This is the last Hoffman article post, I promise

From Hoffman:

“In my mid-20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

So often, I feel like I'm trying to find the formula for writing a good play -- the set of fail-safe rules that will allow me to emerge from every trip to the laptop with a shining, successful play. And of course, I know this isn't how it works...but if you're one of those people who, as a student, figured out the formula for getting straight As and then got them, it can be very disconcerting to realize that there's no one way to guarantee the result you want. But commitment, I can do.

On the Willful Rearrangement of Molecules

Great article on Phillip Seymour Hoffman in NYT magazine this week. I sometimes forget how deep his roots are in theater...it's so lovely to see an actor of his stature with the commitment to new work that he has. There was this quote on Hoffman from Mike Nichols:

“I don’t know how he does it. Again and again, he can truly become someone I’ve not seen before but can still instantly recognize. Sometimes Phil loses some weight, and he may dye his hair but, really, it’s just the same Phil, and yet, he’s never the same person from part to part. Last year, he did three films ...and in each one he was a distinct and entirely different human. It’s that humanity that is so striking — when you watch Phil work, his entire constitution seems to change. He may look like Phil, but there’s something different in his eyes. And that means he’s reconstituted himself from within, willfully rearranging his molecules to become another human being.”

I liked the reminder that good actors can do this...I know that there are a lot of playwrights whose intention isn't, necessarily, to write "great parts for actors..." but a big reason I write is to TRY to write roles worthy of this kind of molecular gymnastics.

On Variety

I'm acting in a play right now, Adam Rapp's Red Light Winter. It's a challenge, but a great opportunity to go "back to the well" -- acting's where I started, and always has plenty to teach me.

This particular acting project has a lot of challenges. We're a group with plenty of history between us, doing a play that asks us to go to some tough places, very close to home. And we're being asked to stage some very intimate moments. I had a long talk with my roommate last night about theater as a sacred space, and sex/lovemaking as a sacred space...they're both sacred, but different kinds of sacred (by about five degrees)...so what does it mean when we're asked to bring those spaces together? How do you fully invest in one without somehow blaspheming the other? I don't know, yet. But I talk a lot about how theater exists on the bodies and in the breath of the actors, audience...this time I'm really putting my money, body, breath where my mouth is. It's a reminder of how hard that is, what I really ask of actors in some of the plays I write or want to write.

Nutshell: I maintain that it is very, very important for playwrights to step out from behind their laptops on occasion and put their bodies and hearts at the middle of the playmaking process.

On Administrations, and working (within and around) the system

Just finished the 14th official-overhaul-rewrite of "Summer People." I need to hear it aloud and tweak it before it can be sent out the door...this month marks two years that I've been working on this one play.

Granted, there have been two-and-a-half plays in the meantime, and each has taught me plenty. Still, when I think back to the original "gee, I think I'll do a writing exercise" that got the "Summer People" ball rolling, I have a hard time recognizing that writer.

This has been the semester, here, where I've started to have growing pains. I still absolutely want feedback on my work from my mentors, and I'm still learning a tremendous amount by teaching...but some of my classes have frustrated me. I've started to resent the time they take away from writing, rewriting, talking things through with collaborators. I'm hoping this is just a sign that my time here is almost finished, and that I have taken/given what I need to. I think it's more a referendum on that than the classes or teachers per se, whom I've liked.

It's also true that the longer I'm here, the more I'm in production rather than simply writing, the more aware I am of the politics at work around me. Now, this can be a good thing...I'm aware of them, so can behave accordingly, so can move through the systems, official and unofficial, with more ease and success than I could initially. But it also makes me more aware of, and wary of, the politics that are at work within any institution, be it educational, arts-related, or a for-profit business. That, too, has been part of my education here. For better or worse. I don't like going back to the lessons of Macchiavelli to get things done. But I will if I have to, with the best of intentions. Which is a bummer.

From No Passport...

Oct 31, 2008
by Geoff McMaster
Esteemed writers weigh 'what matters' in their work
Nobel laureate Derek WalcottEdmonton - Nobel laureate Derek Walcott has a message for young artists: if you're looking for applause or recognition, you may be in the wrong business.
"The really great artist works on in a private silence that does not need the accommodation of applause," said the celebrated Caribbean poet, playwright and visual artist. "That is the only message I can give the young."
At a Faculty of Arts panel discussion, Thursday, called Writing: What Matters, Walcott lamented the competitive spirit in contemporary cultural production, arguing that it has very little to do with being an artist.
"I believe we have come to the point where we are all measured as artists by these various criteria that really have nothing to do with the craft that you practise. In the West, success is measured by the amount of money you make. I'm increasingly disturbed by this, because it makes the craft competition, and it makes it financial competition or career competition, and it's disturbing that the young have to be fed this.
"What is the answer to the artist who craves recognition or applause for his or her work? It may be nothing. It may be simply what that artist contains in him or her self."
One of the most accomplished literary figures of modern times, Walcott is on campus to participate in the Great Minds, Nobel Ideas program, bringing Nobel laureates to the U of A from the Caribbean and Africa. He is the first Nobel winner to visit the U of A as part of the program.
Walcott explained that he grew up in St. Lucia, "a very, very small, obscure, semi-literate island in the Caribbean," and was not the least bit embarrassed by it. Since it was far from the world's cultural centres, he was able to resist assumptions of the dominant esthetic, which can be trite and suffocating, he said, resulting in the production of what he calls "bright trash."
If the standard of the centre were the only possible measure, "you would not have (Gabriel Garcia) Marquez writing about his little town in Colombia," he said. "You would not have (William) Faulkner writing about an absolutely obscure hamlet in Mississippi."
The unstated bias of mainstream culture is that nothing of value can come from a "backward origin, that you can't have genius in obscure places," said Walcott.
But nothing could be further from the truth, he said. "Genius is found in the most contradictory places...You cannot predict who will speak for their country."
Walcott also admitted that he was "a little horrified" to learn of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's dismissive view of the arts during the recent election campaign. "It's profoundly scary when the leader of a country can be so ridiculous in terms of thinking of his artists as people who are not needed.
"People who presume to speak for the common man demean him - they do not help him. It's insulting to the ordinary person to be told, 'we'll create an art that will get down to your level.'"
Also on the panel were U of A writer-in-residence Lynn Coady, playwright-in-residence Kevin Kerr and Edmonton's writer-in-exile Rita Espeschit. All spent time attacking Harper for his remarks on the arts, but they also discussed what makes their work worth doing.
Coady, for instance, elaborated on Walcott's description of that lonely, silent place where the artist dwells and why it's important to seek it out.
"Something I struggle with more and more these days is the notion that every time I sit down to write a new novel, I'm making a choice to distance myself even further from normal life as most people know it," said Coady. "I'm choosing to embark on a project that will keep me indoors and alone for large swaths of time, while my bank account dwindles.
"So why does writing that novel matter so much, to the extent that I would put myself off from a world I desperately want to connect and engage with? I guess the paradox is I do it to accomplish the very thing it simultaneously prevents me from accomplishing - to connect and engage with the world. It's the best way I know how to do that."
Ending a two-week visit to the U of A, Walcott will teach a three-hour master class in poetry for graduate students on Saturday. He has also led master classes for undergraduate English and drama students.
The Writing: What Matters forum was hosted by the departments of english and film studies, drama and political science. A podcast and audio recording will be made available by the Arts Resource Centre for teaching and learning purposes.

Directing Existing Work...

These were the guidelines Scott gave us for our final project in Directing Existing Work...but it's also a good list of "ways in" when given a script to direct...

Directing Existing Work – Final Project Guidelines. Use what’s useful.

1. First response: What was your initial response to this play/script? Gut-level. Love it? Hate it? Indifferent? Why? What did it do or not do for you? What specifically engaged you—viscerally, intellectually, emotionally, Did you see images? Hear music? Did you easily visualize it in your mind, see it clearly on stage in any way? Where did it live in your imagination as you read it or saw it? What kind of emotional journey does the play evoke for you. What moods and tonalities does this play suggest to you?

2. Summarize the story briefly, defining it in terms of its key events.

3. Text: theme, language and structure: What kind of play is it? Can you characterize it by genre or not? Is it a translation or adaptation? What themes does it examine? What broad questions does it raise? In what ways are its time and setting operative? What sort of reality does it suggest? What’s the nature of its language? Its musicality? In what ways is language operative? How are character voices differentiated? (as in Shakespeare, for example: prose vs verse) Is the language lyrical? Heightened? Stylized? How “self-conscious” is the language (as in Marisol, where the diction always implies a kind of awareness of itself and thereby plays a critical role in establishing the the play’s fractured universe). What is the play’s sense of urgency?

What is the play’s central event? How is it introduced, developed, defined? As with a scene, is there a significant initiating event or action? A series of rising actions? Complications, turning point? Are these of sufficient urgency to compel a clear trajectory of action (or story line) for each character? Consider the ways structure works to generate and support the emotional arc. Break down the scenes or components of the play and visualize what must happen as a series of events. If each event has a title, can you tell the story by listing the events in sequence? This will help you to see the play as a framework of actions, and determine how it must move in space or on stage. This leads to crucial storytelling awareness, and is also a good step in developing a ground plan and other basic scenic ideas.

4. Character breakdown. 1) Describe each character as you see her/him imaginatively : physical characteristics, behaviors, etc. Get all the adjectives out of your system, and then 2) describe each character by how she/he behaves: Pick a scene or episode that you think is defining for each character, and describe what the character does. State the facts in the simplest way you can. By defining character through a paradigm of action, you invited the kind of inference that is open-ended and useful (to an actor, a casting person, etc) rather than asking to see certain emotional qualities played or imitated. This process also gives you a jump into a framework of objectives and actions.

5. Audition sides: Choose one or two scenes for each character. Will you be looking for a range of behavior? Then choose accordingly. Choose acive, climactic scenes with strong events and clear, playable objectives. How do you see the character’s essential demeanor? Can you find an audition scene that will elicit that, and then another that will ask the actor to make more urgent choices? Think about scenes with contrasting objectives rather than different emotional qualities. What will you want to see in a first audition vs a callback?



6. RESEARCH
With what aspect of the play are you inclined to begin your research? Its setting? Its time? Its literal subject? (i.e. marriage, liberation, infanticide, war, etc.) Are you drawn first to critical texts? To visual imagery? Music? Does the play exist in a natural world, a city, a dreamed world, a historical world? What would it look like? Can you Trust what engages you, let the research lead you, but ask at some point in the proceedings, preferably before you have become completely overwhelmed, if you see any relationships among the items you are most drawn to? Do they begin to suggest patterns of ideas, thoughts, etc? Do they spring discoveries, “eureka” moments? Do they propel you back to the text in any way? Do they begin to arrange themselves, juxtapose themselves? If they don’t, you are having a good time anyway; maybe go back to the text for more inspiration. Show this stuff to a designer, or an empathic relative. Better still, take a nap, listen to some music or clean your house. Hokey as it sounds, trust your unconscious; it’s all in there, and when you least expect it something will emerge. Even if not, you have a lot of stuff to share. And at least you’ve begun the process of elimination. You guys know how to do this stuff. Think about kinds of spaces, sounds, light, movement, dress . . .

7. DESIGN
Depending on your proclivities, you may or may not want to take a stab at developing rough designs for your projects. You might want to track one character’s clothes, for example; or arrange a series of images of different spaces, or even moods, or examples of light or music, in ways that suggest a sequence determined by the play (not literal images of the play). For our purposes, I am less interested in ideas about specific sets, costumes or lights than in how you begin to pull the research together to suggest a world of spaces, moods, tones and relative values that can guide you and form a basis for discussions with all your collaborators.

8. SUMMARY: Look at where you started. Look at where you are after all this. How has your thinking developed? Is your gut response to the play enhanced? Altered? Do you still want to work on it sometime? What’s the next step?

Understanding: Art and Craft

We read an interesting article today in Kirk Lynn's class, "Who's Afraid of the Avant-Garde." The "garde" in this case, was the garde of classical music.

There was one passage that stuck out to me in the article; the author talked about "the hatred for an art that one does not understand -- or rather, for an art that one is UNWILLING to understand."

Forgive me for quoting out of context, and I DO suggest reading the whole article, if you can find it. But this fragment made me itch, and it was the focus of a whole morning of mulling. It seemed to me like the author was saying "with enough time and effort, an viewer/audience member should always be able to understand any piece of art...the involved effort might be herculean, but understanding is always possible."

It felt like the author was denying me permission to NEVER understand something.

Which, okay, I understand some art should and does require a LOT of effort on the part of receiver, and that I shouldn't "shut down" in the face of such effort.

But isn't it also possible that some things might be BEYOND our understanding? Isn't it also possible that part of what art does is express or make manifest or at least point to something that is BIGGER than our understanding?

So I circle back to my secretly strong belief in God. I'm not a churchgoer...my God is less burning bush, more force that exists within and between people. And theater -- a living art that happens on the bodies and in the minds and of people sharing time and space and breath -- theater is my church.

If that's true, then I hope there's always a part of every performance that is bigger and beyond what can be "understood." If you can understand it, you can take it apart and put it back together and measure it and claim it and reduce it to the sum of its parts. And yes, maybe you can still APPRECIATE it. But you're taking the God out of it. The God part is the slippery part, the part you can't quite nail down, the part you strain toward, the part you wonder at, the part that frustrates, uplifts, teaches, and flays you all at once.

Of course, when you're spending your days in a classroom, you get caught up in the "understanding." That's what we're here for; to break things down to its components, to take apart the engine so we know how to build it. In a very real (and very good) way, these three years are about CRAFT, not art. These three years are about the "how."

But the Art is the Why. Lose that, and you're lost.

So I respectfully insist on my right to try, and sometimes FAIL, to understand art.

Milton Glaser on Making Art

Many, many thanks to Luke Leonard for sharing this in our "Directing Existing Work" class with Scott Kanoff. You can follow the full link to Milton Glaser's remarks here...and they're absolutely worth reading in their entirety:

http://voiceconference.aiga.org/transcripts/presentations/milton_glaser.pdf

But HERE are the ten things he's learned, in a nutshell, at least as applicable to Life as to Art:
1. You can only work for people you like.
2. If you have a choice never have a job.
3. Some people are toxic; avoid them.
4. Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5. Less is not necessarily more: 'just enough' is more.
6. Style is not to be trusted. Anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist.
7. How you live changes your brain.
8. Doubt is better than certainty.
9. Solving the problem is more important than being right.
10. Tell the truth.

To Think About When Getting Notes

Is it more helpful for you to get written notes?
Or notes as part of a conversation?

At which point in your process, or from whom, does either of those make the most sense FOR YOU and what you need to do?

Your Own First Dramaturg

I don't know if a playwright is necessarily his or her own BEST dramaturg. But a playwright is always the FIRST person to see the play, and probably the FIRST dramaturg, no? And certainly a person who can/should have a set of dramaturgical PRACTICES or TACTICS in her arsenal, in order to communicate with the world about what she (and the play) are trying to do.

Yes?

Anyway. What follows is a list of questions we generated today in my "New Play Dramaturgy" class, with the inimitable Liz Engleman (who is awesome; if you ever have the opportunity to meet or work with her, run screaming toward it).

QUESTIONS A DRAMATURG CAN ASK A PLAYWRIGHT AT THE FIRST MEETING
What does this play dream of?
Where are you (the playwright) in the process of writing this play (what draft, etc)?
Are there other drafts I can or should see?
What have you worked on in each draft? What was your goal with each draft?
What can you tell me about the original idea for this play?
How do you want your audience to feel?
What are you worried about with this play (or, as another friend says, "what about this play makes you want to vomit in your own mouth?" ew, I know)?
What research have you done already?
Is there anything I should read/listen to/look at to better understand this play and where you're coming from with it?
What questions do you still have regarding the play?
What's still missing?
What are you excited about in this play/draft?
Whose story is it? Who's the main character, in your mind?
What conversation are you having (or hoping to have) with your audience?
To what end? Ie what are you trying to say, what's your message?
Who's the ideal audience for this play, in your mind?
What are you planning for your next draft(s)?
How can I best be of use to you in this process?
What relationship have you had with dramaturgs in the past?

QUESTIONS A DRAMATURG CAN ASK A DIRECTOR AT FIRST MEETING
How do you see the director-dramaturg relationship? How can I help?
What visual images do you have in mind with this play?
Why THIS play NOW?
What's the story of this play to you?
What relationship do you have/want with the playwright(s)?
What excites you/scares you about this play?
What do you want to uncover or examine with this production?
What's your way into the play?
Can you talk about the world of the play?
What don't you need/want from a dramaturg?

INSTITUTIONAL DRAMATURGY QUESTIONS (FOR THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR)
How do you see this play relating to the company's mission and/or season?
What conversation do you want to have/do you want this play to have with the audience, and how can I help to further that conversation?
What kind of institutional structure do you have or envision to support that conversation?
What excites you/scares you about this play?
If this play doesn't change at all, are you still excited about it? What are your expectations for change? What are the dealbreakers?
What questions do you still have about the play?
How would you describe this play to your company, your audience, a member of your board?

More Questions from Dramaturgs

TWO amazing dramaturgs visiting UT in two weeks.
Liz Engleman this week, blowing our minds.

Three Questions:
What is it
Why do it
How to do it.

I.E. WHY THIS PLAY AT THIS TIME IN THIS WAY.

A question for dramaturgs, yes, but also for playwrights.

Young Jean Lee and the "dragon play"

Young Jean Lee wrote this incredible, gutsy, crazy, smart, balls-to-the-walls play that we all read in Kirk Lynn's class about two weeks back. It absolutely took on being Korean-American, race, racism, self-inflicted racism...it was a "minority issues" play.

Kirk talked to her about it...apparently she decided to write it by asking herself "what's the one play I would absolutely NEVER want to write?

Then she wrote it.

The lesson? Maybe there's something to tackling the thing you absolutely DON'T want to tackle, rather than the thing you're dying to tackle. What do you have to say about the thing about which you think you have nothing to say?

Or maybe it only worked for her because she's crazy and brilliant.

Question --

Please finish the following statement:

"Theater would be better if it were more like..."

Corresponding Challenge.

Okay, now go do that.

Good Enough

I changed the ending to Summer People. With two performances to go. On a Friday night. About two hours before the show. It involved the director sending a frantic, formal, pleading email to our faculty and designers. It involved getting a light designer to run from teching an opera to the theater building. It involved no more than 15 minutes of actual rehearsal to get it right.

It was a stress on all of us who have been dedicated to making this production go up. It isn't how anyone, least of all me, would CHOOSE to revise.

And it made a world of difference in the story-telling. The actors felt it. The stage manager felt it. The director felt it. At least 350 audience members are now going to get an ending that comes "that much" closer to being the ending the play needs. I mean, we could have let it stand. It was good enough. But --

Is there really a "good enough?" "Good Enough" in construction leaves you with a leaky roof. In finance leaves you with a bailout and a foreclosed mortgage. In engineering leaves you with a broken bridge. I have thought I was "done" with this play at least three times now. Each time, for one reason or another, I've gone back to the well and found things, some big, some small, that can help to tell this story better. After meeting with Michael Dixon, I know there's more ahead. And yes, at this point, more of my focus is on the projects coming down the pike. But we're in this for excellence, right?

I owe a lot of people a lot of brownies.

But it was so, so worth it.

10 Ways to be Creative

As defined by Michael Bigelow Dixon. Yeah, there are several posts now dedicated to his wisdom. What can I say? He had some interesting insights, and he had LISTS, which I love.

His suggestion: To identify which of these you’re good at, and get better at them. To identify the ones you’re not as good at, and continue to work on them.
1. Virtuosity (being better than everybody at one particular skill)
2. Interdisciplinarity (being good at bridging disciplines)
3. Associative
4. Reactionary (looking at things, saying “this is something that sucks,” and going from there
5. Observation/Insight
6. Altered State
7. Invention
8. Discovery
9. Intuit
10. Distortion

Simply Put...

A reminder to post above your computer, or wherever you write:
Clarify. Focus. Broaden. Deepen.

Three Questions to Ask Yourself

As you make theater, and move through the world…from Michael Bigelow Dixon

1. What’s wrong with theater? What makes you mad about American Theater?
2. What do Artists now want and need? What do you want and need?
3. What do you really care about in Life?

The point, of course, is not simply to ask the questions, but to let your answers to those questions guide your actions in your career, in your life.

By the way, I've been testing these over the last week - you can get to know someone, and start a very interesting conversation, by asking ANYONE to substitute their field of choice in for "American Theater" - either their profession, or "American Politics" or "Environmental Policy" or what have you. You can learn a lot, fast.

The Five Steps to the Creative Process

As defined by dramaturg Michael Bigelow Dixon
1. Ideas - the "wouldn't this be cool" stage
2. Selection - the "this idea has more mileage than that one" stage
3. Implementation - the "let's break this down and get it done" stage
4. Finesse - the "that was a great first draft, but how do we refine and improve it" stage
5. Energize/Articulation - the "let me tell you about this fabulous thing I made, don't you want it too?" stage

What are you Trying To Say?

I had a good meeting today with Michael Bigelow Dixon, a rock star in the new play world. We were talking about "Summer People," which has just opened at UT.

He had a lot of great things to say. We talked, especially, about the end of the play, which still isn't working. Now, there are probably some technical reasons for this, but the MAJOR one is all me.

It's that old question: "what's your message?"

Now, all along with this play, I've been bridling at people's assumptions about the POLITICAL message they're reading into the play (not everyone). But the fact is, when you ask me what the play's about, I'll tell you about plot, I'll tell you about lots of themes, and I'll evade the question.

Michael's point is (I think) that, in addition to telling a story, a play is about communication. So you better be trying to communicate something. Or maybe you're just wasting oxygen.

Later, he quoted an Isherwood review of a new play:

" [the play] does not deepen as it progresses toward a solution to the mystery at its heart. On the contrary, it flattens and stalls as theories keep emerging. Eventually you have to conclude that [the playwright] himself has not satisfactorily worked out its meaning."

Put another way: If you don't know what you're trying to say, how will you know if you've succeeded in saying it?"

5 Things (for directors)

I was talking to the fabulous Steve Moulds the other night, one of our latest additions to the playwriting program, about directing.  He gives a workshop on it, that is "five things to think about as a director."  They're listed below.  Thanks, Steve!

1.  Look for contrasts in the script.  These contrasts generally point to the main issues at hand, and being mindful of them energizes things.

2.  Pay attention to character diction.  Rhythm, repetition, etc.  Especially helpful if the play doesn't tell you much about a character, or if you have multiple members of an ensemble you have to draw distinctions between.

3.  Look for explicit clues from the playwright.  Simple, really.  If the playwright took the time to point something out, pay attention to it...good for directors who think it's their duty to ignore stage directions...

4.  Come up with your provocative questions.  What are the questions the script leaves open to interpretation?  Pose these to your creative team -- don't try to answer them yourself.  Coming up with answers together can unite an ensemble.

5.  Find a way to tell the story of the play through an overarching metaphor.  Nothing too rigid - the play wants to tell its own story.  But this can be useful for designers trying to figure out what this particular production is focused on.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

...I don't know why this is resonating so much today. It's about why we make art, among many other things.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean bule air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

No Means Yes

Elaine Stritch came to speak to the UT students this week.

Yeah. Elaine Stritch. The woman from the original broadway production of "Bus Stop," the original Lady Who Lunched. I mean, wow. The woman was 81, wore short shorts and a sailor hat, milked her audience for all they were worth, did a little number for us. With an economy that age and 65 years onstage have earned her. I was smiling so hard I had tears running down my face.

She did a Q&A. Which is when Scott Kanoff asked about "Company," asked "did you know when you started it that it would change the shape of musical theater?" To which she replied "you betcha."

She told us that she lived at 79th or so at the time, that the rehearsal space for the show was down on 18th. She told us she moved down to the Chelsea Hotel for the duration of the rehearsal period. That she wanted, NEEDED "a little room with a loo, fresh clean white sheets every day, to be able to walk a block to rehearsal, and nothing, nothing, nothing else. A clean slate, no distractions." That the play demanded that, that she just KNEW she needed that in order to do the show.

I spent the rest of her Q&A fixated on the image of that clean little hotel room.

Right after her talk, I met with my collaborators on the Psyche Project. One so tired after three days of school he could hardly sit up. One about to take on what will be the role of her life, I think, after just finishing a big old musical. One scrambling to graduate in December. One about to pull an all-nighter, the first of many. One juggling two shows, a husband and a toddler. We all said "Yes, And" to trying to pull off Psyche...then pulled out our calendars. "Yes, And" instantly turned to "Crap, When?" As in, "Crap, WHEN do we have more than two hours of free time in common over the next three months." As in "Crap, WHEN is our festival proposal due?" As in "Crap, When did you say you needed my revision suggestions? When is Winter Break? When do my three other shows start rehearsing?"

Not long ago, I put up a post that celebrated the idea of saying "Yes" to what life puts in your path.

I sat there with my calendar open, trying to "rally the troops," and myself, around this project, and I thought of Elaine's hotel room. She walked away from her life, from her calendar, from her "Yes, Ands" to embrace white sheets, blank walls, one project that was worth her giving over to it.

Maybe sometimes you have to say "No" to say "Yes." Have to say "Yes, this project means something to me...it matters that I get it right, that I give it my best energy, that I come to it having slept, eaten, made my bed, kissed my lover, PREPARED myself physically, mentally, emotionally to give everything over to it, to give it my best self. And so I say 'No' to it, FOR NOW AT LEAST, because right now, I cannot do that."

The best art should require your whole self, shouldn't it? If you're not giving over to it, what ARE you doing?

All this is not to say that you shouldn't say "Yes" to everything. Just to acknowledge that "Yes" is sometimes pronounced differently.

"Writers Write" but WORKING playwrights also...

...research contests, residencies, theatres that might do their work.
...update their bios.
...write synopsis for their existing work.
...submit their work to contests, residencies, etc.
...keep records of where they have submitted their work.
...correspond with friends and acquaintances in the business.
...keep up on the news, both theater-related and otherwise.
...catch up on theater-related blogs and websites.
...outline/take notes/daydream on OTHER things they may write.
...read and respond to any work their colleagues have sent.
...read plays or books that have been recommended as pertinent to the projects they have in mid-stream.
...go see theater, movies, dance, art exhibits.
...go on walks to clear their heads.
...re-read their work WITHOUT a pen in hand.
...gather together friends to hear their work aloud.

A Friendly Reminder on a day when I couldn't concentrate on a rewrite.

Questions About How You Work / Rant

One of my goals for this year is to pay attention/articulate a system for how I *tend* to do my best writing. Why? Because back in the big, scary world, there will be a lot of people asking me to do things other than write (ahem, earn a living, ahem, be in a relationship, I hope).

Every book on writing seems to exhort that you find "what works best" for you in terms of when/where/how you write. I'd like to unpack that.

1. How do you work best in the GATHERING INFORMATION stage of writing? Do you research at all? Do you check a million books out of the library? Freewrite? Draw? Make collages? Find pictures that remind you of your characters? Are you incredibly focused and diligent about doing research, or dreamier? How long do you spend researching? How long do you sit on your research before moving to the next stage? How much does it vary, project to project?

2. How do you work best in the PLANNING STAGES? Do you do a lot of pre-writing, where you're writing monologues or scenes or character bios or "letters from your character" or any of those random exercises we pick up along the way? All of the above? None of the above? Are you an OUTLINER, who has to have a roadmap before you really get going? Do you make a million stops and starts before you really get going? Is language your way in? Image? Plot?

3. How do you do your best FIRST DRAFTS? Are you a "write every morning" person? An obsessive notebook-scribbler (you know who you are)? Can you write anywhere and everywhere or are there particular places/times of day/rituals that have to happen for you to get out the FIRST DRAFT?

4. Do you do anything BETWEEN your first draft and your rewrite? Set it aside for a month? Work on a side project? Clean the house? Dive right in, red pen in hand? Host a reading so you can hear the thing out loud? Hand it off to a few trusted friends and wait for feedback? Some combination of these? What works best, or is it not consistent?

5. What conditions do you need for REWRITES? Me, I find that for first drafts I need to clear the decks and do an old-fashioned writing binge, but for rewrites, I can chip away a little bit each day. Do you need the same writing conditions for your rewriting as for your writing? My friend Michael does his marking-up on the stairmaster.

6. What do you LOOK FOR in your rewrites? Do you look for everything at once, or do you make multiple passes looking for different things? What things? This, item #6, is one that I plan to spent a lot of time on this year -- what's my "generic to-do list" for rewriting a play, and how does it change project to project.

7. Assume you've done some rewrites, and are in the position to do a WORKSHOP. What are you looking for from your actors, from your director and dramaturg, from each day or hour in the room?

That's all I got for now.

Your Screenplay Sucks

...is an absolutely TERRIBLE, CORNY name for a book...but I'm finding the book itself (by William M. Akers) to be pretty helpful. It takes the form of a list of 100 things to watch out for, in the outlining, writing, and rewriting of your screenplay. Here are a few highlights. And he goes into a lot more depth, so please, if this is at all useful, get the book. Some of these are drop-dead obvious, of course...but that's because we're good writers. Still, checklists help.

1. Never forget that a screenplay is, on one level, ACTOR BAIT.
2. Write something YOU really care about.
3. Write something ORIGINAL.
4. Communicate GENRE quickly and early.
5. Make sure you're telling a STORY, and aim for a happy ending, or at least some hope.
6. Have a good title (the man should take his own advice).
7. Your main Character should be ACTIVE, should have a well-defined and interesting PROBLEM, must be able to solve OWN problem.
8. Make sure your character TRANSFORMS over the screenplay. Remember that what your character WANTS may be different than what your character NEEDS.
9. Be very specific about your character. Know your character in detail.
10. Be very specific about PLACE.
11. We have to want your main character to WIN.
12. Your main character's opponent should be a PERSON (or embodied by a person...).
13. Your opponent should be an AGENT OF CHANGE in your character.
14. Your character is not a device. Don't have him or her do STUPID things to move the story forward.
15. Make sure there's TENSION, and that the tension ESCALATES.
16. Make sure there's some kind of TIME PRESSURE (not always, but in general).
17. Milk emotional moments.
18. Do a one-line outline (ie what each scene "does" in a line)
19. "Just when everything seems fine, it's not."
20. Do you have an A story and a B story? Do they intersect? Does B support A?
21. Take advantage of set-ups and pay-offs.
22. Bury exposition.
23. Every scene should (a) Advance the story (b) Increase dramatic tension and (c) tell something about characters.

I suspect that you could apply a lot of these to playwriting, without being dogmatic about it.

Saying Yes

Oh! I forgot. Tea with playwright. Stolen from Erik Ehn:
"For the first five years, say 'Yes' to everything."

Good career advice. He says the best he's gotten.
As in improv, and the inescapable "Yes, And"
As in "And Yes I said Yes I will Yes."
What would happen if you said yes to EVERYTHING to for five years?

What would it mean to live your life in the "Yes?" Like, I mean, permanently? Dude.

An (obvious) observation

The two big problems in NY seem to be MONEY and SPACE.
SPACE is expensive.
Actors, especially Equity actors, are also expensive.
The solution? When you're not talking Broadway?
To truncate both RUNS and REHEARSAL PROCESSES, because otherwise you go broke.
So the problems of money and space become a problem of TIME.

The problem: More than most plays, new work needs rehearsal time.
Playwrights aren't bringing tested material to the table.
The play needs time to change over the rehearsal process.
AND the actors need time to live and breathe within those changes.
It's not like it's Chekhov, which MAY be harder to wrap yourself around, but which PROBABLY you've been studying in acting classes since you first started acting.
With new work, you don't have a head start.

Add to that: You do a play in New York, you probably want people to come see it. You want it to build your career. Which probably means getting critics in, getting literary managers or directors in. Who then see work that hasn't had time to find itself.

There are ways around this. "Development Hell," for starters. Lots of table reads in your living room. Non-Equity Actors, who aren't bound by the same rules, and don't need to be paid the same way.

Or the OUT OF TOWN production that you move to New York.

Tea With a Post-Grad

The day before I left NYC, I met up with a gentleman who graduated from my program about three years ago. Mostly this was to find out how NYC has treated him, and how the first three years out have been for him. A chance to gain wisdom at the feet of an elder, if you will. We talked a bit about his experience of the program, and mine, talked about what he'd do differently, what has gone well for him. A few notes:

1. He interned at New Dramatists upon moving to NYC. It sounds like he met a lot of folks that way.
2. He did the Kennedy Center's two-week program. Sounds like he might have met even MORE people that way.
3. It sounds like MOST of the things he's been involved with have been through folks he's met. I hear this from more and more people, that most opportunities come from either (a) a CONTEST/juried festival or (b) through friends. But the people he's met aren't necessarily other playwrights; it's actors, directors, artistic directors, other folks.
4. He advises saving EVERY receipt. Tea with me -- a legitimate business expense (he was, after all, networking).
5. He had a lot of good things to say about Minneapolis.

A few interesting (to me) notes on how the program I'm in has changed since his time.

1. Sounds like my program/the faculty are, on the balance, more interested in STRUCTURE than they were during his tenure.
2. Sounds like there really HAS been a shift (or we are in the middle of a shift) toward a more collaborative model.
3. Sounds like the nuts-and-bolts of professional development for playwriting (as opposed to teaching) were as much (maybe more) neglected during his tenure as mine. Probably more, come to think of it.

Collaboration, Boot Camp Style (Bullet List)

I just got back from an amazing week. The long version I just posted. This is a list of conclusions drawn from it.

1. The People are Everything. It was partially luck and partially the foresight of Cari, Babs and Yari (Trillium Studios), but the group of people assembled in the Berkshires were smart, talented, easy-going and dedicated. Twelve people, seven days, (barely) two cabins, and not nearly enough sleep COULD have been a recipe for disaster. Instead, it was hard-working heaven on earth.
2. Isolation and Intensity. There are times in the life of an artist where the habit of a few hours of work every day on a project is the way to go. But there are other times, especially with collaboration, where you want folks to leave EVERYTHING at the door. We had NO cell phones, ONE landline, ONE barely-touched internet connection, NO town within walking distance, NO television, NO newspapers. We had each other, and the task at hand. The rhythm of our days was guided by work, and only work. And what we got done in a week (and the level at which we did it) was staggering. This isn't always possible, but it's clear to me that sometimes carving out five full days is better than carving out a month of Sundays.
3. Know Your Weak Spots, Play To Your Strengths. We had a lot of people in the room on this project...and we were doing something unusual in that we had TWO people directing the film. BUT one of those people is a film editor by day, the other a theater director. One worked with ALL the technical/visual aspects, the other with the actors. And they were in constant communication about where those things overlapped. Cari and I said, mid-week, that the thing about film directors is that they need a huge, divergent skill-set...a lot to ask of one person. In this case, we got that skill-set by using two people. So far, so good.
4. Know When To Speak Up, When to Shut Up. Okay, it's me, so I didn't always manage this one. But part of the week, for me, was the art of letting go, letting Marie and the actors find THEIR way through the words Erica and I had written for them. For the most part, I stayed on the sideline, and enjoyed what I was seeing. But sometimes I jumped in...and I knew I could...and I did it THROUGH Marie unless she gave me the go-ahead to go straight to an actor. The rest of the time, I got to just hang out with them, and tell them (truthfully) how fabulous they were.
5. Ask For What You Need. Assuming You Can Figure Out What You Need. One of the few "oops" moments of the week, for me, came late, when I realized that we could have made life easier for the actors if we'd given them a couple more full-script read-throughs TOGETHER and talked to them about the overall, underlying, "no matter what is going on, this is the bedrock of your relationship" tone of things. They got there anyway, but if we'd asked for a little more time up front, we would have saved a lot of time later.
6. If You Can Shoot In A Place That's Heaven On Earth, So Much The Better. 'Nuff said. :)

Collaboration, Boot Camp Style (narrative version)

I just got back from one of the most positive collaborative experiences I've ever had.

So often I find myself trying to pick apart why a performance, theater experience, relationship, collaboration, whatever DIDN'T quite feel right, DIDN'T come off in a way that felt ideal. So often, the lessons I learn are negative lessons. It's important, yes, to draw what wisdom you can from moments of discomfort or disappointment...but it's equally important, isn't it, to identify/celebrate the times when everything feels like it goes RIGHT.

Long Story Short:
My friend and director, Marie Brown (who is directing Summer People at UT this fall) emailed me and my dear friend Erica about a month ago. Said she had some filmmaker friends in Boston who wanted to shoot a 10-minute movie. They had a location, they had the people, they didn't have a script: could we write one?

She sent us a description of the location: an old lakefront cabin in the Berkshires. Some other spots around the tiny town of Monterey, Massachusetts.

Three days later, we sent her 10-page scripts. Her friends chose one. Erica and I both worked on rewrites for it. They assembled a crew. Marie held auditions in Boston. I (I kid you not) IM'ed with a Texas-based friend on Facebook, and convinced him to get on a plane.

Two weeks later, we assembled for nine days. We shot on the porch, we shot IN the lake, we hiked to the top of a mountain with all our equipment for a day of shooting. Marie's baby was onhand, along with her mother (at one point) her husband (at another) and her best friend. Cari, Babs, and Yari Wolinsky, the film's producers, kept everything running smoothly. Everyone chipped in ideas about everything. The movie had TWO directors, Marie and Yari, and they managed to get along marvelously. I was there for rewrites (Erica couldn't make it), and worked with the actors (mostly through Marie). I bunked with our lead actress. Half of us played extras in the movie at some point. We had our actress jump in and out of the lake approximately three hundred times over the course of the week. Nearly every time, we had to dry her (AND her costume) between takes. Mark, our actor, looked like a frickin' Hugo Boss ad in his suit...in the water, and in a tree.

We were up at dawn, we shot all day, we pitched in where we could, we ate fabulous meals, we lived in ridiculously close quarters (literally sleeping on set), we watched the sun set over the lake every night, we kayaked, we swam between takes, we held bounce boards up for hours in bathing suits and fleeces, knee-deep in lake water, we taught Marie's daughter new words, we skinny-dipped, we napped when we could, and we ended our evenings curled up on the porch.

Hard work.
Heaven.

I could go on an on about the people, on and on about the beautiful shots we got. Of course, now the hard work (months in the editing room for Yari) starts. But for me, the last week will go down in the memory books as one of the best I ever spent. It made me think that my dream (Plays, Babies, Table -- the new mantra) might, just might, be a feasible reality.

I really lucked out that I got dragged into it.
The GOAL is to be the kind of person who can create the time and space in which that kind of experience can happen.

The Round-Up So Far

Here's what I've seen so far in NYC, including a movie and a concert:
The Bacchae (Lincoln Center, with Alan Cumming & Nat'l Theatre of Scotland)
Tell Out My Soul (part of the SPF festival)
Boeing-Boeing on Broadway
a reading @ New Dramatists
Slavey @ Clubbed Thumb
Sunday in the Park With George on Broadway
Palace of the End @ Playwrights Horizons
Penalties and Interest @ Labyrinth Theater
Canary (a reading) @ Rattlestick
The Philharmonic in Central Park
High and Low, a Kurosawa movie

There have been some great performances in this set of plays. There has been some great writing. A few gorgeous sets, some great tech. Even, at The Bacchae last night, some honest-to-god pyrotechnics.

But pyrotechnics of the heart? Not so much.

I could turn this into a cranky post about "how do half these things get produced?" -- and yes, the thought has crossed my mind over the past couple of weeks. But after letting all these performances sink in, that's not the lesson.

The lesson is: Theater is frickin' HARD. Everything about it is hard. It's hard to write a really, really good story (be it traditional or experimental), it's hard to direct a play so that you're SUPPORTING and ELEVATING the story rather than miring down, it's hard to assemble a fantastic ensemble of equally skilled people who can work as a true ensemble and who are dedicated to telling that story, but who manage to make it seem effortless (who was it who said actors are "acrobats of the heart?" these days we need them to be straight-up acrobats too, half the time). It's hard to create a gorgeous design (costume, sets, lights, sound etc...) that supports the storytelling...and it's really, REALLY hard to do this on painfully small budget, over a punishingly short rehearsal period.

I'm surprised anybody ever manages to do it at all. It's a miracle, really.

And of course, the Broadway shows above weren't exactly strapped for cash (granted). And some of the more successful designs I saw were the most minimal (partially my own taste, likely). And I'm not saying plays should be let off the hook that fail on several counts...BUT.

It's important to know that what we're attempting to do, here, is not easy.
And that that only makes it more imperative that we give this thing all it deserves.
And if we're content to half-ass it, we should get off the stage.
Because when we do theater right, there's God in it.

On Finding a Home, Artistic and Otherwise

Home Is...
...where when you have to go, they have to take you in?
...where you hang your hat?
...where you keep your leftover thai takeout?
...where your cell phone bill is mailed?
...where you have Top Chef Tevo-ed?
...where you have to help with Box Office?
...where you and your collaborators go for beer?

Several friends of mine and I have been billing this summer as the one where we decide what to do next. "Next" being post-MFA. And by "what to do" we mean "where to go." And by "where to go" we mean "New York or Chicago?" We've been asking questions about production opportunities, advancement opportunities, networking opportunities, visibility, romance and heartache, cost of living, cold winters, public transportation, community, ability to have a real life, etc. etc.

And yes, we've got the ever-expanding mental list of pros and cons for each city. And no, neither city (NO city, despite those sweet nothings Los Angeles is whispering in your ear, Norma Jean) is gonna give us a lottery ticket, orgasm and Oscar upon arrival. That much is clear.

We could always go to one or the other and "just see," then change our minds. Well, they could. For myself, I'm not so sure.

I did the math today. I have lived in 15 different homes or apartments in the last 11 years. In three states and two continents. Each with the intention of staying. I have owned and bought, sold, or chosen to leave 8 different beds. I have called each place home, and in the process, I have called NOWHERE home, carrying the few belongings that mattered to me (and there are very few) on my back, saying "Yes" to places and people with a silent "For Now" always left unspoken.

At some point, "Nomadic" runs the risk of meaning "Homeless."

Maybe Home is Where You Plant Your Ass.

Maybe Home is something you make by saying "Yes" and ignoring the "For Now." Maybe home is something you have to WORK to make in a place, painting walls and putting up plays and getting invested and getting messy with the people who are in front of you, keeping your easy, lazy philosophy of "everything is temporary" to yourself and participating in the collective delusion that we can and should make something permanent, that it's possible to dig in to a place and to each other without having half your heart out the door.

Maybe it doesn't matter WHICH city I pick, as long as I pick one and mean it, and do all the hard, fun, necessary work to make it my artistic home.

Maybe it's time to plant some roots, and see what grows.

Playwrights to Watch (Chicago)

....that is, if you're not already.

Emily Schwartz
Marisa Wegrzyn
Rob Kozlowski
David Alan Moore
Sarah Gubbins
Laura Jacqmin

A play about a modern-day Slave

...with a company I really love and would love to work with at a Soho space. It was workshop-level, maybe a little more than that, but even so, it was weak, I thought. It definitely fit into the "strange" part of the host theater's "Funny, Strange, Provocative." At points it was provocative, too.

It was...the TIMING was off. Both of the direction but ALSO of the play itself. Usually when I read a play I "play it forward" and see the production. Tonight I was playing the production backward and seeing the script...and it felt like a screenplay, with "shots" built in that had to be accomodated, scenes that didn't build or give enough information, scenes that felt like non-sequiturs. Which is different than Tina Landau's/Madeline L'Engle's concept of the Tesseract, one I wholeheartedly embrace.

I know that some of the weirdness was inherent to the project being set forth by this author...you have a kid played by an adult running around in a dog suit, you're not an Aristotle Acolyte. Of course. And no reason you should be. But even trying to meet this play on its own terms, it felt like the playwright (and maybe playwright/director) hadn't spent enough time with it, thinking it through, playing with it. This felt like a sculpture put together with toothpaste and silly string, falling apart when you add glitter.

This was NOT a well-crafted play. Which is a damn shame, because the playwright really WAS taking on some fascinating issues/power dynamics/human relationships. Which should be applauded. I mean, this writer was, on some level, aiming the humor gun straight at race, class, and power -- exactly what I was arguing for in my last post. But. It wasn't landing.

And it wasn't landing because of CRAFT. Because (I'm guessing) not enough time, patience, care were taken. Which makes me sad. And is a fair warning to take TIME with a play before throwing it into the glare of the spotlight. There's no going back at that point.

I dunno. Maybe after this production the playwright will go back to the drawing board. I think that this could turn into something really special. It's just not there yet. Or maybe I'm wrong and silly string is what the playwright was going for.

On Humor

I saw two plays today. One was Judith Thompson's "Palace of the End," the other was Rebecca Cohen's "Penalties and Interest." Both (bless them) were affordable. The first was a trio of successive monologues on Iraq. We met the woman who was in the infamous torture/prison photos, David Kelly (wmd inspector), and the ghost of an Iraqi woman describing her family and her torture. The second was about people in an office and...um...people in an office.

Both were well done. The first was a full production, the second a workshop. The first had a definite axe to grind. The second...was hilarious.

But see, it's that problem that keeps surfacing. The first was so HEAVY. The issues it addressed, the characters, the stories the characters had to tell...it felt like the audience was being stoned. Not with marajuana, with stones. And these were excellent performances, and this was a script by a playwright who knows how to craft a story, to sculpt words, all that. An award-winning play, an important play. The second was so ENTERTAINING...it was hilarious, it was well-choreographed, the staging was smart and specific, the actors, in their own way, equally strong as the other piece. I was grinning through the piece as they hit moment after moment in the script.

But. It didn't add up to much.

I spent the first half of my day at a play with so many important things to say, but delivered in such a way that I could feel the audience sinking back AWAY from the play and its message. The second half of my day, the whole audience was leaning forward, but toward WHAT?

Which brings me to humor. This is maybe a point that is belabored, god knows it's been said elsewhere, but...

Humor, in theater, isn't just a tool. It's a weapon. It gets you past the guard of your audience, it keeps them sitting up, leaning forward, disarmed...to the point where you can get to the core of your point, to the burning, loving, angry, enlightened whatever-it-may-be that had you putting pen to paper in the first place. If you want them to listen, you wanna be funny. If you've already got them laughing, KNOW the opportunity you have and USE it.

At tonight's play, because the play itself wasn't giving me much to think about, I started to ponder "what's true about funny stuff on stage." Here are a few things I observed.

1) Humor has repetition. It establishes a pattern, makes it TOTALLY clear to the audience...hence the rule of three.
2) Humor messes with repetition. Once a pattern is firmly established, you screw with it. So it's set-up, set-up, twist.
3) Funny plays are PRECISE. Because timing is everything. There's an inherent musicality, a rhythm, to stage humor.
4) Funny plays grow out of relationships.
5) In funny plays, there is often a dissonance between how high the CHARACTERS perceive the stakes to be, and how high the AUDIENCE perceives the stakes to be. Characters stakes = incredibly high, AUDIENCE stakes = not so high.
uh...I'm sure I'll think of more.

Celebration!

I was wondering what my 100th post would be...it gets to be something very special.

My dear friend, George Brant, just won the Keene Prize. $50,000. For his wonderful play, "Elephant's Graveyard."

George, I'm so happy for you and proud of you and your play! No one could deserve the award more.

Now you owe us all a drink.

Canary

Is a musical-in-progress by a playwright I know. It's Bluegrass/punk, which I find especially cool, and the performers were great.

Molly, the writer, crafts a mean monologue. The show's pace was still meandering, and I think it's still finding itself, but this was a script-in-hand reading, which is REALLY tough for what she's writing, so that makes it a little bit hard to tell. I hope she got what she wanted to from it. I enjoyed myself, anyway.

There was a nice crowd for what was, essentially, an invited dress. It was the first time I'd seen Rattlestick Theater's space, which I loved, felt very much like a Chicago storefront space. Seemed like good people.

Sunday In The Park With George

...was a disappointment. I had never seen it. There were some great lyrics, but the story was patchy at best, more like a sketch than a complete show. Was Sondheim trying to comment on the construction of the Seurat painting through his story construction?

I don't know.

There were some interesting technical elements introduced by the director...but I want theater to make me engage intellectually and emotionally...and this left me cold both ways.

What to take away? Well...it was an affirmation that well-constructed story will pull and audience through. That half-assing it won't. And that if you're getting experimental with construction, the experiment needs to be as well thought out (in fact, BETTER thought out) than the traditional storytelling would be.

Harrumph. To bed.

On Breaks...

I didn't really mention this before, but I've been on a semi-conscious break from writing over the past several weeks. It started as an accident/meltdown, and turned into a resolute "let me wait until this feels right." This is one of the reasons for all of the recent blog entries.

Because I've actually had time to PROCESS six months' worth of (various kinds of) learning. Which is a very good thing.

And now I've started writing again. Just in the last couple of days. But it's with a clearer head. And a stronger sense of purpose. And a renewed spirit. And with many writing lessons / life lessons learned. And, um, it's fun again.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could call "time out" in EVERY aspect of your life, to such good result? Sigh.

I guess we'll see how much of it sticks.

Point being...if it feels right and good to step away from the page, and your life permits it, I recommend it.

Notes and quotes from a great panel...the last of Momentum

Momentum had a good panel discussion the other day, this one with agents and literary managers and artistic directors....
Tracy Brigden, City Theater's Artistic Director (and someone who directs all over the East Coast)
Christie Evangelisto, Director of Musical Theater&Dramaturg at Playwrights Horizons
Beth Blickers, Literary Agent at Abrams Artists NYC
Lou Tyrrell, Artistic Director at Florida Stage
Carlyn Aquiline, City Theater's Dramaturg

Discussion Highlights (things attributed when I remember who said them)

When asked what was new and exciting to them in American Theater, Tracy said MUSICALS! They're starting to break more from form, and draw more on popular music, are showing a strong forward motion of storyline. They said that lyric writing is changing. Lou mentioned the push for new plays to get multiple productions through organizations like the National New Play Network, Christie mentioned a growing interest on the part of audiences to see the early stages of the development process, and Beth talked about the increasing number of regional theaters that are bringing in work created off-site (as in NYC's The Civilians touring a show, Rude Mechs touring a show, Steppenwolf bringing other theaters into the garage...)

How has playwriting changed?
Beth says she sees playwrights getting more political, going outside their living rooms to find windows on the world, looking at Israeli Palestine, looking at the Muslim world…finding things that are unique, unknown, resonant. She says she’s seeing fewer 20-something plays, fewer “mother plays,” fewer “coming out plays.”
Someone said there had been a “sorry trend for a while of no comedies…” It wasn’t clear whether that had begun to change…but they said the best comedies they were seeing were coming out of politics.
The three big issues around which people seem to be writing are family, war/ripped from headlines, and faith.
They said that people aren’t going to see their Iraq plays…

They were asked about the trend of new play production moving out of NYC, how it has helped, and how it’s hindered…
“It’s very smart to show new work out of NYC first. The critical climate in New York is currently awful”“It’s great to do work elsewhere and bring it in…develop out of town whenever you can.”
“The PERCEPTION has changed. Playwrights don’t need to be in NYC to make a living in theater.”
“If you’re emerging, and you have an opportunity to get good reviews outside of New York, you should.”
“Regional Theater is the new Off-Broadway.” – but the regionals “aren’t bubble-wrap.” It’s still got to be a great play.
“The scary thing happening New York is…people read the regional reviews, and if those reviews aren’t good, the play won’t even get looked at for New York.”

What are the Qualities you see in good Directors and Dramaturgs in new work…
“If you love a play out of the gate, you have to agree to nurture it and the playwright (the whole creative team does)…a new play is ‘a very fragile thing’” (side note…I don’t know whether I agree with the idea that a play is “fragile.” I know Dietz doesn’t...and I guess so far it hasn’t been my experience...but my experience is limited)
“Basically, you want a director and dramaturg who shut up and listen…a great question to ask is ‘what was the genesis of this play’ – then pay attention…and see if that genesis is showing up in the play as it stands…”
“It’s tough when emerging playwrights work with established directors, or it can be…the balance of power can go off”
“be careful of the ‘I know what’s best for you’ line of thinking”

WHAT NEEDS DOING? WHAT NEEDS WORK?
“Agents are encouraging half-baked plays. That needs to change”
“You don’t get to send a play twice…you’re already in the Excel Spreadsheet as having been rejected.”
“To rewrite during the rehearsal process, it really helps to be in the room for the rehearsal process…”

ADVICE
“Make your own work. Don’t RELY on other people. Put your plays in front of people and take them out for coffee.”
“Develop a feedback circle with people who know what they’re talking about.”
“Get to know the regional theater world. Become a human being.”
“Really hold on to your relationships from school. They’re your colleagues for life. Help each other wherever you can”
“Constantly listen to your own inner voice and heed it.”
“Don’t fuck around.”

Chicago. Huh.

There was a playwrights panel at the Momentum Festival today. One of the questions asked was "So we have a lot of playwrights in the room thinking about moving to New York. What advice would you give to them?"

The response: "Move to Chicago."

Not from one playwright. From three. Whose collected hardware included Tonys, Emmys, and Oscars.

Huh. Okay. So that's something to think about. Especially with me asking the universe for signs about the course life should take from here on out. That one's, like, neon and flashing, right?

Mo' thoughts on Momentum

(Sorry about the title, couldn't resist).

I'm in day...what, three or four? of Pittsburgh City Theater's Momentum festival. The folks involved with the theater, and the artists they've brought in, are just AWESOME. I was talking to Ange, who is helping with Company Management during the festival, and she basically said "yeah, we always get nice, smart people here, I don't know what that is...". I do. It's "Like meets like."

This morning, in the midst of photocopier orgies, pencil-sharpening and bagel runs, I paused for a second and looked around City Theater's offices. There were about ten people, from the Artistic Director and Associate Artistic Director down through unpaid interns, running around to make sure that the five playwrights-in-residence this weekend have everything they need for their workshops. That the actors have up-to-date pages. That everyone's got coffee. It struck me JUST HOW MANY RESOURCES (money, time, energy, creative juice etc) go into making a single weekend-long festival fly.

And I thought:

Man, if you're a playwright who has folks marshalling these kind of resources behind your project, you are BLESSED. And Baby, you better do what you can to DESERVE those people, and those resources...out of respect for them, yourself, and the 150 playwrights behind you in line who would kill for the opportunity.

What does that entail?
um, well...again the list below is of things people are totally doing RIGHT at this festival. Hurray, City Theater & co.
-Showing up ready to work...to skip the bar and go make changes to your script.
-Listening to the smart people who have thoughts for you...really considering and/or trying what they say (and if they're NOT smart people...well...why the hell did you sign on?)
-Making sure your changes are well-organized (make those pages easy to coordinate for the frazzled literary manager and her interns)
-Being gracious, honest, forthright, thoughtful on any panels in which you're asked to participate
-Being NICE to everybody. Saying hello, remembering names if you can
-Trying, in general, while you're there, to be as positive a member of that theater's community as you can. Make nice to donors. Thank staffers. Don't make extra work.
-And, you know, write a really really good play that the company can tape to their refridgerator.

Proud Parent/Momentary Horn-Tooting

Summer People just got nominated for an award (thank you, beloved nominators, and it's Williamstown's Weissberger Award, for those who care, which is, um, probably my mom). It's one of those awards that the play is very unlikely to WIN, but that is wonderful to be able to mention on the resume.

It's funny...I'm very proud, but really of IT rather than of ME. I told someone today that I kind of felt like my third-grader just did something really cool and I got to stand back and say "good job, kiddo." Not that I'm not geeked-out, I am.

Our relationships to our plays change over time, I think. I guess that's not surprising, but I'd never really thought about it.

Momentum, continued...

Day two of watching the musical. A mini-avalanche of new pages from Brendan and Valerie, as they fine-tune lyrics and add music. Much running back-and-forth to the intermittently cooperative photocopier.

Here are a few nuts-and-bolts things I'm learning, watching. These are, by the way, all things that are going RIGHT in the room.

1) Thumbdrives, thumbdrives, thumbdrives...it's amazing to be able to throw a new set of pages onto your thumbdrive, hand it to an intern, who can then go run off new copies for you.
2) Use a different color of page for new changes for each day...helps you keep track.
3) Gotta learn how to use the "lock pages" function in Final Draft...looks like it's a godsend.
4) You want a director like Tracy, who "directs fast"...and nicely. Gotta make quick decisions, give the actors what they need succinctly, watch the clock, move on.
5) Casting, casting, casting. ESPECIALLY in a staged reading/workshop, it's enormously helpful to have the kind of actors who give a great cold read, who will "get" the first three layers of what you're doing in your dialogue on the first read...so that you can use your workshop time to get to the OTHER five layers.

More to come...

All roads lead to...

I'm in Pittsburgh at the Momentum festival, at City Theatre. Watching new plays. Spent all of today at a workshop for the musical they're working on, "Long Story Short" by Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda. It's the story of a man and a woman from their first date, through the ups and downs of their long, tumultous relationship. They drive each other crazy, they face tragedy, they part, they find each other again, they grow old together. The songs are funny and sweet and shmaltzy and it was a pleasure to hear them worked all day. I have several favorite songs, but the refrain that sticks talks about "sitting in our rocking chairs, watching grandkids playing on the lawn."

The Psyche Project, my big play for the summer, is about the many hurdles that a woman goes through to deserve the man (god, actually) she loves.

Have you noticed that, when you're working on a play, forces tend to conspire to teach you the lessons you need in order to write your play?

This is the Summer of Love. By which I mean "the summer in which the Universe has decided to bonk me over the head with the lessons about love that I had neglected to this point." Perhaps substitute "clobber" for "bonk". Learning, real learning, hurts like hell.

I am, intermittently, a total hysterical psychopath and a Love Yogi, as Zen as they come. I'm terrified and totally at peace.

Ah, but how does this relate to playwriting? Funny you should ask. Here's what I've got so far...

1) In playwriting, as in love, there are moments when you will feel discomfort (even pain). You will want to burn your scripts, you will want to erase your hard drive, you will want to run screaming from the work at hand. Don't. Breathe. Stretch into the hard places...those are the ones that have something to teach you.
2) In playwriting, as in love, there will be people who will tell you to abandon ship. They are not always wrong. They are not always right.
3) In playwriting, as in love, you must seek the balance between patience and caution. Patience is your friend. Caution (ie fear) is not.
4) In playwriting, as in love, you can make all the plans you want, develop all the outlines and checklists you want...but eventually you have to let go and see where the moment takes you...which will usually be someplace much messier, and more full of life, than whatever you'd planned. If you're looking for perfection, forget it. "Perfect" is another word for "dead."
5) In playwriting, as in love, it ISN'T ABOUT YOU. It isn't even about the play. It's about the play's relationship to the audience, about the messy, magical things that happen in the SPACE BETWEEN you and another opinionated, fragile, resilient, imperfect human being and everything that THEY bring to the table.
6) In playwriting, as in love, all I can do...all any of us can do...is articulate a best guess, pour another cup of tea, and face the blank page.

Yeah. I sorta knew some of this stuff, but it's only really starting to sink in now. And there's probably more coming. Bonk.

The Loop

If you're a playwright, and you don't subscribe to The Loop, you probably should. This is the latest from Gary Garrison, who's in charge of the thing.



Yeah, it’s beginning to make more and more sense to me. As I travel
around the country and meet more and more artistic directors, literary
managers and producers, and I contextualize them in the common cry
of most playwrights I know (“We need more productions!”), I’m slowly
realizing that if really we want things to change, clearly we’ll have to take
matters into our own hands.
I was in Seattle a couple of weeks ago and met with a lot of play-
wrights and almost twelve (!) members of the producing community
there. Representatives from the largest (and consequently, most presti-
gious) theatres were present. The panel then scaled down from the large
theatres all the way to the smallest, tiniest, barely-surviving theatre (lit-
erally, a converted home garage where an adult hand-puppet show ran
for months). Playwrights peopled the audience and you could instantly
feel that “us against them” energy that hangs over meetings like this.
Inevitably the question was posed to the big theatres: “Why won’t
you produce local playwrights -- playwrights that are literally in your own
back yard?” I watched the panel people shift in their chairs, their faces
immediately demonstrating the war-torn fatigue when trying to form a
peaceful answer to this question. Rising out of the ashen looks of the
panel was the voice belonging to a man named Jerry.
Jerry (on staff at the largest of all the theatres) calmly looked up and
said, “Because every time I do, I lose anywhere from $25-50,000 at the
box office, and then I have to fire someone on my staff. It’s not that
we don’t love you, but we’re a regional theatre that depends on our
subscribers. And our subscribers depend on us to bring them the latest
from Broadway, or the Pulitzer Prize winner, or the Tony winner. Period.
End of story. And I know it’s not the story you want to hear, but it’s the
only one I can tell with honesty . . . and even compassion.”
Fuckin’ A. Bravo, Jerry. Yeah, no one wanted to hear it. But you told
the truth. You were courageous in a way I’ve hardly ever seen from any-
one in your position. It took balls, my man, but every playwright lucky to
be in the room now know where they stand with you and your theatre.
But the brilliance didn’t end there. What fell out of Jerry’s honesty
was a call from all the theatre people in the room to embrace the notion
of playwrights producing playwrights (13P in New York, Playwrights 6
in Los Angeles), or small theatres banning together to co-produce (and
hence share the risk) the overwhelming number of original plays, or how
about this idea: self-production.
I can hear your groan from here. Self-production? Ewwwwww. Look,
the “vanity production” argument is tired and old and something too
many of us embrace because we want someone else to pay for our candy
bar. Okay, I get it. But baby, if you don’t see anybody with their change
purse out and poised for you, wouldn’t you like to do something beyond
standing there feeling helpless?

Sincerity and Irony

Are the salt and pepper of theater-making.

Sincerity alone will kill an evening pretty quick, I think. There is little "lightness" (see Sarah Ruhl's discussion in this spring's New Yorker article, but really see Italo Calvino, from whom she borrows) in Sincerity, especially with a capital "S." Earnest characters earnestly pursuing their earnest goals...is that a show you're gonna see? We go to the theater to be entertained, and sincerity has a way of rolling that flat.

Irony, though...we live in the "age of Irony," no? The Hipster, the culture of internet, the 'zine...I'm using lazy, lazy shorthand here, but there's the sense that we're awash in irony, that it's the distanced, distancing position from which one regards the present world climate, in order to SURVIVE that climate. Still, at some point, Irony (capital I) is SO light, SO biting that you can walk away from it feeling...bitten. We go to the theater to be moved, and irony may not be up for the job.

So the question is how to balance them, how to be versed in, but never entirely seduced by, both of them.

All this because I'm trying to decide, tonight, between seeing "W;t" or "Avenue Q."

On August Osage, Playwrights Dreaming, and the Problem of Resources

From the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/theater/theaterspecial/01ishe.html?_r=1&ref=theater&oref=slogin

Art, Life, Cancer

My theater company is doing W;t.
My friend has Cancer.
He's keeping a blog.

Several posts ago, I mentioned that we are the same playwrights as we are people (the same teachers as we are people...etc). If this is true, and I think it is, then that necessarily expands the scope of this blog (and you may have noticed a shift in postings since I brought it up). The work of our lives IS our lives, not in a selfish "I'm going to go do yoga and talk about myself all the time" way...although admittedly I'm not above that... but in a "how can I connect the moments and days and interactions with the broader sweep of how I/WE move through the world, learn from the world, contribute TO the world, and make art or whatever we make in the world."

My friend, La M, or Cancer Cupcake, as he is affectionately known, is very good at this, I think.

His blog is a daily inspiration.

Today he talks about food, the taste of it, getting as much of these amazing tastes as he can before Chemo starts.

I will be commenting on his blog occasionally, and checking it often. I recommend it. A daily meditation on illness, life, community.

http://www.squirrelsintheattic.info/

Crazy Idea

You know what would be really awesome?

A city-wide searchable database with the name, email, cell phone, and headshot of every actor in a city, that could be cross-referenced by gender, ethnicity, languages spoken, and age range. You could get really fancy and upload resumes? You could get really smart and note when people move or quit acting.

Apparently Remy Bumppo in Chicago has something similar. OMG, the time this would save when casting.

Why'd I think of this? Because I just spent the last three days chasing down last-minute replacement actors. And my other friend is casting a show and it's driving him crazy. And I know there are jazzy sites like that in NYC and Chicago, but they seem more corporate and less nuts-and-bolts than what I'm talking about...just something you could use to make a general call-sheet for auditions.

30/60/90

Austin Scriptworks is about to start its (now annual) 30/60/90 project.  I heartily recommend getting involved.

It's basically a month, two-month, or three-month commitment to write EVERY day.  Anyone who signs up will receive a daily writing prompt email from ASW.  The organization was inspired to start it by the 365 project, and has solicited writing prompts from people all over the country.

Maybe you get 30 3-minute plays out of it.  Maybe you get a full-length.  Maybe you get fifteen minutes of daily frustration.  In any case, the nominal fee to participate seems worth it.  Personally, I'm planning to keep a folder with the prompts for the next time I'm stuck for a freewriting prompt when I teach.

Go forth and write.  

Back-up plans

My dear friend wrote to me today about a mantra she's got.  It's a good one for all striving/struggling artists: "don't have a backup plan because you'll fall back on it."

Her goal:  to avoid the 9-5 day job for AT LEAST a year, to make sure her energy is aimed straight at her writing.  I applaud that.

It also makes me wonder: what IS a backup plan?  Is it something you'd be happy doing if your dream plan doesn't work out?  Is it the way you make ends meet while you wait for your dream plan to work out?  When does a plan move from a "good, practical version of how to have a life doing what you want to do" to "backup plan?"

This is an honest question.  It makes me think about the obituary I wrote yesterday (for myself).  Is it truly the height of my ambition?  Is  it a "backup plan" with some bells and whistles?

Where do we draw the line between artists who give everything to our art, and people who MUST live in the world as citizens, friends, children, parents (with all the responsibilities to ourselves and  others that those roles entail) while STILL finding time to fan the flames of our "inner artist?"

That "flame" analogy may seem a little over the top...but sometimes I imagine that my writing is a small fire, zippo-size, that I can warm my hands at...but that I also have to protect from strong winds, with my whole body if necessary.  My job is to keep the flame going so that it can keep ME going.  Which maybe means I can't have a backup plan (which would snuff out the flame), or maybe means that I HAVE to have one (to keep the wind at bay).

I don't think artists have the monopoly on this analogy.  Most people I know have  their own flame, the thing that protects them and needs protecting, the engine that keeps them moving through the world.  There are friends for whom it's religion, family, teaching, service...important to remember and honor that, too.

All that to say, I think my friend has discovered what she needs to do to keep her flame lit.  Which is awesome.

Writing for TV, Part II

The list of things I/we learned in Stuart's class, continued.

1.  "Never be afraid to put your character through the wringer."

2.  Conflict, conflict, CONFLICT.  If your main character isn't in hot water or trying to solve a problem, YOU have a problem.

3.  Keep your stakes high.  This is true for comedy too.

4.  Sit-Coms are just that...SITUATIONAL comedy.  The joke and the one-liner are the LAST layer of comedy...find the good premise, the good characters, and comedy should arise pretty naturally.

More later.

The Obituary Question

Actually, less a question than an exercise.  It's from Daniel Alexander Jones, second-hand.  I don't know where he got it.

Are you wondering how to move forward in your life?  Having a bit of a writerly existential crisis?  Get a pen.

1.  Write your obituary.  This can be as long as it needs to be.  Write down all the things you hope they can write about you when you're dead.

2.  Read it through.  What would you need to have accomplished in FIFTEEN YEARS to be well on your way to earning that obit?  Make a list.

3.  Now look at the Fifteen Year list.  What do you need to do in TEN YEARS to earn the Fifteen Year list?

4.  Now Five.

5.  Now Three.

6.  What can you do in the NEXT YEAR to work toward  your three year list?

See, wasn't that fun?

Writing for TV Recap, Part I

There will probably be more posts for this.  What follows are the "pearls of wisdom" I got from Stuart Kelban's writing for TV class...and ones suggested by other students in the same class.

1.  Writing a spec script?  Here are the major steps:  (1) get extremely familiar with the show.  Watch a lot of episodes.  Go online to its official and unofficial fan sites.  Do a breakdown of how long scenes are.  Get your hands on a copy of a script written for the show, if you can.  Either FIND or WRITE YOUR OWN "Bible" for the show -- basically a document that outlines everything that is true about the show's universe.  There's a good one online for "Freaks and Geeks" which serves as a strong, possibly over-the-top model.  Make sure to think about commercial breaks, about the network on which the show appears (2) Write an OUTLINE.  Revise, revise, revise.  More on outline writing below.  These are called "Beat sheets" in the TV/Film world, and they basically go scene-by-scene through your show, with the location and a description of what happens in the scene.  I swear, if playwrights were this organized, we'd save ourselves some trouble (and maybe some "eureka" moments, granted...).  Get people who know and love the show to look at your outline.  Make sure that the show's protagonist is your episode's protagonist.  Try to write an episode that is relatively "stand-alone." (3) Write, and keep revising.  Make sure the characters sound like the characters you've heard on the show.  Make it awesome.

2.  The protagonist in your spec script should be the show's protagonist.

3.  In TV, your act breaks are your commercial breaks.  The standard half-hour has a "Teaser", first act, second act.  Hour-longs can vary more, especially depending on whether it's network or cable, so pay attention.  They can have as many as five or six acts now, if you count the teaser.

4.  Your acts have to end on a climax, preferably of your A story.

5.  Obvious to anyone who's already a screenwriter -- TV shows have A, B, and C stories.  The A story is the main story of the episode, and gets the most scenes.  The B story is the secondary story, maybe it furthers a longer story arc, maybe not...and so on down the line.  Depending on the show (West Wing, Dirty Sexy Money...) there may even be D, E, F stories.  The bigger or more ensemble-oriented the cast, the more likely you are to run into more story lines.

6.  The cool thing about television, and the thing we're probably all more aware of now that we can watch whole seasons on DVD, is that shows don't just have stories that start and end in one episode anymore.  Story arcs can last three episodes, half a season, a couple of seasons.  Not maybe so crucial in a spec script as when you're doing a pilot, but if you can nod to longer arcs, bully for you.

7.  I said this already.  But there should be a major story turn/climax right before every commercial break...so people come back AFTER the commercial break.

8.  When you're outlining your script, don't try to outline it beginning, middle, end.  Start with placing the things you know you want to hit and fill in from there.

9.  This was  one a lot of the screenwriters found really helpful.  Stuart says that for every scene, you've got "options A, B, and C."  A is the first one you come up with.  It's usually not great.  B's the better option, but still not great.  C is the option that not only moves the story forward the way you need it to (because your other options did that, too), but it ELEVATES the story, and twists things in a surprising way.  Sometimes it's the way you find "to talk about the thing without talking about the thing..." if that makes sense.  I'm sure fellow writers can chip in on that.

10.  When you're faced with choosing between the good piece of writing or the delicious scene you just wrote, and the story you're telling, it isn't actually a choice -- you choose STORY every time.

More to come, I'm sure.

"Circles Rise Together"

"Circles Rise Together"

This is a lovely phrase that got tossed around in Aspen, when I was part of a group of MFA playwrights from around the country who were invited to show work there/in NYC. I think it was attributed to Paula Vogel. (Sometimes I wonder if the legendary Ms. Vogel has ACTUALLY said all the fabulous, inspiring things that are attributed to her? What is she, the Oracle at Delphi? Anyway). The idea is, we all need a peer group, we all need to encourage our peer group, that as their fortunes rise so too will our own.

It's a lovely sentiment.

I hope it's true.

I wonder if it's true.

And it makes me ask questions like "how big or small a circle? what circles am I part of? what about squares?"

Really, it makes me ask questions about Community. I think community is really really REALLY important. More than anything, the idea of community (Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities?") is why I keep this damned blog in the first place, on the off chance that something I've learned in a classroom or picked up at a cocktail party might prove useful to someone I know or someone who finds these posts. The posts are my effort to widen the circle, my messages in a bottle to anyone who DOESN'T get to sit in a classroom with the likes of Suzan Zeder, Paula Vogel, Marsha Norman every day (which, uh, will be me in a year or so).

And it's nice to think that our circles will rise together. But I also want to think that our circles are a...well, I think the word I'm looking for is Mitzvah...in their own right (says the shiksa). It is right and good that we, who are working hard to tell meaningful stories, should come together at a table, should support each other, should share the joys and, yes, burdens of trying to make stories in a world that still needs stories. It is right and good that we should form a community, whether or not the members of our community can ever help us "get somewhere." We are somewhere. We're together at the table.

In graduate school, that table is often literal. The workshop table, the table of the nearest local bar (bless you, Sao Paolo's and your happy hour), at the kitchen tables of our classmates. It's been a real joy to cook for people at my house over the past few weeks, and I look forward to doing it a lot more next year.

But what about BEYOND graduate school? What about in the big, bad world, when the community that we have formed moves to far-flung parts of the globe (Los Angeles, China, Germany, Chicago...)? How can we maintain a meaningful circle across space and time? How can we be sustained when the table goes from tangible to metaphorical?

I don't know. I know websites help, listserves help...but I'm someone who, as fellow playwright David Modigliani has said "lives in the analog world." I love Facebook, but God, please, give me face TIME. Give me table.

Is All Theater Political?

A dear friend of mine was talking the other day, and said something along the lines of "all theater is political."  It might have been "all art."

This is a comment I've heard before.  Usually I nod my head, sip my wine, and silently castigate myself for not being someone who invests heavily in the idea of "the political."

But the other day, I put down my wine.  "Wait," I said, "is ALL theater really political?  What do you mean by that?  Because I can think of theater that is telling very small stories, that really deals in the microcosm, in interpersonal relationships, in structures that are, in some sense, timeless or cut across cultures or...."

"No," my friend said, "even that is political."

For me, then, this raises the question of "what do we mean when we say 'POLITICAL'."  How are we DEFINING the "Political" that we  say all theater/art is?  And at what point are we defining it so broadly that it ceases to be a useful term?

Because if we, as artists, are holding ourselves to the mandate that our work be political, and then we point at anything and everything and say "yes, THAT is political," aren't we, in some way, letting ourselves off the hook?

Of course, you can argue that the act of bringing people together in a room to watch a one-time event, the act of sharing your thoughts, hearts, talent with a room of people is a political act.  Sure.  But I do that when I invite people over for dinner, don't I?  Is dinner political?  Does it depend on the dinner?

I think we (playwrights of all people) need to be careful when we're defining our terms, especially if we're going to move into action based on those terms.  Because I think that the act of sharing art is inherently SOCIAL, that there are lenses other than "political" through which we can view the world and...what...the lines of connection, disconnection, power that run through it?  There's religion, there's marxism/economics, there's a cultural materialist view of things...I could throw out a lot of terms here, you know?

All this to say that I don't think all theater is, or need be, political.  It does and  should bring people together, it does and should make people think about the world and their relationship to it, but while this CAN be a political act, it would be an overstatement to say that it always is.

Reminder about why we do this (and why we don't)

This links to a speech Craig Lucas gave at a recent commencement in Boston.  Good words to remember.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-lucas/leaving-your-artistic-leg_b_102332.html

On GOOD (not icky) self-promotion

I promise this whole blog won't become about promoting our work (or my work)...but if we're gonna be freelancers, it's a big part of what we've got to do, and it's something that makes me nervous, so it merits some thought.

This is a great post.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/741-ask-37signals-10-ways-to-get-ink