Lanford

I want to give a nod to playwright Lanford Wilson, who passed away March 24. He was one of my guiding lights, especially when I was first trying to write plays. In high school, the playwright I was most familiar with was Neil Simon. What can I say, I did a lot of speech tournaments and used cuttings from his plays. As I got a little older I read Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill, as we all did. Stuff to admire but I couldn’t imagine writing like any of those folks. But then I discovered Lemon Sky and This is the Rill Speaking and Talley’s Folly and The Fifth of July by Lanford Wilson. Plays filled with people who seemed relatable and real. Plays crafted in a way that seemed that maybe if I put my nose to the grindstone I could emulate them.

Well, I ended up not writing like Lanford Wilson, either, as you can imagine, but he gave me hope and something to shoot for.

I went to see his Burn This at the Taper last Saturday. I can’t say I “grog” the character of Pale nor root for his relationship with Anna, but there were other moments that pulled me in – the pain of being at a funeral where the relatives don’t know or won’t admit the deceased is gay, the push-pull of writing a big, commercial screenplay versus something more human and intimate. So the play wasn’t perfect, but it was still a worthy effort. Thank you, Lanford.

Here are other tributes to him by people who knew him intimately, if you want to see how profoundly he touched others’ lives: 

http://www.playbill.com/features/article/150064-Remembering-Lanford-Wilson-Colleagues-Reflect-About-the-Playwright/all

Gut Reaction

Went to see Jane Anderson’s thought-provoking and funny The Escort last week at The Geffen. The basic storyline is a female gynecologist meets a call girl (“A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar and…” sorry, I couldn’t resist…) and ends up learning where she stands when it comes to her own sexual beliefs and just how open-minded she really is. It makes the audience think, too, presumably, if they’re willing.

I bring it up because in the second act, the call girl did something that made my stomach muscles tighten. No, it didn’t involve sex toys. She asked the gynecologist if she could keep a photo of the doctor’s teenaged son. It didn’t seem in character plus it seemed like a big red flag of a plot point to be used later. Sure enough, it was.

Then even later in the second act, the doctor and her ex-husband got all worked up (again, not in a sex act…) and took a decisive action. My stomach muscles were all in a bunch, the decision seemed forced.

I try and pay attention to my stomach muscles at my own play readings and performances, but it’s harder because I don’t often have the distance that I have when I’m seeing someone else’s play, especially if I’m hearing it for the first time. But seeing Jane’s play – which I liked in spite of my stomach muscle moments, and I’m a huge fan of her work in general – reminded me how important it is to pay attention to my gut reaction.

Hmmm… maybe I can market this as The Playwrights’ Workout: “Build better plays and stronger abs all at the same time…”

Happy Anniversary, baby, got you on my miiiiind….

I don’t know how far we’ve come. It’s hard to measure when you’re in the smack in middle of something.

But an initiative was born. Heat was generated. Actions have been taken.

We have our study (thank you again Ella Martin and all who queried and compiled) and its oh-Lord-we-have-more-work-to-do results… http://lafpi.com/about/the-study/

Theatres have been put on notice that we’re paying attention.

Speeches have been made at award shows, articles have been written and circulated.

And this blog was started a year ago, April 19, 2010.

Even though I haven’t gotten to gather in person with the LAFPI gang in many months due to my schedule conflicts (I do plan on making the May 15^th picnicky thing!), I definitely have felt a sense of community as we write and share the journey of being playwrights here in da blog.

It feels better when you’re going through something together. Here’s to the next year of blogging, playwriting, initiating, activating, and makin’ more noise… together.

Hang in there

Last year I went to a play reading by someone in my writers’ group that chronicled how Kenneth Grahame came to create his famous children’s novel The Wind in the Willows. The play touched upon the difficulties of Mr. Grahame’s marriage and his relationship with his son, who ended up committing suicide at age 20, and simultaneously featured the animal characters of the book as well. The subject matter was intriguing but I had some trouble following the story.

Flash forward to December and I went to see something else by this writer: The King’s Speech.  I loved it and I hope David Seidler wins an Oscar for it.

Maybe it was me, maybe it was the script, maybe it was a combo of both on why the Kenneth Grahame piece didn’t take flight for me during that reading. But I was heartened to see that David had something else that not only is flying but  flying high.

Baseball players don’t bat a thousand — .300 is a good batting average. They keep coming up to the plate, we keep putting pen to paper. We re-write. We start something new. Either way, we get another shot.

How David came to write The King’s Speech is a fascinating story unto itself – he asked the Queen Mum permission to write about that period in her husband’s life — and she said not in her lifetime. She ended up living to be 101.

Fortunately, David didn’t forget about the idea and in the intervening 28 years from the time he contacted her, he accumulated life experiences that made the script even richer.

The King’s Speech in the L.A. Times

Failure

Right now I’m nursing some pulled muscles in my right side. I’ve been taking an exercise class at work on my lunch hour, and we were doing as many sit-ups, squats and pushups as we possibly could during a timed workout last week. I felt a weird pressure sensation on my back about halfway through the workout every time I did a sit-up. Did I stop? No. Should I have? Yes. Why didn’t I? I didn’t want to fail. Me. The instructors. My parents. Fill-in-the-blank.

Failure can lead to insight, which is what my aching side is leading me towards even as I type this. Must I drive myself so hard? No. Of course there is a fine line between that and throwing in the towel prematurely.

Back on January 11th, Ravenchild shared on this blog a link to J.K. Rowling’s commencement address (“The Fringe Benefits of Failure”) where she discussed how the very lowest of low points in her life led her to create Harry Potter. If you missed it, I highly recommend it.

Someone else whose life derailment led to astounding insights in the form of a bestselling book is Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame. I resisted the book for a long time thinking it had to be overhyped, but I found it rich in observations and laugh-out-loud funny to boot.

If these two women can take humongous life setbacks and turn them in to inspiring art… who are the rest of us to throw in the towel when the going gets tough?

So I’m listening to my body – always a wise move – and taking a break from the exercise class. I’m also using a heating pad, ice, Advil and help from my acupuncturist. In terms of writing, I’m gonna keep at it. No strained muscles in sight at the moment.

And if you’d like to hear Elizabeth speak, check out her talk on creative inspiration….
Elizabeth Gilbert on Genius

The Bubble

I’m in the bubble right now. A week from tonight I will hear my new full-length play COMMUNITY read all the way through for the first time at my writers’ and actors’ group Fierce Backbone. I’ve heard chunks of it before, in installments, weeks apart. But next Monday is the first true road-test to see if it can go the distance without all of the wheels falling off and the transmission landing smack in the middle of the second act.

I like the bubble. It’s one of my favorite places to be. It’s a happy place. A place full of optimism and potential. It’s where I’m insulated from any script problems that are still lurking out there. It’s where the script’s amazing possibilities are still alive in my mind.

Before cold reality sets in.

The individual sections read well, we got some laughs, the characters were engaging. Yes, I did get feedback on how to make things better and yes, I’ve implemented some of those changes.

Right now I don’t know whether those changes work. And that’s fine. Because soon enough I’ll be wrestling with characters that need more development and an ending that needs more punch and… you get the idea.

Right now I can catch my breath and dream of glorious productions of this baby on down the road – before I have to get out my tool box and start tinkering and rebuilding again.

Here’s to the bubble. Because without the bubble, especially in the future when I’m up to my elbows in sludgy motor oil of scenes that have no pace and cylinders that aren’t firing because there’s no conflict, I need to remember the bubble of possibilities and keep driving towards it.

Pulling Me In…

If you want to see what works in a short play, be part of a short play festival and watch your fellow entrants (or sit in the lobby listening) over and over. By the end of the run, you’ll know.

I had the good fortune a few years ago to have a piece in a Christmas monologue event sponsored by my then-group Playwrights 6. I was at the theatre every night because I was helping set up or selling tickets etc. All of the pieces were stage-worthy… but the one I made sure to catch every night was by Gib Wallis. His character, a charming and gregarious immigrant named Alfredo, relives his first Christmas in the U.S. and his first-time meeting a guy under the mistletoe, told in fractured English. My heart never got tired of going on that journey with him.

A couple of weeks ago I had a short play in a weekend of shorts sponsored by my current writers’ group Fierce Backbone, and this time the piece that grabbed me was Ten Hours by David Watkins. In brief scenes it told the ten hour journey of a man and woman meeting, getting to know each other over some meals and in bed… And then it ended in a heart-breaking moment of the man saying to the woman, when pressed why he doesn’t want to date her, “You’re fat.” I knew how it ended and yet I got pulled in every time.

Neither of these short plays were clever or flashy. Both of them allowed their characters to be vulnerable, to let me see inside their hearts. My favorite type of theatre.

And Yet…

I recently had new business cards made.

I’ve had my old ones for 15 years or so. A friend designed them in a very clever way: all they say is (in a font reminiscent of a manual typewriter): Nancy Beverly writes for a living and then my phone number.

I justified changing them because a) I was almost out of them b) they don’t have my cell phone number c) they don’t have my email and d) they don’t have my street address. I did love the simplicity of them, though, and they always got a smile from people whenever I handed them out. But it was time to let people know they can get in touch with me via the other modern ways of communication.

Overriding all of those justifications, though, was e) the fact that that simple sentence on there – Nancy Beverly writes for a living – has been eating at me for 15 years.

My graphic artist friend must’ve been inspired by my spirit guides to write that sentence because that’s why I moved out to L.A.

To make a living at writing.

I’ve actually “made a living” at it for only a couple of years. The rest of the time I’ve worked a number of show biz jobs, while continuing to write.

Part of me felt I was lying on my business cards by saying I write for a living.

It doesn’t mean I’m not a writer. I live to write. Since I was a kid.

My new business cards list the space-age ways of getting a hold of me… along with a beautiful lake and mountain landscape background… and these words:

Explorer/Writer/Photographer

Peyto Lake, Alberta Canada

They feel like a better fit.

And yet, I feel as if I failed the big goal I set for myself.

And yet, I’m still pursuing my other big goal, which is to be a good writer, and I practice that daily.

And that feels good.

And Then Again…

And then again, maybe it’s a personality thing.

The last time I wrote for this blog, I was saying how I hoped I wouldn’t “say something stupid” in front of a new director I was about to meet – translation: overstep some line between writers and directors.

This director was interested in a full-length of mine. That project hasn’t gotten off the ground yet, but in the mean time I had a ten minute play going into production and I needed a director. I thought it’d be good to see if we worked well together.

It turns out we worked very well together. She happens to be open to collaboration and as we went through rehearsals, she didn’t mind me piping up at all.

Maybe it’s a country thing.

She’s from Finland. Perhaps they do things differently there.

Maybe it’s a no-pre-conceived-notion-about-living-playwrights thing.

She’s used to working with dead playwrights. She doesn’t have rules in her head about how to work with living ones. We did both agree that we shouldn’t simultaneously be talking to the actors.

So all of my worries about overstepping any lines went out the window because there were no lines. There was this joyous person from Finland who wanted to make every moment work and happily welcomed both my script changes and interpretation notes.

Life is good.

I Walk the Line

Some recent events:

Someone in my writers’ group brought in sections of his full-length play over the past few months whose set-up is this: in the future, old people will be eliminated because they are no longer of use to society. It’s satirical, it’s biting, it’s funny. And after a few scenes, it wasn’t my cup of tea. My mom, a widow, has had a rough few years (read between the lines: so have I). I had to move her first into assisted living and then six months later into a nursing home. In Florida. That would be the Florida that’s waaaaay far away from California, where I reside.

Many of the other writers and actors in attendance laughed all the way through but it just was salt in the wound for me. The writer did rewrite it (some of his changes seemed sparked by an observation I made about the passive wife in the piece, “So similarly, perhaps the Nazi wives had some thoughts about what their husbands were doing…”), and that provided better arguments for the other side, for which I give him major credit. But I still passed on going to see the full read-through and sent him an email explaining the situation with my mom.

Then a few weeks ago, another writer in our group brought in a short play set after the Civil War wherein a very graphic rape and murder were described. By the end, I had no idea what I was supposed to take away from the play, or what the characters learned or how they had an arc. In my comments, I gave the writer props for holding my attention the entire time, but I wondered for what purpose.

It’s true we can all write whatever we darn well want. I wouldn’t want anybody, even a fellow writer, telling me what or what not to write. But do we consider how much we might lose the audience with our subject matter or approach? Or do we just say frack the audience, I don’t care what they think or feel, I’m doing this for me.

I tend to come down on the side of WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER, me and the audience. I have a journey I want them to witness, to understand to some degree.

I think those two guys in my group care about what the audience response is, otherwise they wouldn’t be in a writers group where feedback is a part of the process. But they can’t tailor their work for just me, because my taste isn’t their taste. It’s an interesting line to walk.

And then there was this event:

Some friends and acquaintances went to see the movie The Kids Are All Right. I saw angry email subject lines from some of them and chose not to open those emails so I could see the movie with fresh eyes. But one of my closest friends walked out of the movie. I was stunned. Then I went to see it, and I and the friends who went with me that afternoon, loved it. So I was even more stunned. Yeah, all of the adult characters have major flaws and make bad choices. But they all learn something by the end. That to me makes an interesting journey and good drama. But perhaps my friend reacted for a deep reason I don’t understand (we haven’t talked about the movie yet). Maybe the movie hit her the way the play about snuffing out the elderly hit me.

Here’s to walking the fine line of getting an audience to go with you on the trip and staying true to your vision all at the same time.