Scott Parkinson, Shakespeare Genius

I'm working on audition material.  For, like, the first time in a million years.  Which is scary as hell.  Which is part of why I'm doing it.  And I'm starting with a Shakespeare piece.  Because I'm crazy. (okay, not because I'm crazy but because after teaching Shakespeare as literature for the past couple of years, I'm dying to wrap my brain and body around it, and because every time I spend time with his text, in any capacity, I learn things that I can apply to my own writing).

Anyway.

It turns out Scott Parkinson, who was one of my favorite Chicago actors one of the best freakin' actors I've ever had the privilege to witness, lives in New York.  And does a little monologue coaching, when he's not running all over the United States acting for prominent directors from both sides of the Atlantic.  And his rates are totally, totally reasonable.

So I figured, well, if I'm serious about working on this piece, and if I want help, I'd be insane not to go to him.  So I went to his apartment today and spoke Shakespeare out loud for the first time in, like, forever (if you don't count reading to my class, which for the purposes of this discussion I won't, although the argument could be made that every class I teach is a "performance"...anyway.  clearly this is tangent day).

Jesus Christ.  Even just watching him say a couple of lines here and there to illustrate a point, I was reminded of how powerful a performer he is.  And talking to him ABOUT the text, working through my monologue, I was reminded just how smart he is.  I want to crawl inside his brain and live there.

Point Being:  if you are an actor and you are working on Shakespeare and you live anywhere near New York, I kinda think you'd be crazy not to make your way to Scott Parkinson for a session or two or ten. Email me if you want his contact information.  I'm not gonna include the list of notes from our session because, well, he says it better than me and it's his livelihood.  Sorry.

Teaching Playwriting in the 21st Century

At the risk of doing nothing but re-post...

This Howlround Post really good.

STOP MOMENTS, HOLD MOMENTS

I asked a friend, yesterday, about what kind of art he wants to spend the rest of his life making.  I'm gonna ask him again, later, when I can write down his responses...but it got me thinking about a couple of things:

(1) I haven't been seeing enough theatre lately.  It's expensive here, I'm tired, it's been a crazy few months.  Excuses.  I'm a better artist when I'm seeing more art (be it theatre, film, dance, visual art).  You gotta stay fueled.  When you start wearing a groove in the pavement between home and work, you're doing your art a disservice.  You gotta stop and notice things.

(2) I started thinking about all the art I've seen in my life, and what's stayed with me.  This was a nice thing to think about, when I was walking to school this morning.  Here are a few.  I hope this becomes a running list:

- in Chicago, Redmoon Theatre did this piece IN the Jackson Park Lagoon.  It was at night.  The play happened on a series of floats and boats, lit up against the night sky, using the canvas of this whole lagoon and its distant shores.  Do I remember what it was about?  Not so much.  Do I care?  No.  Because sitting there, on the shores of the lake, watching these moments unfold in the dark...it was magical.  It moved me.  It made me see the world through different eyes, at least for the duration of the piece (speaking of duration -- if you're talking the language of Viewpoints, this was a piece that was very much about duration).

- In New York, Young Jean Lee's "Untitled Feminist Show" was another one that (without words) moved me beyond words.  It was a different way of framing women's nudity onstage, of staging female identity and relationships.  It was funny, it had intention, and it was smart.  I was sitting next to a gay man at the show who appreciated it, I think, but I walked out feeling like I had been given this gift of being seen, of having a part of myself that is hard to articulate articulated onstage...without words.

- In Chicago, a site-specific performance of TAPE.  Not the best show on the planet, but there was this sense, being one of 10 people on folding chairs in a real hotel room, watching this story unfold in real time, of seeing something special.  And the performers went at it with total intention and dedication.  It was one of the first times I found myself thinking about naturalism and site-specificity as things that could lend a great deal to each other.

- in Austin, the various iterations of THE METHOD GUN.  Each, in its own right, had plenty going for it, and I really appreciated the kind of low-tech, DIY aesthetic of the pieces -- taking odds and ends and using them to transform a space and a story into something different.  But more than that, it was the insistence on experimentation, on "this isn't done yet, but it's worth your time and attention," that invitation to the audience into the experiment, into the mess, that opened up the idea of development of a piece, that created, for me, a different understanding of the relationship between audience and performers.  And it was, you know, beautiful, which helped.

- In New York, BAM's Production of Richard III.  Both for Kevin Spacey's performance, which was great, but even more for the set design and staging, which worked together in such a way that a basically blank stage kept on opening up and opening up and revealing itself in new ways, with very little work.  Brains beating brawn, in terms of a smart set design.

- In Austin, the Casket of Passing Fancy, where a Woman (actually a man) sat at a small table, and invited the audience to have certain experiences...and we sat, considering which experiences we'd like to have, raising our hands or not, leaving to have our experiences, until the room was empty.  Was it theater?  Yes.  But a very different way of thinking about theater.

What do these moments have in common?  They all, in different ways, open up different possibilities for how to think about theatre, and the role of theatre, and the relationship between audience and performance.  In some ways, it's like they invite me to form new neural pathways, as I'm thinking about  my own role in the creation of something like theatre.  They were all exciting, even when they were slow.  They were all different from each other.  They all, even the ones that were probably expensive to make, relied more on imagination (the makers' imagination and the audiences' imagination) than any other thing.  They gave at least equal weight to audience experience as they did to story.

Anyway.  Some ideas to chew on.

On Rejection, on Personal Statements

A thoughtful, useful article from Alex Lewin (a 2012-2013 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights Center), writing on Howlround.

What Do You Need To Do Your Best?

I was at a bar with a couple of actor friends the other day, and the conversation turned to different rehearsal rooms in which they had worked.  They swapped stories about good experiences and bad...and what impressed me was how clearly they were both able to articulate what they needed to do their best work.  They needed slightly different things, but simply the fact that they could both say "I need X to be true for me to be able to bring my best game to the room" -- pretty powerful.  And sometimes they got those things from a director and a process, and sometimes they didn't.  And the things they needed were pretty simple...maybe not things that could happen in every process, but nothing crazy.

I asked them if they'd ever had a director ask, on day one, or in the audition, what elements they needed in place to do their best work.  Nope.  None.  Not once.

And I realized I'd never asked that, when I jumped into a workshop with actors.  And that I'd never really been asked myself.  I'd sometimes offered some pieces of "how I work" if I felt like I wasn't going to get it otherwise, but I'd never really sat down with collaborators to say "this is how to get the best out of me."

And I thought: what a missed opportunity!

And I thought:  that's it, I'm gonna ask every potential collaborator that question from now on.

And I've gotta give some thought to what I need, too.

What Is Radical?

So there's this church.
Which is sort of something like an artistic home and sort of something like a spiritual home, not that I draw much distinction between those two things.

It's full of lefty-pinkos who tend to couch god-talk in "whatever it is that's out there." And it's full of white-haired little old ladies who wear pearls and scarves.  And it's full of old drag queens, and young couples both straight and gay, and lots of single people and people who are dying and people who are rich and people who are broke and some veterans...

And I go there sometimes.  Because they say smart stuff that makes me think.  And I like to be in a room with a bunch of people who don't have a lot in common except that they wanna be there.

And it's a place that defines itself, in part, by its being "radical."

They sing hymns and have a choir and coffee hour.  They have a sermon every week, they pass a collection plate, they visit the sick and dying and comfort each other.  And yes, they help occupy Wall Street, but for me, just about everything they do is radical -- and totally traditional -- and totally radical.

Anyway, I was sitting there today, mumbling along with a prayer, saying "What is Radical?"

Yes, as Dietz used to say (probably still says), "a good story well told is always radical"  -- which, hell, you could argue the New Testament and Old Testament sure as hell were, right?  You could say that performance art is radical.  You could say...

That's as far as I've gotten.  Or, rather, I'm more interested in ASKING that question right now than I am in ANSWERING it.

What is radical?

What does it mean in the space of Judson church?

What does it mean in the world of theater?

What does it mean in my life?

What does it mean in my community?

A New Play

Right now, I'm casting and going into rehearsal for a festival/workshop production of The Dragon Play, with a friend's new theater company.  My screenplay has reached the "let's do readings with real, bankable actors and see what feedback we get" stage (pushing the boulder up the hill!  inch by inch!).  I've built/am building a website, am making a concerted effort to get to know more directors and to create opportunities to work with them, and I'm actively rewriting the play I've been working on all year, in hopes of sending it out to different development opportunities this summer and fall.

I'm also writing a new play.

In a year characterized by my carving out lots of quiet time to write, and working on one project at a time (more or less), this play is...well...being born in the midst of a storm.

But because it's a play I've been thinking about for a reeeeaaaalllly long time, and because the characters are based on people I know really well, or have known forever, or both, and because the play is set in a place I inhabited for years, the weirdest thing is happening.

I keep rushing back to my computer, not thinking "I gotta work" but thinking "I wanna go see what Amanda and Ben and Max are up to?" and "what's Jesse gonna do now?"

I've never had so strong an (admittedly ridiculous) sense that the characters themselves are simply hanging out in the room I've made, doing their thing, not even waiting for me to show up and watch them.  It's like they're the bunch of kids who live in the basement, and I occasionally pop down with snacks to check on them and see whether they've lit the den on fire.  It's really weird.  But also kind of nice.

I like these kids.  I look forward to spending more time with them.

Perspective from Arthur Penn

"I do not want to know another thing about what a nice guy or gal someone on the stage is: This is entirely irrelevant to me. Some sort of desperation has crept into our theatre--all of our arts, really, but we're discussing theatre--where we feel a defensive wall is erected around the meretriciousness of our work by highlighting how hard someone has worked; how many hours they've put in at the soup kitchen; how many hours they spent researching the aphasic mind in order to replicate the actions of one; how many ribbons sweep across their breast in support of causes; how much they love their lives and how lucky they feel to be on Broadway!

There is very little art, but there is a great deal of boosterism. Fill the seats; buy a T-shirt; post something on the Internet; send out an e-mail blast.

I'm in my eighties, and I think I should have left this earth never knowing what an e-mail blast was.

I saw a play recently that was festooned with understudies: Not the actual understudies, but the hired, primary actors, all of whom performed (if that is the word) precisely like a competent, frightened understudy who got a call at dinner and who raced down to take over a role. No depth; no sense of preparation. These were actors who had learned their lines and who had showed up. And that is all.

I spoke to the director afterwards. By all accounts a nice and talented and smart guy. I asked him why a particular part in this play--a Group Theatre classic--had been given to this certain actor. He's a great guy, was the response. Prince of a fellow. Well, perhaps, but send him home to be a prince to his wife and children; he is a shattering mediocrity. But nice and easy counts far too much these days. Another director told me--proudly--that he had just completed his third play in which there wasn't one difficult player; not one distraction; not one argument. Can I add that these were among the most boring plays of our time? They were like finely buffed episodes of Philco Playhouse: tidy, neat, pre-digested, and forgotten almost immediately, save for the rage I felt at another missed opportunity.

All great work comes to us through various forms of friction. I like this friction; I thrive on it. I keep hearing that Kim Stanley was difficult. Yes, she was: in the best sense of the word. She questioned everything; nailed everything down; got answers; motivated everyone to work at her demonically high standard. Everyone improved, as did the project on which she was working, whether it was a scene in class, a TV project, a film, or a play. Is that difficult? Bring more of them on.

Is Dustin Hoffman difficult? You bet. He wants it right; he wants everything right, and that means you and that means me. I find it exhilarating, but in our current culture, they would prefer someone who arrived on time, shared pictures of the family, hugged everyone and reminded them of how blessed he is to be in a play, and who does whatever the director asks of him.

Is Warren Beatty difficult? Only if you're mediocre or lazy. If you work hard and well, he's got your back, your front, and your future well in hand. He gets things right--for everybody.

No friction. No interest. No play. No film. It's very depressing.

I don't want to know about your process. I want to see the results of it. I'll gladly help an actor replicate and preserve and share whatever results from all the work that has been done on a part, but I don't want to hear about it. I've worked with actors who read a play a couple of times and fully understood their characters and gave hundreds of brilliant performances. I don't know how they reached that high level of acting, and I don't care. My job is to provide a safe environment, to hold you to the high standards that have been set by the playwright, the other actors, and by me. I hold it all together, but I don't need to know that your second-act scene is so true because you drew upon the death of your beloved aunt or the time your father burned your favorite doll.

Now the process is public, and actors want acclimation for the work they've put into the work that doesn't work. Is this insane? Read the newspapers, and there is an actor talking about his intentions with a part. I've pulled strands of O'Neill into this character, and I'm looking at certain paintings and photographs to gain a certain texture. And then you go to the theatre and see the performance of a frightened understudy. But a great gal or guy. Sweet. Loves the theatre.

Every year or so, I tell myself I'm going to stop going to see plays. It's just too depressing. But I remember how much I love what theatre can be and what theatre was, and I go back, an old addict, an old whore who wants to get the spark going again.

I don't think we can get the spark going again because the people working in the theatre today never saw the spark, so they can't get it going or keep it going if it walked right up to them and asked for a seat.

It's a job, a career step, a rehabilitation for a failed TV star or aging film star. I got a call from one of these actresses, seeking coaching. I need my cred back, she said.

This is not what the theatre is supposed to be, but it is what the theatre now is.

I don't want to just shit on the theatre: It's bad everywhere, because it's all business, real-estate space with actors. It's no longer something vital. I used to think that the theatre was like a good newspaper: It provided a service; people wanted and needed it; revenue was provided by advertisers who bought space if the paper delivered, but profit was not the motive--the motive was the dissemination of truth and news and humor. Who goes to the theatre at all now? I think those in the theatre go because it's an occupational requirement: They want to keep an eye on what the other guys are going, and they want to rubberneck backstage with those who might use them in the future. But who are the audiences? They want relief not enlightenment. They want ease. This is fatal.

I talk to Sidney Lumet. I talk to Mike Nichols. I ask them if I'm the crazy old man who hates everything. You might be, they say, but you're not wrong. They have the same feelings, but they work them out or work around them in different ways.

The primary challenges of the theatre should not always be getting people to give a shit about it. The primary challenge should be to produce plays that reach out to people and change their lives. Theatre is not an event, like a hayride or a junior prom--it's an artistic, emotional experience in which people who have privately worked out their stories share them with a group of people who are, without their knowledge, their friends, their peers, their equals, their partners on a remarkable ride." ~~ director ARTHUR PENN

Light Yourself On Fire -- a re-post

I'm working on a play right now that is deceptively simple, and is kicking my ass.

Premise: Five teenagers try to get their hands on some beer.  Simple and fun, right?
Problem: Lights up on five teenagers in a room.  Lights down.  The teenagers in question are of a world where their vocabulary is...impoverished, shall we say (f-bombs every sentence).  Their town is tiny, their outlook hasn't yet expanded beyond the county line.  Gotta keep it moving, gotta keep things turning.  I LOVE these characters, I KNOW these characters, but it's harder than I thought.

Thank you, Brian O'Malley, for your admittedly cutesy but nonetheless inspiring post.

Once more into the breach.

Going to South By! ...sort of...

I've got a speaking role in Geoff Marslett's mumble core "Loves Her Gun," screening at South By this year!

Totally stoked.  Wish I could go.  Proud of/excited for all the great folks involved.

(this is a still from the movie...dramatic, no?)

...there's a clip of my scenes around somewhere (first few minutes of the movie), but I can't find it.

Offer Help

Was re-reading my Ask for Help post, and my post about Turnabout as Fair Play.

I wanted to make a quick list of ways that, even where I am now, I can help fellow artists.  I'm sure there are more...will keep thinking.  Just want to continue turning the question from "what do I need" and "what do I believe" to "what can I give" and "what don't I know?"

Anyway.  Some ways to help artist friends:
1) Make an introduction.  Introduce a writer to a director, an actor to a teacher, a director to a producer. Don't worry about them connecting more with each other -- spread the love.
2) When you're offered comps, be sure to take two -- and give the second to an arts friend you haven't seen in a while, or who might not be able to afford the show otherwise.
3) Read their stuff.  Give positive but rigorous commentary.
4) Share what you learn -- in blog form, in person.  If you have a really great "eureka" conversation, don't keep it to yourself -- tell your theater buddies what you're picking up.
5) Promote their readings.  Promote their work.  When someone asks you what work you like, don't just name the three "safe" (or dead) artists everyone names -- tell people, loud and proud, about your awesome writer/director/actor/designer friends.
6) Create moments where people can gather.  Invite people over to do something that is somewhat artistic or useful, but keep 'em long enough to break bread, talk and laugh.
7) Give'em ten bucks for their kickstarter campaign.  It won't change the world, but it's a start.
8) Willingly offer to take young alumni from your alma mater out for coffee, to share what you can about the experience of the first few weeks/years/months.  Tell them what you can about surviving what city you're in.
9) Call the colleagues who live far away.  Remember to ask how they are -- about their lives, not just their work.
10) TELL THEM when you really like what they're working on.  TELL THEM when you don't, if you can do so in a way that's productive and kind.
11) Show up.  Whenever you can.
12) Cheer them up -- buy 'em a drink or meet up for a walk during the inevitable dark moments.

I do all of these.  I don't do any of them ENOUGH (is there such thing?).  The goal, I think, might be to do at least one of these a day, or a week.

An Expert in Curiosity

Two days ago, through a series of unexpected events, I was asked to take over a colleague's African Fiction class for about two weeks.

Friends, I know nothing about African Fiction.  Latin American fiction, yes.  European and North American fiction, yes.  Middle Eastern fiction, a bit.  But besides some Gordimer and Coetzee, besides several African playwrights...I'm exactly where my students are.

But I said yes immediately.

This new adventure is a reminder, though, that on my best days teaching material with which I am intimately familiar, I go in with the mindset of student, of NOT knowing the "answers" to a given text.  That the focus, in a classroom, should be on the student's learning rather than the teacher's knowledge.  For the next two weeks, these guys are going to be in a deliberately, necessarily student-centered classroom.

This isn't to say I go in with no plan, or with no role.  What I can give them is my experience asking deep questions, and holding the group's feet to the fire to be rigorous in seeking answers.  I can remind them that no one knows everything (particularly with fiction), and the most important thing to do is keep interrogating.

The best teachers, I think, are experts in curiosity.

What about playwrights?  The more I think about it, the more I see a parallel.  I've heard people say that I should be an "expert on my own play" or "the toughest critic in the room."  But what if I re-frame that?  Isn't it the playwright's job to create a play that asks questions?  Isn't the difference between great literature (or drama) and great diatribe that art leaves room for questions about the human experience, pushes deeper toward more meaningful, trickier questions?  And isn't the real strength of critique the ability to ask fresher, deeper, more rigorous questions about the work in front of you?

And don't the best plays work to create an "audience-centered" experience?  How many times have I asked a young actor how they can invite the audience to HAVE an emotional reaction to a given moment, rather than simply observe the ACTOR's emotion in a particular moment?  Isn't our job to move our audience toward thought, emotion, action?  And isn't the play itself, the production itself, simply the assembly of tools we're employing to do so?

Perhaps the role of theater practitioners, too, is to be "experts in curiosity."
Perhaps the relationship between playwright and teacher is both more direct and more...what...generous?  Humble? than I thought.

Turnabout is Fair Play

Today, I finish the "first" draft of my TV pilot, which has benefitted from the wise counsel of several of my playwright friends.

Tomorrow, I bake cookies to put in the mail, and read the three plays that those friends have sent me, for return feedback.  Because now it's their turn.

Worth remembering -- we all know "you have to put out what you want to get back," but it's easy to forget that's TANGIBLE, not something you simply meditate on whilst in savasana pose.  When it comes to your writing and art community, that better take the form of reading their stuff, feeding them, buying them drinks, or calling them on Sundays to see how their lives are going.

Friendships and working relationships are like plants.  Very few of them thrive on neglect.

Feedback and Revisions

It was easy in graduate school.  Bring your pages to class, ask questions, get thoughtful responses from ten people at a time.  Set up an appointment with your professor, come in, take notes.

Not so, now.  If you're lucky (and I was, for a while), you're in a play group where you get to bring in pages to some smart, talented peers.  But that's necessarily on a schedule, and people are busy, and if you're getting feedback on pages once every few months, that's great -- but it may or may not line up with your writing schedule.

I really only had to get my act together, and get proactive about my drafting and feedback process, once I was out of grad school at UT Austin, and out of Ars Nova.  I made a commitment to writing more (and took a steep pay cut at my job to do so, which has been holding my feet to the fire), and soon realized that there was only so much I could do on my own.

My favorite professors have always said "be your own worst critic," and I try to be, but it really really helps to have the perspective of people who aren't buried in the work alongside me.  So.  In the past three months, on three different projects, I've been employing three very different feedback/revision techniques:

(1) One-on-one.  I'm working on a film, with a production company.  The development executive I'm working with, who is wonderful and who has become one of my favorite new New York friends, gave me terrific page-one-to-one-hundred feedback on the first two drafts.  But going into the third draft, I asked her if she'd be willing to give me feedback ONE ACT AT A TIME.  She was.  So we identified what felt "off" about Act One, I revised it, she gave me feedback, I revised it -- then we moved on to Act Two, then Act Three.  The nice thing was, by the time we moved on to the subsequent act, we knew the preceding one was solid.  This really may only have worked because the (fantastic) reader in question has a big stake in the script -- she, too, wants it to get made -- but it's incredibly rewarding, makes a script very solid very fast, and really makes you feel like you've got someone on your team.

(2) The Kitchen Table Method.  I talked about this in an earlier post.  I'm working on a new play.  No one's waiting for it; it's just one I wanted to write.  So once I hit what I *thought* was the last page, I invited a bunch of deeply trusted folks, mostly actors, over to read the thing aloud.  I fed them.  A few were friends with each other, so it gave them a chance to catch up.  It helped us all feel like part of a community.  I think it gave them the (correct) sense that I highly value both their talents and their thoughts.  And they gave me terrific feedback, informed by all of their time working on other peoples' plays.  I wrote a new draft, invited over a slightly different crew (for fresh eyes' sake).  And so on.  I'm on the third round now (the first I'm willing to call a real first draft) and it's starting to look like a play -- AND I've managed to deepen some friendships along the way, with people I really value.

(3) The Crowd-Source Method.  In mid-December, my manager was finally happy enough with my crazy pilot outline that he said "okay, go to script."  BUT -- he wants that script very soon.  And I want it to be good, because he's never seen me write for TV.  Not enough time for kitchen table reads, and I definitely need outside eyes.  So as I got close to the end of my zero draft, I emailed a few (3-4) friends around the country, writers with experience in the genre, and asked if they could do a 2-4 day turnaround on feedback.  They said yes.  I (barely) managed to get it to them when I said they would, and they got me feedback within a few days.  I rewrote for five days straight, and did the same thing -- but this time, with a second group of friends, to get fresh eyes.  By this third draft, I *will* send it to my manager, but will also send it to a couple of my very demanding writer friends, so that I will have their feedback *and* my manager's to work from when he (inevitably) asks for a rewrite.  All told, about fifteen people will have given feedback on this pilot before it hits the desk of anyone in the industry.

I've also found a method that has helped me to move more efficiently through a rewrite.  Which is obvious, and which I guess I've done in some fashion before, but with the amount of rewriting I've been doing lately, it's solidified.  I've always used a "punch list," a bullet-pointed list of things I need to work on or revisit in the rewrite.  But I've started breaking that list out by act (in the case of movies and TV) and scene (in the case of plays), one page per act or scene, with one extra page for the bigger, longer-thread stuff.  It helps ENORMOUSLY.

Stealing from Other Art Forms

One of the things I hear, again and again, from more seasoned artists, is to make time to explore/learn from/appreciate other art forms.  Lisa D'Amour brought it up in the workshop I did with her, Suzan Zeder and Daniel Alexander Jones talked about it, and I remember being so struck, at Steven Dietz's house, by how much of his bookshelf space was given over to music and the study of music.

I'm prepared for it to seem weird that I'm posting this here, on my playwriting blog, but one of those websites on which I obsessively spend time (yes, more than Howlround or 2amT) is called Houzz.com -- and it's all about home design.

Background: I think I was seven when I asked for my first magazine subscription...and it was to Architectural digest.  I started arguing with my parents about how we decorated our house by the time I was ten, I've moved over 20 times since I was sixteen (for those who are counting, that averages about once every nine months), and I've collected and cast off more furniture than I can recollect.  I've built tables by hand only to give them away, scattered my grandmothers' antiques from here to California (but I know whether they are -- and I'm going back for them), rolled couches down dozens of city blocks, painted and repainted and repainted...suffice to say, the idea of "home" for me is fraught (and frequently shows up in my playwriting), and I'm someone who cares -- a lot -- about the aesthetics of a space.  Which isn't to say my apartments have looked great -- because I've never committed to a space, and thus have always seen everything it contains (myself included) as "temporary."  So.  Modern Nomad.

Houzz is a place where I can live vicariously, where I can collect and store a huge number of images for "someday."

And sometimes it occurs to me that there might be a connection between the art form I practice, and my extracurricular obsession.  Check this article, for example.

Note the principles this landscape architect talks about using to communicate abundance:

Color
Views
Timelessness
Layers
Intimacy
Focal Points
Movement
Ornamentation
Spontaneity
Pattern

The minute I saw that list, I thought "Viewpoints" and "Aristotle's Poetics."

I think every one of the principles Jeffrey Gordon Smith talks about here has an application on stage -- and, by extension, in playwriting.  I think that if we look at our scripts and ask whether we've created room for Color (diversity, yes, and also vibrancy), Views (perspective), whether we've created layers of meaning, whether we've created an experience with focal points (what Dietz called "stop moments") and intimacy between the people on stage and for our audience, whether our play moves, whether it has ornamentation (perhaps what Aristotle referred to as "spectacle"), spontaneity (what all actors work for, I think, and something that's huge in Viewpoints training) and Pattern (call it story (Dietz), call it Harmony (if you're Aristotle).

Anyway.  Another interesting set of questions to ask of your plays, when you're looking at a draft.

Love's Labours Lost

...is the latest blog I wanna follow.  RVCBard (real name I don't know, but when I learn it, I'll change it here) has some good stuff.  I found her on an older post from Josh Conkel over on the Youngblog about class in theater.  This post, in particular, is one I want to both think about and use.