Which Conversation?

Which conversation do you want to be part of?

I'm starting to think that's a pretty powerful question to ask yourself as a theater artist, because it shapes how you do everything else. The "why am I here" question...

In the beginning, the majority of my conversations were "how can we get noticed by these companies, and how can we get them to like us/want to work with us? how can we get agents?" Then: Which of these companies are ones I want to work with? Or: What companies within the city are doing work that interests me?

Local conversations. But then there are NATIONAL conversations about the state of the arts, politically, socially, in terms of how new work is cultivated, in terms of what the arts are or should be. There are the INTERNATIONAL conversations, where American or Western assumptions about arts are affirmed or upended. There are conversations that bridge the artistic and the political (Erik Ehn/Rwanda work), conversations that are about the arts and the kind of people they create (Clowning)...

There are the conversations about the cutting edge of the arts, there are the conversations that happen at new play festivals, in the pages of the New Yorker and the New York Times, on blogs like this one, there are the nuts-and-bolts conversations over cups of coffee about how to make one single play or scene its absolute strongest. There are post-show bitch sessions about why a show didn't work.

All this to say: I don't have to choose ONE conversation...I can be a part of many at once...but the kind of artist I am will be shaped by the conversations I have, and they, too, should be thoughtful, wide-reaching, attentive to detail... and I should be mindful that those other conversations are happening around me, whether or not I choose to participate in them.

Speech: Sobel's LMDA Acceptance

I'm afraid I can only post this as a link to the PDF, but Ed Sobel, Steppenwolf's Resident Dramaturg/play guru made a speech worth reading and remembering. A bit snarky, but well-aimed.

www.lmda.org/_attachments/3053714/SOBEL-%20Hayes%20Acceptance%20Speech%202007.pdf

Nuts and Bolts -- Monologues

Am often tempted to write monologues for my characters to help me get to know them -- "pre-writing," I guess. But what are the different KINDS of monologues, to be pedestrian about it?

1) I have a burning secret I need to tell you (See Masha Act 3 Three Sisters)
2) I have this one memory from way back which, when I tell you, will help you to understand me better (See Violet in the dinner scene in August:Osage County, when she talks about the Clawhammer)
3) You know, the thing about this other character we both know is / let me tell you the story that will help you understand this third character
4) Character A tells Character B what Character B's problem is
5) Character A tells Character B what happened to Character A today...and we find out it relates, somehow to the events of the play and how they will unfold
6) "Let me tell you how the world works, and how I know it"
7) Let me tell you a joke or a funny story (The Clean House)
8) The equivalent of an "I wanna" song in a musical -- this is everything I want, layed out for you
9) I am going to nervously go on about something esoteric that has nothing to do with what is happening between us at the moment, but which will reveal aspects of my character like what books or movies I enjoy, and which the playwright will probably use to draw some artful parallels to what will be happening in the play, unbenownst to the characters (See half of what Matt says in Red Light Winter)
10) Character A tells Character B a secret about Character C which Character C wouldn't tell of his or her own accord (See Davis talking about Matt's Giardia in Red Light Winter)
11) The Grand Exposition of everything that has happened to this point, so that the play can continue (see Olga, Act 1, Three Sisters)

What else? What are the other standard KINDS of monologues, or what are ways that we can use monologues in our work? Help.

Different Day, Same Lesson

Just spoke with a favorite friend about a scary but ultimately good experience he had on his most recent project.

Week before tech. The person who hires you has just seen your run-through, calls you into his office, and says "it isn't working. Fix it." You think it through, and realize that in trying to fit the play to your perception of the aesthetic of the institution by which you've been hired, you have moved away from your OWN aesthetic -- which is, not coincidentally, probably why you were hired in the first place. Gulp.

What do you do? If you're my brilliant, brilliant friend, you throw cold water on your face, walk into your rehearsal hall 15 minutes later, tell your stage manager "follow me" and then walk the stage saying "cut this. cut this. cut this and this." And it works out. It might not work out, but in this case it does.

The lesson? Again, I quote (probably mis-quote) Herr Dietz:

"The material is not fragile. YOU may be fragile. But the material is not fragile."

Things You Learn Other Places

Was working today on a new piece and how to shape it, thinking about organizing principles and asking myself "what's my aesthetic?/do I have one?"

Thought about another set of tools that I use often onstage as an actor and how they might translate into my work as an actor. Yes, the oft-used, oft-misused Viewpoints.

Anyway. Here are a series of elements that might be useful to keep in mind when playing with your play.

Architecture -- what are the architectural elements of the space? This could mean a lot of things -- what kind of theater do you envision for the play? What would be the architectural elements of imagined space? What kind of set would best allow you to tell your story?
Spatial relationships -- between characters, between set elements, between actors and audience, etc,
Topography -- what kind of floor patterns can people make through the space?
Shape -- The shape of lights, space, actors themselves, the shapes actors make with their bodies, the shapes actors make together with their bodies...
Gesture -- what is the physical language you imagine in your play...and how does that translate to/work with/counterpoint the play's verbal language? Think both behavioral and psychological gesture. Does the play live in realism? Something more heightened? A ping-pong between the two?
Repetition -- repetition of words, of scenes, of images, of themes, elements, music, light, arguments, jokes. Repetition WITHIN the play of these things, or borrowing from stories, plots, cliches, fairy tales that are shared within a particular culture (maybe your own, maybe borrowing from others) to call to mind other things
Duration -- how long does a scene last? A moment? The play? The intermission?
Tempo -- Fast, slow, languid, choppy, hyper, still, super-fast etc.
Kinesthetic Response -- What happens in response to something else? Think of Dominos, think of reactions, think of football plays.

Another Playwriting Blog

I've gotten my first responses to my notebook! Thanks to those with interest. David Alan Moore, a playwright friend of mine in Chicago, has said I can post his blog address here. It is www.davidalanmoore.wordpress.com.

Check it out for more thoughts on playwriting.

Things Stage does better than other mediums

1. Simultaneity. Simultaneity works better on stage than on film. That could be of worlds, but it can also just mean that you can watch two people reacting to something more easily onstage...because the audience can direct their focus as they choose.
2. Inability to escape. On stage, you are two people trapped in a room. With fifteen or five hundred or however many people are in your theater. The stage does the LONG ARC of a scene better than other media.
3. "Magic with the wires showing" (to steal from Kushner) -- you can see the magic, and the trick, at the same time onstage (ie having someone "fly" on visible wires or by swinging them around on a ladder. Which ties into:
4. Conjuring (to steal from Steven Dietz). Steven says "Film shows...theater conjures" Theater is still the storyteller's great medium. You can sit a person on stage and listen to them talk for three hours and still have had a brilliant night at the theater, where you've gone through thirty years and six countries, without even necessarily changing a light cue.

To be continued...

On "August: Osage County"

Or: just when you were feeling safe in your blanket statements...

So I just saw "August: Osage County," Tracy Letts's new play, which is receiving its world premiere at Steppenwolf right now.

And it overturned all the things I've been saying about what I find interesting on stage.

I think I've spent a lot of this year getting VERY excited about plays that play with perception by playing with "what is reality" -- having evil garden gnomes appear mid-act (Devil Baby), having split-second transitions between places, playing with technology onstage, having actors play multiple characters, filling the place with ghosts, having three worlds onstage at the same time...I was beginning to feel like "three people in a room" was all well and good, but simplistic. I was also ready to state categorically that no play should go longer than about 90 minutes.

Enter "August: Osage County" in the form of a free ticket from my friend Paul. Three and a half hours. Two intermissions. A single set, built like a dollhouse, showing a whole family home. A family drama, where the trick is that nobody gets to leave the room. And it FLEW by. I mean, I was on the edge of my seat for three hours.

Granted, part of this was the acting. This was the Steppenwolf ensemble at their finest, all but chewing the furniture, playing characters who clearly sat close to their own hearts (small-town people of the Plains states). But you know what? Even some of that has to go to Tracy, who made a point of writing this play to actors he knows, to damned fine actors he knows. And who let the play be autobiographical, and who let the play break all the assumptions about what is "innovative" or "interesting" or "theatrical" that we throw around. This was a damned fine play.

A Few Words from Adrien-Alice Hansel

This is reproduced from the Actors Theater of Louisville website. It struck me and I wanted to remember it.

Adrien-Alice Hansel has been the literary manager at Actors Theatre since March 2004. This piece originally appeared in Inside Actors in September 2005.

As I write in early August, the literary office is busily reading away getting ready for Humana 2006. Since the first Great American Play Festival in 1976 (renamed Humana Festival of New American Plays two years later), the Actors Theatre literary office has read in excess of 200,000 plays. These days we read roughly 700 full-length plays a year. The literary staff hunt high and low for the best plays: we attend readings all over the country, chat up agents, e-mail playwrights we’re interested in and read hundreds of ten-page samples of plays by writers who are new to us. Once we’ve read the plays, we write up an evaluation, and decide whether to return the play — encouraging the writers of compelling pieces to continue to send us their work — or to send it on to another reader. We pass the promising pieces around the theatre, where they’re read and discussed several more times, until we’ve whittled our list down to the five plays you’ll see this spring.

So. When I sit down with a play, what am I looking for? It’s a tricky proposition, because the writer has spent some real time making decisions about his or her characters, the way the story unfolds, the interplay between setting, theme and plot, where I’ll only spend an hour and a half with it. This is my chance to enter a world and to make sure that I see it as it could be on stage.

Here are my ground rules:

Assume the play is perfect. Try to enter the play on its own terms. A good play, I’ve found, will teach me how to read it. Time may unfold in a peculiar way, or characters may use language differently, but a good play will let the rules of its world unfold.

So, what works? When I write up my evaluations, the first thing I address is what I loved (or even liked) about the piece — the characters are impossibly charming, I was stunned by the language, the plot kept unfolding in intriguing ways.

And how does it work? Then I step back and take a look at how the whole play fits together: what’s the basic question that the playwright is examining? How do the characters, plot, language and style of the play feed into that question? What’s the playwright trying to do?

Sometimes, the things that don’t seem to fit are the best clues to what the playwright is trying to get at. Why does Queen Victoria suddenly show up in the middle of a contemporary family drama? Why does time run backwards in the first act? Crack that, and suddenly the universe opens up. Ignore it, or judge it, before considering it and you’ll never get inside the play.

Remembering the play is perfectly itself, what questions am I left with? Then I assume that I’m wrong about everything I don’t understand: if the characters feel thin to me, why might the writer choose to do that? Is the writer commenting on the world of these characters? Does something else in the play — the language or the conflict — support this new view? How might this play be working that I don’t expect?

Then, make a judgment. Having identified what the play is setting out to do, how well does it do it? And then, how interesting is its ambition? Is it a solid play I don’t respond to? A not-quite successful play that I’m head over heels for? Does it get my blood pumping? Am I thinking about it a few days later? Is there something unavoidably true here?