Hey, at least the title wasn’t PUSSY RIOT

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And then there was this from the L.A. Times on July 30th: The Pasadena Playhouse told playwright Gina Young they had problems with the title her play that was set for the Carrie Hamilton Theatre. The title? TALES OF A FOURTH GRADE LESBO (a nod to Judy Blume). Sheldon Epps, artistic director of the Playhouse, said he had concerns over the title, “the same concerns I would have if a play had the N-word or the F-word in the title.” But then he learned the term can be one of empowerment in the lesbian community, so he withdrew his objections.

Then the Playhouse offered a compromise in which TALES could rent the theatre but would have had to hire an outside ticket vendor and agree not to be represented on the Playhouse website. The offer was declined.

I went to research this further on-line and found a happy ending to this story… one that the L. A. Times didn’t follow up on and report, darn them.

Writer Sara Cardine filled in the remaining details in the Pasadena Weekly… which I encourage you to read here.
http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/?id=11403

I loved the fact that people kept communicating and worked things out.

Deathtrap

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This just in…

The headline in today’s L.A. Times Calendar Section: Too Nude? Too Gay? DEATHTRAP at L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center is canceled after the author’s estate balks at staging.

According to the article, DEATHTRAP ran last spring at the Gay and Lesbian Center with 30 seconds of nudity, but author Iran Levin’s estate has revoked permission for the September run.

Hmm… What happened between last spring and now? Did the estate (Ira’s sons) not know about the nudity earlier?

This time around, the estate said cease and desist, and then upon appeal, they said the production could continue but under the condition the staging would not include any behavior indicating a physical relationship between the two men in the play.

Producer Jon Imparato’s reaction: “No director could adhere to these restrictions. They were so limiting.”

Director Ken Sawyer said the staging featured some kissing and embracing between the male protagonists and described the nudity as “innocuous. They [the estate] are making a big deal out of relatively little.”

But then there is this from a professor of theatre: “It’s a gay relationship, but it’s a tacit one.” And a Backstage review last spring described the nudity as “gratuitous” and said that it does a “disservice to the play.”

The actor who took off his clothes for the part didn’t feel it was gratuitous and felt it was appropriate for the production.

My head’s spinning. Since I haven’t seen the production, though, I’ll weigh in generally as a playwright. I’m a little peeved by Imparato’s words. “These restrictions… so limiting.” Well, the play was written in 1978, did the author intend to have physical contact and nudity in the play? And if you don’t like those parameters, then don’t do the play.

Of course there are the productions of (Mr. Public Domain) Shakespeare’s plays where the concept is updated and re-imagined. But if something’s in the public domain, does that allow directors some ”give” in their interpretation? Or not? Where is the line? I suppose somehow staying true to the intent of the play would be key in deciding. Back to my earlier question: Did Ira Levin intend for this relationship to be tacit and not overtly physical? Did the director update the play to 2012? And is that okay? I’d be a little nervous if someone inserted nudity into my play written and set in 1978… unless I saw it and thought it was fabulous. But once a play is published, you can’t check every production. And if I were dead… hmmm, really hard to check up. The sons are trying to do right by their dad, I’m guessing.

More Fun Writing Men

playwriting

I finish my blog week with something for the boys. As always, it has been a delight.

Back when I was a little girl making up adventures, all my stories had a female protagonist standing in for me.

Then I got older, and two things happened.

First, I had adventures of my own, so I didn’t need to make stuff up.

Second, I started writing male characters and kind of dug it. Then, the male characters started getting deeper and more complex.

In As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson’s character is asked how he writes women so well. His answer is: I think of a man and take away reason and accountability.

My answer to how I write men is not: I think of a woman and take away reason and accountability and tits. I work a little more intuitively.

Men are just guys. They do their guy things. They might do wrong. They might do right. They might have the house fall down around them.

I’m interested in what drives them. What sends these guys hurtling forward to their triumph or their doom? Sometimes they don’t even know. Sometimes they think they know, but they are wrong. Still, they’re a gender that’s interesting to watch.

And there are a lot of great male actors out there looking for parts to play.

Two Hundred Grand and Silliness

playwriting,

This week, I am lucking out on playwright news items. First, it was the Drama Book Shop, then Eve Ensler, then yesterday, a director friend sent me a link to a news item about David Henry Hwang winning a two hundred grand playwriting award. When are you gonna get yours? She asked in a half-joking/half-serious way which I translate as God I hate my day job.

I’m glad someone somewhere is giving playwrights a bucketful of cash. In fact, more people should give playwrights cash. Just give us money. We promise not to spend it on frivolous things like houses.

I just realized that the three news items I dealt with this week were about exhibitionism, rape, and money. How very American.

But enough of current events. I have a blogging plan, and I must follow it. I wanted to talk about a very serious topic, silliness.

Sometimes I’m writing along and singing my song, and I come up with an idea that is just plain silly. Decades of writing have taught me not to fear the silly. If an idea seems silly, I just go with it.

Over the years, I have encountered people who fear the silly. They don’t like silliness. It’s irrational. It’s too childish. Not serious. Everyone knows that theatre should be serious. Who would pay a hundred bucks to see something silly?

As playwrights, we like it when people think we’re smart. We like it when our writing shows off our intelligence and learning. However, we don’t have to be intelligent all the time. We’re not negotiating world peace or finding a cure for a disease. We’re writing plays. We can dive into the irrational.

As a theatre goer, I don’t always want to see logical plays with everything laid out smoothly. Let’s have some fun. Let’s get the folks to laugh so hard they spill red wine on their dry-cleaned shirts.

If you really want to have folks lose control, make them laugh. Pies in the face still work. Walking into walls is still hilarious. Stumbles, prat falls, or an odd farm animal.

The odder and sillier it gets, the more the audience will laugh for more.

 

New Ways To Kill Your Mother

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So my plan for my LAFPI blog posting today was to recommend the new Colm Tóibín’s book of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother. I will get to that in just a minute.

But first, this is a blog about women playwrights, and over on Huffington Post, Eve Ensler wrote a response to the Todd Akin rape comments. You can read it here. Please Eve Ensler, get some sleep.

Now, I want to talk about a man who writes with intelligence instead of a man who speaks with stupidity.

I recently read Tóibín’s new book of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, and I highly recommend it.

Many of these essays have been published before, but together, they explore the ideas of writers and family both in work and life. For example, the aunts in Jane Austen’s novels had more power than the mothers. Many writers had dominating mothers or strained relationships with their children. How do the power dynamics within families play out in novels and dramas?

In the course of the book, Tóibín explores the work of writers fromIrelandand elsewhere. The list includes Jane Austen, Henry James, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Brian Moore, Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, Hugo Hamilton, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, James Baldwin, and Barack Obama.

As a playwright, I was happy to see several essays on playwrights. In addition to Samuel Beckett, there were essays on Sebastian Barry and Tennessee Williams. I thought the essay on Beckett and his mother could have gone a little deeper into his women plays such as Rockaby and Footfalls. However, I liked that he gave me a whole new way to look at the plays of Williams as well as insight into how an audience reacted to a Sebastian Barry play. Who owns our public figures? The public or the artist?

Reading this book, I also started thinking about the question of privacy. How much of writer’s biography is relevant to the work we are reading? A writer can draw from his or her own life, but does the audience or reader have a right to know about it? How much of an artist’s identity is beyond his or her control? How much are we the result of the savage loving of our families?

 

How Much Is That Playwright In the Window?

News, playwriting,

 

Usually a week before my blog week on LAFPI, I open up the yellow idea folder and start compiling the blog postings. I try to find a nice mix of entertainment, theory, criticism, and stuff that’s happening to me.

Last week, a really nice bloggable topic fell out of the New York Times and into my lap. The article in Saturday’s Times was about the Drama Book Shop having playwrights sit in their front window and work.

Perfect! I thought. I loved the absurdism of it.

Then, I realized that it was a sincere project.

Oh, you’ve got be kidding. I thought.

But the New York Times does not kid.

The project is called Playwright Working (which reminds me of Dead Man Walking), and Playwrights sit for two hours at a time in the window and work or browse facebook or play spider solitaire. Yes, it’s playwriting as reality TV without the TV part.

Am I jealous that these writers get to show the world how they pursue the glamorous art of playwriting? Uhm. No.

I wonder how much performing instead of actual writing the playwrights are doing. In such a situation, I would not be writing. I would be Jen pretending to write. In other words, I would be acting. Why would I want to do that? Acting is even less glamorous than playwriting. You have to put a lot of junk on your face when you act.

The whole reason I became a writer was that I didn’t want to deal with people. If it works for some writers, fine. Personally, I would rather write alone. I can play with my hair.

Hello Again Hello

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Happy Week one hundred and twenty three, LAFPI Blog!!! Woohoo! Has this blog really been up for over two years? I swear, it doesn’t look a day over six months.

When I first started blogging for LAFPI, I figured I would stop when I ran out of ideas. Well, this is my eleventh time blogging here, and I’m still going. I wonder how many times I have to blog in order to get an LAFPI baseball cap.

My playwriting coffee has been percolating nicely. Last month, I traveled to Prescott, Arizona for yet another theatrical extravaganza produced by Tiffany Antone (producer, playwright, fellow LAFPI blogger, and the more I know her, the more I am tempted to put the words, ‘the great’ in front of her name).

My short play, POP, a meditation on the financial crisis told with balloons, was part of an evening of short plays called From the Mouths of Babes. It was great fun returning toPrescott for a second time and seeing folks I hadn’t seen in a year.

POP was directed by Cason Murphy who directed my play last year. Once again, he made a production that was dynamic and exciting. I just sat back and delighted in it. It was a moment in time that happened and then popped like a balloon. Yes, it was good. I was a happy playwright.

Cason also wrote about directing my plays, and you can read his words here.

This week, I plan to put up new posts every day Monday through Friday this week, so check back for more playwriting fun. I promise there will be no posts about how difficult it is to write because it’s August and too darn hot for any of that.

The Package

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I recently received an email soliciting for plays; a networking kind of “form” email. Apparently, the producer found my name on a website. Which one, I don’t know; haven’t asked… I wrote back, curious, and turns out we know people in common. We got to chatting via email. I pitched a couple of plays. The producer expressed interest in one and requested a “package”.

Now, if only I had a play. Well I have a play but it was written in 2008 and revised in 2010 and 2011. Neither rewrite was complete or satisfactory to me. I am within days of finishing my latest rewrite and am happy. I met with my director and we are close to submitting “the package”.

This play is different than my usual, “It takes place in somebody’s mind” and it isn’t a psychological drama. It is actually a “straight” drama, or as somebody who has read my recent draft said, “It is my most accessible play.” Of course, it’s set to music in the public domain, so, really, it’s a play with music. But it’s accessible. Apparently.

I liked hearing that.

With a Little Help From My Friends

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It’s been a tough year for my playwriting. Changes at the day job, fighting for writing space in an 800 square foot coop with my husband who’s writing a book, plus a tough critique of a play that’s been haunting me for ten years are all the excuses I have for not turning out stellar pages ready to hit the stage.

And I call myself a playwright?

Thank goodness for my playwriting community!

I’ve been lucky to have that strong playwriting community in three cities – LA, DC, and Omaha. These are people who’ve heard my lousy first draft, shown up at the first public reading full of encouraging words and – a day later – helpful criticism, who never miss a full production. They’re the ones who’ll nurse a glass of wine for hours, talking about the process of writing, the tyranny of the literary manager, the terrific show they saw at Fringe. They’re the ones who talk you off the roof when you’re having that very tough year.

And of course, the best way to create that community is to be that friend for them, too, showing up at opening night, offering to read their first draft, buying them that glass of wine and sitting for hours.

So how do you create that community of playwrights?

Keeping the Faith

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I’m trying to keep the faith.  Despite my “choose happiness” pep-rally blog yesterday, well sometimes it’s just hard.  If I have to recite a mantra to convince myself to BELIEVE, BELIEVE, BELIEVE that there will be light at the end of the tunnel then that’s what I have to do.  I look for graces everywhere; signs I’m on the right path and not insane to write a play.  I’ve never done this before.  I’ve only known bits and bytes, and talking about “processes”, “methodologies” and “testing” (in every possible flavor.)

I think this is probably the gift of suffering, though I’m not really suffering.  It’s a metamorphosis, and I’m transitioning to a different me.  I’ve been split in my mentality between the professional IT dudette.  I’ve got to commit to the dream now.

“The darkest hour of the night is just before dawn.” – Thomas Fuller

As part of keeping the faith I booked all my hard earned vacation days to do some writing.  It’s part of my commitment to finish the play.  I’m fearful that nothing will come out, or nothing worthwhile.  (See there’s the critic already raising its ugly head… “You can’t do it.  You don’t know how.”)  People at work ask, “Are you doing anything on your vacation?”, “Are you going anywhere?”, “What are you going to do?”  I answer simply with “I have something I have to finish and I’ve got to take time to do it.”

 I haven’t been writing rigorously, meaning, I don’t sit down daily and write the play.  I’ve just been doing a lot of marinating and let insights bubble up, and look for common themes that leads me to the underlying theme of the story.  Maybe marinating is okay, and part of the process.  But I’m compelled to think that I need to strike a balance between “just marinating” and actually putting down tracks. 

 I had one of the situations put up for a reading last week, and that fired me up to go further.  One step at a time, one day at a time… maybe I should look up the 12 step program and see if there’s anything there of use to me.  What is my addiction? Negative thoughts?  I took this list from aa.org website and replaced alcohol with Negative Thoughts

 THE TWELVE STEPS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

1. We admitted we were powerless over negative thoughts—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to negative thinkers, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Sure.  There are some things on this list I can use to empower me for finishing the play, and I’ll start with #11.  I believe this idea of writing a play is not random, and that I’m being led to this path, and there are people and circumstances opening up to me that will help me.  But I need to be open to these opportunities.  So go write!

 Thank you.