I Interview Playwrights Part 910: Laura Neill

Laura Neill

Hometown: Wrentham, MA

Current Town: Brighton, MA

Q:  Tell me about Don't Give Up the Ship.

A: Don't Give Up the Ship goes up at the Boston Center for the Arts with Fresh Ink Theatre from February 10-25, directed by Joshua Glenn-Kayden. It's a funky feminist drama that centers on Diana, a middle-aged mother, as she takes on the identity of an 1812 war hero to explore her identity and sexuality. A few years back I did a lot of research on Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry for the Dartmouth Digital Library Program, and I started to wonder what would happen if I mapped that incredibly structured, masculine world of the 1800s Navy onto 2017. "Diana" is actually the name of one of the ships that Perry captured in the war... I thought, what if Diana captured Perry? And the result is this crazy romp that mounts the Battle of Lake Erie in a bedroom, transforms awkward meetings into sweeping waltzes, and involves swashbuckling with a Swiffer sword. I'm incredibly lucky to be working with Fresh Ink on this piece--Josh and I are having a lot of fun with it, and I'm absolutely in love with my cast and team. Shout-out to Wilbury Theatre Group in Providence and the Norwood and Watertown libraries for hosting readings of the piece as it grew.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  LOTS. My play Cap, or, El Limite peels off the rhetoric hiding the U.S. education system and tells the stories of four students and teachers over one unusual school day. It's a nine-character behemoth with an exuberant chorus that tackles the phenomenon of charter school expansion. (You can read my current draft on NPX here.)

My youngest play is The End Will Hurt, which tracks three generations of women through their digital lives on Facebook, on the Food Network, and in video games, respectively, as they deal with the matriarch's upcoming death. The youngest daughter blurs the lines between her video games and her real life, with dangerous consequences.

I've also been commissioned by OperaHub to write the book of TRUNK SHOW!: A Fashionable Fantasia of Women on the World Stage, a pastiche play with opera that weaves together the lives of past opera divas with questions that are crucial to our society in 2017. Stay tuned--TRUNK SHOW! premieres in Fall 2017.

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

A:  I basically grew up in the town library as a kid. This has had the effect of shifting my ideas of geography to center entirely around libraries. Any town or city I visit, I'll find the library--and anyplace I live, if someone asks me for directions, I'll probably use the library as a reference point. Free books call my soul.

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

A:  Representation and the need for gender parity. Seriously, if playwrights and actors of color had more space and audience to tell stories--and if at least 50% of all stories on our stages were coming from female playwrights--this country would be in a better place.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Caryl Churchill, David Henry Hwang, Lila Rose Kaplan, Charise Castro Smith

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I love theater that is ambitious--plays that make the audience embrace suspension of disbelief. I'm intrigued by plays that contain multiple worlds, whether that's magical realism or parallel timelines. I'm also a huge fan of woman-driven stories, plays that include multiracial families, and plays that utterly defy stereotype or genre.

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

A:  Ask for what you want. Nicely, of course. There are so many fantastic theater makers out there who are looking for their next collaborators and/or are happy to give you a leg up. Outline your goals for yourself and then take specific actions to achieve them, whether that's getting coffee with a friendly artistic director or hosting a reading of your own new script.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Playwrights who live in New England: submit to Fresh Ink Theatre! They're brilliant (but they only take subs once a year in January, so put it on your calendar for 2018). Come see Don't Give Up the Ship this February and I'll introduce you to the excellent artistic team.
Also, for folks who are trying to figure out the giant ongoing performance that is our political state right now, I'm grateful to the new site The 65 for a different sort of script.

Websites:
NPX: https://newplayexchange.org/users/1933/laura-neill

Home site: http://laurajneill.wixsite.com/home

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I Interview Playwrights Part 909: Augie Praley

Augie Praley

Hometown: Annapolis, Maryland

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about Looking Back.

A:  Looking Back, It May Not Have Been Ridgefield High’s Best Production of Our Town is a play that chronicles the memories of a high school gymnatorium—very much based on my own high school’s gymnatorium—on the eve of its destruction. I am personally a character in the show that guides the audience through the many different events that seemed important to the building. The play becomes this exploration of memory, significance and worth and what it means to be human.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I’ve got a couple of different television projects that I’m working on--an animated pilot and two pilots based on previous web series I’ve created.

We’re hoping that Looking Back… has life after this production as well. We’re still developing and honing the stories within it and have been getting closer and closer to where I want the show to get to. We took huge steps forward with this production—including defining the generations of people that are all interconnected at this school—and I’m eager to see what steps we might take next for the development of the play.

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 dad and my brother were both sailors growing up—we lived in Annapolis—they were competitive racers, but I didn’t have the same athletic or competitive impulse. I was also just pretty bad at sailing.

Eager to find a way to connect, my dad would take me to the movies every week, just me and him, and we’d see basically whatever we pleased. He took me to see Rushmore when I was 11 and probably too young to see that movie, but we went anyways, and I’d never seen him laugh like that. There was something that had him rocking the whole aisle of seats with this deep bellowing laugh that turned into a whinny as he lost breath… it was surreal.

I remember thinking: I want to make my dad laugh that hard. That’s why I started really goofing off on old VHS cameras and writing little sketches and plays—to make my dad laugh.

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

A:  I think the cost of theater makes it seem like an elitist craft and the cost of producing makes it difficult for shows to gestate and become what they need to be.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Thornton Wilder—that one’s probably obvious, Chuck Mee, Sarah Ruhl, Mickle Maher, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, The Neo-Futurists and countless other Chicago theatres that do it for the love of play.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like theater that brings everyone into the same place, that reaches out and engages with the audience and doesn’t ignore them. That’s the most exciting thing to me, to sit in the audience of a play and feel like I am integral to its creation—like I need to be present for the story to exist at all. I like theatre that makes the ephemeral moment we’re seeing feel all that much more fleeting and important.

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

A:  Oh, boy, that’s tough because I kind of feel like I’m also just starting out and it’s tough to give advice to someone you’re in the trenches with, but I think it’s just to keep writing. It’s important not to get too precious with everything you’re writing and know that you will have more ideas.

Keep writing, you have stories in you, it’s why you’re a writer.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Looking Back… still has shows at the PIT Sundays at 8:30 through February 12th, with a Monday show on February 6th.

You could check out my web series Augie, Alone at www.augiealone.com and you can also check out my Super Deluxe web series FUTURE YOU here http://bit.ly/2jPWslP.

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I Interview Playwrights Part 908: Dennis Staroselsky

Dennis Staroselsky

Hometown: Brookline, MA

Current Town: Norwood, MA

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Like everyone, just throwing a lot of stuff against the wall and hoping something sticks. Just finished 5 Minutes Alone, a two hander set in an alternative reality, where the loved ones of murder victims get to sentence the convicted—it's hilarious! Waiting to hear if I get a grant to fund a production of my play The Cuts, in Boston, at the same time I'm turning it into a pilot, also just finished potty training! My daughter ...I still have some work to get to her level.

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

A:  Tough question! The only one that sticks out, and it's only in retrospect that it seems applicable, is when I was a sophomore in high school. I was so obsessed with being liked by everyone, that I betrayed a lot of real friends by having a big mouth and easily gossiping about things that were told to me in confidence, and I just couldn't stop. Once I made new friends I'd do the same. By the end of the year a lot of people hated me—for good reason. I was in a production of Doctor Faustus, and there were posters all over the school with a drawing of me in it, one day I showed and noticed that I had been torn out of one, and then another, and another. I had been ripped out of every poster in school. It was a feeling of humiliation and loneliness that I had never experienced before. I think the influence of that day was the realization that all the energy I put into getting people to like me, just repulsed them... and hurt me. As an artist, I battle with creating work that is honest, and still hoping that everyone likes it, but I never create something with the impetus of impressing...maybe only my real friends.

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

A:  The audience. A lot of people talk about cultivating great artists, but what about audiences? If people in this country went to the theater a third of the amount they went to the movies...that would be something. We need to cultivate audiences.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Bill Camp, Mark Rylance, Rory Kinnear, David Rabe and Adam Bock

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind that isn't "Paint by numbers." Something that surprises me. Why Rabe and Bock resonate with me is they're ability to beautifully examine the mundane and uneventful, because those are the that moments make up the vast majority of our lives.Visiting Edna and A Life are amazing examples of that.

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

A:  Same advice I give myself. Your work isn't precious, you have permission to suck!

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Laura Neil's Don't Give up the Ship at Fresh Ink. Boston. She's really good. Feb 10 -25 BCA Plaza Black Box

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I Interview Playwrights Part 907: Mark Jackson

Mark Jackson

Hometown: Placerville, California.

Current Town: San Francisco.

Q:  Tell me about Messenger 1.

A:  It’s a play close to my heart. Art Street Theatre had a great success with it when we produced it in 2000, which was such a weighty historical year given the turn of the millennium and the play spoke to anxieties people were having then about the internet and media. The Catamounts, in Denver, had a good time with it in 2012 and my old EXIT Theatre buddy, Meridith Crosley Grundei, played M#3, which delights me. A professor at William & Mary University used it in her curriculum for a Feminist Theater history class, and I really enjoyed reading the papers students wrote on it. I’m very taken by the inner struggles of the messenger characters, their conflicted feelings about class and what defines their personal sense of integrity. And I think Electra is a very interesting character. She has the potential to open her heart but is afraid and protects herself with violence. I think the play gives actors a lot to do, something passionate to say and an opportunity to work in a really physical way that marries humor and emotion. When actors enjoy material it's infectious for an audience. I really look forward to what Hunger & Thirst do with it, and am tickled that Emily Kitchens, whom I worked with at A.C.T., is now taking up the M#3 role. She’s perfect for it, really tough and passionate and open and honest.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m in pre-production for THE BLACK RIDER, the musical by Waits and Burroughs, at Shotgun Players. Also I’m writing a book about the 2016 Shotgun Players HAMLET production, in which the actors learned all the roles and found out who they were to play on a given night in a drawing held before the audience five minutes before curtain.

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 don’t have such a story… I think I was making theatre in the womb and birth was my first opening night. Or, morning rather. I was born at 9:04 in the morning.

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

A:  About the American theater I presume? That it be better understood and also better supported financially in this country. That might require magic powers at this point... In the meantime I try to change theater slowly, one show at a time, by changing how I work myself in order to up the odds of my helping the group involved to make something together that is fresh and alive and provocative in some useful way. “Useful” to me means an audience goes away thinking anew about what they experienced and what they felt. If I could change one thing about the American theater it would be that it was more consistently useful.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Ariane Mnouchkine. Vsevelod Meyerhold. Beth Wilmurt.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Many kinds! I’m most excited by theater and performances that embrace the metaphorical nature of theater and performance, and that exploit all its aspects and artists to impact audiences. I’m excited by theater that offers something to see, something to hear, something to feel, a LOT to think about, and that changes my body temperature. I’m excited by theater that compels me to keep thinking about it for weeks, months or years. Whether I “like” it or “don’t like it” matters less to me than what I take from it that stays with me and continues to feed my imagination and thinking.

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

A:  Write a LOT. See a LOT. Do other jobs in the theater too. Do things that have nothing to do with theater. Seek out real news and information and read it.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I’m excited by the entire 2017 season at The Shotgun Players. Other than that I’d like to plug the idea that we all be extremely conscious as citizens of this country in the coming four years and thereafter, and that we endeavor to eradicate the narcissism we’ve embraced and replace it wholesale with as much empathy as possible.

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I Interview Playwrights Part 906: Jonathan Dorf

Jonathan Dorf

Hometown:  Broomall, Pennsylvania (I wasn't born there, but I moved there before third grade and did most of my important growing up there).

Current Town:  Los Angeles, CA

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Unfortunately, I'm working on too many things, so it feels a bit like inching an entire row of pawns forward one at a time. Most of my stage work is for teens, which is what I'm best known for. On that note, I'm nearly finished a draft of Me, My Selfie and I, a one-act play that contemplates the selfie. But I'm also working on a mash-up parody of Lord of the Flies and Lord of the Rings for a potential YouthPLAYS anthology and was asked by another publisher (hint: it's one that publishes some of my most produced works) to contribute a ten-minute play to a new anthology they're putting together. In the meantime, I'm working on a long overdue update to Young Playwrights 101, my how-to book for young writers—fingers crossed for spring sometime. I'm also hoping to work on some web series (or TV) and short film projects, and I'm polishing some scripts that I could potentially shoot later this year.

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 ten, we did our epic family vacation, spending nine weeks driving all over the US. It was actually supposed to be ten weeks, but we hit the wall in New Mexico and decided to drive home from there. We started in Pennsylvania and, with an emphasis on national parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, etc), toured all over the country. I had a lot of back seat time, and I'd lie there—at that point being small enough to fit sideways—and read. A lot. I was reading the Great Brain series, possibly some Agatha Christie, maybe Encyclopedia Brown and probably a few others. I tore through books so quickly we actually had to stop partway through the trip to buy more. Luckily, those were the days when bookstores were still plentiful. While the obvious takeaway is that I read a lot—I still do, but I feel that too much of my reading now consists of scripts that have been submitted for consideration by YouthPLAYS, my little publishing company—the subtext, as it were, is that I'm a plugger. My dear friend and mentor, the late Thom Williams, used to say that it was a Capricorn thing, that we just put our heads down and plunged forward. The challenge for me these days is to make more of that plunging actual writing, rather than administrative work, whether for YouthPLAYS, for the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights (which I co-chair) or even for my own self-promotion. Sometimes I wonder "what if" I didn't do all of these other things—how much could I accomplish? Who knows—maybe one day I'll find out. Life was certainly simpler when I could fit sideways in the back seat of my parents' car.

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

A:  I'd want to change how severely underfunded theater is, both at schools and nationally. There should be opportunities for all young people to have drama classes from elementary on up, and it should be a requirement that is just as important as math or English—and it should include trips to and visits from quality theater groups. For the cost of a few high-tech fighter jets, you could fund a huge amount of theater, and it would help us turn out better, more thoughtful human beings.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I've always been a fan of those twin towers of menace, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter. I've always thought of them as late absurdist brothers from another mother, and both of them influenced how I think about dialogue, and particularly the silence between it. And of course, both of them wrote plays that could be disturbing and unsettling, and disturbing and unsettling us is one of the theater's most important jobs. I also love the work of Suzan Zeder, who creates pure magic for young people and for many years has helped mentor playwrights and pass along her knowledge.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I love theater that has some kind of magical, expressionist or heightened elements about it—I like to see something that shows me I'm in a theater. That could be an Angels in America or Marisol or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Doubt or Mother Hicks. Or it could be a show with awesome poetry in its language (which some of those do too), or a play like Ruined, which is beautiful and shows us something we need to see that isn't part of our everyday.

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

A:  1. Plays are written to be produced. So read and see as much theater as you can, so that you can understand the relationship between what you put on the page and where it needs to go after that. And the more you see, the more ideas you get for what may be possible, and the more styles you're exposed to.

2. Remember that they're not doing you a favor by producing your play. Yes, we all want our work produced, but chances are they're not paying you enough to compromise your integrity. Get acquainted with the Dramatists Guild Bill of Rights, and don't give those up.

3. You learn by hearing your work read, and even more by seeing it on its feet in front of an audience. Whenever possible, sit behind the audience so that you can watch both the show and them watching the show.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I'm lucky that I typically have a goodly number of productions upcoming at schools and youth theaters. While 4 A.M. is my most produced play at this point—check out its new companion, The Magic Hour (A Play), of which I'm quite proud—I've been particularly pleased that the one-act version of Rumors of Polar Bearss seems to have hit people's radar of late, with a half-dozen productions scheduled from December 2016-March 2017. I hope that those looking for longer plays will look at its full-length version, as I think it's some of my strongest writing. You can visit my website at http://jonathandorf.com to learn more, as I wide range of plays, from wild comedies to more thoughtful, serious pieces.


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I Interview Playwrights Part 905: Seamus Sullivan

Seamus Sullivan

Hometown: Glenside, PA.

Current Town: Jersey City, NJ, by way of DC and LA.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  This month, I'm getting together with my friend Jason Schlafstein to start collaborating on a mythological wrestling epic he's had brewing in his head for years. I'm a wrestling outsider, so I'm looking forward to an educational process. I've also been writing a lot of short fiction lately, stuff about suburban superheroes and Greek mythology and even some realistic fiction, which I don't normally do. It's been a fun opportunity to build new muscles.

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

A:  In elementary school I wrote and drew my own comics, and they were wildly derivative, but I kept them up for a year or two, doing one comic every month. And I wasn't a great artist or a great writer or anything by the time I finished doing all those comics, but I proved that I could stick to a schedule, and I probably knew on some level that if you can do that for long enough then you'll probably write something good eventually.

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

A:  Over the summer I interviewed some occasional theatergoers for a Theatre Development Fund project. The aim of the interviews was to get an understanding of why people did or didn't go to see plays. And one of the younger people we talked to, who didn't go to the theater often, said that she did go to sporting events all the time because she'd grown up going to sporting events, and it was a regular pastime in her hometown. And I thought about this, and my Dad did take me to plays at the Arden in Philadelphia when I was growing up, and I did theater in school, and that's probably why going to see plays is such a given for me now. So if I could change one thing, it would be for theater culture to be more widespread, more of a regular, community thing that you do with your family all the time, wherever you live. Easier said than done, I know. I think more arts education and lower ticket prices and shows that tap into the energy and fun of pop culture (quick shout-out to Jason's and my DC-area theater company Flying V here!) are all part of the solution. We'll probably never catch up to sports, but it should at least be easy for kids and adults who want to get into theater to get into theater.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that plays with genre, like Conor McPherson writing ghost stories for the stage or The Honeycomb Trilogy doing a giant sci-fi family saga grounded in old school dramatic structure.

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

A:  Write plays that make you happy, and work with people who make you happy. Not every play is going to work out exactly the way you want it to, creatively or professionally. So you should at least make sure you're having a good time and building relationships as you work.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My next show with Flying V, Brother Mario, starts previews on February 23 in Bethesda, MD. It is a mashup of Chekhov and Super Mario Brothers. It will make you laugh and feel things, and may cause you to spend more time thinking about King Boo than is your wont.

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