A playwright’s bill of rights

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I’m going to share a conversation DC playwright Gwydion Suilebhan just posted on Facebook. He heard from a UK playwright that writers in Britain came up with a playwright’s bill of rights. Gwydion took suggestions from folks here in Washington and came up with his own list. I offer it here…and ask what do you think? Needed? Or just gripes? Or do you have ideas of your own to add? Are there items the LAFPI constituency thinks are missing?

Submissions: Nuts and Bolts
1. No playwright should ever receive a rejection letter that begins with anything that resembles “Dear [INSERT NAME OF PLAYWRIGHT HERE]” or that’s addressed to the wrong person.
2. No playwright should ever receive a rejection letter that includes a significant misspelling, either of the playwright’s name or the title of the play.
3. Theaters, development programs, and contests should standardize on what constitutes a play sample: 10 pages, 15 pages, 20 pages. Playwrights prefer a longer sample, but standardization is of paramount importance.
4. Theaters, development programs, and contests should abandon any other esoteric submission requirements: demands that several different files be combined into a single PDF, or that an extra title page be created, or that bios be limited to a random number of words. Again, a standard set of requirements should be adopted.
5. No playwright should be asked for a letter of reference in support of an application or submission.
6. Theaters, development programs, and contests everywhere should immediately stop asking for paper submissions; all submissions can and should be handled electronically.
7. No theater, development program, or contest should ask for submission fees of any kind.

Submissions: Selection Criteria
1. All submissions for development programs and contests should be blind submissions; plays should be judged on their own merits, not on any other criteria.
2. All submissions for theaters should also be blind during the first round of review and selection.
3. No theater, development program, or contest should inquire as to the educational status of a playwright, nor should that status ever be used as a criterion for submissions.
4. Theaters should replace the “never before produced scripts only” criteria with a less restrictive “no more than two prior productions” criteria.
5. Playwrights should be allowed to re-submit scripts when substantial revisions have been completed.

Submissions: Transparency
1. All submissions for theaters, development programs, and contests should be as transparent as possible.
2. Theaters, development programs, and contests should publish the names and bios of judges, reviewers, and script readers prior to opening submissions.
3. Playwrights should have access to any reader’s reports.
4. To whatever extent possible, theaters, development programs, and contests should indicate why a given play has or has not been selected after it has received extensive consideration.

Submissions: Best Practices
1. Theaters, development programs, and contests should respond to every submission. It is not acceptable to let silence stand in for a courteous rejection.
2. Theaters, development programs, and contests should publish a maximum turnaround time for review of submissions and be held accountable to the dates they publish.

Nomenclature
1. No more infantile language should be used to describe play development: no cradles, no incubators, no hatcheries.
2. The term “emerging” (as in “she’s an emerging playwright”) should be eliminated immediately.

General
1. More playwrights should be considered for artistic director positions.
2. A higher percentage of plays produced in any given geographic area should be written by playwrights who live in that geographic area than is currently the case.
3. More theaters nationwide should have playwrights on staff, or at least in long-tenured resident dramatist positions.
4. More theaters nationwide should add playwrights to their artistic advisory boards.

Of course, he adds, that Dramatists Guild members have their own bill of rights…

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Why we write

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I read (in my latest edition of the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal) Roosevelt’s review of an obscure book called “John Gilley, Maine Farmer and Fisherman” by Charles William Eliot. TR said he was “immensely pleased” with the “little book.” He says, “it seems to me pre-eminently worthwhile to have such a biography of a typical American. How I wish President Elliot could write in the same shape biographies of a brakeman or railroad locomotive engineer, of an ordinary western farmer, of a carpenter or blacksmith in one of our small towns, of a storekeeper in one of our big cities, of a miner – of half a dozen typical representations of the forgotten millions who really make up American life.”

Roosevelt goes on to muse about immortality. “It makes small odds to any of us after we are dead whether the next generation forgets us, or whether a number of generations pass before our memory, steadily growing more and more dim, at last fades into nothing. On this point it seems to me that the only important thing is to be able to feel, when our time comes to go out into the blackness, that those survivors who care for us and to whom it will be a pleasure to think well of us when we are gone, shall have that pleasure. Save in a few wholly exceptional cases, cases of men such as are not alive at this particular time, it is only possible in any event that a comparatively few people can have this feeling for any length of time.”

And therein lies our gift as playwrights: to create living, breathing characters of what some might call ordinary people, the un-famous. And we are able to give them immortality, living long after we are gone, long after the people who inspired those characters in the first place are gone. It makes us gods of sorts, creating human beings and turning them loose on the world.

Who says playwrights have no power?

Dig that out of the trash can

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I can’t recall who said it originally or who it was that repeated it to me, but some wise writer once said you’re not allowed to throw out bad writing until you’ve shared it with someone else.
We’re our own worst critics, snarky and nit picky, embarrassed by our work, hiding it until we think it’s properly “cooked” and ready to serve to an audience. Even if that audience is your own writing group.
I’ve finally found a wonderful group of writers here in DC and our “assignment” was to bring in the final scene of the play we’re working on. Even if you haven’t written a word for any other scene in the play. I’ve been struggling with my LA riots play for ten years now. It haunts me. And since this spring marks the 20th anniversary, I know I’ve got to finish it. So I gave a stab to the assignment, trying to write that scene that I’ve been avoiding forever.
It was awful. Hide your face in a paper bag awful. Repeated sentences, facts out of order, wierd entrances, and worst of all, no resolution. I knew it was awful and spent weeks trying to “fix” it. Finally, I decided to stop looking at it and just not bring anything in to my group. Chicken!
But Sunday morning, I asked myself what I had to lose? This was a new group of people. If they thought ill of me and my work, did it really matter? Would they tell the whole town what a lousy writer I was?
I printed out the pages, handed them out, and confessed I hadn’t really completed the assignment. The scene was a problem. So there.
Listening to it read out loud, I could see where my fellow writers were interested, confused, amused. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. And those generous writers put their clever heads together and offered me a way out of my conundrum. It wasn’t one last scene, it was a series of scenes trying to squeeze into that last scene. Let it breathe.
But most of all, their enthusiasm for this badly written piece of work, wanting to know the characters, the rest of the story, helped me regain my confidence about the work. It wasn’t awful. Just a work in progress.
So my advice for the day: courage fellow writers. Be brave enough to share the rotten work with people you trust. There may be seeds there that can grow into something even more wonderful than you imagined it in the first place.

Spalding Gray

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I first saw Spalding Gray perform in person at Lincoln Center in 1996 when he did his monologue It’s a Slippery Slope about learning to ski and changes in his relationships. He sat behind a table with a notebook in front of him. He spoke with a Rhode Island twang. I liked his voice.

He was performing in tandem with Julie Taymor’s The Green Bird and Taymor’s lush green forest hung above stage like a forest of the mind.

I later learned he never wrote out his monologues. He performed from an outline, so he wasn’t reading. He was engaging the audience. He was telling his story, and this made one feel very intimate with his story. However, this intimacy only went one way. He didn’t know his audience members personally and only told what he wanted to tell. He had control over his material.

Even though he was sitting the whole time, he had physical presence. He leaned forward and leaned back. He gestured with his arms. He could become very animated without leaving his seat.

The second time I saw Spalding Gray perform was at PS 122. I don’t remember the year. It was probably the late 90s. He was workshopping a new piece called Morning, Noon, and Night. He went for an hour and a half, got to late afternoon, and stopped there. He was trying tangents out and still trying to find the structure of it. We witnessed the hours of his day pass in minutes, and it was so rich and lovely that we could’ve sat and listened for another hour.

The last time I saw Spalding Gray on stage was a panel at ColumbiaUniversityon the theatrical avant garde. It was late autumn 2001. 9/11 had just happened, and we were still sorting through the rubble. Other panelists included Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, and three or four others.

Spalding Gray walked with cane and several times had to get up and walk off the stage, but he always came back. I didn’t know at the time that he had been in a bad car accident that past July. At one point on the panel, he talked about stories and how he use to think they had power but he doesn’t feel that way anymore. Still, he structured his thoughts as a story.

I recently read The Journals of Spalding Gray published by Knopf. Even though I knew how the book would end, I was still very sad when I got there. However, the journal journey to that end has writing and insights from some good time spent on this earth.

He wasn’t just an autobiographical storyteller. He sculpted his story to something beyond even himself.  He created a theatrical event with desk, a chair, a notebook, and himself. Adios, Spalding Gray. Thanks for the words.

At the end of my blog week on Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative, I’m gonna give Spalding Gray the last words. This is from a journal entry dated June 9, 1995:

 . . .eating my old tuna, jalapeno and “hot” hummus sandwich I had a peaceful sense of NOTHINGNESS and that was what I was going to come to. DEATH is NOTHING. It’s not death that’s sad, it’s life. There is nothing sad about nothing. I had a very strong feeling that I am nothing visiting something. Yes, I am nothing visiting something and returning to nothing.

Theatre Dot Orgy

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Earlier this month on facebook, Tiffany Antone posted a really funny Freudian slip her Dad made about her website (http://www.theatricstheatre.org/). He called it theatre dot orgy.

This made me laugh not only because I love puns, but also because Tiffany’s Dad stumbled onto a fundamental truth about theatre. Way to go Tiffany Dad! Woohoo!

On dictionary dot com, Orgy is defined in a variety of ways. First, it is a wild drunken or licentious festivity or revelry. Second, it is any actions or proceeding marked by unbridled indulgence of passions (an orgy of killing). Third, in Ancient Greece, an orgy is an esoteric religious ritual in worship of Dionysius with wild dancing, singing, drinking. Finally, informally, an orgy is a boisterous rowdy party.

I worry sometimes that theatre writing is too much in the head, that plays ignore the body in favor of people sitting and talking about feelings, psychology, philosophy, ideas. Bodies on stage can move, dance, sit down, stand up. Plays are not just about the spoken. They are about the physical.

Orgy in theatre is not just sex orgy. Orgy in theatre is the revelry of the play. It is brutality and joy. It is passion and destruction together in their most extreme form. And there’s something holy in it—not in some organized religion kind of way, but in the communal understanding of the mystery of the unspoken.

And this unspoken does not need to be talked about. It does not even need to be whispered about, but when it happens, everyone in the audience knows it.

You Will Submit!

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You all are catching me at a crazy time. I’m in the middle of a big script send out to places far and wide. My brain is thinking about Character Breakdowns and Playwright Biographies. Am I just a playwright character? Or am I a character playwright? Who am I? What am I doing?

I also want to give a shout out to the National Playwrights Conference which used their Facebook page as a force of good to explain what a Statement of Objectives was. Yay Eugene O’Neill!!! And I’m not kissing ass to get my play selected. Okay I am, but whatever.

I have also been on the other side of the submission process and read submissions for theatre companies and contests.

I am currently on a submission reading hiatus, so I know for a fact that I am not reading plays by anyone who might be reading this.

I recently was asked by a new playwright acquaintance about submissions. What makes a good play? Or more importantly, how can one’s play stand out and shine in the early rounds of judging?

There’s no definite answer because every reader comes from a different place. However, there are a few simple things that all writers can do.

Layout. Especially dialogue. I don’t care if you put the character name over the dialogue or on the same line as the dialogue. Please, just do it one way or another, and keep it consistent.

Also, make sure the character’s name is spelled the same throughout the script. Yes, I have read scripts where character names change halfway through.

Sometimes characters speak over each other. Yes, I know it happens in life. I don’t want some weird formatting. Just write (speaking over her) in the character direction.

I don’t want to see a lot of character direction. I don’t want to know when a character turns her head or even crosses the room. Please, just the essentials for staging. Think of it as the important stuff.

Third, please, please, please could I have a list of characters at the beginning of the play. I don’t need a lot of detail. Sometimes I forget who’s the mother and who’s the sister especially in big epic family melodramas.  

Should you have it single sided or double sided on paper? I don’t really care. But please, make sure you have all your pages. For computer submissions, I prefer the script be in pdf instead of a word processing program so I don’t mess up your lovely formatting.

How should the paper script be bound? Brass binders are fine for me because I can take them out when I hold the manuscript.

Finally, please please please don’t write plays that are dumbass. How do you know if your play is dumbass? Well, you really don’t. That’s the fun of it.

Another comic thought. I have no power to get your play produced. However, I can recommend it or not recommend it.

I will read your script intelligently and perceptively. I will try to imagine the characters as flesh and blood people on a stage. I will delight when I am surprised and laugh when it is funny. When I’m reading your script, the stage in my head is yours. Now, show me something

16 Possible Glimpses by Marina Carr at the Abbey Theatre

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This is not a review. Just my notes.

Last month, I was in Dublin and caught a preview of the world premiere of the latest Marina Carr play at the Abbey Theatre.

16 Possible Glimpses is an artistic impression of the life of playwright Anton Chekhov. Instead of writing a definite biography play, Marina Carr set out to write her own Chekhov, and she shows us a man who is both contradictory and painfully human.

Personally, I also thought her Chekhov was kind of sexy, and that is an adjective I never would have used about Anton Chekhov in the past. The structure of the play is nonlinear, so Chekhov dies in the beginning, then he’s onstage for the rest of the night. We see him resurrected again and again.

Carr’s Chekhov embraces a lot of people, and these physical connections make the missed connections in Chekhov’s tragic comedies even more tragic. How often we are afraid to embrace each other in life. Chekhov had TB and did not have the luxury of time, so he had to embrace as much as he could.

The play asks the question: what is a good man? How can one be both a good man and a good writer? There is a great scene where Chekhov is trying to write a story to pay the mortgage, but he is constantly interrupted by people needing him either in his family or as a doctor.

The production also incorporates video. By projecting the actors behind their physical selves, what is said and not said becomes more distorted as some phrases become overemphasized. It also allows glimpses of actors’ faces when they have their back to the audience or to other actors. The focus is not so much on the talker but on the listener.

As I witnessed the play in the tiny Peacock theatre, I thought about how a person’s life is really just glimpses and how fortunate that we got sixteen possible glimpses of Chekhov. By the way, the play doesn’t have sixteen scenes. Sixteen never comes up. It’s just a random number. Now, that’s really cool.

The production at the Abbey closed on October 29th. You can find out more about it here.

Inciting Incident

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Let’s start at the very beginning

A very good place to start

I start my blog week with Julie Andrews’ voice in my head. A very nice voice to hear. I’m also going to begin my blog week with beginnings.

Recently, I heard an aspiring screenwriter use the term inciting incident so reverently that I thought she had found the holy grail. Then I realized that she was just trying to sound writerly.

An inciting incident in a play or movie is the moment when the whole thing gets moving. The conflict is introduced. The goals of the protagonist are laid out. The inciting incident is all very precise and mathematical.

Aspiring writers are usually very good at having the inciting incident happen quickly then giving us a lot of pages of gobbelygook.

Gobbelygook is my term for time-filling writing.

When I went to writing school, we didn’t talk about the inciting incident. We just talked about the beginning. We also called it the start.

In sports, the start is very obvious. It’s the first pitch or the starting bell or buzzer or flag. The contest is happening. Action movies usually have a definite starting bell; then it’s on, and we’re in for two hours of some excellent sound editing.

However, not all plays are contests. To begin a play, you just gotta get some characters out on a stage. However, sometimes they don’t want to leave the backstage. Characters can be so difficult sometimes.

Wouldn’t it be great to start the play before the audience showed up? Just start in an empty theatre, then the audience shows up and has to figure things out.

However, in LA, the audiences would want to know when the start before the start is, so they can have access to the play. In LA, it’s all about the access.

Changes

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 At lunch yesterday the subject of Seth Godin came up. My friend had read his book “The Dip.” He is quoted by J.D. Meier (who works at Microsoft and leads project teams on Agile project. He has authored several technical books.) He said, “Seth Godin is an author, an agent of change, a meaning maker, and an Idea Merchant.”

 The “agent of change” interested me.  I was reminded of  when Obama threw his hat into the presidential race; and the buzz word was “change.”  And when he finally got into office there was a collosal global rush of air that was released like a when you’ve held your breath for too long.

 It seems to me we are all agents of change when we consider the list of heroic acts of people who have changed situations:  Egyptians protested against the 30 year reign of Mubarak; 3 women are the recent recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for being full participants in peace building work in the most war-torn countries; and then there are the ongoing protests against the financial institutions across the world in support of the “Occupy Wall Street Movement”.

 “Do people really change?” I asked my friend.  He said, “Naw, some people do change, but the vast majority don’t. And those people that do change are never truly comfortable in their new skin. Even when people are like “Oh, you’ve changed”, it’s like “No, I’m finally able to be myself”. Like The Scorpion and the Frog.  This is who you are, deal with rock and roll.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog.

What brings about change? What would force anyone to change their direction and ways? Another friend described a questionnaire he had to fill out at a medical office and he was surprised at some of the psychological questions such as “Have you ever thought about suicide?”  Shocking at first, but after thinking about it I wondered if anyone can honestly admit they have not thought about death.  Yes to consider suicide is something deeply wounding, but considering suicide for the clinical and objective curiousity of it.  (The story line of the movie “Kissed”  is about a a child’s romantic ideals about death, and how it turns to necrophilia, and the study of embalming, and finally affecting her relationship with a man who kills himself so she could love him in his death state.)

 If there is any agent of change that is powerful and lasting I’d vote death as the winner. I wear a pendant made from a tusk of a Wooly Mammoth that was unearthed in the Northwest Territories of Canada. It has been carved into a skull. I wear it most times (even to work.) It’s a reminder to me of change, and acceptance of the nature of death and dying. My whacky point of view is that it is life that kills you. When I think about that pendant and its source I think that death brings me life, because it makes me aware of the finiteness of time as perceived in the living form; and how we cling to permanence such as our ideologies, practices, philosophies and our niches and fetishes that gives us identity.

 Our identity is perceived as valuable, and we attach idenfication cards as a means of giving us form: driver’s license; passports, social security numbers. There is now the crime of “identity theft”. I can name a few forms of identity change of hands: stealing dead peoples’ identity for collecting welfare benefits; stealing peoples’ financial data; FBI’s witness protection program; identical twins playing pranks on people.

 How we change internally and externally changes our identity and how we relate to the external world and how we feel about ourselves; this incorporates a change in attitude towards ourselves, how treat ourselves and how others will treat us. It’s so reciprocative.  People go for hypnosis sessions to change habits. People pay lots of money to get nose jobs, boob jobs and lifts and tucks. People will still lose their advantage over their willpower and binge on sweets. When the masses overturn the oligarchy in Wall Street what “new” face will sit in the executive board room? Are we bound to repeat our history based on DNA and our conditioning?

  “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.” – Steve Jobs

 But he did preview that with:

  “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.  Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” – Steve Jobs

Bringing it all home, what is it in practice for me? The smallest and simplest thing makes so much difference. I hate to say that I will probably still hit the snooze button tomorrow morning. But I’m still hoping not to, and that will be like letting out that breath of air I’ve held too long.  Follow my heart…  Do what matters…There is no formula…

I will close with a couple of Bruce Lee quotes:

  • Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. The aim of art is not the one-sided promotion of spirit, soul and senses, but the opening of all human capacities – thought, feeling, will – to the life rhythm of the world of nature. So will the voiceless voice be heard and the self be brought into harmony with it.
  • Flow in the living moment. — We are always in a process of becoming and nothing is fixed. Have no rigid system in you, and you’ll be flexible to change with the ever changing. Open yourself and flow, my friend. Flow in the total openness of the living moment. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo. 

 

What Matters Now?

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Working in an office there is the cycle of the highs, the lows and the flatliners during during the week. Some of you can relate to the mood patterns as it transitions from Monday Blues to TGIF – Happy Friday! Comic strips, I find, are best at depicting the reality of the workplace.

 

Credit to Tatsuya Ishida

So today is Tuesday, near the end of the day, and I’m between tasks. I can’t quite get up my excitement to start the next task, so I hang out with the mailroom guy for a wacky conversation to give me a fresh insight on life. (Pretending to “work” at my desk when I’m really checking my email or doing personal research can sometimes feel empty unless I can do it with full permission from my manager (not likely to happen.)) I walk into the mailroom and my buddy looks up. “What’s a five letter word for a mountain?” “Ararat”, I said. He plugs it into his “Nook”, and he’s happy, “Hey that worked!” I hung out a little longer as I too was happy to be doing something interactive with somebody, instead of being in my head doing “design work”.We get a few more words together doing team work. Then I take my leave as my conscience beckons me to go back to my desk and start the new task. Argh… resistance. I don’t want to go into the ivory towers yet. It’s too lonely. It’s too hard. I want fun.

 

I shake my myself mentally to wake up! “What matters now?” How does what’s happening outside these four walls affect me? I feel so insulated often working in my little world (which is actually scary because I swear I’ve become less intelligent that my skills and knowledge is like this solid single tap root about computer acronyms and methodologies that noone outside of my co-workers really care to know about. As an IT person I’m the one who makes the business users successful. I am like the elf that makes the toys so Santa can give them away and make the kids happy; or the the person operating the lights and sounds on the stage to hi-light the mood of the situation on the stage.)

 

Then I hone in on my sense of smallness and the fear of it, and it leads me to a discovery. “Wow, this is how Paul feels.” (Paul is a character in my play.) My curiousity and interest in working on the play again is re-awakened. I’m like a child again full of “Wow!” These characters are real. “Wow!” I can’t just design them like a stick figure. They have skeletons and muscles, a nervous system, and they get all gooey and sticky. Gee, I’ve had it wrong for awhile to think that I can manipulate these characters. I can only put them into specific conditions and circumstances and observe and record what they say, do and think.

 

And I know now why I was stuck for awhile, and I was afraid to get back into the ring to fight the battle. I was already trying to manipulate the outcome of the encounter.   And this is countered by another awesome quote from Bruce Lee:

 

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment. – Bruce Lee.

 

The tools being all my senses especially my heart so that I can write truthfully instead of from the head. I was trying to “figure out” the outcome of the play, when it’s an organic living story, because it is made up of real characters of my imagination and heart. Without the heart, the story will be like the manufactured “perfect” apple on display at the window of a furniture store. It’s not the beautiful smelling apple that someone wants to bite into.

 

And so it is with my office work too. Yes it can get dry with all that heady stuff, but if I design it with heart – with the intent of making something beautifully functional for my users then I’ve done my job right.  That’s what matters now (figuratively and literally for me.)  Back to work!