On the road again

I’m looking forward to Tuesday.  That’s when I’m stepping on a plane to Rhode Island where yet another college is producing my war crimes play “A Patch of Earth.”  I’m looking forward to the talkback session with the students.  They always ask the hard questions.

I’ve been very fortunate with this particular play to find exactly the right audience.  It premiered at the Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, where it won the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition.  But it’s not exactly the most commercial thing I’ve ever written.  As my pal who runs MetroStage in Alexandria puts it, “it’s hard to sell tickets to a show about slaughtering Bosnians at Srebrenica.” 

But it’s exactly the right play for colleges, a place where young people spend hours debating moral questions.  The play is the true story of Drazen Erdemovic, a Bosnian Croat who ended up fighting for all three sides during the Yugoslav war.  He says he never killed anybody until his unit was sent to a farm outside of Srebrenica where they were instructed to kill busloads of men.  He said he didn’t want to shoot, but was told if he felt so sorry for the victims he could stand up there with them and be shot himself.  And then his compadres would go back to his village and shoot his wife and child. 

It’s a story with characters around the age of college students, a story that happened in most of these students’ lifetime.  The play has a big cast (at least 9, as many as 30) with lots of good female roles.  Perfect for college productions.

And it’s had those college productions in Detroit, Pretoria, Costa Mesa, New Jersey, and now Rhode Island.  (It even had one high school production last year in England!)  “A Patch of Earth” was even published by the University of Wisconsin Press. 

I don’t write all this to brag on myself, but to remind myself that not everything I write is destined for the Taper.  Or the Geffen.  Or the Pasadena Playhouse.  That doesn’t mean the script doesn’t have value.  In fact, it might affect more lives by being the perfect script for colleges.  Or for community theatres.  Or for young audiences. 

Write the play that’s calling you to be written today.  Worry about the audience it’s written for after you’re done.  Because plays that need to be written seem to find their own audiences.

Time management

There really are only 24 hours in a day.  And on a night like this, where I’m just getting home at 8:30 in the evening, the last thing that I want to do after dealing with words and sound bites all day is stare some more at my computer and deal with words and dialogue.  If I were a better person, I’d go to bed earlier and get up at the crack of dawn and write.  But I’m not that better person.

I’m giving myself a pass this week.  I knew it would be a stressful week at work, what with threats of a government shutdown.  Plus, my Skype partner had another commitment and couldn’t make our once a week playwriting lab.   So no new pages for me. 

But just giving myself a week off gave me the space to actually send out some query letters and submit a couple of plays here and there.  And my brain has been working on rewriting the LA Riots play.  So I haven’t completely given up my identity as playwright. 

I’ve had a hard time finding a regular schedule for my writing – partly because of the unpredicability of the day job, partly because both my husband and I work out of an 800 square foot coop.  And he’s a writer, too.  There’s something about that other person sucking all the creative energy out of a place. 

When I was working on the many, many rewrites of “Gogol Project,” I found that if I could set aside 90 minutes a day, I could write a play.  That resolution has fallen away. I did manage to finish the first draft of a new play in spits and spots.  But after more than two decades of writing plays, I wish I knew a more efficient way to do it.

I’m curious about your writing habits.  Do you have a sacred place and time?  How long do you typically sit down to write at a time?  Is caffeine a requirement?

Over-Extended and Under-Funded: an Exercise in Remembering to BREATHE

Breathing… Breathing…

I have to remember to breathe.

I’m producing a Young Playwrights Festival, and although I’ve headed up smaller such things before, all the people (and kiddo) wrangling has got me feeling a tad overwhelmed.  I mean, this is quite a bit different than wrangling characters and inventing location… this is tangible, frustratingly human, manuevering…

And it’s got me cringing at all the variables.

Which is why I need to remember to breathe… that it’s all going to be just fine…  That ultimately, all the worrying and fretting don’t actually do anything except make you miserable.

But I am sitting here, wondering how in the world I got myself so mightily committed overall – I mean, I’m earning a 19-hour a week paycheck at my “job” and probably logging an additional 25 a week for non-paying endeavors:  There’s the Festival (Gah!) and rehearsals for the show I’m directing, and the countless emails from the other directors and committee members and… woof!  Then there are my blogs – I have a personal space that allows me to pontificate periodically on anything from cat-hairs in my breakfast to the agony and love-lust of art – plus I edit a larger scale Los Angeles-centric blog-collective with a bunch of other writers (Ahem, and might I say, we’re always looking for more people to blog for us, my fellow scribes!)  And then I have my playwriting log – which consists of an ever increasing list of characters and plot-lines banging down my mental door, demanding to be paid attention to…

No wonder I’m tired!

So I’m sitting here, in the midst of things, wondering just when the heck I’m going to be able to pay Visa back (and Mastercard, and Discover…) from all my below-the-poverty line living, and actually manage to eek out some sort of existence that doesn’t land me gasping for air and sanity every Friday night as I clutch my empty wallet in shame over my under-funded dinner…

Woe. Is. The. Playwright.

And yet…

I can’t fathom having a laundry list of over-compensated-for tasks that looks like an accountant’s sheet… I can’t imagine finding happiness in a full-time paycheck if it was sans-flexibility for these things that alternately drive me crazy and flood me with joy… I NEED to be able to flit from project to project; writing, directing, producing, editing… I NEED THE UNCERTAINTY!   I just want to get paid better for it

So… as I sit down at my desk and hammer out a few fumbling sentences here, I’d just like to tell the universe that I’m not complaining – not really.   I am so thankful for my life – I’d just like my life to start paying for itself so that I can afford the massages I need to soothe the worries my over-committments manifest and to move out of my parents house and into some big-girl living once again.

But until that happens, I guess I just have to continue to remind myself to B-R-E-A-T-H-E.

Now What?

You know that idea, the one that rolls around in your head whenever you don’t want to concentrate on the project you actually should be writing?

Then one day someone gives you time and resources and says that idea sounds great for a workshop. At least, that’s how it happened for me.

Now what?

Nothing is written, perhaps some notes jotted, an image folder created on my desktop but still sparse: this is the state of that project.

I start by collecting source material, images, and just seeking as much research on the topic at hand as possible.

How do you start a dream project?

Caffeine, please

Kitty Felde – January 21, 2011

Time and energy seem to be my biggest obstacles to writing these days.  I have a day job where I’m writing a lot.  And running all over town.  And shocking though it may be to admit, I just don’t have as much energy as I used to.  

I consume vast amounts of tea and chocolate to fuel my writing periods, but it’s just not enough.  There aren’t enough hours in the day for work, exercise (ballet and swimming), opening the door for the cat, and kissing my husband.  Oh, and many days I’d much rather be pursuing my other creative outlet: sewing.  I can spend an entire weekend at my sewing machine and plan entire trips to various cities just to shop their fabric stores.  (My last trip to NYC was split between seeing theatre and seeing the Balenciaga exhibit and the costume exhibit at Lincoln Center.)

I’m trying to take the long view.  I’ve written ten plays over two decades.  I don’t have to do it all in 2011.  I am entitled to just sit around and be a vegetable sometimes.  I don’t have to write everyday. 

But that’s the rub, isn’t it?  On days when I don’t write, I’m not as nice a person to those around me.  Growl.

Guess I’ll summon the energy to write a few lines.

Hats off (no, really) to Committees

“A camel is a horse designed by committee” – Vogue, 1957

Mayhaps you’re all watching what is happening on The Hill… a room full of (mostly) men are sitting firm on their political high-horses, battling over what IS and IS NOT good for the American public…  They’re making decisions based on what they deem “right” (OR) “left” and the rest of us restlessly sit and wait.

Anybody else find this macrocosm representational of the more mundane parts of life?  Anybody ever scratch their heads at the “people in power” and wonder just “How in the hell” they became the megaphone for our “Voice”?

I’m interested in the parallels in politics between “their” and “here” – the White House to Theatre House -because it seems that I’ve been privy to a few conversations lately that make me wonder just when it was that these people lost touch with the world and began, for lack of classier language, touching only themselves.

I think it has something to do with hats.

You see… I’m broke.  And I live IN the world.  I’m not shoveling gravel, or hauling garbage… no, those blue-collar citizens might look at my liberal artistic self and roll their hard-working eyes.  But I am struggling, I am walking around in the shoes of the well-traveled and hungry.  And I’ve got about a dozen or so hats to juggle as a result.

Which means I can’t ever get too comfortable in just one.

I write, I teach, I tutor, I am the web-master/social media maven for my current employer – I also blog (for my own sake and as the occasional guest) and edit a LosAngeles centric webzine.  I am a daughter, friend, and (yippee) girlfriend – which means I am involved in the lives of those around me and I have a stake in their happiness as well as my own.  I work with students and faculty, and I do my own friggin’ laundry… I drive a beat up little Hyundai and my “grand” dreams of upgrading involve another… wait for it… Hyundai.

So, you see, I wear a lot of hats…

And I live a pretty down-to-earth existence.

But the people in “power” seem to have forgotten what it is like to live like this…

It requires compromise… it requires flexibility and ingenuity…

It requires the ability to put oneself in other’s shoes.

But instead, we get people wearing their “Control” hat (the one that shoots you the whammy if you disagree) and folded arms, standing atop their pillars of salt as though it’s all going to go their way or no way at all.

Mayhaps, and here’s the theatrical segue, the answer is to tear down and start over.

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute!  WHAT?

Just hang in here with me a moment longer…

I hear a lot of chit and a lot of chat about theatre companies NOT producing enough: new work, work by women, culturally specific work, devised work, political work, etc.   I hear a lot of theatre companies turn around and bemoan the lack of quality in said work, the lack of faith, and the lack of $$…

The people in charge, are dealing with budgets and spreadsheets, and trying to read the minds of their paying audiences and benefactors and otherwise worrying about keeping the “business” afloat, while the people creating the art are dealing with paying rent, trying to get produced, struggling to be relevant, and worrying about keeping their lives afloat.

What would happen if the two switched places for a while?

Probably something on par with what would happen if our Congress and Senate switched places with some “real folks” for a while:  Total and complete madness, followed by a (gasp) revolution of thought and of practice.

I mean, I am talking about some good old fashioned Freaky-Friday changes in perspective here, people!

Might we not all be able to head back to our “tired, stuck-on, and stubborn” hats with a little more perception?  Might we possibly come back to our “positions” (as power-player or peon) with a little more flexibility and ingenuity?

Or would it only strengthen our resolve to lock ourselves away in our tight little corners, unwilling to trust or listen to those we stand among, atop, and for?

(sigh)

It’s all really a bit of a mess, isn’t it?

Kind of like the camel…

Stealing Time to Write

Everyone does it: sometimes in a restroom, in a corner of a park, in your bedroom, hell – some people even do it in a public cafe.

We all steal time to write.

I say steal time because it feels selfish, inward, private.

And it just feels so good. Especially when it feels horrible during the process, it feels so good when you’re done. Writing is very much like spinning class in that way.

The true reason we steal time to write, though, is because we find it so easy not to write.

There’s laundry, the dog, the kids, the love interest, the season finale we could consider research, the day job, sleep, Facebook, Twitter, blogs about writing - no matter how you add, multiply or divide the time, these only equal procrastination.

I recently learned the hardest part about being self-employed: when deadlines aren’t met, you mostly disappoint yourself.

When I don’t write, I only disappoint myself.

Time to stop talking about it and start doing it! See you later………

The Thought My Soul Appalls

My childhood playmates were Gilbert & Sullivan*.

My family saw shows together. That’s what we did. We saw and       produced shows. We subscribed to ART (American Repertory  Theatre) in Cambridge and The Huntington Theater in Boston. We traveled hours to see the College Light Opera Company and drove back the same night. On vacations, we’d squeeze the Baseball Hall of Fame in between Glimmerglass Operas in Cooperstown.

If Gilbert & Sullivan played within three hours of us, we saw it. We bundled in the car, return trip full of patter songs and arguments on the character interpretation or a set piece. I auditioned for NYU with Pinter and was accepted, mostly because I astonished the Dean with my resume, listing only male roles and whores.

Not finding my voice in New York City, I got my license – didn’t really learn how to drive – and ended up in Los Angeles. List of jobs in roughly chronological order: QA for a lotion and scrub factory, personal assistant, Equity Stage Manager, customer service for adult products while stage managing, staffing assistant, director, staffing supervisor, clutter-clearer, recruiter at a not for profit school for kids with special needs, teaching artist, playwright, artistic associate, producer, bum, outreach chair, representative-at-large, career coach, resume re-vamper, consultant, writer.

I know we all mostly are slashers (actor/writer/producer, for example), but this list just feels ridiculous.

As much as some of those day jobs were hated, they fuel my creative bank. Who doesn’t like a good story about temping in an adult products factory? Seriously. Everyone in LA has the crazy day job story. It’s a rite of passage here, like visiting the Getty for the first time or realizing you can’t get to the 101 south from the 134 west.

In May it all added up, when I started calling myself a Storyteller. The title encompasses all the ways I tell stories: outreach, novel, poem, play, PR, resume, blog, branding – and now, I tell stories all day. It’s pretty cool. Honestly, it’s the only thing I actually know how to do. (Did I mention both my parents are also librarians?)

Now that I love every hour of my work, I hope I won’t lose that connection to completely random people in Los Angeles brought only by the day job. That would be a shame. Most of my stories originated within the hours when worth is measured by a time-clock. At least that’s the story I tell myself when I need a temporary gig.

*in case you want more Gilbert & Sullivan – and who doesn’t? Click here.

Part 5 (or) Some and Summation

I think, then, as I wrap this monster up, that the thing to remember is that we are all of us aspiring towards the extraordinary.

This is not an easy, or necessarily “friendly”, field.  Neither is the theater industry is a snake-pit either.  (Hello Hollywood!)  But the journey of the creative spirit continues to ask of us an incredible balance:  making art for art’s sake is one thing, commercializing it quite another.

If a theater company is interested in diverse theater, or if a theatre company generally produces plays about/by men, and if I am a white female playwright, do I keep writing the way I have, or do I write more characters of color/or/male?  How do we maintain our integrity in our strides to get ahead, be we author, producer, or artistic director, while we also strive to maintain cultural “fairness”?

Or is thinking about it too much a danger of another sort?

As a literary manager, I must remember to value balance – I would not want to see a whole season of plays written by “privileged white men” anymore than I would like to see a whole season of just about anything else.  The key is to create a balance within the designated aesthetic of any given theater company… And the theatre company itself has every right to decide what that aesthetic is.

My job as playwright then is to try to find theater companies who’s aesthetic matches my own… or even (perhaps) those theatre companies who look to be open for a feminine revolution.

The struggle then continues to be both global and internal; to engage in the community we so want to conquer, but to do so as best we, the individual theatre artist, can.  We will continue to juggle our own perspectives of what makes a play “good” and what makes it “necessary” and we will continue to fight for those that stir our convictions.

Meanwhile, there will continue to be conversations among those at the top and between those on the bottom, about how in the world to manage things better…

I guess, what I’m saying is, I can’t wait to be one of those people at the “top” – where the discussion is less about surviving as it is about setting the trends.

Part 4 (or) In Which we Juggle…

I’ve always been a big advocate of “Competition of Self” – what I mean by this is that as I navigate the playwright’s landscape, I may see many people winning accolades that I myself covet, but I truly believe that the only course of action from such observations is to learn from these talented writers as I myself strive to top my last work with the new.  I may feel a flash of jealousy or of heartache, but I never think to myself “They won!  They beat me!”  Instead, I think to myself “DAMNIT!  (sigh) Alright… well, what can I learn from this writer so that I can do better next time?”

It’s one of the things that keep me sane.

But, in exploring this week’s train of thought, I have to ask myself who my scripts are in competition with…  It’s certainly not the brain-child of Sarah Ruhl or Martin McDonough!  While I like to think I write on par with them (don’t we all) and while I have been influenced by both, no theater in their right mind is currently weighing my playscript and one of, oh, say David Lindsay-Abaire’s, in their hands wondering “Gee, I wonder which we should go with.”   Because I’m simply not a big enough fish yet to be part of that kind of decision.  Instead, my scripts are sitting in piles with other “emerging” playwrights – those that have a few awards under their belts, but no BIG productions… yet.  We are engaged in silent battle for desk space and shelf space… We go head-to-head for literary manager’s time and interest…

Every.

Single.

Day.

We playwrights just aren’t present to witness the literary carnage.

And so, we send out scripts to various competitions, hoping that we’ll win a reading or a ribbon, or, if we’re lucky, some kind of travel or monetary prize… OR, if we’re really lucky, an airline ticket stuffed with cash all wrapped in ribbons and trade magazine announcements exclaiming our brain-child a total GENIUS…

Yeah, that happens.

But the point is, we hope we will win accolades so that we can use the 5-seconds of fame to edge out the other scripts in that “emerging” pile to the left of the Lit Manager’s elbow.  (The pile that sits depressingly close to the lip of the desk and the gaping mouth of the trashcan…)

So what happens when a theatre company run by someone like that first artistic director endeavors to fill slots according to a cross-cultural quota?    Does such thinking narrow the question from “Who’s the best playwright?” to “Who’s the best Latino playwright?  Who’s the best Woman playwright?” or “Who’s the best transgender-African -American-who-walks-with-a-limp playwright?”

And is it helpful?

I don’t know the answer… I wear enough hats to recognize that it’s overly complicated.  There have been times when, in reading a winning script, I’ve scratched my head and thought to myself “Jesus, I wish I had thought of this!”  And there have been times when I’ve looked over lists of contest winners that read like a United Nations meeting, but included plays that I had actually turned away for (what I perceived to be) poor writing.  I’ve been on both sides of the selecting and entering… and I still don’t have an answer.

Because I want to believe that the best man or woman will reach the stage.  I want to believe that if I keep growing as an artist, if I keep writing and dreaming and running this race, that my work will be recognized, produced, and applauded regardless of my gender or (lack of) ethnicity.  I want to believe that I will get there on merit…

But as a woman playwright who is all-to-aware of the numbers before her, I will also take any advantage I can get.

I will enter contests designed to honor female playwrights, and I will challenge any contest or theatre company that seems to eschew balance in (perceived) favor to male playwrights over female.  I will also look at a list like that one from the “UN” and sigh with frustration – What were the parameters of their evaluation if not totally and irritatingly PC?

Because I want it both ways.

And it all speaks to the one achingly human truth – no matter the rules or the designations, we are all of us reaching and scraping for the finish line.  It’s a business, it’s a dream, it’s a damned difficult trail.  We try to find the best shoes to get us there… sometimes they’re ugly, but if they get us there…

Well, more often than not (and no matter their “how”) we will defend those shoe’s merits to the death.

Because that goal, that gold, that rising above the tides to be seen, heard, my GOD, produced?  Doesn’t it seem built on a lot of hard spilt blood and tears all the same?  Isn’t it the mountain we look down on, and not our feet, even as we focus our eyes on the next looming peak?

(Tomorrow: Part 5 (or) Some and Summation )