeon but, rather, that I am a devotee of much of his writing and often, simultaneously, want to kill him.)

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Bert States says that “the theater is the place where the ear sees” so I think every time I go to theater and hear (see) something new, it’s actually very exciting. Even if the play isn’t “great” there is an undeniable pleasure in hearing a play hit your ear in a way that is actually unfamiliar and surprising and doesn’t sound like anything you’ve ever heard before. It’s kind of like as a kid, the first time you hear Public Enemy, Led Zeppelin, Nas, The Pixies. It’s electric.

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

A:  It’s never easy. Don’t try to cheat.
Stick with the people who show you respect and with whom you share a sensibility.
No matter how small the job or task, treat it like it matters or else don’t do it.
There are many, many roads to Rome.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I want to plug Babel Theater Company, P73 and Partial Comfort Productions. They are vital to American Theater and the careers of people like me. You should all go see everything they do.

Aug 4, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 231: Stacy Davidowitz



Stacy Davidowitz 
Hometown: Merrick, Long Island, NY

Current Town: Morningside Heights, NYC

Q:  Tell me about PINK!:

A:  PINK! is the story of five 12-year old girls and the interpersonal relationships that bind them. It plays out in real-time over the course of an hour and a half while they are alone in their bunk at sleep-away camp. A dark, dark comedy, PINK! presents 12 year-old girls in a way you’ve probably never seen them-- as themselves, unsupervised and unleashed. Take note: animals in their natural habitat can be extremely dangerous.

Originally a ten-minute play, PINK! was first produced at Tufts University, later announced a finalist at The Tank Theater’s SLAM playwriting competition, and then produced at Manhattan Repertory Theatre. Its full-length version, produced by Down Payment Productions at the WorkShop Theater (www.pinktheplay.com), was a finalist for the Lark Play Development Center’s Playwrights Week 2009, and received seven NY Innovative Theatre Nominations, including Outstanding Full Length Script.

I was incredibly fortunate to have worked with such ridiculously talented artists on every aspect of the production. Directed by the brilliant, brilliant Brian Smith and acted by the most outstanding ensemble-- Kaela Crawford, Julia Giolzetti, Caitlin Mehner, Alison Scaramella, & Stephanie Strohm – I really had it good. Real good.

PINK! will be published by Broadway Play Publishing at the end of the summer / early fall. I also adapted the script for film, and as a screenplay, PINK! is currently being optioned as an independent feature film.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  As far as playwriting goes, I’m working on a variety of projects:
1. Attempting to secure the rights to adapt my favorite novel into a rock musical.
2. Putting the final touches on my children’s musical, Hank & Gretchen: A Modern Re-telling of Hansel & Gretel; or Because Candy is That Good, collaborating with composer Mark T. Evans, as well as Rag n’ Bone Theatre Company.
3. Working on my screenplay, Lady & the Vamp, for a Columbia MFA student short film being produced by Yves Bouzaglo at the end of the summer.
4. Writing showcase scenes for MFA / BFA programs around the country.
5. Diving into my next full-length play, THE RUBBER ROOM.
6. Developing a short one-woman play with my puppet, Swaby.

And outside of writing:
Currently coordinating and running a day camp. They are giving me a week at the end of August to develop and direct an Adventure Camp. I have 75 k-6th grade kids enrolled. Goal: make it the best camp ever. Go.

I also just graduated from Columbia University with a MFA in Acting. So, acting. Just finished a reading of Daniella Shoshan’s exciting new play, YES WE CAN, at Atlantic Theater Company. And singing. Love to sing. And running obsessively through Central Park. Or to New Jersey. Love to run.

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

A:  When I was 11 years-old, I was at sleep-away camp (are you sensing a theme?) and decided, per usual, I was going to stay back in the bunk that night while all the other girls were socializing with the boys so that I could write. At this point, I was walking the line between popular and being the weird kid. When my friends got back to the bunk, I shared with them my very long poem that described, in unnecessary, bloody detail, the murder of a camper by a counselor in the middle of the night. I think after that I was the weird kid.

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

A:  More risk-taking, cheaper tickets.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I wrote my first play immediately after being introduced to Sarah Kane’s work. Her writing is beautifully sick, full of humor and wit, with layers upon layers of crazy shit. She goes there.

Lorca, Chekhov, Brecht.

Tracy Letts, Sarah Ruhl, Sheila Callaghan, Polly Stenham.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  If I am emotionally invested, and I mean choked-up, heart-pounding, tears-rolling, ear-to-ear smiling, involuntarily-mumbling-praises-under-my-breath-like-my-disruptive-yet-fantastic-grandma invested, I know it’s a good show.

Also, if I laugh a lot. If I laugh a little, it’s probably not too special; I’m a laugher.

A really, really good musical.
Anything with children.

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

A:  This is the advice I remind myself to take, because I too am just starting out:
-Try to sleep but not if it interferes with writing.
-Submit, submit, submit.
-Collaborate with talented friends if you’ve got em. Embrace their feedback.
-Explore: rejuvenate yourself by seeing, reading, breathing new works.
-Make time that doesn’t exist.

I Interview Playwrights Part 230: Molly Rice


Molly Rice

Hometown: Born in Houston, TX, but Austin is home.

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about the Saints Tour and Futurity the Musical.

A:  SAINTS TOUR means a lot to me. I wrote the play in 2009 for Ray Rizzo's live arts exchange MOTHERLODGE (a great festival, www.motherlodge.com), to take place in Louisville, KY. The play was a bus tour, led by a "Tour Guide" character who uncovers the secret saints of a local area. I wrote it using Google Maps Street View, never having been to Louisville, and Ray connected me to local musicians willing to be planted around the city for audiences to discover. Actress Emily Hyberger (a Louisville native), director/ writer/ actor Marc Bovino, and I went down and put the thing together in a week. And it was just magical. We had local sax player Mauriece echoing through the Salvation Army's cavernous 1950's gymnasium, and Louisville singer/ songwriter Tyrone Cotton singing about time in a graveyard, showered by white cherry blossoms, and so many other magical Louisville moments. We enlisted the Center of Hope Soup Kitchen, where the tour ended and we all ate a meal together. It was Community Theater, in the deepest sense of the word. I wrote it to be redesign-able for production in different communities, each time using a local actor and musicians, local sites, and a local community service organization-- so this Spring director Rachel Chavkin and I tested its flexibility in the West Village as a walking tour, with Taylor Mac as the Tour Guide and 20 participating artists and musicians (!!!). Totally different-- the Village itself was a character-- but totally interesting to see its translation. I plan to do it in as many cities as I can. The play is a story, but also a sort of frame to showcase these rich little pockets of culture out there that we sometimes lose sight of in New York. And as a writer, the sites just unfold into stories in the most exciting way.


FUTURITY is a beautiful example of a contemporary music/ theater hybrid. It was conceived and developed by the Lisps, a strange, smart Brooklyn band who I'd never heard of. I went and saw a presentation of FUTURITY at Joe's Pub in Spring 2009 because somebody sent me an email about it and it sounded cool, and I was like, this is fascinating-- there is something special here. I was touched by the way it balanced intellectual ideas with the emotional force of music. I felt like its book might need some development and that I might be a good match, so I connected with them and joined the team. The story is about a Civil War soldier and his imaginary relationship with mathemetician/ Lord Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace, which is fascinating enough, but at root the play's about the way science and art talk to each other, push each other forward, from one era to the next. I'm thrilled to be working on it.

I love working on strange music/ theater hybrids like these two. I was into music from early on--singer/ songwriter out of high school, went to Austin for college and promptly quit to play in bands. Music and story cleave to each other in my brain-- they're never fully separate strands of narrative. Even straight plays feel like compositions, and songs and compositions have a shape that feels like story. I'm interested in trying to 'braid' them in new ways, and with these two projects I'm still working it out.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  Right now I'm writing a new play about lying. It's a commission from the Tisch Grad Acting program, an ensemble piece for 9 grad actors who are aMAzing. It's an awesome challenge to write a narrative that makes room for the full range of 9 skilled actors like those guys. I'm also working on a final draft of my musical CANARY (with Ray Rizzo and Rachel Chavkin), and Rachel, composer Stephanie Johnstone and I are developing a new piece about James Agee and Walker Evans based on Agee's book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

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

A:  My family used to watch the Carol Burnett show when I was very little. When I was 3 or 4 my dad asked me why I liked it so much, and I said, "The song and the story." That pretty much sums it up for me.

After my dad died, I found that written on the back of an envelope in his files. That probably explains something about who I am as a person. I'm not sure what.

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

A:  It would be interesting to see New York Theater become a little less insular, get more curious about work in other places. Coming out of Austin in the 90's and early 2000's, where 1 out of 4 shows produced were new plays, I knew when I got here that New York did not represent American theater-- New York theater is local, too. There are innovative conversations going on between locally-grown theater and the communities that grow it, and the have a lot to teach us about what American live art really is.

I also wish we could all chill a little. Yes, there is no money. Yes, theater is not the primary performance genre out there today. Yes, audiences are small. But change is constant. Limitations and resources change throughout the course of history, and we are just a page in that history. We can work to change the limitations and resources. But in the meantime, this is our page. We need to keep the focus on making great things; that's what we're here to do. There's always a way to make them. The rest is more likely to come if we focus on that.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Well I LOVE Ruth Margraff's work-- talk about song and story. I think her brain is a national treasure. Sam Shepard was an artistic father figure. Freddy Mercury is my patron saint. My favorite play is the Bacchae.

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

A:  Let's see...A big turning point came when I stopped asking people to do my work and started doing it, in one form or another. People began to support it, once they could envision it. And that shift really changed the experience of being a theater artist from frustrating to liberating.

When I find people I love to work with, I stick with them. As Paula Vogel says, we rise together.

I find ways to situationally, financially, and personally stabilize my life because we work in a rocky, unpredictable field.

I try to be a good person and to find the good seed in others. I don't work with someone if I can't find it.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The Tisch show opens in December; Saints Tour will happen again next Spring in New York; and look for a showcase workshop production of CANARY in February 2011! And thank you, Adam, for your interviews!

Aug 3, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 229: Julia Pascal


photograph by Habie Schwarz

Julia Pascal

Hometown: I was born and brought up in Manchester and Blackpool in the north of England but at 14 I moved to London where I have lived ever since.

Current Town: London

Q:  Tell me about Dybbuk.

A:
The Dybbuk.
History

PASCAL THEATRE COMPANY’s innovative take on THE DYBBUK was supported by the British Council on a tour to Poland in l993. (Tim Butchard was the British Council supporting Officer), It went to Bialystok and Radom and was extremely well-received.


The production has been seen in France, Germany, Sweden and Belgium as well as enjoying a British tour. It has received rave press and is now invited to be part of the first theatre festival at the Manhattan theatre The Theater for the New City in August 2010.

We would like to have British Council support and can offer educational workshops around the production,

The play was written and directed by NESTA Dream Time Fellow Julia Pascal.

It was choreographed and designed by Thomas Kampe.

The production which has five performers, uses text, movement and music in a homage to a culture that was annihilated by the Nazis. It is a major work of English theatre which has been part of Pascal’s creation of an English Jewish body of work seen in the l990s and 2000s and published by Oberon Books.


The Dybbuk.

Synopsis


A British woman goes to Germany today and finds it full of wandering souls or dybbuks.


She imagines a ghetto in 1942 where five Jews are assembled for deportation. One of them remembers the story of The Dybbuk . She makes the others re-enact fragments of this famous legend. This work poses the question about why we keep on telling our stories even on the eve of destruction.


The play premiered at the New End Theatre in 1992. It toured in the UK and in continental Europe over a decade and is invited to the Theater for the New City in August 2010 for its professional US premiere.

Q: What else are you up to?

A: I have just written a new play about a London woman who goes to the Brooklyn Bridge to jump off it and another about Mossad. I need to get them read and produced now.

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 was brought up by my Romanian grandparents in Manchester. They brought with them an atmosphere of many cultures and spoke several languages. Although I was born in England, I never felt 'English' and this alienation made me always an observer. I was never a religious Jew and embraced atheism at twelve. My Jewishness made me connect to other outsiders. I became fascinated by the lost souls that vanished in Hitler's Europe and learned of the Holocaust as a young child. This had a profound effect on my writing.

I was also a balletomane and dance has had a strong effect on my writing and the way I see work expressed.

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

A: Give women equality.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Bertold Brecht, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Joan Littlewood, Hilde Holger.  Kantor and Grotowski are also major influences.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Work that is Poor Theatre and rich in ideas.

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

A: Write what you know and then go much deeper. Talk to people especially people with extraordinary lives. Listen to your grandparents and get them to talk about their own.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: THE DYBBUK by Julia Pascal. US premiere at Theater for The New City, 155 First Avenue (10th Street. East Village. August 10-25 2010. Telephone 212 254 1109. www.dreamupfstival.org www.pascal-theatre.com

Aug 2, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 228: Yussef El Guindi




Yussef El Guindi

Hometowns: Cairo and London

Current Town: Seattle

Q: Tell me about the play you're working on at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival:

A: It’s called THREE WOLVES AND A LAMB. A comedy about the Palestinian and Israeli imbroglio/ conflict. The subject matter just screamed comedy to me. So I just followed those initial screams and ended up with this play. We’ll see if I’ve managed to morph it all into laughter or not. It’s a prickly subject that lends itself to the extremes of both painful comedy and high drama.

Q: What else are you up to?

A: I’m workshopping another play in August at the Icicle Creek Theatre Festival in association with ACT in Seattle. The play is called PILGRIMS MUSA AND SHERI IN THE NEW WORLD. It explores the emotional havoc that attends those who leave one country to try and make a home in another country....The baggage that one unavoidably lugs around in one’s travels, as well as the stuff you’re forced to leave behind. And how the absence of those things left behind often accrues an emotional weight of its own. A weird number is done on your psyche when you the find the familiar touchstones of your home country absent from your daily life. That is of course both thrilling and exciting, as well as overwhelming, and even terrifying at times. Sometimes, an emotional free-fall takes place, where nothing familiar remains for you to hold onto in times of crises. Truly, one becomes a stranger in a strange land; and one simply can’t create memories and comfort zones fast enough to break this fall.

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

A: Continuing from the previous response: writing (as well as acting) was what I did to create those comfort zones, that sense of home, after emigrating with my family at a young age. I think the constant in my life has been this continuos uprooting, and traveling. Not just from different cities, and countries, but also from one language to another, from one cultural mindset to a completely different one, etc. What has shaped me as a writer and individual has been this need to adapt, to put aside what one knew in order to survive and thrive in whatever new country I was in.

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

A: I was in a theater lobby not too long ago and heard a mother tell her son, who was acting up a tad, that he should behave himself as he was in the theater now. I groaned when I heard this, feeling that we’d surely lost a future audience member. I wish theater wasn’t perceived as being so stiff, stuffy, and inaccessible; or done for a small group of cultural elitists....Of course it would also help if the theater pieces themselves weren’t sometimes stiff, stuffy and inaccessible. It would also help if discussions about theater were woven into the cultural conversation more often. I find it a little depressing when I can’t find American Theater magazine in stores that seem to display every other kind of magazine imaginable. Surely they can find a corner on their endless racks for a magazine that covers the interests and activities of a whole lot of people!

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: I admire those who manage to stay in the game despite long periods of seemingly wandering in the wilderness. Basically anyone who keeps at it, in spite of the obstacles, the disappointments, etc. People who take all that crap in stride and still manage to produce good work. (And who are able to get over themselves and move on when the work misfires or isn’t what they hoped it would be. Theater artists who are able to see those dips and disappointments as part of the ride.)

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that doesn’t bore me. I don’t mean to sound flippant. I like theater that grabs my attention and doesn’t let go. Theater that, while being developed, knows an audience will be in attendance at some point. Yes, this can lead to pandering crap. But I am little put off by plays that simply don’t care about their audience. This may very naturally lead to people not showing up. And nothing is more depressing in theater than seeing so many empty seats.

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

A:  In spite of what is said - that writing can’t be taught - theater is a craft you can learn. The medium has its own demands and requirements. (Note the many successful novelists who couldn’t make the transition to writing for theater.) And so whether you learn that craft on your own by watching/ reading a lot of plays, or you attend playwriting courses, I would advise paying close attention to what makes this particular mode of expression tick. Nobody can teach you, or give you your voice, yes, but the medium in which you choose to express it can be learnt.

Aug 1, 2010

I Interview Playwrights Part 227: Meg Gibson


Meg Gibson

Hometown, Current Town:

Born in Bridgeton, New Jersey-really South Jersey as we say, down by the Delaware Bay and the reason why they call it the Garden State. I ran around in the asparagus and tomato fields until I was eight. My father is third generation inventor so there was always a lot of creativity going on.

I do remember the parents going to NYC to see plays and how wildly excited they were by what they'd seen. When I was old enough to be taken to the city it was like being in a comic book. It loomed over everything. I spent some time in PA then vamoosed to Utah for college and skiing. I started acting there and then came to NYC for conservatory training. Pretty much been here ever since. I am a settler as E. B. White would say. I've made this my home. NYC- it's tough, it's expensive, it's home.

Q: Tell me about Seven Seven Seven.

A: The play is Tatata. It means the suchness of the moment.

It's a riff on making music, being sisters, having parents that are rock and roll and movie stars from the 1960's, what it is to be second generation to that history, how do they carve out their own careers, keeping their own work real in this culture of fame and product.

All that in ten minutes. I liked the challenge of the form and the sight specific setting of Jimmy's. Jimmy's is an old speak easy- I can always sense the history of burlesque or vaudeville or whatever went on in that back room with this little stage and little bathroom. Doing a theatre piece about young musicians fit with all that.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I'm currently shaping on the next writing project. It's a short B and W film. That's all I can say for the moment.

Just finished directing the regional premiere of Too Much Memory, the adapted Antigone I wrote with Keith Reddin that Rising Phoenix Rep produced in the Fringe Festival of 2008. I also directed this wildly funny new play called Charm. It's a surreal comedy of manners about Margaret Fuller and her buddies, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. It's the antithesis of masterpiece theatre. I loved creating it with a very game cast and design team and old friends in Utah at Salt Lake Acting Company. The play is having some regional productions and I'm working hard to get it done here in NYC.

I'm also in a few episodes of AMC's, Rubicon. I play the widow to the mentor who accidently? mysteriously? was killed.

It's taken me a few years, but I'm finally starting to juggle the three gigs- writing, directing and acting.

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

A: Childhood influence to make theatre. I taught myself to read by the age of 4. I don't know which came first- the imagination or reading and seeing it all as I read. It's a 3D movie in my mind's eye- full of texture, smell, sounds. Same with plays. I imagine the production as I read. So, reading gave me the path to making this work. I also can't help but want to play- play with creating work, developing it with actors, or being the actor that brings a story to life. What better edge is there?

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

A: I wish Theatre were better funded. If we didn't need names to draw in box office and critics, if the work just stood on it's own, produced as pure artistic pursuit- that would be a real plus for our culture.

I enjoy the anonymity in work. How great is it to go to BAM or our Fringe Festival and not know any of the creators or performers? Jus going, being this blank slate and taking in what these producers have chosen to present.

Every culture has it's names. I did enjoy Denzel Washington in Fences. Glad he took the time to come do it. He was consummate. But,that will always be a part of our choice. And as a producer, I recognize the need to do that. But we need to look at which piece can be done without the big names. Some work is better without the focus on a star.

More theatre with consummate artists, enthusiastically funded, that's what I'd like to change.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Theatre heros: Ariane Mnoushkine, Bernie Gerstein, Joe Papp, Simon McBurney, Thomas Ostermeir, LIsa Kron, Les Waters, Irene Worth, Jennifer Tipton, Annie Baker.


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

A: The only advice I have is find your own form, make your demons work for you.