Fear (or was that anxiety)

playwriting, , ,

by Cynthia Wands

The artist is Christian Schloe

Here ‘s a wonderful interview with James Grissom with  the late Marian Seldes. She was a force of nature, and someone who was a fearless artist. Here she talks about some of the facets of fear. And it’s amazing to see that it’s so connected to the process of sharing our work, as artists.

Mandala, original artwork Cynthia Wands

I asked Marian Seldes what she most wanted to teach her students, and she stopped me and said there was something she most wanted to teach everyone. This is what she told me in July of 2008. Always make sure that fear is fast on its feet around you. That’s something Garson [Kanin] told me. You can be afraid, but you can’t stay afraid. Deal with the fear, and I always dealt with it by recognizing immediately how I could vanquish it. Someone somewhere–nearby–is ready to help you with what frightens you, if only because they recognize the fear you currently have. They’ll remember feeling it, and they’ll remember how they got rid of it. Sometimes the fear disappears simply by reaching out to someone else for relief. We are not alone. We are all connected. In an acting situation, I always wanted students–and those with whom I was working as an actress–to firmly believe that I knew they belonged where they were: They had talent and worth and placement. If you make a mistake–even if you fail completely, as we all have–you still have merit and talent and are able to move on. Never be afraid of the work: You can be respectful of the task; you can want very much to live up to the expectations of the writer and the director and your peers, but fear is not a part of this. Fear is poisonous. I can always lose my sense of fear by looking at my partners and remembering that they have talent and resources, and they are my shore, my sturdy foundation on which I can stand. I need them, and they need me. In this sense of trust, great work can be made, and lovely friendships can be built. I heard someone say the other day that greatness lies beyond your greatest fear, and I think that’s true, but that greatness is what you find when you conquer the fear, throw it to the side. Fear tells us to protect a child, ourselves, a neighbor, an idea, but the greatness–or what I call our basic humanity–comes through when we help the child, the neighbor, repeat the idea, get back to work. Maybe fear is our conscience. Just a tap on the shoulder or a still voice reminding us what we should do, but our job is to still the voice, do the task. If we allow the fear to remain and grow, we become mean and suspicious, and we kill everything. Fear destroys us. Fear destroys everything. I think we were put here to restore and protect others, so I always remind people how quickly we have to dispatch fear and help each other and get on with the work. © 2018 James Grissom

Mandala, Original artwork, Cynthia Wands

Fear seems like such deep and overwhelming emotion to me; I think of characters on stage as experiencing fear as a mortal vulnerability. Some of the characters I’ve written seem to experience anxiety, more than fear, and it seems to lower the stakes for the outcome. I’m still thinking about fear. And feeling it too.

Other People’s Process

playwriting

by Cynthia Wands

This interview for the Clubbed Thumb production of PLANO brought up a lot of feelings regarding the noisy (and public) collaboration of a director and new works.

Other People's Process, Original Artwork, Mixed Media, Cynthia Wands 2019
Other People’s Process, Original Artwork, Mixed Media, Cynthia Wands 2019

The interview from the magazine:

Director Taylor Reynolds on Plano, Clubbed Thumb, The Movement Theatre Company, and More

April Fish

playwriting, ,

by Cynthia Wands.

I meant to do some research on a current writing project this evening.

“APRIL FISH”

But no. My sister reminded me that today is April 1st. April Fools Day.

And so, instead of researching my play, I fell into the internet and found out that today is April Fish Day.

Okay I’m exaggerating a little bit.

Actually it’s not April Fish Day. It’s a day where strangers can yell “April Fish” to you on this day. Really.

In France.

This is what happens when you need to write more on your play but you find out about the April Fish Day story.

Some history suggests that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Now the New Year would start on January 1, rather than the last week of March through April 1.

But for those poor dullards who failed to recognize that the start of the new year had now moved to January, they now became the butt of jokes and hoaxes on April 1. (Leading to our culture’s shout out to “April Fools”.)

Throughout France (though mostly among children) April Fools’ Day is observed by sneakily sticking a paper fish to someone’s back. These pranks are referred to as “Poisson d’Avril” (April fish), and are said to symbolize a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.

When the hapless victim discovers the prank, (meaning that they discover that there is a paper fish on their back) the successful prankster will yell out “Poisson d’Avril”  which means “April Fish!”

I have never had anyone yell out “April Fish” to me. Mostly, I suppose, because I have never been in France on April 1, and therefore the French pranksters couldn’t find me.

(Can I use this in a script somewhere? I will have to file it in my folder called “Holidays” and then never find it again.)

I also found out that April Fools’ Day is linked to a Roman festival called Hilaria, (now there’s a theatrically festival day: Hilaria). This was celebrated in ancient Rome at the end of March and involved people dressing up in disguises. (Again, another holiday note for the archive.)

But one of the best stories about these first days in April come from Scotland. In the 18the century April Fools’ Day spread through Scotland, and the tradition became a two-day event, starting with “hunting the gowk” day, in which people were sent on phony errands (gowk is a word for cuckoo bird, a symbol for fool).

This is followed on April 2 by Tailie Day, which involves pranks played on people’s derrieres, such as pinning fake tails or “kick me” signs on their rear ends.

So on my day of research, where I meant to find very different stories, I found stories about April Fish, Hilaria the Festival Day of Disguises, Hunting The Gowk Day, and lastly, Tailie Day.

I will be checking in mirrors tomorrow to make sure that I don’t have a fake tail pinned to me. Or a paper fish on my back. And then maybe I’ll be able to get back to writing again and not looking up stories on the internet…

Day 4 of everything

playwriting

Well, maybe those serene views and walks and this blog have been helping me. I am at Day 4 of writing, as well as Day 4 for of my 90-day playwriting. I decided to re-visit the book, as I will soon be without internet (heaven forbid) and what will I do with all my spare time. I mean aside from perform, which I was hired to do on this wild and crazy trip, what should I be doing? Also, after much pondering, and let’s face it, procrastinating, I really want to write. I have stories I want to share. I’m sure if you’ve read my other posts, somewhere along the way I have said that I am afraid of the comments. Ooops, and if I didn’t, cats outta the bag now. You know the conversations that happen, hopefully after your show, and not during intermission while people are walking out wondering “what the heck” that was and how they lost their mind wanting to come and see new work. “No, no honey, let’s stick to the classics, I don’t understand the crap some people write.”

Back to the beach….

Ok, peaceful moment taken. I’m back.

I just have to keep reminding myself that people don’t really care. Sorry if that’s a shock to you, but I think on some level it’s true. Let’s take my one-person show. I wrote what turned out to be a very personal story, something I had not intended, about my life, sprinkled with some truth and some fiction, but nonetheless as it was being performed I realized “Holy heck, people are going to think this is how I think, that I did this that or the other thing…etc. And lets face it, it was too late at that point. But for all the worrying I did about what people were going to say and not agree with me, all the thoughts I had put in my head, none of it happened. Ok, it may have happened but no one talked to me about it, so it didn’t happen. I was ready for the conversations I had imagined my work would provoke and nada, zip, zero, zilch. What did happen was a pleasant conversation with a lovely elderly couple who identified with my 8-year old character. Something totally unexpected! So, see. It wasn’t about me, or even the story I had imagined I was telling. This couple spoke of how this little 8-year old girl made them feel. And in my head she was talking about her culture, her loss of it, her finding it, and how she identified in the world as a NATIVE person. Yet this couple was non-Native and saw themselves in her. I try to prepare myself for conversations that I am trying to ellicit from the audience with my work. I think of both sides of the argument so as to have a well rounded view and informed opinion, but the conversations and comments I imagined never happen.

People are going to come into your show with whatever baggage has happened to them that day and they’re going to watch your show and put whatever their worldview is on it and their ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.

So just take a breath. Clear your mind of worry, and write. That’s what I’m going to try to do. ON TO DAY 5!

I wish you happy writing!

Jennifer

Checking in

playwriting

Ok. So it’s now the end of March. It has been roughly 60+ days since my last post and my grand ambitions of 2019 goals. I just looked at my last post Moving On and I am taking a moment to review my list. Truth be told, it’s a list I had forgotten I made. You see, I have been here

ALASKA, BEACH

since my last post. How can you get anything done when this is your view? I am still here, working on a new project and I was reviewing my note book, where I put my January Goals. Yup, my 2019 plan was to write down monthly goals to keep me on task. But as I turned the pages, I found no February or March goals. Oops. I have written a few things. Daily musings of life on the road but no finished play like I had hoped. The 90-day play book I had started, still on day 3, the daily writing I wanted to do, of anything, non-existent.

But with this new project, came encouragement from the playwright in the form of a blank journal. I had just been shopping for a new notebook and here one presented itself. The perfect size, 6×8 lined and stapled. The notebook I had brought with me, found at the Dollar Tree I think, is falling apart. This one is ready for a new adventure. So, yesterday while taking my daily walk on the above mentioned beach, listening to a podcast and running lines, thoughts and stories running through my head, I pulled out my shiny new notebook, found a relatively dry log on the edge of the sand and started writing. Day 1 done and in the books.

How has the first quarter of 2019 been treating you? Hopefully better than mine. But I would love to hear how it’s going. Inspiration. Motivation.

I wish you happy writing!

Jennifer

We interrupt…

playwriting

Ok. New Idea. Sort of. But where do I start. How do I start? What do I write? What kind of play is it going to be? How many characters should I have? When is enough? Ok, deep breath, step back, take a minute, take off the perfection hat and start writing. More deep breaths, panic has set in. I don’t know what I’m doing….

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

We interrupt this blog post for a tiny meltdown. Please enjoy this calming landscape, while we collect ourselves.

Sandy Beach, AK

Ok. It’s just me, trying to keep writing. J.

Hard Lessons on Interpersonal Skills:

playwriting

The act of telling stories, creating work with strangers, friends or repeated colleagues in the theatre is the greatest gift and seems at times a hard action.

The merging of ideas. The coming together to birth then share a common vision requires an artist to shed old fears, break repetitive habits and go beyond their own abilities to fuse a groups talents into a collaborative manifestation all can stand by.

Active listening, being aware of how my verbal / non verbal communication affects the group, knowing when to be assertive, as well as being able to negotiate are social skills that I continually am practicing.

I do not need to always win nor am I conforming with a loss. Instead, I’ve come to see that I am expanding/growing as a storyteller. Giving the work a chance to be great and since the work cannot be fully done alone; I’m learning to bend with the wind in all aspects of my life. That way the work stays fluid. Making sure that I do not allow fears to get in the way. Trusting the team, relying on practiced social skills and believing in what you’ve created are the first ingredients of theatre magic.


Don’t Be A Girl

playwriting, , , , ,

by Kitty Felde

When I was in 8th grade, transitioning to a Catholic high school, my teacher advised my mother to send me to a co-ed school. The reason: I didn’t know how to act around boys. The nun wasn’t worried about my body. She was worried about my mouth. I wasn’t afraid of speaking out – loud and often – behavior she suspected would make me an outcast for life. I didn’t defer to the boys.

My mother did send me to a co-ed high school where I continued to speak out – loud and often. And indeed I did find myself the outcast, but luckily I discovered theatre and the power of the written word.

And yet.

How often do we apologize for our writing, telling anyone who will listen that it’s “not quite finished” or “just a first draft” or whatever qualifier we attach to it. Have you ever heard a male playwright describe his work that way?

STOP BEING A GIRL!

That’s my mantra to remind myself to just finish the damn play and get it out there. How often do you hear a male writer apologize for his work? Uh – never? Helaine Becker put it a different way.

Helaine is a very successful non-fiction writer for kids. Her latest work

“Counting on Katherine” profiles Katherine Johnson, the NASA math whiz from the film “Hidden Figures.” I was lucky enough to hear her speak to a group of children’s book writers in San Diego last month. Her talk covered the usual topics: putting together a non-fiction proposal, creating a target list of places to send your work, following the decision makers on Twitter, and all the nuts and bolts of the topic.

The room was full of women. Children’s book writers are almost always women, despite the fact that the industry itself overly celebrates male writers for kids. (For more on this sad topic, check out the essays and podcast Kidlitwomen.)

Helaine looked around the room, shook her head, and started to give a different lecture. She laid down the law for the ladies who wanted their work to see the light of day: send out your manuscript when it’s “good enough,” she said. Don’t wait for perfect. She insisted that “not open for submissions” was a mere gatekeeper to keep the timid out of the system. Sitting around waiting for someone to get back to you was unprofessional. “You have an obligation to followup.” After six weeks, write back, ask whether they’ve had a chance to look at your work yet, and ask when you might expect a response.

In other words, STOP BEING A GIRL.

My plays are not perfect. It’s unlikely any will ever make it to Broadway or Arena Stage or South Coast Rep. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of productions and reviews and publication. (In fact, my adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” was indeed just published by YouthPLAYS!) Instead of apologizing,I’m sending them out, trusting that I just haven’t found the right audience for them. Yet.

The same can be said for my first kids book. It will likely never win a Newbery Award, but it was “good enough” to get me an agent, to get great feedback from big-deal editors, but it was soundly rejected by the big five New York publishers.

That hurt. A lot.

STOP BEING A GIRL, KITTY!

I thought a lot about who was the audience of this book. I decided that “Welcome to Washington, Fina Mendoza” would resonate with folks inside the Beltway and with kids who are from California, Texas, and the west. So I shopped it to independent publishers thousands of miles away from New York and it found a home with

Black Rose Writing out of Texas.

Think about your work. Which audience can it particularly inspire? Out of towners visiting  Broadway? Students who stumble into a reading of your play at a neighborhood coffee house? Senior citizens who would adore a play about a famous woman from their lifetime? There is an audience for our work. Our “good enough” work. We just have to find it.

In the meantime, let’s stop apologizing for our work. The only way our voices can be heard is if we have the guts to put it out there…over and over again.

Be brave. Be persistent. Be a new kind of girl.

Kitty is on book tour with her first middle grade mystery “Welcome to Washington, Fina Mendoza” (Black Rose Writing, 2019) and will be reading from and signing books at: Politics & Prose, The Wharf, Washington, DC Monday March 18 at 7; Children’s Book World, West LA Saturday March 30 at 2:30; and Vroman’s Pasadena Monday April 1 at 6pm.

Binge Writing…

playwriting

I used to binge write. It kept me tied in to my creative side. Now, all I want to do is write something every day. One sentence will do. I want to turn off my edit machine and just write.

I’ll even settle for re-writing. It is never good to be a writer who is too busy to write; it is suffocating me…

Today, I decided to create an in-house retreat – set the date, take vacation, create the itinerary, and just do it.

Sometimes…

playwriting

by Chelsea Sutton

Sometimes you spend all weekend writing out a book idea about haunted houses and choose your own adventure books and the meaning of home but then you miss the deadline for the application you were writing it for because you can’t tell the difference between am and pm, apparently.

Sometimes you get big rejections all in a row and your summer is already feeling empty and long and what the hell are you going to do after you graduate from this MFA program anyway?

Sometimes people ask you what are you going to do with your degree? As if the answer isn’t what I always did before, but, like, older.

Sometimes you meet your best friend’s new baby and love her immediately.

Sometimes you finish something. Sometimes you feel as if you’re never going to finish anything. Sometimes you feel as if nobody cares anyway and what are you doing writing about monsters and ghosts and weird shit when there are politics to worry about, real monsters just around the corner.

Sometimes you sit in a room of people you adore talking about creative things and you just want to run out of the room, out to the street, tossing your notebook in the air, the hell with shoes, your bare feet slopping in the puddles along Laurel Canyon Blvd, a street not built for this sort of rain, the endless, all-at-once, confusing Southern California rain that you will miss terribly when it’s gone.

Sometimes you grieve for things years before you have to. Like this moment. And this one.

And this one too.

Sometimes you see the rest of your life spinning out from you, circling back upon itself like a rope tied to an anchor and thrown overboard of a ship, twisting down and around itself on and on, into nothingness and you realize too late that the free end is not tied to anything, and there it goes, your life, twisting down into the water for some dolphins to laugh at.

Sometimes you make scones.

Sometimes you drink too much coffee and don’t sleep enough and your heart feels like it wants to choke you.

Sometimes you write a meandering monologue just to get something out and it suddenly opens up your play, and it doesn’t seem scary anymore. Not anymore.

And then another rejection comes.

Sometimes you buy a typewriter from 1941 off of Craigslist for a project in which you don’t end up using it anyway, but you have always wanted a typewriter so, what the hell. The guy selling it is also a writer – TV, he says – and he’d bought the thing with big plans to write his poetry on it – the romantic poet with his typewriter and coffee and cigarette. But he never used it. And the poetry was never written. And now it’s yours, along with its two unused ribbons. And it scares you, to type on it, because it feels so much more permanent than a computer. If you want a rewrite, you got to type it all, word for word – and it makes you realize that the kind of relationship writers used to have with their words was perhaps different, having to rewrite them over and over. An intimacy we don’t know in the same way these days. The intimacy of old friends. The intimacy of old lovers.

Sometimes you dream of traveling the world with this typewriter, creating a one-woman show with it, building a whole magical event around it that you can take to festivals, perform in grand halls and in elementary school classrooms.

And this, too, has already been grieved for. Remember that time I could dream about traveling the world with this typewriter? Remember when that was a possibility?

Sometimes you think, boy, everyone makes it look so easy.