A COUPLE OF THINGS

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I’ve been asking myself. Do I blog about the general perception of community theatre or do I go right to shameless promotion? What the heck? Why not do both?

Lately, I’ve heard people disparage non equity theater, saying that the work is not on a par with equity shows. Having worked in both professional and amateur theater for many years, I think that’s a misperception, and that good and bad work is done by both. I’ve seen exciting shows at the Taper and the Odyssey, at the Elephant and the Blank, the Pacific Resident Theatre, etc. and some that were rotten.

I’ve seen exciting work at community theaters as well. I’ve been knocked out by some of Theatre Palisades’s shows. Lieber and Stoller’s Smokey Joe’s Café to name one, was superb, as was DiPietro and Robert’s I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, and Alan Ayckbourn’s Things We Do For Love. The sets are often gorgeous and some of the talent that I’ve seen on that stage rivals that in shows I’ve seen in New York and Toronto. Amy Adams did a terrific job in Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, for example.

There are differences. Generally speaking, the community theaters rarely take chances and believe that new work will not draw. I wish they’d produce more shows by women. (Was Agatha Christie a woman or was she born an icon?)

That brings me to the shameless self-promotion. Theatre Palisades is giving my comedy, Has Anybody Here Seen Roy? a good run in 2013. It goes up on January the 18th and runs through February the 17th, playing on Fridays, Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2.

Rehearsals are fun and exciting. I know many of you, like me, have been shut out of the creative process – I know some playwrights who have been not allowed into the rehearsal room – and I’m very grateful to both this director and the company who want me there.

The director, Susan Stangl, and an excellent cast are taking the time to establish the tone, go deep into the characters, explore the subtext and find the theme. The cast is delighted to be putting its stamp on new characters. The talk is lively, improvisations bring new discoveries, and the play grows as they work.

I’m not only allowed at rehearsals but am asked to clarify, contribute, and to rewrite when doing so improves the play. It’s just a joy to be part of the team and to hear my words coming to life.

If this play draws, maybe more community theatres will do more new plays by women. Or I’ll go back to my original plan and change my name to Agatha Simon.

Writer’s Block Redux, Redux, Redux

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I have been whining about Writer’s Block for a couple of years. Whining, fretting, raging – in despair. I’ve tried everything – exercises, games, ten minute nonstop unfiltered writing, resting, relaxing. Nothing. Zip.

In September, Valerie Ruel, an actress with the Kentwood Players, asked me if I had a short play she could look at. She was auditioning to direct at Kentwood and had to bring in a more or less full production of a short play for a one night workshop, which the membership would attend.

I gave her my favorite one act play, a comedy called Rondo a la Condo. It’s a forty-five page, one set piece with five characters. And she liked it. Not only that, she asked me to play a part in it. “Well,” I said, “Yes.” I think I may also have said, “Yippee.”

We rehearsed for a brief couple of weeks. Valerie was efficient and well prepared, the actors were fun and enthusiastic, and the stage manager transformed the existing set into a condo balcony in about ten seconds flat. On performance night, the audience loved it.
We all had a blast!

After it was over, one of the actors, Ted Pitsis, said, “People don’t put up one acts. Why don’t you turn this into an evening?” “Impossible,” I thought and put it out of my mind.

Then, walking down the street, the other day, I suddenly had a “What If?” Out of the blue. What ifs came tumbling after what ifs. What if this one act is actually the second act of a two act play? What if the first act took place fifteen years earlier? What if the one actor plays two different parts, one in the first act, and one in the other? Etc.

I made some notes and have made some more and I’m hope, hope, hoping that the note making continues and the lines start to flow.

It could happen. It’s happened before. Yippee.

Too old?

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DC playwrights are watching their “in” boxes this week, awaiting word about whether they’ve been accepted into Arena Stage’s playwrights’ group. Six locals will be invited to join this elite bunch.

I’m not one of them.

And that’s fine. I have a weekly skype writing appointment with a fellow playwright in Omaha, a wonderful writer named Ellen Struve, who gives me feedback and keeps me honest – ie: keeps me writing. I’m also lucky to have found a great group of writers here in DC that meet monthly. They call themselves the Playwrights’ Gymnasium. And I still am a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre Los Angeles’ Playwrights Lab – though my attendance has been spotty of late due to that five hour plane ride. So I’m not lacking for writing groups.

But Arena’s cache would mean avoiding the slush pile when sending out plays. It would – to paraphrase Jane Austen – put me in the way of meeting other eligible theatres and literary managers. It could jumpstart a career. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

Lately, we female playwrights have been counting noses – how many plays being produced are written by those of our gender. Theatres are more aware of that these days. Some progress has been made.

But the fear among other writers here in DC who were also not chosen to join the Arena group is that frankly, we’re too old. Too old to be considered an “emerging” playwright. Too old to be the hottest young thing out of an MFA program. Too old period.

Somehow, this hurts more than being told one’s writing is just not good enough. We can certainly work on our craft. Not much we can do about turning back the hands of the clock, no matter how much we spend on facial products.

I aged out of acting when the commercials slowed way down; I know I’m too old to write for television anymore. But I never thought I’d become too senior for the theatre. Particularly since when I attend most plays, I’m the youngest one in the audience!

I hope this isn’t sour grapes. I hope the writers Arena chose are truly wonderful, no matter what their birth certificate says. I hope they choose at least one person old enough to remember where they were when John Glenn flew in space.

After all, isn’t it the theatre that keeps us all forever young?

Old Friends

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I had the unusual opportunity a weekend ago to see and/or hear one of my earliest plays – and one of my newest ones. It wasn’t quite as embarrassing as looking through old photo albums full of 80’s hair. But almost.

MUM’S THE WORD was the second play I ever wrote – dialogue heavy, lots of phones ringing, a fairly simple story that was a tribute to one of my favorite genres in film: those 1930’s Warner Brother musical comedies. My characters didn’t sing. But I hoped the play would crackle with that fast paced dialogue between dames and saps. I hadn’t seen it in – okay, I’ll admit it – in nearly 30 years! I wrote it with a part for myself, of course. And it was a wonderful role: Jinx Riley, the gal born on Friday the 13th, the sucker for the wrong kind of guy. I kept the wonderful depression era secretary costume until just last year, when I admitted I’d never get down to that size again. Or play that part again.

I was surprised at how well it stood the test of time. Acoustics in the North By South Theatre space (a church auditorium in Glendale) were awful. And an electrical malfunction meant all the lights on stage left had blown out. So it was hard to hear the dialogue – or watch the actors’ lips for clues about what they were saying. But I wasn’t embarrassed by the script. Oh, sure, the turn around at the end came too quickly. But it wasn’t awful.

Earlier in the afternoon, I got to hear the ten minute version of an even shorter play for the first time. Ensemble Studio Theatre was holding its annual “Playday” reading series on exactly the same day that MUM’S was going up!

I had written LAKE TITICACA for a contest sponsored by DC’s Theater J. They invited playwrights to create a 5 minute reaction to Matthew Lopez’ terrific post-Civil War play THE WHIPPING MAN. I recalled the odd period after the LA riots when everyone was walking on eggshells. That grew into a five page piece, which was chosen by Theater J for a reading.

But since five minute plays are a rarity, I felt the piece had some room to grow. So I expanded it to ten minutes. But the EST reading was the first time I’d heard it aloud in that form.

Ouch.

This is the blessing that actors offer. You can HEAR and SEE what’s missing, what doesn’t work, where the klunky parts are.

But I was pleased to hear audience reactions – particularly from a trio of African American actors waiting to go on in the next piece. They got it. And looked around to find the author. Me. That made the day.

The experience of two plays in the space of a few hours was particularly valuable to me as a writer. Such a contrast in writing styles over three decades! I’m less verbose. Still interested in quirky humor, but more apt to let the audience figure stuff out.

I’m trying to let the experience reassure me as I try to get back to writing a new piece – much more similar to that first comedy than to anything I’ve written lately. I may not be Preston Sturges or Jane Austen or Tom Stoppard. But I am Kitty Felde. And while my work may not win Tonys or bring down the Berlin Wall, it has value.

Taking the new car out for a drive

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It’s like that first ding in a new car.
It’s all shiny and perfect, those first few scenes of a new play. At least inside your head. Oh, the laughs it gets! How the characters jump off the page. What a clever girl I am.
And then you get that first ding, that hint of criticism. And the bloom is off the rose. The car just isn’t new again. And the play isn’t perfect.
I hate this part of writing – exposing pages that in your heart of hearts you KNOW has flaws. But you’re so in love with it, you can hardly wait to share it with others, confident they’ll love it as much as you do. But they don’t. They see the flaws you blind yourself to see. And they have the nerve to tell you.
I brought 30 fat pages of my newest play – a romantic comedy because I’m tired of writing “serious” plays – into my monthly writing group. (A note about this monthly approach: It’s hard to establish a rhythm when you only meet every month. I much prefer my weekly Skype writing partner for continuous feedback and a weekly deadline for pages.) I was the last to read. There was silence around the table. (I should have prepared questions I wanted the group to answer!) And then our fearless leader asked the question about the king’s clothes: what’s the play about? What’s at stake? Ouch.
It was enough to inspire me to walk the 2 ½ miles home. In the rain. And eat several Trader Joe’s dark chocolate sea salt caramels. And become fearful of even looking at the script again.
At least until today.
It’s still a good car, er, play. It’s just not perfect. But a little polish and TLC and it will still get me where I want to go.

Things from the Writing Box…

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In the early nineties, I began my quest to look at my heritage and find more pieces of what makes me who I am.  I imagined that any journey toward that knowledge would be good for my little box of things to write.  One day while home from my day job, a man stepped out from between two cars in front of me.  I had to swerve to miss him.  Later that night in my apartment, I had a visitation from the man in the street. Not his physical self but his spirit or so it seemed.  I write about things of the spirit a lot in my work…it just shows up – like he did.  I have been trying to put the vision I had that night in a play but am not sure when, where or how to enter as I really do not want a literal interpretation of that experience.  I want to capture how I felt in those moments…  Over the years, I’ve tried different things but can never quite get that, “this is it” feeling.  Two years ago, I wrote this poem:

the Medicine Man

he stepped out from between the cars

with his staff

magnificent, authentic, ancient, familiar

he was tall like my uncle huron

with chiseled facial features

in headdress/ high moccasins/ native attire/ regal/ warrior-like

the feathers hanging from the staff caught my eye first

they were real

and i wondered if they were eagle

then i noticed that he was looking directly at me as i approached

our eyes locked for an instant/ for an eternity

my car seemed to be driving through a time warp

as i slowly passed him there in the street

looking through me to some place

we must have met before

in the rearview mirror

he turned his entire body to watch me drive away

i could not watch the road for watching him

he was a shaman/a medicine man, i knew

but why was he looking at me

did he know me/ daughter to native ancestors

i should have stopped/asked

later that night as i lay on the floor in prayer

i could hear and feel footsteps vibrating on the floor

moving toward me

a hologram in moccasins was all that i could see

his…

he placed one foot on the back of my head and pushed me into a vision

of the past

afraid/ unable to resist/ unable to move from the floor from the smoke

what is that?

i could hear the rattlers and sounds of war

the screaming women and children

i could smell the smoke and see its fog

then it lifted just enough for me to see

i was there dressed in buckskin

lying face down in the rubble

watching the boy as he searched through it for

his family

i was there

he knew me, daughter to native ancestors…

he knew me…

As a writer, do you ever wonder just how long a story can germinate before you can write it?  Have you ever come up against any story that just doesn’t seem to have an “in”? What do you do?  One of the greatest things about theatre is that the playwright doesn’t have to limit their approach to conventional ways in order to write their story.  Stuff just needs to be pulled out of the box, lived with for a while and looked at it from several angles…

 

 

A Place of Strength…

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“Don’t lose your footing. Find your place of strength. Take time to identify those things that anchor your soul.”  —   Dr. Cindy Trimm

Often life goes full speed ahead – with or without you.  You can be so wrapped up in keeping up you don’t take the time to renew yourself.  Then, before you know it, out of the seemingly blue, you hit a wall and find yourself dazed and confused about how you got there.  You know you have gotten off track…  You know you aren’t yourself.  You know you’ve been missing you for a while.  You know that wall really didn’t just show up out of nowhere, you felt it coming but just didn’t stop yourself from walking into it.  You told yourself to “fake it till you make it;” which worked for a while – till the residue from the build-up of not taking a rest became so thick visibility was lost…

Now you’re at that wall, face in or butt down, and you’ve got to pull yourself back together again, got to find your place of strength…  You’re so far away from yourself, your normal avenues to renew and press just haven’t been working (to be honest, you haven’t been using them, hence the residue build-up).  What do you do?  How do you get your feet back on solid ground and get back to you?  How do you find a place of strength that will help you right here, right now?

I have a favorite passage of scripture, from Jeremiah that was ringing in my head as I found myself getting up off the ground recently:

16 Thus says the Lord: “Stand in the ways and see,
And ask for the old paths, where the good way is, And walk in it;
Then you will find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not listen.’

Jeremiah 6:16   New King James Version (NKJV)

This verse – taken completely out of the context of the story in Jeremiah but completely in context for me because I was not paying attention to how far away I was getting from my stress releasing regiments  – helped me get back to me.  I had been ignoring my own warning flags – my failsafe anchors that keep me from losing my footing.  I wasn’t taking time to read things that feed my soul, that recharge me and encourage me.  I wasn’t getting out in nature to simply enjoy the air and growing things or checking on/hooking up with family and friends…all the things that seem like nothing special but are…

A place of strength is where you go to find renewal, redemption, and hope…  It is a right now place…

The first thing I did to get back to there was pray.  Not my regular prayers I had been praying everyday for myself but the “can we talk” prayer where I pulled out by backstory, looked at the character traits, and examined the plot.  Repented.  Where did I veer from the natural flow of things?  Where did I lose my footing?  Examined myself with unabridged honesty.  Truth does set you free; it allows you to reset your pace and rewrite…  It allows you to get back to you no matter how far away you think you have gotten…

My place of strength is staying connected to me, to God, and to my backstory that informs the plot points in my life – plot points that can change if needed…

 

Time Spent…

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There are long nights of writing and longer nights of thinking about writing.  All seem to run together as I work out story bits, running plot lines in my head, listening to dialogue, visiting the people who live first in my mind then on the page.  A lot of time is spent working through a preliminary story, till it flows just right … If I could add up the hours spent before my computer, wonder how many times I could cross the earth with it.  It gets old – the constant push – but the time spent doing my craft is so much a part of me, too much time away from it makes me disoriented.  Funny, I can imagine myself day-job-less but I can never imagine myself not writing…

Time well spent is my daily goal; no matter the discomfort, it’s worth all the long nights needed to create that next perfect line…