Lanford

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I want to give a nod to playwright Lanford Wilson, who passed away March 24. He was one of my guiding lights, especially when I was first trying to write plays. In high school, the playwright I was most familiar with was Neil Simon. What can I say, I did a lot of speech tournaments and used cuttings from his plays. As I got a little older I read Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill, as we all did. Stuff to admire but I couldn’t imagine writing like any of those folks. But then I discovered Lemon Sky and This is the Rill Speaking and Talley’s Folly and The Fifth of July by Lanford Wilson. Plays filled with people who seemed relatable and real. Plays crafted in a way that seemed that maybe if I put my nose to the grindstone I could emulate them.

Well, I ended up not writing like Lanford Wilson, either, as you can imagine, but he gave me hope and something to shoot for.

I went to see his Burn This at the Taper last Saturday. I can’t say I “grog” the character of Pale nor root for his relationship with Anna, but there were other moments that pulled me in – the pain of being at a funeral where the relatives don’t know or won’t admit the deceased is gay, the push-pull of writing a big, commercial screenplay versus something more human and intimate. So the play wasn’t perfect, but it was still a worthy effort. Thank you, Lanford.

Here are other tributes to him by people who knew him intimately, if you want to see how profoundly he touched others’ lives: 

http://www.playbill.com/features/article/150064-Remembering-Lanford-Wilson-Colleagues-Reflect-About-the-Playwright/all

Gut Reaction

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Went to see Jane Anderson’s thought-provoking and funny The Escort last week at The Geffen. The basic storyline is a female gynecologist meets a call girl (“A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar and…” sorry, I couldn’t resist…) and ends up learning where she stands when it comes to her own sexual beliefs and just how open-minded she really is. It makes the audience think, too, presumably, if they’re willing.

I bring it up because in the second act, the call girl did something that made my stomach muscles tighten. No, it didn’t involve sex toys. She asked the gynecologist if she could keep a photo of the doctor’s teenaged son. It didn’t seem in character plus it seemed like a big red flag of a plot point to be used later. Sure enough, it was.

Then even later in the second act, the doctor and her ex-husband got all worked up (again, not in a sex act…) and took a decisive action. My stomach muscles were all in a bunch, the decision seemed forced.

I try and pay attention to my stomach muscles at my own play readings and performances, but it’s harder because I don’t often have the distance that I have when I’m seeing someone else’s play, especially if I’m hearing it for the first time. But seeing Jane’s play – which I liked in spite of my stomach muscle moments, and I’m a huge fan of her work in general – reminded me how important it is to pay attention to my gut reaction.

Hmmm… maybe I can market this as The Playwrights’ Workout: “Build better plays and stronger abs all at the same time…”

Happy Anniversary, baby, got you on my miiiiind….

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A little over a year ago on a cold, rainy Saturday, I huddled with like-minded individuals (playwrights who thought women should be getting more productions. Duh.) in a dressing room at the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga.

I don’t know how far we’ve come. It’s hard to measure when you’re in the smack in middle of something.

But an initiative was born. Heat was generated. Actions have been taken.

We have our study (thank you again Ella Martin and all who queried and compiled) and its oh-Lord-we-have-more-work-to-do results… https://lafpi.com/about/the-study/

Theatres have been put on notice that we’re paying attention.

Speeches have been made at award shows, articles have been written and circulated.

And this blog was started a year ago, April 19, 2010.

Even though I haven’t gotten to gather in person with the LAFPI gang in many months due to my schedule conflicts (I do plan on making the May 15th picnicky thing!), I definitely have felt a sense of community as we write and share the journey of being playwrights here in da blog.

It feels better when you’re going through something together. Here’s to the next year of blogging, playwriting, initiating, activating, and makin’ more noise… together.

Monster Inside You

playwriting

I’ve always written things. Since I was small, writing and telling stories was just part of my life. I followed an acting dream to NYU and within a month switched to directing and design.

Writing always followed me but I never focused on it. I don’t know why.

Whenever I work on a piece, I start by tearing it down and building from the ground up, discovering the structure as I go. As a director, I always chose plays that required more imagination than simply a kitchen sink. Whenever I went the kitchen sink route, I utterly failed. It’s just not my niche.

Writing is the clear solution. So why not the focus? Recently I defined the underlying reason : The Ursula Effect. Getting past the monster inside me who says people won’t like my voice, who says I will hear that one word to kill all drive:

bad

I can’t believe I even included it in this blog. That’s the equivalent to screaming “MacBeth” as a community theater is about to open a production of Sweeney Todd.

How do you stomp on this monster and move onto writing? I essentially wrestle with her until I punch her out.

Time to put on the boxing gloves. Chat later.

On the road again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think local, write local

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I continue my discovery of theatres around the Washington DC area and always compare them to our companies in LA. Last night, I saw a new show “Resurrectionist King” by a local DC writer Stephen Spotswood, at a theatre near the University of Maryland called Active Cultures Theatre.

Was it a perfect play? No. Was it a darned good attempt? You betcha. And creatively directed and pretty well acted.

But here’s the thing that impressed me: the play was commissioned by the theatre company Active Cultures.  It was based on a true story that someone had read in the local free weekly paper, about a local “celebrity” – a guy who dug up bodies for medical students to examine. The Resurrectionist King he called himself. And he did a one night show at a theatre near Ford’s Theatre (where Lincoln was shot) showing the audience the art of his craft.

Active Cultures worked for about a year with the playwright, developing the piece.  And then, instead of just a reading, they actually produced it!  What a concept.

The audience LOVED the fact that it was a story about their own community. They could identify with the places and some of the characters.

How many great stories are untold in LA? And why isn’t there a company commissioning local writers to write them?

Time management

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agents

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I know you really don’t need an agent at the beginning.  But suppose you’re a “mid career” playwright, you’re getting productions around the world, half a dozen a year, but still not yet enough of a name to be chosen for the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage?  

It’s so frustrating to find submission restrictions from theatres that won’t even look at a few pages and a synopsis unless you’re represented by an agent.  And since there’s so little money for agents representing playwrights (unless they sell that script to Hollywood) most call ill afford to take on new clients. 

I had a wonderful agent back in the days when I was writing spec scripts and going out for meetings.  I sold TV scripts, but we parted ways when I showed a decided lack of interest in becoming a staff writer on a bad sitcom.  I wanted to freelance.  But there’s just not enough money for an agency to support a freelancer. 

I’m curious to know what you do.  Send a query and pages and a synopsis anyway?  Beg influential friends in theatre to write letters of recommendation?  What works?

Adaptation

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I was taught that Jon Jory was a god in the world of playwriting.  But I saw a lousy production of his adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” in Florida.  And the actors and director cannot take all the blame. 

Jory’s adaptation was way too literal – this happened, then this happened, then this happened.  The theatricality was mostly absent, except for borrowing the technique used in “Nicholas Nickleby” where prose is put in the mouths of characters and shared with the audience breaking the fourth wall. 

Now, I admit I’m a bit prejudiced myself on the topic of Jane Austen and “P&P.”  I’ve seen the 1995 BBC adaptation at least two dozen times and the various movie versions several times apiece.  But those were films.  This was theatre – or at least it was supposed to be.

I’m no expert on adaptation – though I did win the LA Drama Critics Circle Award for my adaptation of Nikolai Gogol short stories for the Rogues Artists Ensemble – but I do have some thoughts.  And I hope you’ll add to my list of what makes a good adaptation.

A work of theatre has to be theatrical.  There has to be a place where the page is left to lie there to gather dust and something bigger than life comes alive in front of an audience.  I don’t need Spiderman to fly across the stage (speaking of problems with adaptation) or a helicopter to land at the end of the second act.  A play should be dangerous.  And unpredictable.  Use the stage.

Someone will be disappointed.  It happens all the time in movie adaptations – something gets left out, characters get melded.  A playwright has to face those expectations an audience brings into a familiar work and be brave enough to disappoint some people.  Trying to please everyone creates bland work.

Jane Austen will not turn over in her grave.  We all want to honor the original work.  But why bother to do anything but retype the book in play format if you’re not willing to make it a bit of your own?  It’s an adaptation, not a literal translation.

That’s enough for now.  What’s on your list?