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?

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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.

Off the Cuff – How Do You Do It?

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It’s one of those weeks when everything just built up to a point of “giving a way”.  I say “giving a way”, because I liken it to running a race, and I’m always trying to stay ahead of or in synch with something – which is usually TIME.  In a 24 hour period when we try to fit in the “work to live”, “live to work”, “working out” and “no work” I decided something’s gotta give.  That something is probably my idea of how my life should be assembled.  I have this image of a pie chart and it’s divided into my ideal of how to allocate my time, and then I compare it to the reality, the other pie chart that’s chewed out at the edges, unevenly browned and probably undercooked inside.

Time out.  I reached my “giving a way” point subconsciously, I think, around 3 weeks ago.  There was a death of someone who was very close to me, and someone who was still quite young.  He passed away with cancer at 51.  I was planning a trip to the memorial service in Canada, but some constraints prevented my good intentions.  It would’ve been a time of gathering with people I have not seen in so long (too long), and to remember the good times and how much we need to create more of them with every moment.

So I hung back in Los Angeles and took care of my dog.  My German Shepherd is aging gracefully at 14.5 years old, though she and I are struggling with her incontinence… (Let me tell you that I do her laundry 6 times as much as I do mine.)  I was really bummed out not going and then I was buried in work.  My manager quit, my work place is in a state of flux, my application for a perm visa is therefore in an unsteady state and I developed sciatica.  Me?  Not me?!  I’m the one who keeps saying I’m going to be hiking well into my 80’s. 

Wow.  This is really happening.  I felt overwhelmed and my pie chart became one whole “No fun” activity.  But something turned around somehow.  I believed I was not going to quit.  I just didn’t know how to do it.  I didn’t want to continue spinning my wheels in the same muddy puddle.  By grace I decided to tackle one thing that I can control which was my health.  It wasn’t just a matter of dealing with the sciatica, but before I can do that, I had to work on my mentality.  I needed to shift my attention from ‘poor, poor me.’

I was hunting around the internet for inspirational stories and found this on The Wellness Clinic, “Top Five Regrets before Dying By Bronnie Ware.  It was an article written on February 3rd, 2011.  Bronnie worked in palliative care for many years and gathered a list of the regrets and common themes that surfaced from people at the gates to the other side.  Here is the link to the article:  http://en-gb.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=144033175657282.

The list:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
  2. I wish I didn’t work so hard
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
  5. I wish I had let myself be happier

That last one summed it all up for me.  Yes, there’ll be very rough times, and I can choose to get down and wallow, and even let it defeat me (for awhile.)  Or I can choose to see the bigger picture and have a deeper insight to what’s really going on.  What value can I take from this experience?  For one thing, always having the courage to go on.  Another thing is getting to know myself in the face of adversity.  And then just choose to be happy and choose to be grateful that I can experience life. 

After all these years I’m starting to get it, and that is life is not an idea.  It is what I’m actively thinking and doing, and what unfolds in the next moment is a result of what I was thinking and doing.  Those things I have control of.  So having boosted my mentality I decided to tackle how to heal my sciatica.  I came upon a book by Letha hadady,  D. Ac., called “Asian Health Secrets”.  The book is a holistic approach to healing.  To my surprise there were presciptions specific to sciatica.  I dug into the book, and my world opened up to a new attitude about herbs and Traditional Chinese Medicine.  I started the anti-phlegm cleanse which improved my condition on all planes:  mental, physical and emotional.  So far so good.

My heightened awareness from the cleanse has allowed me to slow down my breathing, rather than not breathing at all.  I’m taking the time to appreciate what I’ve got.  It’s such a good feeling.  It was a matter of choice to remind myself what really matters to me.  I catch myself still mindful of time, but with a perspective that time is relative.  (By the way, I’ve started reading Gary Zukav’s “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” which is described as “a mysticists interpretation of quantum physics”.)  It fell into my radar just after I was pondering about Einsteins Theory of Relativity.  I believe my thought created this possibility of the book coming to me.

Bronne concludes his article with this: 

Life is a choice.  It is YOUR ife.  Choose consciously, choose wisely, and choose honestly.  Choose happiness.

This is my favourite Goethe quote:

Choose well.  Your choice is brief and yet endless.

So I’ve made a commitment to a director to finish my rewrite of “Original Sin”.  I’m not going to say what date, but I did make a choice to put the play into others’ hands now.  I’m sharing the gift.  I somewhat left myself without a choice but to do it.

Thank you.

 

 

 

The Art of Story Telling with Integrity – a la Bill Hicks

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I can’t get enough of Bill Hicks.  I saw a documentary about him in 2010 at least 10 times.  When you see a movie for that many times the sentences from the situations just fall out of your mouth like braised meat falling off the bone – tender, juicy and succulent.  The content is so rich from that documentary.  It’s called “American:  The Bill Hicks Story”.

I discovered Bill Hicks from a musician.  The Tool album “Aenima” was a tribute to Bill Hicks.  There was mutual admiration between the band and the comedian.  The band also mentions the comedian/satirist as the inspiration for another album, “Undertow”.    I admire Hicks’ integrity and genius.  He spoke it as he saw it, and he didn’t just speak off the cuff without giving it thought.  There’s deep insight to what he said.  He was devoted to raising the evolution of humankind.  Yes, he had controversial ideas, opinions and he spoke them. 

That flag burning thing, god did that bring up some retarded emotions… The flag! The flag! They said we can burn the flag!!! they didn’t say that, they said if a guy burns a flag he probably doesn’t have to go to jail… For a fucking year! People going… “Hey buddy, let me tell you something… My daddy died for that flag!” Really? I bought mine, you know they sell them in K-mart, three bucks. “He died in the Korean war for that flag.” Well want a coincidence! Mine was made in Korea! He didn’t die for a fucking flag, it’s just a piece of cloth, he died for what the flag represents and that the freedom To Burn The Fucking Flag!

– Bill Hicks

For me as an artist, I look to Bill as an inspiration for honest story telling – telling it from the gut, and not being concerned about others’ opinions, especially the critic in me.  When I write like that, I find it rings truer to other people who sees my work.  Whenever I let the critic run amok I don’t write at all.  Best to gag that critic and leave him out of the creativity realm.  The only use I have for the critic is when another critic tears into a piece of my creation.  Maybe that’s the only purpose for the critic.

In February 2009, David Letterman apologized to Mary Hicks (Bill’s mother) for censoring a taped performance by Bill Hicks that was scheduled to air in the autumn of  1993.  It would’ve been his last appearance (his 12th) on the Late Night Show.  In his apology to Mary Hicks, Letterman said, “What was the matter with me?… It says more about me as guy than it says about Bill, because there was absolutely nothing wrong with that.”   I agree with that statement.  When I am critical of somebody else’s opinion or behavior then it’s a sign of a shadow in my own personality that is being reflected back upon me.  The other person’s words and actions is reflecting back to me what I don’t like about me.

A few days ago I was running one of his skits in my head.  I had just finished reading “Soul Stories” by Gary Zukav, and one of the messages from the book is we are all one.  Bill Hicks closes his shows with the same message.  He asks why the media never portrays a positive drug story.  In his fantasy he describes what could be a positive story:

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.   Here’s Tom with the Weather.”  – Bill Hicks

I needed another dose of Bill, so I replayed one his recordings over the weekend.  (If you’re curious to hear any of his work, I’d recommend “Sane Man”, “Rant E-minor”, or “Arizona Bay”.)   I wondered if there was anyone these days that can come close to being in the same league as Bill Hicks.  So I hopped on the internet to do a search found this new flash.  Actor Cameron Crowe will be directing a biopic on Bill Hicks.  The actor was originally going to play the part, but the casting for the role has been opened.  Production of the movie is scheduled for next year.  It’s hard to imagine who can touch the intelligence, compassion and talent of Bill Hicks, but I hope that whoever communes with Bill’s words can aspire to the consciousness he inspired among his fans.

Bill died of pancreatic cancer in February 1994.  He was 32 years old.

Totally Worth It!

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I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut of for the past four months and I’ve felt the pinch in a number of areas – sleep(!), diet, patience, nerves, peace and balance – but the details of the “then” aren’t as important to the posting of the now… the great happy “Ahhhh” I’m reveling in tonight, as it all finally wrapped up.

I get to sleep in tomorrow and the only thing I HAVE to do after I drag myself from bed is add up receipts and get my oil changed.

Two things.

I only have to do two things tomorrow.

I can’t wait.

And I’m heading into this much-needed day of repose after a hugely successful final performance at the summer camp.  These kids knocked it out of the park!  Not only did they jump head first into Viewpoints, Suzuki, and the myriad other techniques and challenges we presented them with, but they also soaked up every moment with joy.  They trusted each other, listened to one another, and they created a completely original theatre piece as an ensemble that was terrifically moving.

My partner and I were ecstatic, watching from the light booth, as proud as we could be, absolutely bursting at the seams with pride.

I feel good.

I feel so good.

I’m so grateful to the kids for invigorating me, for reminding me why I do what I do, and for showing me the magic that can happen when actors listen, trust, and explore together.

It was inspiring.

So after I catch up on sleep, eating, and yoga, I’m going to get right back to writing… the muse is awake and happy.  Working with new artists has proven again just how much I love teaching, how important it is to share our passion with the future, and how wonderful we can be when we work together.

Creationists

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I know the word “Creationists” can stir emotions, but I’m not talking about religion today – I’m talking about the theater, and more specifically talking about young artists in the theater.

I’m co-teaching an acting camp with 10-16 year olds, and they’re blowing my mind – because no one is telling them “No”, or “You’re not right for the part” or “You can’t do that!”… and they’re enjoying every minute.

They’re enjoying every minute of “Yes.”

And I hope the world gives them more a lot more “Yes’s” as they grow… because it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the “No”s, “No Thank You”s and “Not Yet”s…. it’s easy to let them add up and weigh you down.

Lately I’ve been dreaming of driving off into a new town, new life, new everything – not because this life is awful (it’s definitely NOT – thank goodness), but because lately I’ve felt like I don’t know how to move this life forward with purposeful motion… motion in the direction I so aspire to move.

So I’m practicing the art of not worrying about it… of just sitting with the present for a change… I’m sitting with the joy of teaching young dreamers.   And they’re encouraging me to let go of the “No”s I’ve got sitting on my shoulders and just get back to playing.

Because that’s what we do – we dare to play…