Spalding Gray

I first saw Spalding Gray perform in person at Lincoln Center in 1996 when he did his monologue It’s a Slippery Slope about learning to ski and changes in his relationships. He sat behind a table with a notebook in front of him. He spoke with a Rhode Island twang. I liked his voice.

He was performing in tandem with Julie Taymor’s The Green Bird and Taymor’s lush green forest hung above stage like a forest of the mind.

I later learned he never wrote out his monologues. He performed from an outline, so he wasn’t reading. He was engaging the audience. He was telling his story, and this made one feel very intimate with his story. However, this intimacy only went one way. He didn’t know his audience members personally and only told what he wanted to tell. He had control over his material.

Even though he was sitting the whole time, he had physical presence. He leaned forward and leaned back. He gestured with his arms. He could become very animated without leaving his seat.

The second time I saw Spalding Gray perform was at PS 122. I don’t remember the year. It was probably the late 90s. He was workshopping a new piece called Morning, Noon, and Night. He went for an hour and a half, got to late afternoon, and stopped there. He was trying tangents out and still trying to find the structure of it. We witnessed the hours of his day pass in minutes, and it was so rich and lovely that we could’ve sat and listened for another hour.

The last time I saw Spalding Gray on stage was a panel at ColumbiaUniversityon the theatrical avant garde. It was late autumn 2001. 9/11 had just happened, and we were still sorting through the rubble. Other panelists included Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, and three or four others.

Spalding Gray walked with cane and several times had to get up and walk off the stage, but he always came back. I didn’t know at the time that he had been in a bad car accident that past July. At one point on the panel, he talked about stories and how he use to think they had power but he doesn’t feel that way anymore. Still, he structured his thoughts as a story.

I recently read The Journals of Spalding Gray published by Knopf. Even though I knew how the book would end, I was still very sad when I got there. However, the journal journey to that end has writing and insights from some good time spent on this earth.

He wasn’t just an autobiographical storyteller. He sculpted his story to something beyond even himself.  He created a theatrical event with desk, a chair, a notebook, and himself. Adios, Spalding Gray. Thanks for the words.

At the end of my blog week on Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative, I’m gonna give Spalding Gray the last words. This is from a journal entry dated June 9, 1995:

 . . .eating my old tuna, jalapeno and “hot” hummus sandwich I had a peaceful sense of NOTHINGNESS and that was what I was going to come to. DEATH is NOTHING. It’s not death that’s sad, it’s life. There is nothing sad about nothing. I had a very strong feeling that I am nothing visiting something. Yes, I am nothing visiting something and returning to nothing.

Theatre Dot Orgy

Earlier this month on facebook, Tiffany Antone posted a really funny Freudian slip her Dad made about her website (http://www.theatricstheatre.org/). He called it theatre dot orgy.

This made me laugh not only because I love puns, but also because Tiffany’s Dad stumbled onto a fundamental truth about theatre. Way to go Tiffany Dad! Woohoo!

On dictionary dot com, Orgy is defined in a variety of ways. First, it is a wild drunken or licentious festivity or revelry. Second, it is any actions or proceeding marked by unbridled indulgence of passions (an orgy of killing). Third, in Ancient Greece, an orgy is an esoteric religious ritual in worship of Dionysius with wild dancing, singing, drinking. Finally, informally, an orgy is a boisterous rowdy party.

I worry sometimes that theatre writing is too much in the head, that plays ignore the body in favor of people sitting and talking about feelings, psychology, philosophy, ideas. Bodies on stage can move, dance, sit down, stand up. Plays are not just about the spoken. They are about the physical.

Orgy in theatre is not just sex orgy. Orgy in theatre is the revelry of the play. It is brutality and joy. It is passion and destruction together in their most extreme form. And there’s something holy in it—not in some organized religion kind of way, but in the communal understanding of the mystery of the unspoken.

And this unspoken does not need to be talked about. It does not even need to be whispered about, but when it happens, everyone in the audience knows it.

You Will Submit!

You all are catching me at a crazy time. I’m in the middle of a big script send out to places far and wide. My brain is thinking about Character Breakdowns and Playwright Biographies. Am I just a playwright character? Or am I a character playwright? Who am I? What am I doing?

I also want to give a shout out to the National Playwrights Conference which used their Facebook page as a force of good to explain what a Statement of Objectives was. Yay Eugene O’Neill!!! And I’m not kissing ass to get my play selected. Okay I am, but whatever.

I have also been on the other side of the submission process and read submissions for theatre companies and contests.

I am currently on a submission reading hiatus, so I know for a fact that I am not reading plays by anyone who might be reading this.

I recently was asked by a new playwright acquaintance about submissions. What makes a good play? Or more importantly, how can one’s play stand out and shine in the early rounds of judging?

There’s no definite answer because every reader comes from a different place. However, there are a few simple things that all writers can do.

Layout. Especially dialogue. I don’t care if you put the character name over the dialogue or on the same line as the dialogue. Please, just do it one way or another, and keep it consistent.

Also, make sure the character’s name is spelled the same throughout the script. Yes, I have read scripts where character names change halfway through.

Sometimes characters speak over each other. Yes, I know it happens in life. I don’t want some weird formatting. Just write (speaking over her) in the character direction.

I don’t want to see a lot of character direction. I don’t want to know when a character turns her head or even crosses the room. Please, just the essentials for staging. Think of it as the important stuff.

Third, please, please, please could I have a list of characters at the beginning of the play. I don’t need a lot of detail. Sometimes I forget who’s the mother and who’s the sister especially in big epic family melodramas.  

Should you have it single sided or double sided on paper? I don’t really care. But please, make sure you have all your pages. For computer submissions, I prefer the script be in pdf instead of a word processing program so I don’t mess up your lovely formatting.

How should the paper script be bound? Brass binders are fine for me because I can take them out when I hold the manuscript.

Finally, please please please don’t write plays that are dumbass. How do you know if your play is dumbass? Well, you really don’t. That’s the fun of it.

Another comic thought. I have no power to get your play produced. However, I can recommend it or not recommend it.

I will read your script intelligently and perceptively. I will try to imagine the characters as flesh and blood people on a stage. I will delight when I am surprised and laugh when it is funny. When I’m reading your script, the stage in my head is yours. Now, show me something

16 Possible Glimpses by Marina Carr at the Abbey Theatre

This is not a review. Just my notes.

Last month, I was in Dublin and caught a preview of the world premiere of the latest Marina Carr play at the Abbey Theatre.

16 Possible Glimpses is an artistic impression of the life of playwright Anton Chekhov. Instead of writing a definite biography play, Marina Carr set out to write her own Chekhov, and she shows us a man who is both contradictory and painfully human.

Personally, I also thought her Chekhov was kind of sexy, and that is an adjective I never would have used about Anton Chekhov in the past. The structure of the play is nonlinear, so Chekhov dies in the beginning, then he’s onstage for the rest of the night. We see him resurrected again and again.

Carr’s Chekhov embraces a lot of people, and these physical connections make the missed connections in Chekhov’s tragic comedies even more tragic. How often we are afraid to embrace each other in life. Chekhov had TB and did not have the luxury of time, so he had to embrace as much as he could.

The play asks the question: what is a good man? How can one be both a good man and a good writer? There is a great scene where Chekhov is trying to write a story to pay the mortgage, but he is constantly interrupted by people needing him either in his family or as a doctor.

The production also incorporates video. By projecting the actors behind their physical selves, what is said and not said becomes more distorted as some phrases become overemphasized. It also allows glimpses of actors’ faces when they have their back to the audience or to other actors. The focus is not so much on the talker but on the listener.

As I witnessed the play in the tiny Peacock theatre, I thought about how a person’s life is really just glimpses and how fortunate that we got sixteen possible glimpses of Chekhov. By the way, the play doesn’t have sixteen scenes. Sixteen never comes up. It’s just a random number. Now, that’s really cool.

The production at the Abbey closed on October 29^th. You can find out more about it here.

Inciting Incident

Let’s start at the very beginning

A very good place to start

I start my blog week with Julie Andrews’ voice in my head. A very nice voice to hear. I’m also going to begin my blog week with beginnings.

Recently, I heard an aspiring screenwriter use the term inciting incident so reverently that I thought she had found the holy grail. Then I realized that she was just trying to sound writerly.

An inciting incident in a play or movie is the moment when the whole thing gets moving. The conflict is introduced. The goals of the protagonist are laid out. The inciting incident is all very precise and mathematical.

Aspiring writers are usually very good at having the inciting incident happen quickly then giving us a lot of pages of gobbelygook.

Gobbelygook is my term for time-filling writing.

When I went to writing school, we didn’t talk about the inciting incident. We just talked about the beginning. We also called it the start.

In sports, the start is very obvious. It’s the first pitch or the starting bell or buzzer or flag. The contest is happening. Action movies usually have a definite starting bell; then it’s on, and we’re in for two hours of some excellent sound editing.

However, not all plays are contests. To begin a play, you just gotta get some characters out on a stage. However, sometimes they don’t want to leave the backstage. Characters can be so difficult sometimes.

Wouldn’t it be great to start the play before the audience showed up? Just start in an empty theatre, then the audience shows up and has to figure things out.

However, in LA, the audiences would want to know when the start before the start is, so they can have access to the play. In LA, it’s all about the access.

How to Hang Out with Female Playwrights

Last weekend in Prescott, when I wasn’t watching my own play, soaking in a Jacuzzi, or poking around the local Salvation Army thrift store, I was hanging out with the other women playwrights.

Because what happens in Prescott stays in Prescott, I won’t air all the Dirty Laundry details. However, I did notice some interesting things about this flock of nine playwrights who all happened to be female.

Since members of the other gender might be curious about how to deal with such a gathering of women who write plays, I’ve decided to raise the curtain on female playwrights.

First of all, female playwrights like to shop. Yep, we like the shopping. Now, shopping is not to be confused with buying. Still, I think our presence did good things for the economic index of Prescott.

Second, female playwrights like to drink adult beverages. We might all drink different adult beverages, but we really appreciated drinking adult beverages of quality.

Third, female playwrights complement each other. During performances, there was a lot of tapping and whispering and giggling in the playwright section.

Fourth, female playwrights ask a lot of questions. I like to ask questions in conversation, and I soon realized that I was around people who also asked questions in conversation. At some point, I just started making statements.

So if you are thinking of producing a Women’s Playwriting Festival, just be aware of these four things, and you should do well.

And on that bombshell, I come to end of another playwright blogging week. Good night!

Dirty Laundry Play Festival

This past weekend, I braved the humidity of Prescott, AZ because my ten-minute play, Rinse, was produced along with ten minute plays by Jennie Webb, Micki Shelton, Katherine James, Kate Hawkes, Charlotte Winters, Sara Israel, Tiffany Antone, and Shanee Edwards in the Dirty Laundry Festival.

Yep, the ladies took over Prescott. Woohooo!

Tiffany Antone came up with Dirty Laundry because she decided to create a few playwriting opportunities of her own. And wow did she deliver an evening of theatrical fun. She is also courageous and bold, and her enthusiasm for all us writers was inspiring.

Even before I got to Arizona, Dirty Laundry was a growth experience. Since I lived 450 miles away, I couldn’t sit in on rehearsals. I couldn’t say yes or no to ideas. I had to let go of my play.

On Friday, Jennie Webb and I rode out to Prescott on 109 horses. When I arrived in the high altitude town, I immediately sought sanctuary in my hotel’s Jacuzzi.

On Friday night, Tiffany put together a backroom meet-up for writers, actors, and directors of the show. When folks learned that I had written Rinse, they usually reacted with Ohhhhhh as if there had been speculation about me.

My favorite encounter at the reception was with one of the actors. He was not in my play but had seen it at the tech.

Man: You don’t usually expect a play like yours from a woman.

Jen: What kind of play?

Man: Women don’t write about torture.

Jen: Actually there was a very popular play off-Broadway in the mid-eighties about a torturer and written by a woman.

Man: There was?

Jen: The Conduct of Life by Maria Irene Fornes.

Man: Never heard of it, but now I know.

On Saturday, the Dirty Laundry plays were presented at 2 and 7 at the Prescott Fine Arts Association whose theatre is an old Catholic Church. My play happened right after intermission, so I spent most of the intermission mentally making people sit down. Sit down, damn it!

Then I watched my play. . . .

Oh wow. . .

The director and cast took it on and went for it. The look and feel of the play was unique. The actors were physical and trusted what they were doing. It was like they were in their own self-contained universe.

So let me take this opportunity to publicly stand up and applaud Cason Murphy, the director and lighting designer and the excellent cast—Sean Jeralds, Anthony Osvog, and Dino Palazzi. I playwright love you guys.

Also a big thanks to the crew that toweled down the stage after my play. Things got a little wet onstage, but no towels were harmed during this production.

Special Thanks to David Cottle for the Production Photos

No Such Thing As Failure

As I strive to create a warm and fuzzy wuzzy theatre, I try to keep it all in the positive.

However, I find it very difficult to keep in the positive even though I live in three hundred days of sunshine and seventy degrees. Still the torture chamber of darkness and despair in my brain sometimes surfaces at inopportune times. 

Recently I was having lunch with an actress friend. She’s one of those actresses that writers dream about. She’s smart and talented. Anyway, she told me about an acting workshop she took which wasn’t really a fit for her. She went in with the best of intentions but the facilitator turned out to be an asshole. It happens.

After she told her tale of woe, she felt bad for how it all worked out. She felt like she had failed in some way. At that moment, I had a career epiphany.

My friend had not failed. There’s no such thing as failure in the theatre. It just didn’t work out. Because it just didn’t work out, you can’t really say anything majorly bad about the experience. It just didn’t work out, then move on to the next thing and the thing after that.

Tomorrow, the fuzzy wuzziness continues with Dirty Laundry. It’s not just about socks anymore.

Illusion and Hustle

Theatre is just illusion and hustle.

I came up with this theory as I watched Guy Hollingworth in The Expert At the Card Table, a one man play directed by Neil Patrick Harris at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica earlier this month. The play has long since closed and like great illusions, it only exists in our inaccurate memories.

The Expert At the Card Table was a book published in 1902 which gave away card shark secrets. In the course of an hour and a half, we learn the fate of the book’s author. Even though I consider myself pretty good at figuring out stories, I must say honestly that I didn’t see the ending coming.

Interspersed with the story of the author, Hollingworth, an accomplished magician, performs card tricks. Thanks to a large screen behind him, we see his hands work. He can make a deck of cards do anything he wants.

It’s like watching a dancer only he dances with his hands. I could write a play starring his hands. Oh wait, that was The Expert at the Card Table.

As the play went on, I thought about the theatrical hustle. He draws the audience into the trick, shows the audience what he wants them to see, then snap, magic!

We playwrights are hustlers too. We are hustlers on the page (we also have to be hustlers with artistic directors, but that’s a different essay). We only show the audience what we want them to see. We might hold off on a bit of information until it is necessary. We might only show one side of a character. We might only show one room of house.

We practice long hours to perfect our illusions, to make them seem almost natural, so the audience doesn’t miss what they can’t see.

Having that much power over an audience is kind of a sexy thing.

Feedback is not just about speakers

Hello again

I just got back yesterday from Prescott, Arizona where my short play, Rinse, was produced at a women’s playwriting festival called Dirty Laundry put together by the great Tiffany Antone.  I will talk about Dirty Laundry a little later this week. In the meantime, you can also check out the Little Black Dress website to learn more about it.

Today’s subject is feedback.

I am a genius, and I like to be praised.

 Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I will talk about feedback.

We live in a time when we are surrounded by dramatic writing. Film reviews talk about a weak third act. TV watchers blog about character arch. Everyone knows about conflict, conflict, conflict!

I think it’s cool that everyone knows how a basic story works and can rationally explain emotional catharsis. It makes me freer to break from convention to draw in an audience and reach dramatic completion.

I don’t mind feedback. I’ll either use or not. I don’t mind dumb feedback because it reflects more on the relative intelligence of the feedbacker rather than the work itself.

Recently a friend praised the feedback I give to other writers. He went on and on about how precise and articulate my comments were. He praised my intelligence. Since I am a genius and like to be praised, I let him go on and on.

 This also led me to think about feedback. How can feedback be intelligent?

Wayyyy back in the late 90s, I was part of the Womens Project Playwrights Lab in New York. We had a specific way of handling feedback, and I adapted it as my own. It was a method developed by someone outside of the Lab, and if anyone could tell me whose method this is, I will happily give credit where credit is due.

The writer presents the work. Then, there is only praise. I liked this and I liked that. It should be specific. After the praise, the second part of the feedback is questions. Who, what, where, when, why? Most criticism of work in development is in the form of a question anyway, so it makes sense. Instead of saying that makes no sense, the feedbacker asks why. Usually the question part of feedback takes a long time because it leads to discussion. The third and final part of the feedback involves general comments. Since most of the criticisms become questions, the third part is usually quick. Someone might want to really specify a point. Someone might want to return to an area worthy of praise. Since comments are intended to be conclusive, it forces the feedbackers to be specific.

I still try to use this form when giving feedback. Intelligent feedback is not about my intelligence. It’s about the work.

How can one become a more intelligent feedbacker? I would say read a lot and watch a lot, so new forms and ideas are not so strange.

How can a writer receive intelligent feedback? Well, unfortunately, you can’t control other people’s minds (I’ve tried, it doesn’t work). I show early drafts to people I trust. Then, I have the next ring of people who read the piece once it’s gone a little further.

For the plays, I also have actors I trust. I can learn a lot about a character from five minutes with a smart actor. By the way, smart actors are geniuses and like praise too.