I Interview Playwrights Part 396: Neena Beber

Neena Beber

Hometown:
Miami, Florida. Still Home.

Current Town:
New York City. Current can’t ever really replace Home, though it  has been a long slog of time.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Trying to finish a bunch of plays I started a while back. I have a very  poor sense of time which is why I need theatre to contain it for me. 

Q:  How has your TV writing affected your playwriting, if it has? 

A:  When I first started writing for TV, my writing for theatre got a little  stranger. I didn't want to write anything that resembled the TV writing at all. That meant no naturalistic dialogue, no banter, no jokey jokes, no straightforward narrative. I wanted there to be at least one metaphorical thread in my theatre work, even better three  or four or five. I wanted sideways sprawl and characters who neither learn nor grow. I became really interested in the space of the theatre, the live event, the meta-reality of theatre itself -- what it means to be in a room with people, real people, crossing in time and space with you.

Now I think TV and film have helped me really think about craft and story and economy and precision, and theatre has helped me see that you don’t need to be afraid to bring your voice and your singular oddness and peculiar humor to the screen big or small. I am not at this point concerned with one being too this and the other being too 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:  My mom decided it would be fun for us to learn a new word a day.  This was before those word-a-day calendars. She was a real wordsmith, an ace at Scrabble and an amazing, charming storyteller. She really understood people and what made them tick. She had this ability to turn the ordinary stuff of life into something magical. Nothing was lost on her. And she appreciated language, words. So I remember sitting on our back porch getting our words. The first word was procrastination. See, I took piano lessons but would only practice when we were heading out the door. When the recital came, I had no idea what I was doing. I made up a tune on the spot. I was winging it, and I thought I pulled it off because no one said anything; of course, no one knew what to say! It was both comical and  dreadful at the same time. Comical and dreadful is a heady combination. I think at some level even then, I knew I was just banging keys. I really was planning to figure it out later -- and not just later, but after, which some might say is really too late.

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

A:  No second guessing from anyone about anything.


Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?


A:  Growing up my theatrical hero was Mad Guy Mogi, my great uncle, a silent film actor, magician, lion tamer, shrunken head seller, lentil soup eater, professional worrier, eccentric dancer, kosher-keeper.  The few times I met him, he was wearing a top hat, a cape, and a giant, gnarled monster hand that he would transform to a normal hand before your very eyes, as he reached to shake yours. He was my hero, or really my meta-hero, because my mom was my hero who conveyed who he was to me, valued who he was, celebrated him in all his eccentricities.

Of course I also have my long list of names, people who come to me when I need them most. Some of them are ghosts sitting on my shoulder; too many of them are ghosts for me now. They taught me.  They teach me. They raise the bar.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I think it is always exciting to have people performing live in a room using their time and energy to delight us. It’s like we’re all kings and queens. I love the attempt at communication that I may not completely understand, not yet anyway. I want to walk a mile in your shoes even if they don’t fit.

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

A:  Start your own thing and go forth fearlessly. Remind older playwrights why.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I prefer to go bald.

I Interview Playwrights Part 395: Joe Roland

 
Joe Roland

Current Town: New York, NY.

Q:  Tell me about On The Line.

A:  I wanted to tell a story about working class people that didn't take place in a trailer and managed avoid the issues of both crystal meth and incest. In On The Line, things are working for these people until their jobs are threatened. It's amazing what having a job can do for someone; and it can be frightening to watch what happens when good jobs disappear.

The play is about what happens to three friends who are caught between loyalties. The loyalties to their union, their jobs, their families and each other.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I'm finishing up my play Lester and Doyle LLP, which is about a young woman whose ambitions come in direct conflict with her principles when she is surrounded by corruption at the law office where she works. It's a comedy.

Q:  How does your acting inform your writing and vice-versa?
 

A:  It's all about story telling no matter which side you approach it from. The question I ask myself over and over, whether I'm acting or writing is "What's the story?" I learned to write by watching Mike Nichols teach a master class where it was all about telling the story.

I teach a playwriting and performance workshop to union members, and I think it's important that they experience both to see what each one requires from the other.

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 whatever the age is when you no longer want to ride a tricycle, I asked my parents if I could have a regular bike. They declined the request, offering some nonsense about my not being ready. The next morning I rode my little green hand-me-down tricycle to the end of the driveway and waited for the garbage truck. When it arrived I instructed the garbage men to crush my tricycle, and they did, as I watched with great satisfaction. My parents were not amused, and I was without any mode of transportation for some time. But I felt good about my decision. Still do.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
 

A:  My teachers. Arthur Miller. O'Neill. And anyone who is trying to have a life in the theater, something that takes a truly heroic effort these days. Kipp Osborne (He opened a theater in this economy, if that's not heroic, don't talk to me.) Bill Buell.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  A good story well told. Honest.

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

A:  None. I don't want to encourage anyone. Seriously, you've already got a couple of hundred playwrights on this site, don't you think it's time we started to cull the herd a little bit?

But if you just can't help it and have to write plays: Arthur Miller said to write a play is a noble act. Make it count. Write about what matters to you. And if you find a way to get your work produced consistently, tell the rest of us.

Q:  Plugs, please:

 

A:  On the Line at the Canal Park Playhouse. Death of a Salesman.

I Interview Playwrights Part 394: Radha Blank

Radha Blank

Hometown: Williamsburg, Brooklyn/Harlem, NY

Current Town: Harlem

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Two plays....HappyFlowerNail...my first solo show in over ten years...follows the different women who call a Korean-owned nail salon (under threat from revitalization of Bed-Stuy Brooklyn) home...then there's Casket Sharp...takes place in a funeral home in a deprived Black town. It's about death rituals and gang rites. One screenplay...a mockumentary....

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'd get in trouble from time to time while in grammar school...always running my mouth or cracking jokes...I'd have to write these letters of apology and they'd always start like....'Dear Miss Such&Such...I am very sorry that I disturbed the class this afternoon....but maybe if you paid more attention to me or if we did more exciting things in class then' Lol. My mom had saved some of these letters....she couldn't believe my gall...and even agreed with some of my grade school sentiments. She figured I'd either be a great writer or a pretty good lawyer. I think I always had a knack for seeing things from another perspective...and definitely attacking injustice...because that was simply unjust (making me write those long ass letters).

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

A:  I wish there was more investment in creating new audiences...and valuing those audiences instead of catering to the same ol' same ol'.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Joe Papp...(theater for the people which includes the poor, thanks) Alice Childress...(she was not afraid to walk away from Bway if it meant changing her vision) John O'Neill and all of the folks connected to the Free Southern Theater movement.. (to create social justice theater around human rights, voting rights in the heart of the south at the time of Jim Crow...was beyond bold...it was life changing)

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater with balls...theater that is not about pleasing an audience but the artist being true to themselves, the message of the work and connecting with audiences who celebrate that. And I love theater that leaves me thinking about it's themes/subjects looong after its done...theater that punches me in the gut...the kind that makes we want to create some change, like The Exonerated by Jessica Blank or Born Bad by Debbie Tucker Green...

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

A:  yes, learn the craft...but take as long as you need to figure out what your voice is...the kind of stories that speak to you....

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  We just closed seed....(seedtheplay.com) but hope to have another life down the road...and then there's HappyFlowerNail...coming soon...by hook or by crook! LOL.

I Interview Playwrights Part 393: Kelley Girod

Kelley Girod

Hometown: Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Current Town: Manhattan

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  As a producer, I'm going into my 3rd year of producing a play festival that I founded called "The Fire This Time." It's a festival for playwrights of African and African American descent whose stories don't often get told. This festival came about due to my own frustration as a writer. I felt that there was a standard perception of what a "black play" is and I was not writing that play. Other playwrights started to voice the same concern as well. Anything that is written by a black playwright is a black play no matter the content or style. So three years ago myself, Germono Toussaint, Pia Wilson and Radha Blank gathered in a room to discuss this problem and now we are going into our 3rd year of programming from Jan 17th - 25th. This includes our ten minute plays for our new playwrights, readings of full lengths for our 2nd year playwrights and this year we will start producing full productions of our playwrights starting with Pia Wilson's "The Flower Thief" in August 2012! I am very proud of this festival and that we can commit to giving platforms to emerging playwrights.

As a playwright I am working on a new play with Keith Beauchamp who is an emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. He produced and directed the documentary "The Untold Story of Emmet Louis Til" and is currently the only African American man with his own series on tv, The Injustice Files, on Investigation Discovery, which reopens cold cases from the civil rights era. I am also finally writing a screenplay with my brother John who is a producer down in Louisiana. Both projects are in the early stages so I'll just save you from a very vague, overly conceptualized explanation of what I'm trying to work out:)

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

A:  Ok, so I have to give a brief explanation before I tell the story. And now I'm afraid the lead-up is just going to make readers say "Uh, that's it?...." But anyway, the first thing to know is that I am one of TEN children. I am number five. Growing up in a Cajun/Creole family in Louisiana, a big family like ours is actually not uncommon. My mother was one of fourteen herself. Ok, second thing to know, Cajuns and Creoles are very, very unique people. Cajuns are the descendents of the Acadians exiled from Nova Scotia in the Grande Derangement, a historical event made famous by Longfellow's poem "Evangeline." My ancestors were the founders of the first Acadian or Cajun settlement in Louisiana. Creoles are French - speaking people of mixed descent. Both of my parents were raised speaking French and yes, I know a lot of curse words in Cajun and Creole French. So mix big families, with lots of storytelling in broken English, stories that had both the dark and light sides of spirituality and the supernatural, place them all in a city where there isn't much to do and the following story is what you get:

So my siblings and I came up at a time when there wasn't much in the way of playstations, internet etc. Saturdays were spent outside building clubhouses and tents. To be authentic, if we built a clubhouse or tent we had to use the bathroom outside because if we went inside to use the bathroom the whole thing wasn't "real." The girls used a bucket, I'm sure my mom still doesn't know about this. If it was raining we were inside playing our favorite games - church or gangsters depending on how we felt. Our game of gangsters once led me to make a small packet of fake cocaine by putting baking soda in a little ziplock. Suffice it to say my mother was beyond startled when she later found it on the floor. We also enjoyed playing a good game of "house" every now and then. In my favorite episode of that game I played the teenage daughter who was returning home after a stint in drug rehab. When I entered the room my brother, who was playing the father, sniffed the air and said "I smell LSD."

But it was the game of "Army" that I think really explains me as a writer. In this particular game, in order to be "real," we dragged a garden hose into the house up to the second floor and dropped it from my brother's bedroom window. One of my brothers then climbed down the house into the garden. We were supposed to do the same. This was an army training drill. Another brother was too small to climb down the hose so we were instructed by our "Drill Sergeant" to throw him out of the window, which we did without thinking twice(a soldier never questions his/her leader!) and my brother caught him. I was supposed to be next to climb down the hose when I heard my mother coming up the stairs. I ran like hell and hid in the closet. She walked in, saw the hose out the window and just walked back out. I am sure at that point she had really just had enough.

What I learned from these childhood adventures that still sticks in my writing - play, have fun, take risks and go all the way with them. In childhood we don't think twice about going as far as we need to go no matter where it leads us. When I am writing my plays, that is my adult playground, that is where I am with my siblings again and I am someone else, in a whole new world.

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

A:  Before suggesting any changes I would want the honest answers to some of theses questions:
Do literary managers actually read the plays that are submitted? And if so, how do they know who is a man or a woman, black or white, and why should any of those things factors into a play being put up? That same question goes to producers, but from them, I'd like to know why a playwright's gender and ethnicity factor into the marketing of a play? Also, when you have a man flying over an audience in a spiderman suit, how do you explain theatre's main aspect - suspension of disbelief through story and staging- to future theatre-makers?

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Tennessee Williams because if you spent as much time in the South around Southern women as I have, you'd understand just why this man was a genius. No one really captures the beauty and complexities of the South and the Southern woman like Williams. Just thinking about the last line of "The Glass Menagerie" gives me chills and makes me want to cry at the same time.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  New plays!

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A:  1) Take care of yourself! I can't stress this enough. Exercise, get sleep, eat well. If you don't have health insurance there are always low-income options. When you do finally get your big break, you don't want your reviews being read to you by your nurse at Bellevue.

2) Keep it in perspective. If you ever find yourself complaining to a cancer survivor about how you didn't get into the EWG it may be time to reassess some things. The same goes for if you ever find yourself scouring the internet for bad reviews of a colleague's play. Just not cool.

3)Always surround yourself with people who will be honest with you and learn how to take criticism for what it is.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come to The Fire This Time, January 16-25th 2012. Look out for our upcoming website www.firethistimefestival.com!

I Interview Playwrights Part 392: Sean Gill

Sean Gill

Hometown: Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

Current Town: Brooklyn.

Q:  Tell me about the Dreams of the Clockmaker.

A:  Dreams of the Clockmaker is an unusual piece and not your typical one-woman show, particularly in terms of its scope, mood, and tonal shifts. We follow our enigmatic lady on a stage as she regales us with troubling visions of a dystopian future, enacts a low-rent 80’s magic show, and bewilders us with Dust Bowl occultism while reliving her captivity in the stately mansion of a master manipulator known only as “The Clockmaker.”

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I’m looking to mount a full production of another mysterious, otherworldly play of mine called Laurie Deacon and the Night Caller, and I am in the process of writing a new one, which may or may not involve time travel and 13th Century monks. I have several films in the works including a neighborly revenge flick called Slumlord Shitheel Slaughter, an ode to watery beer and urban archaeology called Puttin’ on the Schlitz, and a freakish tale of puppetry and class warfare (set in a cesspool) called Fresh Piss.

Q:  How does filmmaking inform your playwriting and vice-versa?

A:  My plays often come across as cinematic, from the perspective of sound (I always do my own sound design) to visual elements. For example, in my play Aenigma, I envisioned (and director Rachel Klein effectuated) the playback of a blackmailed videocassette, complete with actors rewinding and fast-forwarding and simulating tape anomalies. In terms of my plays informing my films, I often make silent films which require a very particular form of theatricality, and I’ve recently moved toward puppetry and set-building, occasionally on a miniature scale.

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

A:  Since I was a boy, I’ve been a careful observer of the miniature comedies and tragedies that play out between the lines in our day-to-day lives, and there’s a certain amount of material that naturally flows from these observations. I remember when I was five or six, a nearby city park would have “goldfish days” whereupon a wading pool would be filled with goldfish, and excitable youngsters armed with tupperware and plastic bags would paddle in pursuit of that simple joy of cradling something alive in their hands. I didn’t participate, because my family wouldn’t acquiesce to a pet, goldfish or not, so I simply watched. After some time had passed and the kiddie frenzy had abated, I remained. In their wake, the children (guided only by momentary euphoria and not with any ill intent) had left behind hundreds of squished and trampled goldfish, grotesque and oozing. I felt a profound despair. I looked around, and no one seemed to notice. I didn’t shake the sensation for days.

On a lighter note but in a similar vein, some years later at Halloween time, our elementary school cafeteria offered Vampire Popsicles with a jet-black exterior and a runny, sticky “blood” interior. Designed to appeal to “kids who love gross things,” they fell flat amongst the student body because they were simply too gross. I envisioned a whole storyline that there was some young, enterprising lunch lady who’d put her ass on the line, arguing in that theoretical cafeteria board room (in the midst of boring Fla-Vor-Ice hardliners!) that the kids would really enjoy the change of pace. To make a long story short, eight months later, at the hottest, balmiest Field Day in memory, the unused Vampire Pops were rolled out at the end of the day as the only means of refreshment for an army of sweat-soaked, severely exhausted youth. The children, myself included, tore into the Vampire Pops with horrifying voracity, turning our mouths inky-black and inadvertently covering our bodies with goopy blood sauce. Even calling it 'goopy' or “gooey” insinuates more rigidity than it deserved. As soon as you hit the center, it was like you were holding a wine bottle upside down above your face and pulled out the cork. If you weren't prepared, your face, hands, and shirt would be showered in sticky, viscous, bloody fluid. It was ludicrous– they might as well have handed us squirt guns filled with maple syrup! We resembled the aftermath of a massacre. The Vampire Pops had transformed a grueling, mandatory school activity into a stunning vision of gory, apocalyptic chaos, and I delighted in it. I’m unsure if others saw the full extent of the situation’s absurdity, but I was happy to take a step back and chronicle the miniature comedy.

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


A:  Gone are the halcyon days of profound pageantry and breathtaking spectacle, of cramming seven hundred dancers and cigarette-smoking extras and dangerous, deranged animals onto one rickety stage. Or maybe they never happened. Perhaps it’s merely the fever-dream of an audience member who’s seen too many Busby Berkeley numbers and Cecil B. DeMille epics. Anyway, at Broadway prices, I basically want to be seeing the Sack of Rome or the last days of Pompeii.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  This is a tough one, and there’s so many to list, so let’s say Euripides, Eugene O’Neill, Antonin Artaud, Yukio Mishima, David Mamet, Ellen Stewart, and Julian Beck. And though it’s technically not “theater” in the purest sense, the teleplays of Rod Serling. And as long as we’re going that far– hell, the Grand Guignol splendors of Alice Cooper live!

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Many kinds, and across many spectrums. Brazen, ball-squashing gutter theater. Doily-enshrouded theater of the upper crust. Theater of exquisite craft featuring costumes, puppets, spectacle, or what-have-you that’s not prefabricated nonsense, but carefully built and rigorously fashioned by men and women with their own hands. Work that lives and breathes with the creators’ joy. Work that lives and breathes with the creators’ torment.

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

A:  Surround yourself with friends and collaborators who excite you, whom you trust completely, and whose company you enjoy; people who aren’t afraid to be brutally honest, yet are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt as you bounce your loopier ideas off of one another. Cultivate other interests, savor your free time, and don’t let your day job(s) get the best of you.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Well, of course, there’s my show Dreams of the Clockmaker http://vimeo.com/27958787, which runs from October 17-30th at the Wild Project, but I would also sincerely recommend Rachel Klein’s morbid fantasia The Tragedy of Maria Macabre http://vimeo.com/28088659 (for which I did the sound design), which runs semi-concurrently with Clockmaker at the Wild Project from October 20th-30th.

I Interview Playwrights Part 391: David Bar Katz

David Bar Katz

Hometown:  Philadelphia, PA

Current Town:  New York City

Q:  Tell me about your upcoming show with LAB.

A:  The play is called The Atmosphere of Memory. The title's taken from Tennessee Williams's stage directions for The Glass Menagerie. It's a bit of a send-up of narcissistic writers who think the traumas of their lives and their dysfunctional families are so interesting they deserve to be plays. Though it is based on some major drama that occurred in my life when certain members of my family were offended when they saw themselves portrayed in Freak. I thought I had disguised them well as Latinos, but I was mistaken. I'm really proud that it's a LAB play, not just that it's being done there but that the way it was developed was uniquely LAByrinth. We are predominantly a company of actors, though many members write and direct as well, and I wrote the play specifically for LAB company members like Ellen Burstyn, Melissa Ross and David Deblinger. The play wouldn't have come into being without them.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I have a pilot at Showtime about a sobriety coach that I'm working on, a few screenplays in development, one an adaptation of a Grant Morrison graphic novel called Joe the Barbarian that I'm especially excited about, being a comic book geek. Also a sci-fi tween novel called Chronicles of the Chosen and many plays in various states of undress.

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 only six I led an uprising at the Terezin concentration camp. At the time I didn't think it was a big deal, but my therapist seems to think I should look at how it effected me more closely. I was a solitary kid and read a lot of comic books and Philip Roth at an inappropriate age. My step-father taught film studies at Penn so in an age before TCM and video rentals I got to see a lot of old films projected in my living room. So the actors always looked life-sized which I guess is why I like theater the best.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  O'Neill, Avram Goldfadn, Tennessee Williams, Neil Simon, Sondheim. I can't write a word without one of them looking over my shoulder or touching my hand.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Passion. When you sit in the theater and you see a writer, director and actors pull their hearts out and leave them on the stage.

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

A:  Write in long-hand. Seeing something on a screen in word or final draft creates the illusion of being done.