I Interview Playwrights Part 874: Olivia Lilley

Olivia Lilley

Hometown: Winfield, IL

Current Town: Chicago, IL

Q:  Tell me about your upcoming show.

A:  "Mary Shelley Sees the Future" is a Freaky Friday-esque journey through time and society. Mary Shelley spends the first act wandering around in the skin of a queer creole female identified novelist named Mya. Mya spends act two navigating Mary Shelley's skin just after the death of Percy Shelley, just before the death of Lord Byron and the early Romantics way of life. It is a story about the female condition and how it exists among people from different worlds.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  Earlier this year, I wrote a film script called "You Can't Win Em All". I wrote it for a couple actors in my company and some I've met in the Chicago storefront scene. It follows a group of young people who ran a DIY venue together two years prior to the start of our tale. Their venue was their kingdom and it was burnt to the ground (possibly by the cops or possibly because of a freak accident). It's a thriller. I hope to start developing it this Winter.

I am also stoked at the potential to direct an original rock musical in a festival in the Wintertime. It's by a cool ass writer named Savannah Reich, fresh to Chicago.

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 am an only child and I grew up with my grandparents in the Western suburbs of Chicago. Because I had no siblings to bully me, I was prone to crying all the time. The kids at school found this fun, but the kids in my neighborhood found it even more fun. I have one memory in particular. After seeing some of the neighborhood kids playing in their front yard, I walked over. They had a bunch of toy guns. Now, I must have been 8 or 9 at the time. These kids were mostly 11, 12, and 13. They immediately started pointing their toy guns at me and telling me that I'm dead. I think it was in jest, but its really hard to tell. The mind of an 8 year old surely exaggerates, but then I started crying. So they kept shooting at me and telling me I was dead and to go home. So next thing I know Granny shows up and she yells at them. She asks them how they can possibly treat a little kid this way when they are way older and should know better. So I'm standing there crying and the kids are not used to being yelled at by a neighbor or an adult. I think they basically just didn't know what to do. So Granny takes me home. An hour later, there's a knock at the door. Granny answers it and it is the kids' mom. I hide behind the couch. I overhear that she is requesting, in a very lawsuit threatening kind of way, that I am no longer allowed on their property. My granny sort of says fine. She doesn't give the woman trouble. As a writer, I am interested in the underlying politics and secret bureaucracies of why things happen. Every time, I start a new project, I remember this story.

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

A:  Everybody would work together to make sure THEATRE survives. Too many people are working on their own to make sure THEIR theatre survives. The Expressionists NOT The Age of Heroes, people. Do you really want to be Wagner? :p

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Schiller, Goethe, Baz Luhrmann, The Wooster Group, The Rude Mechs, Elevator Repair Service, Annie Baker, Sheila Callaghan, Bekah Brunstetter, Shannon Sindelar

Q:  What kind of theatre excites you?

A:  Theatre that seems extremely difficult to pull off. When I'm trying to decide what to go see, ambition is the number one deciding factor.

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

A:  When you listen to actors read your script out loud, a) do not look at the page b) literally cross out whatever sections bore you.

Q:  You never know what is boring out loud, until you hear it and you have no safety net.

A:  My other piece of advice is think a lot about "What is action". Try defining that term for yourself in your work. Try it. And then do it again, totally differently.

Q: Plugs, please:

A:  The Runaways Presents "Mary Shelley Sees The Future"
October 21st - November 13th @ Outerspace Studios, 1474 n. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL
For more info, go to runawayslab.org

I've got a short play going on at Playwrights at The Grand in Brooklyn on September 8th at 7:30pm, for their anniversary show.

I'll be reading from some of my plays with friends at the Wit Rabbit reading series on September 17th @ 5pm @ Quenchers Saloon in Bucktown, Chicago, IL

I'll be reading a short piece at Ghost Planet on October 15th @ Midnight @ Township Bar in Logan Square, Chicago, IL


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I Interview Playwrights Part 873: Nelle Tankus

Nelle Tankus

Hometown:  Seattle.

Current Town:  Seattle.

Q:  Tell me about The Untitled Play About Art School:

A:  First of all, thanks to Copious Love Productions for producing this show. They've been so patient through my many edits, and I'm really excited to work with them. It's a dark comedy about flesh-eating monsters, how capitalism destroys people and art and yet how how the art world and academia is so closely linked to it. Also about how two people try to heal each other from trauma when they're both traumatized. It's half greek tragedy and half dark comedy that collapses on itself halfway through. Here's the summary on the audition (they're happening in a couple weeks, aaaaah): Anarchy! Revenge! Flesh-eating monsters! When Amy's failure to show up for her thesis presentation is blamed on her depression/anxiety, she is threatened with expulsion from Whetmore's College of Performing Arts. Meanwhile, in Ancient Greece, a carnivorous beast has escaped Echo's watchful eye and is hungry for blood. As Echo and Amy's friends continue to betray them and bystanders are devoured, they must decide whether to give up on theater while they still can, or burn everything to the fucking ground and start over. The Untitled Play About Art School is a very harsh comedy following an unbreakable friendship that tries to find a way to heal when all hope seems lost.

I started the play two years ago wanting to make fun of art school... of course that was too easy, but I naively thought it would be interesting. I had just graduated from my alma mater and was frustrated with the administration due to some shit we went through together my senior year, and the general privileged culture of private art school. Of course I was implicated in this but at the time my self-reflection wasn't so great, so every time I put pen to paper nothing came up, and if it did it was so hollow and trite. I put it to bed for about a year, and then picked it up again after taking some personal journeys and reading an article talking about students that were expelled from Ivy League schools because they told the school therapist they were suicidal. This led to a research and writing spiral that turned into what the play is today.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I'm working on a new play with Parley Productions called Gemini Season. It's about Mia, a transfeminine person who recently changed her name. Her sister Janine organizes a funeral mourning her past identity (even though she's not dead), and then Mia receives a letter from a Britney Spears asking both of them to visit her at a diner in rural Idaho. Meanwhile, her best friend Dream builds a house with a childhood hero.

It's the second in a series of plays I'm writing that feature parallel worlds. I don't know how far it's going, but I want to keep pursuing 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:  Being at the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer's Retreat was pretty significant. I had the privilege of working with Cherrie Moraga and 11 other queer/trans playwrights on plays we were working on/hadn't started but wanted to. I learned so much about simplicity while there, not complicating the work because I think it's cool, instead making it complex. Really challenging me to justify every single thing I was saying. I got my ass kicked because it was the first time I had been in a professional environment where people were creating theater for their lives, or it felt that way, the hunger to always do better, to go deeper and deeper and deeper. It shattered my world. Not that I was a lazy writer before, but I think I let things skate by using the justification of "it felt right" or "I wrote from impulse" instead of knowing the work inside and out, backwards and forwards. I learned to be a student, always. I also made so many friends from that experience... it was a summer camp for weirdo radical queerdo playwrights. I found my community.

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

A:  Accountability. To other artists, to the rehearsal process, to humility, to rage, to the local and global community, to social justice, to practicing what we preach, to failing better, to being more kind, to levering whatever privileges we have, to holding space for people, to supporting queer and trans spaces, especially those for queer and trans people of color.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My favorite plays are Fefu and Her Friends and Mother Courage. Maria Irene Fornes and Brecht are always always always and forever inspirations. Whenever I feel lost I go to their plays and I'm inspired. Young Jean Lee is a pretty close second, how she breaks her worlds wide open, risks looking stupid in order to create something new. Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Chekhov, Ibsen, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Deborah Stein, Naomi Wallace, Mallery Avidon, Jean Genet, Caridad Svich too. I'm also pretty obsessed with Azure D. Osborne-Lee and MJ Kaufman's work, and Seattle theater-maker Sara Porkalob.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  See two above questions. Also, I read a review of Young Jean Lee's Lear and something the reviewer said struck me. "We don't have a language to describe plays that behave badly." I like those kinds of plays: that behave badly. Even if I don't necessarily like it it excites me. There's a Seattle company called The Satori Group that did a show called ReWilding a few years ago, and though I had no idea what was happening, it was spectacular visually and shrouded in mystery and I was strangely moved, though it didn't really follow the rules of dramatic structure or character. I'm still thinking about it years later, so clearly it did something right. I'm also a sucker for family dramas, like almost camp-level melodrama. If I wasn't broke all the time, I would see August: Osage County and The Seagull ten times in a row. The Seagull is totally camp. Fight me about it.

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

A:  1. Write as much as you can (I try to every day) but seriously if you don't want to, don't. Take distance from it.
2. Read. Everything. Read shitty plays too. Watch shitty plays. If you can afford it, go see plays. If you cant, find ways to get in for free or go see free shit. If you can't, read them. I know the Seattle Central Library has a huge play section, and most Half Price Books have a decent drama section. Pick a random title and take a couple hours and read it.
3. Self-produce if you can. If you don't want to/have capacity to, have reading parties. Buy a twelve pack of PBR and get your friends together to read your play and get feedback from them, even if they don't know anything about theater.
4. Make friends who aren't theater people.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The Untitled Play About Art School, directed by L. Nicol Cabe

December 1-21st at 12th Avenue Arts


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I Interview Playwrights Part 872: Mary Laws

Mary Laws

Hometown: The Woodlands, TX

Current Town:  Los Angeles, CA

Q: Tell me about Blueberry Toast:

A:  I suck at talking about my plays, so here is the blurb that my collaborators helped write:

It's a Sunday morning, in a sunny, suburban kitchen. Barb is making breakfast for her husband, Walt. Their children, Jack and Jill, are busy writing a play. When Barb and Walt disagree over a seemingly innocuous piece of blueberry toast, the veneer of their polished existence begins to crack and what's underneath might eat them for breakfast.

I wrote this play for Sarah Ruhl’s workshop when I was at Yale after she gave me a copy of Tales From Ovid by Ted Hughes (which changed my life). It is funny. (Hopefully.) And scary. (Hopefully.)

Q: What else are you working on now?

A:  Well, I write for a television show called Preacher right now. It is on AMC and it is based on the Preacher comics by Garth Ennis (that you should definitely read).

I’m also writing a play about clowns which could be really silly or really good or both.

BUT…………… What I really want to do is spend a year travelling with my friend/director/collaborator Margot Bordelon and making interview plays/projects for small towns across the country. If you know anyone who is independently wealthy and would like to fund our little venture, tell them to email me at LawsMC@gmail.com.

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

A:  The subscription system that theaters use to sell tickets. I think it becomes dangerous when an audience is allowed to dictate what kind of theatre they will see. Theatre should challenge the audience and make them uncomfortable! I worry sometimes that the theatre I see produced at companies with subscription based systems is too safe. And I mean, I get it! Lose your subscribers, lose your season. Maybe I think there should be more national funding for theaters. And for the arts in general.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Reading Sarah Ruhl made me want to be a writer. Reading Sarah Kane made me want to be a badassmutherfuckingwriter. And reading Caryl Churchill... Well that bitch exploded my brain. These three women writers are my holy trinity. If ever I am stuck, in doubt, depressed, or lost at lonely-writer-sea, I read The Clean House or Blasted or Far Away and my faith in theatre is restored.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I’m a huge fangirl of plays with innovative or interesting structure!

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

A:  Write a lot. Read a lot. Go have non-theatre-related experiences. Repeat?

I don’t know. I don’t have any advice. I don’t know shit. And honestly, I’m not a naturally gifted writer, either. I’m not, like, some boob who doesn’t know the difference between ‘you’re’ and ‘your’, but I’ve also never lived in a movie montage where I am struck by sudden inspiration and the narrative flows easily from my fingers while I’m, like, smoking cloves and staring pensively out the window and at the end I stand, presenting to the world my magnum opus!!! Does this ever really happen to writers? Or is Hollywood just lying again? It has certainly never happened to me. Writing is really fucking hard. Actually, some days I think I chose to be a writer because I knew it would be hard, and I like doing things that people tell me I can’t do (because I’m a stubborn asshole who doesn’t like the word ‘no’). But I practice a lot. I write every day. And I love it, which helps. I don’t know. Fuck it.

OH -- Ask Paula Vogel! That is my advice. Go take her playwriting bootcamp somewhere!! She is one of the smartest women I’ve ever met, a beautiful writer, and a terrific mentor. When I was just starting out and applying to grad school, Sarah Ruhl gave me this advice: Go somewhere free, and go study with Paula Vogel. So, I’ll just plagiarize her advice and make it mine. Study with Paula Vogel!

Q: Plugs, please:

A:  Blueberry Toast opens Sept. 17. Go to www.echotheatercompany.com for tickets!

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I Interview Playwrights Part 871: Niccolo Aeed

Niccolo Aeed

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: Still New York, I haven't managed to escape yet.

Q:  Tell me about Room 4.

A:  It's a weird one. Basically, four black actors keep auditioning for the same drug dealer role over and over until they realize they're stuck in a time loop. It's unpredictable, strange, and very funny.

Marina initially had the idea of several black actors in a waiting room wondering if a fourth was going to come or if he had booked a part in The Lion King. That those were the two options for these actors -- you were in The Lion King or you were going to try to book this bit crime TV show part. I'm not exactly sure where the time loop idea came from, but lately our writing has been more heightened and absurd. We've been writing more about ghosts and twilight-zone-type twists, and I think we were interested in doing something bizarre. At first maybe the time loop seemed interesting as a metaphor -- there's something about race in America that feels repetitive and cyclical, like we've had these conversations before but still done nothing about them. Then after that I think we were interested in seeing what it would be like to actually live in a time loop.

Marina and I are also generally thinking about what kind of stories we tell. Probably most people in theater or entertainment are, but it often feels like you're telling someone else's story. Maybe this is an inevitable part of writing or acting or directing, but the story you're hired to work on can feel untrue or at worst downright offensive. So we're definitely interested in artists' relationship to the thing they are performing, how it effects them or changes them or messes with their heads.

Q:  Tell me about your 6 month residency at the PIT.

A:  Marina and I started mostly doing sketch comedy. Our sketches were usually pretty short and not necessarily connected to each other. But in the past couple of years we've been interested in creating longer narratives, longer comedic plays. At the same time I think the People's Improv Theater was also having some success with more narrative shows, rather than the usual sketch and improv. So it came together at a great moment. The residency really allowed us to work on longer more complex stories while also applying the quick turn around of comedy. Though we had a little head start on the writing, by midway through the residency we really were writing a play a month. It was exhausting but it was a blast.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  We're very excited to continue to develop a number of the plays that we workshopped during our residency, so over this year and next we'll hopefully bring a few back. In addition, we'll of course be releasing new sketches online and we're developing a web series about an online dating site, and the people who are begging the site's customer service to solve all their relationship problems.

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 can't really think of a specific story. Sometimes when I think of where my humor comes from, I think it lands somewhere between Calvin and Hobbes, the Boondocks and The Far Side. I had all those comic strip collections and I never stopped reading them through middle school. Those three comic strips may have influenced my humor the most.

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

A:  It would pay me more money. I probably should say more diversity, but really I just want that money. Though come to think of it I probably can't get hired till there's more diversity, so maybe it's like a tie, more diversity and theater paying me more money.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  So many! The first theater company I remember loving when I was in high school was The Classical Theater of Harlem. It was the first theater company whose work made me realize what powerful things you could do with live theater. I still watch and love all the plays they make. In college I learned about Pig Iron Theater Company and I think the way they create work physically always seems magical to me. I'm in awe of the actors when I watch them. Once I saw a Shakespeare play they did, and a kid was in the audience -- he must've been younger than 10 years old. During intermission his dad asked him if he wanted to explain the plot to him, and the kid said no he was enjoying it as it is. Which is really incredible. That you can make shakespeare accessible and funny even for young kids who can't understand the language.

Recently as a playwright I've been in love with the plays Dominique Morisseau has been writing and I was blown away by Radha Black's Seed, which was partially written in this hip hop verse and it was so lyrical and flowing and incredible. Both of their work is just so powerful to watch and just makes me want to be a better writer.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I really like immersive theater, I know sometimes people get exhausted by it, but I always love it. Basically I love it when watching a play you feel like you could have only experienced this story in this way, with these actors in this exact moment.

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

A:  First write and find people to write with, I could never have written a word without Marina. Then find a stage that will allow you to put something up. The PIT has really been a blessing for us, it has allowed us to try some really fun things. Find actors who are game to help you develop new work. With the residency and this play we've worked with such talented people and having those actors develop characters with us has been so helpful to our writing.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  If you haven't seen our work before, check out our videos here:

http://www.marinaandnicco.com/ videos/

They're really good. You'll like them a lot!

Or check out our murder mystery radio show we wrote last year

http://www.marinaandnicco.com/ murder/

Or you can find it on iTunes or Stitcher. 


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I Interview Playwrights Part 870: Lucy Teitler

Lucy Teitler

Current Town:  Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me about your play Engagements, which just had an extended run at Second Stage Uptown.

A:  Engagements is a play about miscommunications and misreads, about the ways in which we all lie to ourselves – it kind of makes this big psychological claim that we lie to each other because we lie to ourselves, that denial is at the root of most bad behavior. It centers on a lovable destructive hurricane of mixed emotions and self-sabotage, Lauren, who adores her best friend, Allison, and thinks Allison is much too good for her boyfriend, Mark. Lauren’s also full of anguish and anxiety about the fact that she’s reached the age when everyone around her is getting married – the play takes place at a seemingly endless series of engagement parties – even though she herself doesn’t want to settle down and get married. So Lauren’s dealing with a lot of dark, serious, big issues, but she's not a person who's comfortable being vulnerable, so she insists on trivializing everything all the time '-- "it's not a big deal!" -- so she tries her hardest to make the play look like a light comedy, a romantic comedy, a Victorian tale of good people vs. bad people -- anything but an actual examination of herself! Because she just can't face what her story is actually about. The play plays along with Lauren and her denial, up to a point, when it won’t anymore, because Lauren can’t anymore. At that point, it stops being the comedy that Lauren wants it to be, and it becomes something else.

So ultimately, Engagements is about how we all think we’re in charge of the story that we’re in – and we all think that the story begins when our role in it begins – but we’re not in control.

Lauren is a PhD student in English, and one of the other characters, who becomes an observer and theorist about Lauren’s situation, is a PhD student in Comparative Literature, so the play calls out these ideas about storytelling in a playful way. The characters analyze literary characters for a living, but fail to correctly analyze themselves or each other in real time, in their own lives. The characters are readers of literature, and the audience is put in the position of being the reader of the literature that the characters are in – and, I may imply, the members of the audience must also be fools on their own stage, especially if they’re lying to themselves about their lives and their motivations. It was all inspired by my own recognition, when I was in graduate school, that I was writing about stories from this position of power, as a reader and a scholar, as an educated person, but that didn’t stop me from being a delusional fool in my own life a lot of the time, flapping around blind in the midst of other people’s illegible, buried motivations. And in a lot of ways that was a really dark feeling, and there’s a lot of twisted darkness in the play. But there’s also an acceptance, and that’s where some of the comedy comes from.... Some of the other comedy comes from the absurd situations into which Lauren's mistakes lead her.

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

A:  This is obvious, but I wish that theater tickets were cheaper, which would then make for a more diverse, younger audience. To be fair, there are a lot of efforts in this direction. Usually, if you’re organized and plan ahead, you can see a lot of things Off-Broadway for relatively cheap, but I guess – it’s been my experience, working in theater and also television and film, that people making theater think the most about the audience, about what kind of an experience they’ll have, about how it will uplift and edify and challenge and seduce them. Everyone making art thinks about these things, of course, but I think it’s just the nature of the immediacy of theater that you think about it just a little bit more – because you’re actually in a room with an audience while you’re in previews. And so because of that, because I’ve witnessed, experienced and participated in that contrast, between the sometimes inward-looking project of film and television, and the often outward-looking project of theater, it bugs me that theater can’t reach more people! That all said, theater is inherently not as accessible as other cultural objects, because you have to be there in the theater in order to see it, there is no recorded version and if there is, it’s not as good. And that’s something I love about theater, and would never have otherwise. It’s a tension. As in so many things in life, what you love creates the feeling that frustrates you. Theater has the power it does because of its limitations – you have to be in the room.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  So many. My ur-texts are very classical. Shakespeare was major, which is so boring, but the truth. Measure for Measure and the other problem plays will keep me creatively agitated and generating work my whole life, I’m sure. I think if I had to choose one person whose work made me want to be a playwright, specifically, it would be Harold Pinter. I took a great course on Modern Drama my freshman year of college (at Williams) and read Betrayal at just the right moment. In Pinter and in Shakespeare, I worship the flexibility of words; each one means so many different things. That’s heroic to me, and uniquely theatrical – not just that words can mean so many things, but that eventually, in different productions, they will mean different things, and the words on the page contain both the potential and the kinetic energy of those expressions. What is happening on stage when Isabella has to marry Angelo at the end of Measure for Measure?? Shakespeare is full of these tantalizing Fermat’s Last Theorems, for every director to have to resolve on his or her own, only to be left unresolved again, for another director. The words allow for that; they are a universe.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I'm excited by theater that engages the audience to do imaginative work. A great example of that is the recent Men on Boats, which was originally a Clubbed Thumb production, but which I saw at Playwrights Horizon. Jaclyn Backhaus and Will Davis did an incredible job. That was a giant, overarching brilliant concept, executed with gorgeous attention to detail. And the audience’s imagination was engaged the entire time, both by having to visualize the Western vistas and action sequences that the play was alluding to, and by constantly integrating the experience of seeing female actors and being told that they were male characters. So beautiful and thrilling. A real active adventure for the audience.

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

A:  Make work about things that bother and preoccupy you – problems you can’t resolve – and try to let go of ego as much as possible. Understand that for a while, your work may not be as good as your taste, and your job is to work to fill that gap. Believe people when they tell you areas where you can improve; you won’t lose yourself, you’ll just discover more areas where you can go – and also find your boundaries. Develop a practice. Find some way to turn your creative chaos into controlled chaos, so it won’t wear you out.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Watch my episode of the USA series Mr Robot! It plays tonight! (August 30th)

I’m also proud to be a collaborator on Marie C’s amazing web series, My Life in Sourdough. We’re currently in pre-production on season 3, which will be shot mostly in Paris. An episode I wrote for season two is nominated for an award from Saveur Magazine! Vote for us!

I’m also in post-production on a documentary/ art criticism/ sketch comedy fantasia that I made with the inimitable Cecilia Corrigan. She and I – together with cameraman Carlos Rigua – posed as broadcast journalists at the Frieze art fair in New York and shot a segment. We were legitimately there as journalists, and used our real press passes and real names, and our video discusses the actual art, so there was a lot of fourth-wall breaking. It’s like Spinal Tap meets E entertainment television, in the art world. It's not done, so it's not online yet, but follow me on Twitter if you’re interested, as I’ll surely be posting about that soon enough. @lucyteitler

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I Interview Playwrights Part 869: Marina Tempelsman

Marina Tempelsman

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about Room 4.

A:  Room 4 is a comedy about four black actors caught in a time loop as they audition for the same Drug Dealer #2 role over and over again. My writing partner Niccolo Aeed and I co-wrote it, and he's also directing it. We're describing it as Waiting for Godot meets A Chorus Line meets Groundhog’s Day meets the real-life-experience-of-virtually-every-black-actor-in- America.

The play stemmed from an initial scene, in which a roomful of black actors awaiting an audition try to remember how many of their peers are in The Lion King -- which, until recently, seemed to be the only show in New York that reliably showcased people of color. As Nicco and I continued to write scenes around this -- some grounded, some not -- we realized what we were really working towards was the surreal repetitiveness of life as a not-white-male in theater.

There's been a lot of attention paid recently to the way in which actors of color are pigeonholed. How, in spite of having tremendous talent and potential, these actors are forced into stereotypical, token roles -- if they're "lucky" enough to be cast at all. In Room 4, the actors realize that the metaphor they've been trapped in throughout their creative careers has suddenly become a nightmarish reality -- and they'll do whatever they can to escape.

But it's also funny! The eight-person cast features some of the absolute best comedic actors we've worked with. They're an incredible ensemble.

Of the six plays we wrote and produced during our six-month playwriting residency at The PIT, this was the one that we were most excited to revisit, revise, and expand. And I'm so happy we got the extended run.

Q:  Tell me about your 6 month residency at the PIT.

A:  The residency involved writing and producing a full one-hour play each month for six months. Nicco describes it as our own self-imposed playwriting grad school, and I think that sums it up.

Nicco and I have a comedy-writing background, and in the comedy world putting on monthly shows is fairly standard practice. So in this residency, we tried to take the quick turnaround of sketch comedy and merge it with the depth and rigor you see from live theater.

Our smallest cast was two people, and our largest was 14 people. At any given point we were in three different phases of production for three different plays. It was a total whirlwind, but we just loved it and had so much fun.

Despite its being a bit of a high-wire act, we learned so much from taking that many plays from concept to production in such a short time span. There's no better theater education that just putting up shows and learning from that process, and we learned so much about writing, narrative, and production. And we worked with such incredibly talented people.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  We're also working on a treatment for a web series and a handful of pilots. And we're reworking a few of the other plays from our residency as well.

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 in kindergarten, I was taking the school bus to a friend's house for a playdate and we got caught in traffic. The busdriver kind of rolled his eyes and said "Ugh, we'll NEVER get home." And I started BAWLING. I 100% believed it to be true, and I was immediately living in the world where my life was just me in a traffic jam forever and ever and ever. Quick and total immersion in a (sometimes terrifying) alternate universe is a trend that tends to pop up in my writing. What if this twist, a seemingly innocuous moment, became the basis of reality?

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  David Lindsay-Abaire. I love the worlds he creates. They are so deeply grounded, even when they go to the most absurd and fantastical places. They have so much love and heart and care in them, and I'm so much more drawn to that than cynicism. I also love that he writes such fantastic female characters.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I love plays that really use the space they're staged in interesting ways, without just being a gimmick. Plays where you leave and think, you REALLY had to see it live.

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

A;  Find people whose work you admire and collaborate. Be scrappy. Embrace the scrappiness, love the scrappiness, and know that being scrappy is your key to being your most creative and free. Remember that every single moment is a learning process, especially when it comes to collaboration, and focusing on what you're learning in a given moment is far more productive than trying to figure out who to blame when the lack of control makes you panic. If you want control, write prose instead. If you want to broaden your horizons and learn an extraordinary amount from brilliant and wise people, then really embrace the collaboration.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A;  Room 4 begins its theatrical run at The PIT on September 6th at 8pm, and it runs through October 7th. Get your tickets here -- it's only $10 and runs 55 minutes!
www.thepit-nyc.com/room4

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Reading Monday

READING

Mercy

Directed by Markus Potter

Starring Zack Robidas, Dan Grimaldi, Sarah Kate Jackson, and Erik Heger

New Jersey Rep
Monday August 29, 7pm
179 Broadway, Long Branch, New Jersey 07740

No reservations. First come, first serve. Doors open at 6:30

When Orville’s pregnant wife is hit by a drunk driver, the doctors can only save the baby. Deep in grief, Orville tries to piece his life back together as a single father until he happens to see the drunk driver on the street one day. He befriends him under an assumed name and buys a gun, and Orville begins an agonizing conflict between revenge and forgiveness.

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Study Playwriting With Me

I'm teaching a playwriting class at ESPA this fall and it's online so you can take it no matter where you are.

http://primarystages.org/espa/online-classroom/online-first-draft

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I Interview Playwrights Part 868: Peter Lefcourt

Peter Lefcourt

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: Santa Monica, Ca

Q: Tell me about Drama Queens from Hell

A:  It’s always difficult for a writer to trace the original spark that set off the process of writing a play. In the case of “Drama Queens From Hell,” it may have been a combination of wanting to write something about competition among actors and about the growing tendency to demand diversity in casting, a response to the “Oscars So White” meme. As usual, the script took off in its own direction, resulting in a play that could be labeled, oxymoronically, “a noir comedy.” The breakthrough, in this instance, was the idea of using a remake of the Billy Wilder classic, “Sunset Boulevard,” as the plot device upon which to hang the themes. The story of remaking the film winds up being thematically akin to the story of the film itself – older, cast-aside actresses vying with one another to play Norma Desmond. Just how that happened, I have no idea.

Q: What else are you working on now?

A:  I am in the middle of a new play, tentatively entitled, “Nine Hours.” The play is set in July, 1969, on the eve of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and follows Ted Kennedy’s actions during the nine hours that elapsed between his driving the car, with Mary Jo Kopechne inside, off the bridge on Chappaquiddick Island and his reporting the accident to the police. The conceit of the play is the visit of Ted Kennedy’s two dead brothers – Bobby and Jack –to help him do damage control. In the process we see the agonizing choices confronting the senator, as well as the dynamics of the Kennedy family, and the political zeitgeist of the time.

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

A:  I would want the theater to be more financially viable, so that playwrights, directors and actors could make a decent living devoting their time to it. Almost every other developed country in the world – as well as some underdeveloped ones – subsidizes theater as an art form that elevates peoples’ consciousness. In this country, it is largely an activity indulged in by artists as an act of philanthropy.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Early on, I liked Ionesco and Pirandello – for their cogent use of the absurd. These days I admire Alan Ayckbourn, for his unique comic voice: Tom Stoppard, for his all-around brilliance, and, for similar reasons, Donald Margulies, Christopher Durang and Terrence McNally.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that I am still thinking about days and weeks after I’ve left the theater. Sometimes for years, maybe decades. I can still remember vividly the first time I saw Mamet’s “American Buffalo” off Broadway (1977), with John Savage and Robert Duvall.

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

A:  Get a good day job.

Q:  Plugs, please.

A:  “Drama Queens From Hell” opens August 20th at the Odyssey Theatre and plays for six weekends, through 9/25. Details at: https://www.plays411.net/newsite/show/play_info.asp?show_id=4453 or 323 960-7787

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