I Interview Playwrights Part 568: Clare Barron

Clare Barron

Hometown: Wenatchee, WA

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about your Summerworks show.

A:  BABY SCREAMS MIRACLE is a play about a freak windstorm that blows down all the trees in a small town in eastern Washington state. I started writing the play for Clubbed Thumb’s Biennial Commission contest. We were supposed to incorporate all these different ingredients into a 10-page sample. I can’t remember everything but some of the ingredients that inspired this play were: the PBS documentary “Unforgettable Elephants,” Joan Baez’s “Tears of Rage,” the character of the Matriarch, a man in uniform, and body parts that don’t work right. I also wanted to write a play about religious people who use prayer to deal with their emotional/existential/relationship problems, so there’s a bunch of prayer in there too. I’m so excited to have Portia Krieger directing! And Maria Striar and Clubbed Thumb are gifts from God.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’m acting in a piece about Mars and Russian cosmonauts and video games spearheaded by the awesome Ben Vershbow. I just got back from Beirut where I was working on an Arabic-English production of Maria Irene Fornes’ MUD with a theater company called Masrah Ensemble, and we’re looking for new homes for the production outside of Lebanon. Sometime between June 2nd and June 22nd I’ll be frantically writing a new full-length play and having a Bloodworks reading for Youngblood. I have no idea what it’ll be about but I think it might involve ballet…

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

A:  It was the last day of 7th grade, and a group of girls and I wanted to hold a mud wrestling competition to celebrate. We didn’t have any mud so we each whipped up a big batch of chocolate pudding and carted it over to Jennifer’s house in tupperwares and dumped it in this little kiddie swimming pool. I forgot my swimming suit and so I had to borrow one of Jennifer’s. Jennifer was athletic and golden brown and wore bikinis that were much higher cut than my sad, floral tankini so my pubic hair was tufting out all over the place. Everyone wrestled. It was super fun and I kept falling down and it was hot and the pudding was beginning to stink. A car circled past Jennifer’s yard once. Then it circled again and stopped. The man inside rolled down the window. "What is that?" he asked. I sauntered over to the car – covered head-to-toe in brown goo and so, so proud – and told him it was pudding. He looked at me and then he reached his arm out the car window and said, "Come closer. I wanna touch it." There was a moment and then we were all screaming and shrieking and the whole pack of 12 girls was sprinting down the middle of the road covered in brown goo. I remember pushing my way to the front of the pack and my legs felt so strong and the asphalt was so hot against the bottom of my feet and I was filled with total terror and total glee. Running away from Pudding Man was one of the shining moments of my adolescence. I don’t think I’d ever felt that powerful.

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

A:  More neighborhood and community theater! I think it’d be cool if neighborhoods and small towns did plays by local writers. I also think it’d be cool if people did theater just for fun like when kids put on shows for the neighbors but with grown-ups.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I’ve learned a ton from Deb Margolin, David Herskovits, and Annie Baker. I think they’re three of the most singular, daring and smart theater makers out there.

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

A:  Here’s some advice that’s helped me: write whatever you want, write from desire and don’t be afraid of writing stupid. Love yourself and show love to everyone else. Support other artists. Find people and read your work out loud. Find people you love to work with – this is the most important and meaningful thing.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A: Come to Summerworks! clubbedthumb.org

BABY SCREAMS MIRACLE
by Clare Barron
directed by Portia Krieger
May 24 - June 2

PHOEBE IN WINTER
by Jen Silverman
directed by Mike Donahue
June 7 - 16

LA BREA
by Gregory S. Moss
directed by Adam Greenfield
June 20 - 29

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Come to the Youngblood Brunch this Sunday! And come to Bloodworks this May & June! ensemblestudiotheatre.org
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And this Thursday I’ll be reading scenes from Syrian playwright Mohammad Al Attar’s recent play COULD YOU PLEASE LOOK INTO THE CAMERA? as part of Masrah Ensemble’s Doomed By Hope Theatre Series. It’s at The Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU at 5PM. masrahensemble.org

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Episode 6 of Compulsive Love

Episode 6 of Compulsive Love is here!  Watch it and previous episodes on Koldcast or Blip or Daily Motion or Boomtrain or Youtube or JTS.

Embedded #6:

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I Interview Playwrights Part 567: Jona Tarlin

Jona Tarlin

Hometown: Palo Alto, CA

Current Town: New York City

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A play called Black Dicks. It’s about a 15-year-old girl, Erin, who finds her dad’s very large collection of interracial cuckolding porn. She corners her neighbor, Vivienne, after ballet practice to get a second opinion on whether her father is racist. Vivienne suggests she create a fake boyfriend named Dante who plays on the basketball team and see what her father says.

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 5th grade my teacher asked a group of student volunteers to help write a play about the Revolutionary War. I don’t remember if we divvied up scenes from an outline or we just wrote whatever but I wrote a scene about a sewing circle gossiping while blood from the war splashed against the window behind them.

I have always had twisted sense of humor and a love of stage blood.

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

A:  Beyond lowering tickets prices and livable wages for artists, I would say no more plays that hinge on a large secret coming out. I think it’s lazy storytelling and ultimately much less satisfying than building solid characters that deal with circumstances in the present with the audience.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My first hero was Michael Litfin who directed and wrote most of the productions at the Palo Alto Children’s Theater. He cast me in my first play and was my introduction to theater. He showed me that playwrights were living breathing people and not just names on scripts.

The playwrights who are heroic to me are Tony Kushner, Edward Albee, Eric Overmyer, Gina Gianfriddo, Robert O’Hara, Sam Hunter, Annie Baker, and The Debate Society.

My writing is also influenced by the work of William Gibson, Penn and Teller, John Darnielle, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Verhoeven, Bill Waterson, Jim Henson, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I am excited by anything dark and funny with a distinct voice. Plays with rich characters struggling with extreme situations in a realistic fashion. Plays where a character can behave horribly and I will still love them.

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

A:  Celebrate when you finish a draft. You accomplished a huge, awesome thing and it’s easy to lose sight of that. After you celebrate, take some time away so the play is fresh again when you’re ready to start rewriting.

Work with the smartest actors you can. They’re gonna fight for their characters and force you to think about your play differently.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I have a reading of my play In Antarctica, Where It Is Very Warm coming up in May with Blowout Theater Company. You can find out more information about that and any of my other plays at jonatarlin.wordpress.com

 
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I Interview Playwrights Part 566: Jill Campbell

Jill Campbell

Hometown: Massapequa, NY

Current Town: Stuvesant Town, New York, NY

Q:  Tell me about your play at LaMaMa.

A:  It's about a mid career conceptual artist who is nominated for this huge grant, but there's a catch - she must create a new work in order to collect. When she's out celebrating with her best friend, ex-boyfriend and mentor, instead of being happy for her, they all seem to want a piece of her success which prompts her to question what success really means to her and to others. As she begins to work on her piece, these “friends” invade her process until she is totally stifled. She gets over this by a decision to put each of them in her work, turning the tables and flipping the play in on itself.

We're creating the actual art onstage with some cool designers and a video artist. I always imagined this as a collaborative piece and left a lot of room for my collaborators and director George Ferencz's magic. There's also an intense scene at MoMA that might get me banned from there and a hipster boy toy who creates beer bong video art. Nothing about this play is safe, so it is making me really nervous but hopefully in a good way.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I've been collaborating on a play called r u nobody 2 ? with playwrights Marya Cohn, Andrea Lepcio and Kim Merrill and directors Allyn Chandler and Elysa Marden for our theatre company, NewShoe. It's about teenage bullying. We workshopped it in the "room" at New Georges last year and after about 3 years of intense collaboration it's ready for production.

I'm also collaborating on a play with a scientist about Crystallography called Bernal's Picasso, and I'm editing a documentary I filmed in London about my playwriting mentor Bernard Kops.

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

A:  Everyone seems to make fun of Long Island, but Massapequa was a very theatrical place to grow up in. Gambino was on one side of the canal and Jerry Seinfeld's family was on the other, so as you were daydreaming about the scary mob shit going down behind the marble facades, Jerry's dad would drive by in an antique car (which I think he collected.) These sightings were the bees knees, because his dad was one of those warm hearted men who loved kids and life and got a kick out of us standing on the corner gawking at him in his eccentric car. Plus I came from a theatrical family, everyone sang show tunes and played piano and loved Streisand, and my favorite activity when I was a kid was to play "house," which I forced my friends to play with me. I was obsessed with rearranging furniture and dreaming up scenes where I was the bad teenager about to runaway. And then there was the beach club where everyone gossiped and they put on The King and I one summer; I was cast in the chorus and had the most exquisite costume, but I got an ear infection on opening night, and my mother sent me home, alone, screaming my head off (I was like 7). I cried and cried alone in my room not because I was scared, but because I was missing the party. My revenge came when I was 11, and I put on a striptease for some neighborhood boys while standing on a Cadillac in one of their garages, until someones dad caught us. Then there was Boces Performing Arts High School which saved me from some bullies at my high school which led to my BFA and theatre, theatre, theatre, until I got so sick of it all that I quit at 25 to become a New Jersey housewife. That lasted for 6 years until I wrote my first play Superbia ... and 15 years later I'm having my NYC debut at La MaMa, so it was all worth it!

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

A:  I would make it less conservative. We've seemed to make this crazy ass flip with TV where Tony Soprano is allowed to shove a woman against a wall in a bar and screw her from behind, but if we try to put that on stage (in a non-exploitative way) it's vulgar. It seems like some people are too afraid to offend their audiences or subscribers, which I think is an insult to the intelligence of those subscribers and audiences who would probably be open to being challenged by cutting edge theatre. I know there are lots of theaters that do do this, but I wish even more would. If what you're doing is authentic, people will want to see it. Which is why so much on HBO is so hot. Can we bring that back to the theatre?

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Ibsen, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, Shepard, Rapp, Guirgis, Shanley and Young Jean Lee.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Challenging, funny, intellectual,risk-taking work that lingers in my mind long after I've left the theater.

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

A:  When you think you're done, you're actually just beginning.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  www.chemistryoflove.net , May 2-19 at La MaMa also check out my website www.seagullink.com.




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Artistic Director Interviews

Peter Ellenstein
Hal Brooks
Chad Rabinovitz
Jim Simpson
Marty Stanberry
Russ Tutterow
Andrew Leynse
Mimi O'Donnell
Marc Masterson

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I Interview Artistic Directors Part 9: Peter Ellenstein

Peter Ellenstein

Hometown: Los Angeles, CA

Current Town: Independence, KS

Q:  Tell me about The William Inge Center For The Arts.

A:  The Inge Center was Founded in 1982, but had two previous, but similar, names. It sits on the Independence Community College campus in the small rural SE Kansas town of Independence. It was founded by Margaret Goheen, a close friend of William Inge’s with the intention of honoring some of America’s Great playwrights. Over the past 32 years nearly every major American Playwright has visited, from Arthur Miller and August Wilson to Neil Simon and Wendy Wasserstein. Since 2002 we have been hosting long-term playwright residencies in William Inge’s boyhood home (setting for “Picnic” and “Dark at the Top of the Stairs”). We’ve helped develop over 50 new plays and through the playwriting classes and at local rural high schools and at the college and through the 24-Hour Plays that we do each year, we’ve helped birth hundreds of short plays as well. In the summer of 2014 we’ll be helping, with many of the towns other organizations, create ASTRA, a unique multi-arts festival which will feature four plays in Rep, music events, visual arts, literary and everything in-between.

Q:  How do you choose playwrights for the programs?

A:  I’ve chosen them from recommendations, chance meetings, longstanding relationships and open submissions. We choose the playwright, not the play. The playwright chooses their own project and we help them, as best we can, with the resources we have, to take the next step in that project.


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

A:  My father was an actor, director and artistic director. My older brother is also an actor, director and artistic director. Sitting around my dinner table every night were theatre and film artists of all shapes and sizes: discussing, arguing, tearing apart and putting back together again every piece of theatre or film or TV that was recently seen. By the time I was 16 I had the equivalent of a PhD in theatre. And then I started doing it, which was where my real education began.

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

A:  I would have much longer rehearsal times, so that we could have a better chance to make real art, rather than just “getting it up”.

Q:  If you could change one thing about The Inge Center, what would it be?

A:  I wish we had the funding to host several more playwrights per year.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Good theatre. I am excited by all kinds of theatre when it is done exceptionally well. And bored to death by all types of theatre when it is done badly. I don’t particularly care for theatre that is hopeless or only points out problems that are obvious without shining new light on them. I want theatre to make me feel more alive in some way, not deadened or depressed.

Q:  What plays or playwrights are you excited about right now?

A:  Well, There are countless playwrights that excite me. At the moment we’re casting this year’s Otis Guernsey New Voices award-winner, Sam Hunter’s new play for a reading at the Inge Festival. I’m very excited about his work, as I see a distinct connection between his writing and Inge. Very few playwrights deal with empathy and forgiveness and both Inge and Sam do. I’m also always an advocate for my good friend Richard Hellesen’s work. I’ve directed him a lot, and I always learn new things. But There really are a great many wonderful playwrights out there these days.

Q:  What do you aspire to in your work?

A:  Having a real effect in some way with whatever I do. Either helping people become more sensitive or increasing their knowledge or allowing introspection or maybe just detoxing through laughter. I don’t care much for mindless entertainment that is just past-time. I strive to make the experience holy in some way, so that people feel that they’ve grown or changed or enhanced their life for having sat in the dark for a couple of hours.

Q:  What advice do you have for theater artists wishing to work at the Inge Center?

A:  Bring your own fresh produce.


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Episode 5 of Compulsive Love!!

5th 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 #5:



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I Interview Playwrights Part 565: Kirsten Vangsness

Kirsten Vangsness

Hometown: Porterville & Pasadena CA

Current Town: Los Angeles, CA

Q: Congrats on the LA Weekly nomination. Tell me about the show you were nominated for.

A: I was Nom. for best play of the year for the play I wrote, Potential Space.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now, I am finishing up the season of CM (where I play Garcia, and I also help write her lines), and I working on a one person show I am doing at the Hollywood Fringe Festival and also rewrites on Potential Space which I will be re-mounting in the fall.

Q: How would you characterize the LA theater scene?

A: The L.A. theatre scene is a vibrant, quirky, wonderland. It's almost like a magical city within the city that you have to KNOW about to know it's there, folks sometimes think L.A. is a vat of TV Shows and people wanting on TMZ, but in reality there is this vibrant world of creatives making new content for the stage. Theatre is where the conversation starts, we are the great birth-er of dreams and ideas and often no credit goes to it. I am so honored to be part of it.

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 had a lisp that made it impossible to understand me sometimes and dyslexic so at school I had speech therapy for years and a reading class, it consisted of me having to talk endlessly to the speech pathologist and have her correct me and write letters and read things and learn the way other people saw things (the right way). I loved telling her stories, I loved to see her look pleased and I loved the paradigm shift my brain would make when I could understand how a word looked and was spelled the correct way-- that are so many ways that things look different to different people. I feel good when I can bend words and see people smile or understand a thing because of how I chose to say it.

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

A: MORE ATTENDANCE.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Scott McKinley. Helen Mirren. Teresa Rebeck. Eddie Izzard. The entire company of Theatre of NOTE.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I love a play cocktail of funny, absurd, & sexy with a good dash of high stakes.

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

A: WRITE. Just write. And Delight yourself, write what your soul longs to know and read and play in.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: Starring in Kill Me, Deadly the movie opening later this year written by Bill Robens

Mess written by me, at Theatre of NOTE during the fringe festival (don't have dates yet)

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I Interview Playwrights Part 564: Madhuri Shekar

Madhuri Shekar

Hometown: San Jose, CA and Chennai, India

Current Town: Los Angeles, CA

Q: Tell me about your upcoming show at the Alliance.

A: My play 'In Love and Warcraft' has won the 2014 Kendeda Graduate Playwriting competition and will be produced at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, February 2014. Not only am I thrilled about the award, this will also be my first professional production.

The play was developed in a workshop production at USC last April, directed by Chris Fields. It's about a gamer girl, Evie, who also plays love doctor by using strategies from World of Warcraft to help other people fix their relationships. For her own life, she's content with a so-so relationship with her online boyfriend until she falls for someone IRL (in real life). In order to keep him around, she's forced to venture out of her comfort zone and explore the terrifying world of real life intimacy, and all the complications of a non-virtual relationship.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: It's the last semester of my MFA at USC, and I'm working on my thesis play- 'A Nice Indian Boy'. When Naveen, a thirty-something gay man, falls in love and wants to get married to his unconventional boyfriend, it's an uphill struggle to get what he truly wants- all the trappings of a fairytale romance, along with the complete support and approval of his family. In most Indian marriages, even the heterosexual ones, you can't have both.

We'll have a staged reading of the play at the end of May, directed by Robert Egan.

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 used to act on stage, and loved performing. He never got a chance to do it professionally, but when we lived in the Bay Area, he and his friends would produce Tamil plays, usually comedies, and he would act in them.

Once when I was three, he was acting in a play called "Ayya Amma Ammamma". I was sitting in the front row with my mom, who had my one-year-old brother on her lap. Enthralled by the show- and before she could do anything- I lept off my chair, ran up on to the stage in the middle of the performance, and hugged my dad's leg, refusing to let go. The best part was that my dad stayed in character and improvised lines until one of the other actors appeared from backstage to pry me off of him.

I think I knew then that I was meant for the stage, but maybe not as an actor.

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

A: I grew up in Chennai, India, and my first real exposure to theatre was working with my college dramatics club and (at the time) amateur English language theatre companies. The theatre scene in India has continued to expand, despite almost no public aid or support from the government. There are many downsides to that for sure, but I am always so inspired by how these theatre companies (such as Evam, who I love working with) manage to produce their shows, raise money from affiliated commercial services, make the sort of theatre they're passionate about, and still remain financially solvent. Sure, most theatre artists can't quit their day jobs yet, but they have a hunger and passion about making theatre that attracts young people in droves. Just from what I've seen, I'd guess most audiences at an English play in India are in their 20s and 30s. I was at the wonderful Prithvi theatre in Mumbai last year, and everyone hanging out in the coffee shop after the show was around my age.
I don't see that here, and although the environments are so vastly different, I think American theatre companies could learn from how theatre is made around the world, and how it's becoming so much more relevant to the younger rising middle class (with disposable income!) than it is in the U.S.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Anyone who makes a living doing theatre is my hero.

Mahesh Dattani's work opened my eyes to how not all English plays had to be about Brits or Americans, that the English language could capture the rhythms of the Indian vernacular, and that yes, I could be a playwright too.

My professors and mentors at USC have had the biggest influence on my writing. Velina Hasu Houston, Luis Alfaro, Oliver Mayer and Paula Cizmar inspire me year after year with their passion and their work ethic.

My classmates Megan Kelly and Zury Ruiz never stop surprising me with their writing. It's such a gift to have been in class with them these past three years. I love them too much to admit publicly, so let's just say I'm excited to see where we go after graduation.

And, of course, my Dad, who has promised to act in one of my plays when he retires.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: If your play tells a strong and honest story, with compassion for the characters, and lets me laugh along the way, I will be your devoted fan forever. So much of the theatre I see is full of cleverness, and dialogue that doesn't ever sound like real people talking. I don't want to see that, I just want to see something sincere and true.

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

A: My MFA at USC is one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I was very lucky to be at the right place at the right time (and with the right people!), but the training I received here has been invaluable. Not all MFAs are financially out of reach (USC gives its writers a generous fellowship), so I think if you're open to experimenting and learning and failing in a safe space for a few years, it's worth it.

And whenever you're feeling stuck, read this blog.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: If you're in LA, come check out the USC New Works festivals in April and May, showcasing the new and original plays of the MFA playwrights.

For tickets and timings- http://sait.usc.edu/spectrum/events.asp

2nd years-
Morning View by Jesse Shao, April 12-14
Tales from Tent City by Brian James Polak, April 19-21
My Dear Hussein by Nahal Navidar, April 26-28

3rd years-
And All The Trees Shall Clap Their Hands by Megan Kelly, May 28 & May 31
¡What a Piece of Work is Man! by Zury Ruiz, May 29 and June 1
A Nice Indian Boy by Madhuri Shekar, May 30 and June 1

Follow the news (and our updates about our last semester at USC) at our blog- mfawriters2013.wordpress.com

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I Interview Playwrights Part 563: MJ Kaufman

MJ Kaufman

Hometown: Portland, OR

Current Town: New Haven, CT

Q:  Tell me about the play you're bringing to New Harmony.

A:  Sagittarius Ponderosa tells the story of a 29 year old transboy moving home to the woods for family reasons and falling in love. And it has puppets. I started writing it a few months ago. I had been feeling frustrated that most queer narratives are coming out stories and most trans narratives are transition stories. Why are the most prominent narratives organized around arriving at a more stable identity? I wanted trans narratives that would focus on fluidity, highlighting the way many of us are different genders in different spaces. I wanted art that would acknowledge constant change as an intrinsic part of being a person.

Around the same time my teacher Sarah Ruhl introduced me to what she calls Ovidean plot form. Here’s how I’d describe it: A plot form in which identities are in a constant state of change and worlds are in a constant state of change so that human beings can be multiple genders at once, or become a beast and then a tree as a result of falling in love or being heart-broken or struggling to struggling to escape from someone. Basically all things and characters are able to morph and change throughout and the resolution of conflict does not depend on arriving at a more stable identity. As soon as I understood it it I fell in love with it. It sounds more true to my life than any coming out story. I started working with it first to examine a landscape of gender fluidity but found the form led me to a more ecological fluidity, the way that things are constantly changing and being recycled in nature. This ultimately led me to a sort of spiritual fluidity: the way that love and souls are recycled.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  A play about a family that goes on a family history tour to connect with their roots but ends up realizing they have no idea who they are. It's actually part of a series of plays about 10 generations of one family haunted by the same ghost. And also another play about gay people.

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

A:  When I was a kid my friends and I used to get my brother dressed up as a girl for fun. We were really good at it. His name was Henry so naturally his drag name was Henrietta. Once he decided to go to a party at my aunt's house as Henrietta. He really committed to the role and party guests were all totally charmed by the new little girl in our family. For weeks afterwards people we met at the party would ask us in complete sincerity, where's Henrietta?

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

A:  Artists would control the means of production.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Paula Vogel, Sarah Ruhl, Naomi Wallace, Suzan-Lori Parks, Caryl Churchill, Cherrie Moraga, Taylor Mac, Peggy Shaw, Adrienne Kennedy, Bertolt Brecht, Thornton Wilder, Hallie Flanagan, Morgan Jenness, Polly Carl...I could go on and on...

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that surprises me into feeling something new. Weird, scary worlds that are strangely familiar. Theater with puppets, projection, music or movement, installations, ensemble theater, theater that moves through a large space or building. Stories about my queer and trans community. Ghost stories.

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

A:  Make sure you get to hear and see your work as much as possible. Theater doesn't happen on the page and you won't know what a play is until you get it up on its feet. Get actors to read your early drafts. Produce your own work. Don't give in to the cycle of readings, readings and more readings- fight to get your work produced. Take risks. Write what you love and really have to write, not what you think other people will want to produce.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Carlotta Festival of new plays! Find out more here: http://drama.yale.edu/onstage/festival/carlotta-festival-new-plays


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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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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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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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