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1100 Playwright Interviews

1100 Playwright Interviews A Sean Abley Rob Ackerman E.E. Adams Johnna Adams Liz Duffy Adams Tony Adams David Adjmi Keith Josef Adkins Nicc...

Mar 22, 2013

I Interview Playwrights Part 562: Jakob Holder





Jakob Holder

Hometown:  Tricky. I'm not even sure what a "hometown" is. The precise location at which one was born? Learned how to forage and thieve? Where one lives at the moment one answers the question? I was born in a hospital in lower Manhattan, and grew up in Woodside, Queens, but pretended I lived in Jackson Heights, which began literally across the street from my house, because even back in the 80s, when Jackson Heights was by no means cool, that somehow bought more cred than the truth. I moved to Homer, Alaska, when I was 16, essentially on my own. From that point on I've paid rent in Bellingham, WA; Houston, TX; and Jyväskylä, Finland; until I finally moved back, semi- kicking and screaming, to within a 10.3 mile radius of my childhood "hometown". I only know this because I just Google-checked the distance from Woodside to Inwood (uptownest Manhattan), and it's supposedly 10.3 miles. I've lived in every borough other than The Bronx (where my grandparents have lived since I was a playwright in Size-2 diapers, so I suppose I've common-law lived there about half of my life), and have averaged one new address for each of the 12 years since I've been back here. Absolutely none of this mini-biography smacks of "home", though, and only one of the cited locations is small enough to classify as a "town".

Current Town: New York Town. (See supra.)

Q: What are you working on?

A: A play. Maybe three. Maybe five. That's all I can say. If I end up answering the question below about my advice for playwrights just starting out, I'll likely explain why no one should ever, under any circumstances not involving unavoidable coercive force, divulge specifics about anything they're in the middle of writing.

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

A: Well, I once had this cat... (Pause.) Okay, I'll save that monologue for a really meaningful scene in some terrible play. How about asking me this instead:

What was the most memorable theatrical production you saw that made you wish you could somehow participate in live theatre?

Q: What was the most memorable theatrical production you saw that made you wish you could somehow participate in live theatre?

A:  There are two, and both were the fault of Lincoln Center. I'll tell them in reverse chronological order. Story the Latter: As far as I understand it, Kabuki Theatre comes to New York City about as often as certain cicadas emerge from the dirt in Staten Island, as often as some East Asian flowers bloom in order to draw crowds of insane anthophilies to witness their imminent wilting, as often as some New York Times critics calmly appreciate new American plays... Anyhow, it's a rare event and I was lucky enough to have a rare enough father who thought it would be a good idea to book a few tickets for his family, inclusive of his then probably-10-year-old son. I was amazed at the wonderful artifice, at how minimal but complete the storytelling was, at how precise the timing, how lustrous the lighting, how transforming the costumes and makeup... (okay, my mind didn't operate with descriptions like that, but I'm sure there was a nascent but full subconscious understanding of how fucking cool all this was). But so, some Japanese guy in a neat costume and a bunch of batshit crazy makeup jumped off the back of the set and two seconds later exploded down a slide, crashed through saloon doors disguised as part of a mountain, during which he had changed into a different costume and emerged as someone completely else. Amazing, life changing, sign me up. Story the Former: I was about 9-years-old, something like that, yeah, fifth grade, and my mother sat me down in the livingroom some seemingly typical schoolnight. My father was adjusting the antennae atop our mono-speakered Sony Trinitron 17" very-round-screen TV; my brother was arranging our handbuilt 1970s-monstrous 62" walnut-cased speakers into some sort of proto-SurroundSound formation; and my mother dialed the stereo receiver to WQXR (NYC's classical music station.) The event for the evening was a simulcast presentation of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, live from Lincoln Center, broadcast on Channel 13 (PBS: home to Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Mr. Rogers, and now Wolfgang Amadeus M.) And at some point the pre-show chatter faded and we began to hear instruments slowly and magnificently yowl into synch, and the curtain rose. About 25,000 hours of magic followed. I was mesmerized. I started falling asleep right around the time something really dramatic was happening (people were hurrying through fire), not because I was bored but because it was just so far past my bedtime my stupid biology couldn't keep up with all the art. But here I was, finally a big kid, earning more cred than my boasts of living in Jackson Heights could ever aspire to. The next day it was all I could do to keep from throwing myself through the school bus doors to loudly boast that I had stayed up past any hour heretofore witnessed by anyone my age or younger. The other kids were severely impressed. And then they asked me why I had been allowed to stay up so late. And I stupidly began sharing the details. And that's when I learned how painful it would be to continue with a life in the theatre....

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

A:  The unsustainable and unnecessary dependence upon the MFA degree as title and deed to the right to be a working playwright. Listen, I'm no trust-fund-baby. I know it's hard-to-impossible to make a living writing plays; I know if you don't get an MFA you can't teach; I know that this means maybe having to work in a coffee shop or as some ogre's factotum or as a staff writer for a second-rate TV show, or being really clever on the subway. But it's evil to get sucked into a game of perpetuating a system where we playwrights make more teachers of ourselves than there are playwrights willing to learn, or stages willing to produce our work. At some point this imbalance will really hit home, so why is everyone so eager to rush up against that point? If you're a serious playwright, write your serious plays and struggle like we all do, whether monetarily or artistically speaking. Serious playwrights have no good reason to fall hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt by immersing themselves in three years of postgraduate dogma, and no good reason to help getting the next group ready for the same. You want solid education and bankruptcy in the same salad? Just attend five Broadway productions at full cost - you'll learn twice as much about the realities of theatre for about the same price.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I wrote something in a journal I kept back around 2009 when I had a hard time managing the voices in my head while riding buses and subways and airplanes (I still ride those with some difficulty, but I no longer keep journals.) I wrote it in all caps, spread over two pages, so I'm going to reproduce it as closely as possible: NO MORE HEROES. Slight expansion, what I was telling myself was: don't fetishize other artists, especially if they're still alive. If you simply must have a hero or two, pick dead ones. Learn from all artists - both the living and the dead, both the sublime and the mediocre - but learn primarily from their work, not so much from their persons. Their biographies are likely even more fictional than their writing ever was, and no one is infallible. Whatever you do: don't create a Hall of Heroes in your mind. You'll spend too much time in that wing of the museum, fretting and fawning, when you should be outside in the sun, or at your desk writing something in your own voice, becoming someone else's hero - someone that someone like me can eventually warn someone else against.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Any straight play that makes me glad to be a part of this insane and frustrating sport called playwriting. I never see a shitty play and think: "Yeah, awesome, I can write a better one than that, look out world!" In those cases I leave the theatre feeling numb and wishing I was a prize-winning cabinet-builder. But when I see something alive in the way only live theatre can be - I never feel jealous ("Why couldn't I write something like that???") - only glad that good stuff sometimes gets to go on, too.

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

A:  I think I hid most of my advice within the answers to all the other questions. If I answer a question actually asking for advice someone will just end up accusing me of a more subtler pedantry. Except that I guess I promised to say something about not talking about writing when you should be writing about something. So here goes, semi-solicited advice. Playwright, think of yourself as a pressure cooker. Only let the steam out when the meal is cooked to its full and ready to serve. You need all the steam and pressure you can maintain to make sure the meal is done. You let the steam out too soon and all you'll have on your hands is a mess of sloppy ingredients even the dog won't touch. End of metaphor. Don't talk too much about what you're writing. In the best case scenario, someone will steal your idea and you'll realize you're a better audience member than dramatist. In the worst case scenario, the person you're talking to will just glaze over and you'll realize you're just as tired of hearing about it as she is and have nothing worthwhile left to put on paper. I say this friendlily: Shut up and write. And for godssake don't worry about writing every day. Firefighters don't fight fires everyday, but they prepare themselves for any blaze; ship captains spend time on land, too, but they always know what the weather's like; babies need to sleep in between growing teeth and learning how to discern warm from too hot. But think like a playwright every day, every moment of every day. Experience every waking moment with a playwright's mind, and store your dreams with the same intensity. Keep your filter working, in other words. And join the Dramatists Guild right away. And wear a hat when it's cold. And remember to drink a glass of water for every glass of something with a lower pH level. And most importantly: don't take advice from strangers on the internet.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I've learned the hard way not to plug planned productions as plans can become unplugged with embarrassing speed. But my play Housebreaking was published by Dramatists Play Service last month (my first in serious print). It's about 8 bucks a copy at the time of this writing and I think that's a pretty decent investment on the per-page unit-pricing scale. Even if you don't buy my play, buy someone else's. Read more plays - don't just see productions you can get comps for. No one knows how much longer the play publishing phenomenon will exist, but without people buying copies it won't be much longer.
 

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Mar 21, 2013

I Interview Playwrights Part 561: Keri Healey


Keri Healey

Hometown:  Born in Long Beach, CA but grew up in half a dozen different towns, from Freeport, NY to Golden Valley, MN to Arlington, TX.

Current Town: Seattle, WA.

Q:  Congrats on the Osborn Award! Tell me about Torso

A:  Thank you! Torso is about one woman’s (Daphne’s) long, drunken night of reckoning with the grief she feels about the wrongful death of her sister. It’s years after her sister died and Daphne gets a settlement check from a lawsuit against the doctor who was found guilty of negligence. Her unresolved anger and sadness is ignited by the news she receives about a childhood friend who was just arrested for fratricide. She sets off on a trip to—in her mind—get to the bottom of how someone could kill a sibling. She hooks up with a pretty hard luck cab driver who becomes her reluctant travel companion and foil. A secondary storyline focuses on the friend’s murder case she goes to investigate. The play started from an autobiographical place as I was trying to find somewhere to examine my own grief about losing my sister, but it definitely took on a different life and became angrier and more violent than I expected.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m working on two scripts that have re-entry after combat as a central theme, but come from different perspectives. One is a multi-generational military family saga that starts in Pearl Harbor and wends its way to Iraq. It feels like a really “big” play right now in my mind with lots of different story threads and time periods. With the other one, I’m aiming for a much smaller piece—about a middle-aged woman’s apartment hunt for her nephew who recently returned from Afghanistan with PTSD.

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

A:  According to my parents, on my fourth birthday I left the party going on in our living room, stormed into the kitchen where my mom and grandmother were prepping the cake, and I announced that I was leaving. When my grandmother asked me why, I told her this about the kids at my party: “They are staring, they are speaking rudeness, and they don’t even want my loving kindness.” Even though I don’t remember any exact details about being four years old, I have to admit this story sounds on the up and up.

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

A:  I just wish that, as a way to make a living, it could feel more like accounting or working retail—like it was more normal and in demand, as if success in theater didn’t need to feel like such a jackpot situation.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  There are many playwrights and other types of writers that I have admired and been influenced by at various points in my life. In trying to mention them all, I risk leaving too many important folks off the list. I think if I go beyond influences, though, and think about real “heroes” it would be the folks who started and ran small, scrappy theater companies where new work has been consistently born and tested and loved: Annex Theatre, Deep Ellum Theater Garage, Peculiar Works Project, Printer’s Devil Theater, and all the places like them. That is some hard, (almost) thankless work. Actors who hang lights and take out the recycling bins, directors who help build sets, and board ops who balance the books all fill my heart with joy.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that employs live music. Talky plays about things people are afraid to talk about. Tabletop and shadow puppetry. Anything where bodies move in unison. Unison always thrills me for some reason.

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

A:  Act in plays before you start to write them. Learn what they feel like from the inside. And later…always, always listen to actors. Make them your collaborators. You don’t always *have to* do what they suggest, but they will be the ones to feel it most when your play is not working and their instincts can be very helpful. You ignore them at your own peril.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  June 14-23— Seattle Repertory Theatre’s doing a showcase of new plays by members of their Writers Group (I’m in it along with Scot Augustson, Frank Basloe, Emily Conbere, Vincent Delaney, Al Frank, Elizabeth Heffron, and Stephanie Timm).
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Mar 20, 2013

I Interview Playwrights Part 560: Anna Greenfield



Anna Greenfield

Hometown: Carmel, California.

Home of Clint Eastwood, former mayor, home of my parents they moved there in the seventies and still rent their house, home of the ocean and a ridiculously beautiful beach. When I want people to think that I am like Steinbeck, I tell them I am from Salinas, California. When I want them to think that I am like Henry Miller, I tell them that I am from Big Sur, California. When I want them to think of me as a retired older gentlemen-and that identity is probably closest to my own in all honesty- I tell them where I am from which is Carmel.

Current Town:   Brooklyn, I like the word town it makes me feel like things are gonna be okay that home is wherever you are and of hearth fireplace conversations people might have during the holidays. But it also makes me feel like nothing ever will change which is a mind cage that I build for myself sometimes.

Q:  Tell me about All Girls.

A:  All Girls is a hyper real, sometimes surreal play about three teenage girls and one colossally scary mother. Trembling on the brink of womanhood, the girls act out with one another and their families in the most outrageous ways imaginable. It’s also funny.

Directed by Lee Sunday Evans. Performed by Zoe Costello, Anna Konkle, Judith Hawking, and me! Aaaaagh! These women who are making the show are incredible. We have an all women design team, production team and a female stage manager. It is All Girls working on this play All Girls and the energy of this piece is pretty amazing and scary and brave and real and raw and truthful and emotional and absurd and hilarious. I am exhilarated and exhausted by our rehearsals. We are doing some real digging deep work into this play and what we have to share is something that is very meaningful to all of us. I hope the connection with the audience works works works! I am working with a pretty big margin of fear with this play but also bravery. Mostly I am in awe and debt to the captain called Lee Sunday Evans, our director who is the most incisive, intelligent, brilliant director I have ever ever ever worked with.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I am also part of the 2012-2013 writer director lab at Soho Rep headed by the insanely great Jenny Schwartz and Ken Russ Schmoll. Mary Birnbaum is directing a reading of my play This Is Gonna Be Great April 29th!! Another play that makes me scared. I freaking love that lab though god it makes me sad and happy at the same time.

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

A:  I used to write stories in this legal pad when I was a child. I wrote stories about magic candlesticks and slavery. I think I was eight when I wrote story about a girl who was a slave in the South and worked on a plantation. Later I realized I had just copied an American Girl Doll story I had read about Abby who was the Doll who endured slavery. And then I passed it off as my own. So, plagiary. My dad is a writer and my mom makes up stories in her head so I think I just grew up thinking that when we feel things we write them down or act them out alone in our rooms. Instead of, you know, talking about it.

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

A:  I feel unqualified to change things about theater. I want theater to change things about me.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Lee Sunday Evans, Boo Killebrew, Jenny Schwartz, Heidi Schreck, and actually seriously anyone who gets a play up and running-it takes collaboration and love and I admire the instinct people have to dive into the unknown with a new play.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  anything goddamn moving. I freaking love to be moved. And entertained. But I want to feel like there is an emotional entertainment happening with a deep punch underneath.

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

A:  I am a playwright just starting out so my advice to myself is to just keep going.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  All Girls. March 28-April 13. Thurs, Fri, Sat at 8pm. The Kraine Theater, 85 East 4th street.
www.allgirlstheplay.com to buy tickets!

Thursday nights are pay what you can! Tickets are cheap anyways!

This Is Gonna Be Great, as part of the Soho Rep writer director lab.
April 29th, Access Theater Space
 
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Episode 4 of Compulsive Love

4th episode of my web series Compulsive Love is here!  Watch it and previous episodes on Koldcast or Blip or Daily Motion or Boomtrain or Youtube or JTS.

Embedded #4:



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Mar 18, 2013

I Interview Playwrights Part 559: Alvin Eng






photo by John Quincy Lee

Alvin Eng

Hometown: Flushing, Queens, NYC

Current Town: Manhattan

Q:  Tell me about Three Trees.

A:  It’s an historical drama about the unique relationship between 20th century Parisian artist, Alberto Giacometti, and his muse/model, Japanese Existential Philosopher Isaku Yanaihara. (Isaku also translated Camus “The Stranger” into Japanese.) During the 1950s, Giacometti created many portraits of Isaku in drawing, painting, and sculpture. For five years, Giacometti kept flying Isaku from Tokyo to Paris to continue their portrait sessions. Still, the artist felt that he could never fully capture the philosopher’s essence. A deep and complicated love, through art, grew. This love became an obsession, a force that upended everything and everyone in its path. This force forever changed Alberto’s intimate, insular home and studio life with his wife Annette and brother Diego. Isaku was also never the same. “Three Trees” is the first work of my Portrait Plays cycle of historical dramas about artists and portraiture. As such, the play also dramatizes the premise of a portrait’s spiritual ownership. When we become enraptured by a portrait, are we under the spell of the artist or model? Can spiritual ownership of a portrait ever be assessed?

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  “33 & 1/3 Cornelia Street,” the second Portrait Play! This historical drama examines the circumstances surrounding painter Alice Neel’s iconic and controversial portrait of poet/oral historian manqué, Joe Gould in 1930s Greenwich Village. The portrait had a profound effect on Gould in life and afterwards. Neel’s portrait indirectly lead to “Joe Gould’s Secret.” This novella framed Gould posthumously as a fraud and was also the swan song of legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes? What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  I took my first playwriting class with Lavonne Mueller at ”The Writer’s Voice” program at the 63rd Street Y in 1988. The previous year I had just taken my first trip to my ancestral homeland of China. At that time I was a lifelong Flushing resident and worked as a “professional rock & roll fan” (i.e.) a music biz publicist and journalist. After China, it was hard to go back to my old life. I wanted more than a job or career, I wanted a creative life. While I had written 3-chord songs and “performance art” interludes for various teenage/college rock bands, I had never attempted any creative writing as an “adult.” As a pre-MTV rock and roll fan, rock & roll song lyrics (and LP liner notes) were what I lived for as a child. I particularly loved the extended storytelling of song cycles or “concept albums” like The Who’s “Quadrophenia,” Steely Dan’s “The Royal Scam,” Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and Lou Reed’s “Berlin.” Concerts of this era were not live “infomericals” that recreated an artist’s latest music video. In this era the stage was where we experienced the transformative power of rock & roll—often in unpredictable performances that deepened our connection to the lyrics and music that were already tattooed on our souls. By offering the duality of the solitude of composing and the collaborative nature of production, playwriting resembled the rock & roll songwriter’s process of writing and recording the album, then touring.

During this heady, transformative period, three plays spoke strongly to me: John Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves” (’86 Lincoln Center revival); Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio” (‘87 Public Theatre) and David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” on Broadway, 1988.

“House of Blue Leaves” strongly articulated that quintessential Queens feeling of being so close yet so far away from the center of the Universe that is Manhattan––as well as the universal yearning to make meaningful changes in one’s life. “Talk Radio” felt like a graduation that I was looking to achieve. Before this production, Bogosian was part of a downtown performance art scene that channeled punk rock energy into theatre. With “Talk Radio,” he became a full-fledged playwright and still got to perform in his own work. Although he was still below 14th St., he had created a theatrical bridge between “downtown” and “uptown” sensibilities. “M. Butterfly” seemed to pull all these strands together—especially for someone who was just beginning to explore and embrace his Chinese-American and global identity. It was profound to see many of the east-west themes I was beginning to contemplate after my China trip being explored on such a grand theatrical scale . . . Then David and BD Wong won Tonys for “M. Butterfly”!!!

To become a playwright, I don’t think you need to reinvent yourself immediately. Find sources and inspiration that nourish you and help you build the foundation for that bridge between who you are and who you want to be.

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

A:  A few years after The Writer’s Voice, I was accepted into NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. One of our first assignments was to write about a powerful turning point in your life. This assignment triggered a childhood memory that was so deeply repressed that I had never even discussed it with my family or closest friends. This assignment eventually lead to a monologue that I performed for years called “F.O.B.” This was a pun on the expression, “fresh off the boat,” as well as the title of David Henry Hwang’s breakthrough play. In my monologue, ”F.O.B.” stood for “Fat Oriental Boy.” In the early ‘90s it was very un-P.C. to use the term, “oriental.” (It probably still is.)

But back in the 4th grade I was a very chubby kid and the only Chinese/Oriental kid in my class. I was a prime target for what would now be called “bullying.” My nemesis collective were a bunch of girls—lead by a cute blonde girl on whom I had a huge crush. She knew this and, with her girlfriends, took turns teasing me mercilessly every day. One day, things got out of hand. This girl and her friends somehow started calling me “fat chink” and wouldn’t stop. Things got very blurry. I only wanted to get them to stop, but somehow wound up pushing the girl’s head into the corner of a chair. She started bleeding profusely from her forehead. No one was more shocked than me. Next thing I knew I was in the principal’s office––crying hysterically at the conflicting emotions running rampant through me. Finally, the girl’s mother sat down across from me and simply asked, “What happened?” Through my still uncontrollable sobbing and choking, I told the mother what her daughter and her friends kept calling me. To my astonishment, she apologized to me for the behavior of her daughter and her friends. That was the first time a grown-up outside of my family told me that I was right. It took almost twenty years to process this moment. I aspire to capture these profound moments in my playwriting.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  “Three Trees” will have its World Premiere production with the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, March 23 – April 14, 2013 at West End Theatre, 263 W 86th Street, NYC. http://www.panasianrep.org/three_trees.shtml  

“33 & 1/3 Cornelia Street” was chosen as one of three plays to be presented at the Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore on April 5. (Edward Albee will be the keynote speaker.)

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Mar 17, 2013

I Interview Playwrights Part 558: Stuart Flack



Stuart Flack

Hometown: Evanston

Current Town: Chicago (Lincoln Park)

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  1) a evening length multi-displinary performance piece in collaboration with The Seldoms a Chicago based dance company run by the amazing Carrie Hanson about LBJ and the exercise of political power, which will premiere at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014.

2) Floaters -- full length play about hallucinations, reading at Chicago Dramatist in April 2013

3) A couple of other full length plays, one with puppets, one based on the weirdest story in the old testament.

4) Maybe a musical featuring people recently exonerated and released from Jail.

Q:  How would you characterize the Chicago theater scene?

A:  Wonderful in aggregate. Best in the U.S. Although many/most companies and artist live hand to mouth, which is a shame.

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

A:  Saw from up close world champ Milwaukee Bucks (1970) with Kareem and Oscar Robertson, play against the Bulls a bunch of times with my best friend (at the time) Steve and his parents at the old Chicago stadium. Back in the day when good seats didn't cost a fortune and were for people who loved the game, not silly celebs. The best two man combo ever on a basketball court. Who better? Maybe the best combination of two people doing anything together ever. Who knows? Bulls of that era also not so bad either.

Kareem was and still is a miracle.

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

A:  More people should come to things that aren't bway musicals and sketch comedy (both of which are fine by way, but come on. enough.)

Q:   Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Beckett and Brecht.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Plays that invite you to feel, think or experience something new; A Red Orchids recent production of "The Aliens".

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

A:  Fasten your seat belts and put your seat-backs and tray tables in the upright position

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Go see actual plays. Many worse ways to spend two hours and twenty bucks.

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Mar 14, 2013

We were SOLD OUT. Now we're EXTENDED.

Clown Bar Extended!



We completely sold out (like SOLD OUT sold out) our current run but luckily we figured out a way to extend.  Clown Bar will now run until April 12.  Three more weeks!  For a total of 7!

New dates--

Friday, March 29, 9PM
Saturday, March 30, 9PM
Thursday, April 4, 8PM
Friday, April 5, 8PM
Thursday, April 11, 8PM
Friday, April 12, 8PM
     
But please buy tickets now in the not-unlikely case we sell out all those performances too. http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/336282




The reviews have been great and the audience response awesome:

Critic’s Pick; “Adam Szymkowicz’s script is unabashedly silly but also shrewd, paying homage to film noir and pulp novels.” --New York Times

"Mr. Szymkowicz has created a new world out old parts, breeding a brand new species of creative animal. He is, in fact, making his own rules – and the pleasure of obeying them is all ours." –New York Theatre Review




“The script is tight and funny—hard-boiled schtick.” --The Fifth Wall

“Adam Szymkowicz’s script is a case study in meticulously crafted playfulness… some of the most quotable lines ever heard in a play… Clown Bar is a fantastic way to spend your evening. If you love clowns, go see this show. If you hate clowns, go see this show.” --nytheatre.com 





“Clown Bar does detective story spoofs one better by employing every single familiar crime-movie trope — brooding hero, crazy crime boss, conflicted gun moll, hooker with a heart of gold — and making them all...well, clowns. It’s weird how well this works: playwright Adam Szymkowicz has combined two inherently ridiculous forms of entertainment and created a perfect storm of ridiculousness.” --Theatre Is Easy


“There’s not a streak out of place in Clown Bar‘s greasepaint; I can’t think of a better nightcap than the shot of extra funny currently being served by Pipeline Theatre Company.” --That Sounds Cool

I Interview Playwrights Part 557: Lindsay Joy



Lindsay Joy

Hometown: Hudson, New Hampshire

Current Town: Brooklyn!

Q: Tell me about The Rise and Fall of a Teenage Cyberqueen.

A: Rise/Fall is the story of a flawed American family uprooted and unhinged by the rapid pace of online chat rooms and video feeds. The play centers around Lyla, a 14 year old girl, and what happens to her family as videos of her go viral. I wanted to use the duality of our "online selves" versus our true selves to unravel the intertwining lives of a family. I don't want to give away too much, but I will say that I'm crazy proud of the play. Director Padraic Lillis and the entire cast have done an amazing job.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I'm working on a few new projects. I'm working on a multi-writer, collaborative project based on the hero's journey with AMios Theater Company. I'm also developing two new full length plays with my company, the LabRats.

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 think that growing up in New England gave me a unique voice. New Englanders show their love by teasing...hard. It allows me to find laughter in awful situations.

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

A: The one thing that I would change about theater? Getting more people to come out and see it.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Martin Mcdonagh, Paula Vogel, Tracy Letts, Lee Blessing, John Patrick Shanley, Sam Shepard, Marsha Norman...I could go on and on!

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I love theater that makes me laugh hard really right before the bottom drops out in a scene (the big reveal in the second scene of Pillowman comes to mind). That excites the shit out of me. There's so much great new work out there right now- new voices. We are on the edge of a paradigm shift to new work and I'm all in.

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

A: Advice? Secrets. Secrets are your best friend. Give each of your characters (even the smaller characters) a secret and it'll open a new play right up for you.

Q: Plugs, please

A: Please come and see the show! http://www.facebook.com/l/zAQHBHaJqAQGwYPZRzHQbsjDkPUeuwweNQxo-VafkDZkgcw/riseandfall.brownpapertickets.com/
5 shows left. $10 tickets with pw: teenqueen

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Mar 13, 2013

Episode 3 of Compulsive Love

3rd episode of my web series Compulsive Love is here!  Watch it and previous episodes on Koldcast or Blip or Daily Motion or Boomtrain or Youtube or JTS.

Embedded #3:

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I Interview Playwrights Part 556: Stan Richardson



"I'm on the left; Matt Steiner is on the right."

Stan Richardson

Hometown: St. Louis, MO

Current Town: NYC

Q:  Tell me about the new Representatives show
 
A:  O Happy Happy Aztecs! is a short dark comedy about an aspiring actress and her gay best friend who move to NYC from Small Town USA. They have all the big dreams of 20-year-olds, but they are in their early-30's. And they carry with them their overwhelming need for safety and convenience which effectively castrates the dangerous and exotic city they have always wanted to call home.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I'm writing the next play for The Representatives which will be a loose adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers & Sons called Bazarov. It's about, among other things, the entrance of a nihilist into a haven of well-meaning, but sedentary liberals; he blithely suggests that all of their useless ideals and institutions should be obliterated and this causes some problems. Unlike most of The Representatives' projects, Bazarov is simply too large to be done in an apartment and will be presented in a larger venue this coming August.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A:  Aside from having it meaningfully subsidized by the U.S. government? I would like for playwrights to devote themselves to work that makes them extremely uncomfortable. That discomfort is inherently entertaining and relevant. If what you are currently working on does not absolutely scare the shit out of you, keep me in the loop about future projects.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A:  Edward Albee; Pina Bausch; Caryl Churchill; Cherry Jones; Craig Lucas; Elizabeth Marvel; Jan Maxwell; Joe Orton; Wallace Shawn; Ivo van Hove; Lanford Wilson; and The Wooster Group.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I'm very drawn to theater that feels like it was created Just Now. The key to this, it seems to me, is not so much topicality but depth of feeling and conviction. Playwrights, unlike politicians, need not under-express their views in order to "stay in office." But another obstacle is the stultifying years-long wait to be produced. The Representatives has given me the opportunity to see my work onstage nearly as fast as I can write it. Matt Steiner, my co-artistic director and an actor for whom I've been ceaselessly inspired to write for the past seven years, and I try to streamline the production process. We figure out who we want to work with and where we'll be performing, then I start writing and a few months later we do the play. Most of these projects have been elegantly staged by Ben Vershbow, a pragmatic poet of a director. And we are continually having the pleasure of working with incredibly talented actors: mesmerizing ambassadors to whatever world we collectively dream up.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A:  I would give this advice to any playwright, including myself, at any stage of his/her career. It's a Godard quote: "At the moment that we can do cinema, we can no longer do the cinema that gave us the desire to do it." Let's acknowledge and honor our theatrical ancestry and then pop out some troublemakers of our own.

Q:  Plugs, please:
A:  Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bradley Manning has a rather important new show running off-off-Broadway right now down at Fort Meade. It's called The Obama Administration Is Going To Destroy the Role of Whistleblower If We Don't Do Something About It. Seats are still available! Please show your support: https://www.bradleymanning.org/
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Mar 12, 2013

Finding Collaborators


It’s been a while since I posted an actual blog post that I wrote myself that isn’t to promote one of my projects. Here goes.

I’ve been reading a bunch of plays recently for contests and such as well as in my new role as a Lit Mgr for an off off theater in town. (Yes, I’m being intentionally vague)

As a reader of over 200 plays in the last six months, I get really excited each time I read something really good. The other day I read a funny heartfelt play by an emerging writer that I was blown away by. (Again, intentionally vague.  Please don't try to guess.)  I immediately started to wonder who I could show the play to. Was there a theater in New York who could do the play? After a quick google search, I realized the play had already been done and had gotten mixed reviews in New York. The times had not been kind. And I knew a couple of the cast members and knew them to be very talented and I knew the play and knew of the director. And I wondered…

What Went Wrong?

1. Was I mistaken in my assessment of the play? That’s certainly possible, but I don’t think so.

2. Did the play just have bad reviewer luck? Did the wrong people see it and not get it? That is a definite possibility and frequently happens.

3. Were the wrong people involved in the production? Was it miscast? Was it the wrong director? Were there communication problems? Has the very talented writer not yet learned how to explain the play to her collaborators?

It could be any of these but let's suppose it’s # 3. Let me ask you, how did you learn how to find the right people to work with? Does it continue to be a struggle? Do you know when to say no? How does a talented writer learn how to cast and choose a director and work with a team to realize the best possible production of a play.  How do we make necessary compromises while keeping intact the vision and structural integrity of the piece?  How do we find the people who will make the play better than it should be?

I’m still wondering if there are theaters out of town I could recommend the writer send the play to, theaters who are young and exciting. The trouble is, how does one recover from bad reviews? The play which should be published, is not. And what to I say to this writer? And how does one talk theaters into it who are leery of multiple bad reviews?

I don’t have the answer to this. What do you think? Certainly, write the next play. Continue. Can anything be done?

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Mar 8, 2013

I Interview Playwrights Part 555: Basil Kreimendahl




Basil Kreimendahl

Hometown: Louisville, KY

Current Town: Iowa City, IA

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A new play, that takes place in Louisville, KY; it's about an unconventional drag house on the wrong side of the Ohio River flood wall, and their desire and need for dignity and belonging. They take performing realness to another level by preparing to give the performance of a lifetime at the Kentucky Derby. It's a play that explores "passing" not in terms of gender but in class.

I'm also working on an adaptation of La Ronde, with one of my favorite directors at the University of Iowa, Nathan Halvorson.

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

A:  Because I quit school young, at 14, I've been working full-time for a long time. Back then, one of my jobs was doing yard work for a lawn company. One day, I had a toothache, the summer heat was suffocating and the weed whacker kept breaking. I'd have to stop and fix it over and over again. In a moment of frustration, I stopped for a minute and sat down on the grass. It was the first time I actually took in the house and the neighborhood. There was a fountain in the yard, a statue and a Mercedes parked in the driveway, and I thought just one of these things could fix a whole lot of toothaches.

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

A:  At this moment, what I wish for theatre is that we stretch our ideas about what  we think is commercially viable. I hope that the kind of theatre our audiences want to see encompasses a broader range of forms, stories and experiments than we give them credit for.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My heroes are not just my heroes because their work inspires me, but because I like how I see them walk in the world. So just to name a few, Naomi Wallace, Lucy Thurber, Christina Anderson, Polly Carl, Jen Silverman, Kia Corthron, Francine Volpe, Bonnie Metzgar... apparently, a lot of amazing women.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  This is one of those things that's bound to change with time, I'm still discovering things that excite me. I'm interested in work that I want to be in conversation with, because it challenges me and moves me. Plays that queer everything. Work that has a bold sincerity, even when it's being ironic. Theatre that goes to those places we don't often go, where it's a little frightening to go, but once we've been we're not the same anymore.

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

A:  Write the next play. Read something other than plays. Finally, to quote Mama Cass, "You gotta make your own kind of music, sing your own special song."

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My classmates, the group of talented playwrights I'm about to graduate with: Kat Sherman, Bonnie Metzgar, Deborah Yarchun, and I have to include a graduating director from Austin, Will Davis. A new project Gabrielle Reisman and I organized, The Iowa/Austin Exchange. Last but not least, a big congrats to my dear friend and fellow Iowan, Andrew Saito for his playwright residency at Cutting Ball.


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Mar 6, 2013

Episode 2 of Compulsive Love!

Second episode of my web series Compulsive Love is here!  Watch it on Koldcast or Blip or Daily Motion or Boomtrain or Youtube or JTS.

Embedded #2

And here is episode 1 in case you missed it


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Mar 1, 2013

I Interview Playwrights Part 554: Cory Finley



Cory Finley

Hometown: St. Louis, MO

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m working with a director friend, Ashley Rodbro, on a romantic comedy about loneliness, addiction, and illegal pharmaceutical testing. A character transforms over the course of the play from a 25-year-old man to a 61-year-old woman. I’m in the Shaping The Mess stage of writing, which is the best one.

I’m also continuing work on SUNK, a domestic horror play, and UGLY PEOPLE, about a group of friends gathering after a death and jockeying for control of the deceased’s tech startup. I’m doing research for a play about cybersecurity and Midwestern power companies.

I’m also putting in some serious time in the gym – it’s cold out now, but beach season is right around the corner.

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 elementary school used to show videos of this dude McGruff the Crime Dog, a cartoon bloodhound who wore a trenchcoat and talked about crime awareness ("Take a bite out of crime," if that rings bells for anyone)

For some reason, I created a pretend game with my little brother wherein we were secret agents working for said Crime Dog, fighting the invisible criminals living in our front yard, under our beds, behind our television, etc.

Over time, the pretend game became increasingly paranoid and hysterical, until we were stalking on our own family members, who, we’d been “told” by this anthropomorphic dog, were actually sinister lookalikes. This so rattled my brother – maybe 6 or 7 at the time – that he asked me to step out of character for a moment and reassure him that we were playing a game. I refused.

As a writer, I’m always trying to create illusions as detailed, persuasive, and unnerving as the ones that fueled those games.

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

A:  I have an impossible dream of a world where no one reads reviews and marketing blurbs, where audiences walk into plays with no expectations. I actually love reviews and learn a lot from them, but when read BEFORE playgoing, they compromise surprises and revelations. They frame the audience’s experience of the play, and therefore cripple the whole enterprise of good storytelling. I always most enjoy plays and movies (and books, and magazine articles -- and kind of even dates) when I go in without any idea what I’m about to see. I love just being along for the ride.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:   Theater that I can’t imagine coming up with myself. Plays that locate a totally surprising source of conflict and action.

Dialogue that’s full of silent menace and accidental grace. Devised work in which the elements of spectacle – light, sound, projection – are deployed not to overwhelm and astound but to punctuate, emphasize, dilate, disorient.

Stories that ask me not just to admire likeable people but also to extend my empathy to profoundly unlikeable people.

Theater that, like artfully mussed hair, works really really hard to appear effortless.

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

A:  Be humble, make bad jokes, put yourself in odd situations, run toward rather than away from worldviews you find strange and wrong, stay until the tail-ends of parties.

Basically just this.

And apply to Youngblood – you can't find better people in this city!

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Grace, a short musical I wrote with Mark Sonnenblick and Stephen Feigenbaum about a forlorn Kansas native finding his voice in a church talent show, is running as part of Prospect Theater Company’s PORTRAITS, through this weekend.

And this Sunday is EST/Youngblood’s EINSTEIN ON THE BRUNCH, where you’re likely to find, if not the best audiences in NY theater, then certainly the best matinee audiences in NY theater.

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