There is perhaps one thing that is innate to us all and that is the need to survive. I’m not proud of the lengths I’ve gone to protect myself from perceived predators, but I’ve survived. But, I was born with this brain that considers death and guilt and purpose, and wonders if I’m better than a beast. And, I realize right now, that I’m not. And, I blessed the chicken for giving its life so I could eat dinner. I’ve survived, and my intelligence, for the most part is intact. So, with this brain and some time over the summer, what’s it going to be? I am tentatively reaching out: Lunch with a friend, Federal grant workshop with a colleague, LA FPI gathering, Throw Me On the Burnpile and Light Me Up, folk music, Crystal Cove Beach Cottages… Baby steps. I gave myself permission to take the time to heal. Not healed yet, but in the process of healing. So, in the meantime, before the writing starts, I curated a speech transcript. A living history. Doing it the Erica Bennett way. No apologies.
Thank you
My heart skipped a beat. Actually, it took my breath away. Tonight, theatre colleagues reached out individually and across social networks to offer me advice and encouragement. Because, and for the first time in months, my brain peeked through the pneumonia fog and made positive relevant connections that they could respond to. I know that I am recovering because I didn’t nap today. I’m actively listening to bluegrass while drinking a stiff strawberry margarita after eating my stovetop cooked bbq chix and Spanish rice dinner. I’ve survived again. And I’m here discussing action in a play. How fortunate am I? Sincerely yours, Eh.
Big Uh-Huh Moment
A friend told me yesterday that he didn’t understand my intentions behind something I recently wrote. Words to the effect, he didn’t understand how I wanted him to feel… “Is crying a bad thing?” That made me curious. Because, I realize that I don’t want people to feel any particular way when experiencing my work, but certainly, yes, feel something.
I’ve been trained as an archivist where being unbiased is part of the mission. I realize today that I must be conjoining archivist-dramatist because, as a playwright, I know I have written other even less focused stories.
Perhaps this has been my fatal flaw. Maybe I need to lead my audience toward what it is I intend to say rather than letting them experience the character’s story and determine for themselves what it means to them and how it makes them feel?
Maybe that’s what they mean by plays are about Action.
10 (theatrical) things that make me cry
- In discussing her method of acting now, after years of study, Meryl Streep stated in an interview that it was a lot like driving a car… she doesn’t have to think about it anymore. It was simply part of her. (or words to that effect.)
- Reading Jane Eyre on the beach on Cape Cod in the late-1980s and thinking, “Wow. This is literature. What the hell have I been reading all my life?” (and wishing F. Scott Fitzgerald had been in charge of my reading list.)
- Thinking I’ve read a ton of books… Before I went to graduate school, became a librarian and discovered myself surrounded by a literal ton of books.
- Thinking, if I’ve read a ton of books, I’ve read a million plays.
- Realizing that I exaggerate a lot.
- When I was an actress, directors wanted to cast me when I projected a foul mood at auditions, and seeing no pay-off for that behavior in the real world.
- Bambi.
- Tennessee Williams.
- If there are no new stories, what are we writing for?
- Puppets. Massive puppets. Massive puppets shaped like horses will do.
15 True Lines of Dialogue.
- I love you.
- I don’t know what to say.
- You don’t mean that.
- I don’t want to know.
- I love you, too.
- I had a really great day.
- You suck.
- I love huevos rancheros.
- I miss her.
- You’re a slob.
- My thighs are fat.
- I had big dreams.
- The Earth is round.
- I love you to the Moon and back.
- To infinity.
Doing the Work
For the last six months, I’ve written in short bursts of inspiration, followed by long spells of enervation. Yet, while I have been fortunate to hear my fruits read on stage, but I am not satisfied.
Three words written to me by a Facebook friend I’ve never met resonate with me, “Do the work.”
For the last several months I’ve been suffering from another long descent into pneumonia and in digging my way back out I’ve done a lot of thinking.
For whom and what am I writing? In the writing, am I fulfilling my vision? Is that even possible in a play format? Why am I not satisfied with the outcome? If not, should I be writing in another format?
Am I writing to get attention? Am I writing because I am addicted to instant gratification? Am I writing from ambition? Am I writing to win an award? Meet a deadline?
Am I telling the story of people? Am I writing for me?
My mentor wrote me, “A play is about action. A novel describes life.”
Can a play describe action? Is action in a play always verbalized? Can a play include movement? Can a playwright write:
“DUCKY pads silently across the plank floor to him, waits. But, the old man sleeps.”
Or, is that directorial? Have I designed the set? And, is any of that allowed?
What I realized this month is that like most people, the characters I write come from some place… Acting 101: Where are you coming from?
If doing the work takes me into another or a combination of formats and down a longer road, who is it I am writing for anyway? Me. Today, I give myself permission to do the work like Erica Bennett.
The Self Production Series with Anna Nicholas: #13 Ticketing…
#13. Butts in Seats and Selling the Tickets to Put Them There
by Guest Blogger Anna Nicholas
A playwright friend told me a story about how her first play was a week from opening when she realized they hadn’t accounted for how tickets were going to be sold. That’s TOO LATE! Once you’re in rehearsals (and regardless of how they’re going) you should already be selling them, or at least figuring out how to.
There are lots of ways to sell tickets; too many, really. So, if your budget allows, this is where you might be best served by hiring a box office manager or combo box office manager/ticketing person/”front of house” manager. This person should know how theatre tickets get sold in your town and have the experience to help you choose the best, easiest way to do it. And when I say best and easiest, I mean best and easiest for your potential customers, i.e., your audience; not you. Because believe me, they’re different.
Have you ever showed up to something, expected to buy a ticket and been told they only take cash? Or you’re online and whatever site you’re on doesn’t take a certain credit card? If you don’t want to lose a prospective customer, you want to make it easy for him or her to buy a ticket. If you don’t care about selling tickets or have such a small house, short run and built in audience that it’s not worth setting up multiple ways for people to buy tickets, then forget all this. But that’s not most plays and certainly not most plays that are self-produced.
I recommend some combination of making tickets available online, by phone and at the door. Sounds simple but stay with me. Figuring out what will work for you isn’t hard, it’s just one of those time consuming jobs that needs to be done.
Starting with the online ticketing sites, there are several to consider. Brown Paper Tickets is what we used http://www.brownpapertickets.com/createevent.html. You decide your ticket price and how many tickets will be available through this outlet. It allows your ticket purchasers to enter discount codes (that you disseminate via any number of ways) and keeps track of it all. At any time before online sales close before a given performance, you can see how many tickets have been sold and who bought them using which codes. Then there’s Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.com which is similar in functionality but seems to be used for more “one off” types of events. And there are others popping up all the time. Each of these sites takes a percentage of ticket sales and will deposit net proceeds into a bank account or via other means such as a PayPal account that you choose at the set-up stage.
In LA, we have a more full-service site called Plays-411 https://www.plays411.net/newsite/ticketagency/ticketagency.asp It offers ticketing as well as other services to producers, including email blasts about your show that go out to their lists and “hosting’ your show’s informational page, which can serve as your website if you choose not to get a dedicated URL for your show as we did with villathrilla.com. On that page you can provide reviews, cast member info, pictures and the like. Publicists like it because they can go into the site and directly book Press tickets. We didn’t use Plays-411 though a lot of producers do. But I recommend due diligence. Not only do they take an up front fee plus a percentage of sales, several producers I talked to say Plays-411 can take longer to pay producers for tickets sold. Brown Paper Tickets paid within a few days of a performance. The amount of lag time can be critical if you are hoping to use ticket sales to pay actors and other expenses in the later weeks of your show.
You’ll also want to register with Goldstar http://www.goldstar.com/company/suppliers, which has become the go-to place to search for discount tickets. If your graphics and logline grab people here, you can even pull in people to your show that might never have learned about it otherwise.
Something else a producer must consider in Los Angeles apropos ticketing is the Ovation Awards, managed by the LA Stage Alliance. http://lastagealliance.com/tix/) To be considered for an Ovation, you need to be a member (or affiliated with a member theatre as we were) and your show needs to run for at least 6 weeks. You also need to make it available to Ovation voters for free. They will then use this outlet to reserve their tickets. Additional discounted tickets can be made available here too, though we didn’t pull in anyone other than voters from this site.
All of these outlets will get your show in front of prospective ticket buyers and give them an opportunity to buy. But I’m sure you can see the downside to having multiple outlets: Checking in with each of them to determine how many tickets have been sold for a given performance. This can be a headache and even a nightmare if you have a hit show, though granted a good nightmare to have. You have to decide how many tickets you will give each outlet to sell at what price, sometimes changing that number if one site is running low. Invariably mistakes get made and you and your various outlets have created a situation where more tickets have been sold than you have seats. The whole thing requires monitoring and that takes time.
Then there are phone and “at the door” sales, and believe me, there is a large, generally older segment of the population that still prefers one of these two means. They just feel better talking to a real person. We didn’t want to pay for a new phone number or use our own. So we got a free phone number through Google, which allowed us to both set up an informational outgoing message and allowed callers an opportunity to leave a message. We’d then pick up the messages and call people back to take a credit card number for their ticket purchase.
As for sales at the door, we accepted cash, check and credit cards through our Square account. There are a lot of different mobile credit card applications now so again, choose the one best for you and your customers. Percentages vary but I don’t think you don’t need to sign up for more than one of these.
We had a master list for each performance compiled that afternoon from all the different outlets we were using so we knew who to expect. As people arrived, we gave them programs for entry. This is what most theatres in LA do these days. With most people buying tickets online and having the ability to print a receipt, there’s really no need to print up tickets. But if you want to, there are plenty of services that will take your money.
In closing, whatever means you choose to offer tickets to the public, may you sell out your houses and make your nut back!
Next up: We are winding down but there are still lots of topics to cover. Is there any aspect of Self-Production you’d particularly like to hear about?
Wrapping Up ONSTAGE and (nearly) on to 2016!
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I used to hate 10-minute plays.
I don’t know why exactly… perhaps it’s because—as a playwright—I found it a real challenge to create a satisfying story in just 10 pages. My first 10-minute play attempts always seemed to bleed into more pages, and felt unsatisfying in their rapid resolutions. But as I’ve gone on to do more and more with short plays, I realize that the thing that used to bother me about 10 minute plays was that I just wasn’t very good at them yet.
I’d like to think I’ve gotten better writing short pieces—of conserving space and creating tighter, more exciting worlds—and that by becoming more aware of the real-estate value a blank page actually represents, my longer pieces have become tighter, more exciting, and richer as well.
And as a result, I’ve become a huge fan of these tasty little 10-minute morsels of playwright excellence. So much so, that I dedicate a sizable portion of my year to supporting and producing other short pieces… and yesterday I saw 15 truly awesome short plays brought to life here in Waco and can’t believe that I have to winnow this list down to just 11 or 12 pieces for production.
WITH MY EYES SHUT By Kira Rockwell- such a lovely play! #femaleplaywrightsROCK pic.twitter.com/FbRtw1LEQy
— LittleBlackDressINK (@LBlackDressINK) May 23, 2015
I’ve written a lot about producing from a playwright’s perspective this week, and I hope it was helpful to those of you who—like myself—have felt stuck, frustrated, or fed up with the stasis of waiting. But I also hope that, even if you have no intention of ever donning a producer’s cap, that you feel like you’ve gotten a little insight how/why some of these festivals work the way they do. We’re all in theatre because we love something about it’s incredible contradictions and magic, but the true power of theatre is the unity of intention it requires on all who come together in order to make it happen.
With that, I’m wrapping up my blogging week in love of writing, writers, and all who take joy from the realization of imagination! If you want to stay in touch, you can follow me @LadyPlaywright or you can follow Little Black Dress INK @LBlackDressINK – we’ll be posting more updates on this year’s fest as it heads to LA for a reading of our winning plays at Samuel French Book Shop on July 11th, and then production in Prescott, AZ August 6-9.
And then we’ll get started on the 2016 Fest, and do it all over again!
On the Fallacy of Space
Although I’m a playwright, I’ve been focusing a lot on producing this week in the hopes that what I’ve learned as a producer can be helpful to playwrights who are tired of sitting around waiting for someone to make the production magic happen for them. I’m going to continue on that thread today as I talk about the unfortunate brain melt that so often happens when we talk about space.
When I’m talking to a playwright about the hurdles of producing, unless they have an ‘in’ at a theatre company, the conversation inevitably begins to circle the panic-drain of “BUT I DON’T HAVE A SPACE!”, because when you consider the fact that most theaters/art galleries charge pretty hefty fees to rent their spaces, a lot of aspiring new producers get cut off at the knees before they’ve even started, and head back desk or day job, defeated.
But when the dollar signs start flashing red and you feel the panic rising, just remind yourself of this simple truth: you don’t need a theater space to make theatre happen!
I’m not sure exactly when it occurs, but somewhere along the route to professionalism, many of us begin to adopt this weird attitude that theatre needs to happen in a theatrically appointed space, and anything else is just… unprofessional, and… ewwwww!
When did we turn into such catty teenagers?
I agree, production-wise, a dedicated theater is a much easier place to work: the lights, the sound equipment, the dressing rooms and fixed seats… all of those things make life easier when you’re producing a show. But they’re not the end all be all to making theatre happen. I’ve seen vivid and exciting theatre happen in living rooms, in parks, at restaurants, in civic auditoriums, and in old abandoned warehouses – and each time it’s been a unique and awesome experience!
The trick is in knowing your space ahead of time, so that you can match your production goals to your resources and select a play (or collection of short plays) that will work in the space you’re using. For instance: living room plays are great fun, but they only work if you select small cast pieces that can be put up around a coffee table, TV stand, book shelves, and whatever else homey obstacles your hosts may have present. It’s also important that they can be performed comfortably for a handful of people sitting within inches of the actors – I saw a very sexually charged piece done this way once and I just couldn’t get over the fact that two strangers were dry humping six-inches away from my face! And sure, you can’t do a piece with a million different locations/light cues because there’s no light board to play with and you can’t load in flats… but each of those Don’ts is an opportunity to seek out what can and will work. So you pick something small, something intimate, something that is transportable, engaging, and good in the close-up, and you make it happen.
So what does this have to do with what we do over here at Little Black Dress INK? Well, for those of you who don’t know, we rely completely on Partner Producers to present readings of our semi-finalists – I wish I could afford to put our female playwrights on tour, but I just can’t (my superstitious side is telling me to include the waiver “yet”). So instead I rely on these awesome Partner Producers—who are actors, writers, and directors themselves— to bring our festival to their cities in the best way possible for them, which means that each reading is unique and personal to them.
This year our semi-finalist readings took place at an art gallery, a teaching studio, and a university, as well as a few very cool theatre spaces, and our final two readings will happen in “unconventional” locations as well; a public park and at Samuel French’s Los Angeles Bookshop. I love these unique spaces – they add a flavor all their own to the readings and add to the conversational atmosphere after the readings are over.
And yes, when we get to production in Prescott, we’ll be putting the shows up in an actual theatre – but if we didn’t have one, I’d have still made the fest happen somehow.
The point I’m going for is this: Playwrights are traditionally rich in imagination, but poor in actual cash-money. Unless you get a theatre to back your production (or find a patron of the arts to fund you), production expenses can add up fast. Space doesn’t have to be the huge obstacle it so often is! You can make just about any space work if you put your creative juices to work making the most of the resources you have available to you. And if all you have is the back room at your local bookstore and some gumption, then why not recruit some like-minded folks and create a reading series? You never know where it could lead, or how good it will feel just to be making something happen.
Creating an Awesome Festival Line-up
By Tiffany Antone
I got started in theatre as an actress. I loved being on stage, but I hated auditioning because that very necessary internal confidence that keeps a persom from being a neurotic mess was rarely in full bloom for me. Instead, I’d pretend I felt confident at auditions and then quietly go home where I could pick apart every choice I’d made and obsess in peace.
Then I directed my first show, which meant I was casting a show for the first time, and in so doing, I had a revelation: for the first time, I understood just how much time I had wasted locked in actor anxiety about things I had very little control over. After that experience, I auditioned with a lot more boldness, confidence, and less personal worth on the line. It was freeing.
I woke up this morning reflecting on this, because we at Little Black Dress INK recently announced our ONSTAGE Finalists and I thought it might be interesting to know how I came to narrow down what was a very awesome list of 36 plays to just 15.
First, it’s important to know that we use a peer review process to select our initial semi-finalists, so all of our participating playwrights are responsible for determining the first cut. After that, I consider peer-review scores and Partner Producer nominations along with the points I’m outlining below to create what I hope will be an awesome and successful line-up.
So, in the interest of helping alleviate some writerly anxieties, I’d like to talk today about what I’ve learned—as a playwright—in the five years I’ve been producing new plays:
- First, proofing your work is important, but a typo here or there won’t sink the ship! I can’t believe how many playwrights send in work that just looks like a hot mess. If you don’t take my time as a reader seriously, why should I take your play seriously? Make your plays easy to read – format it in a way that is friendly to the eye and go over it for typos and grammar! BUT, that said, if a play is truly unusual, gripping, or awesome, I’m much more likely to excuse a few formatting hiccups. That’s just the way it is. I would never not-produce a piece that I loved just because there were a few misspelled words. On the other hand, most of the time, the work that is the most compelling is usually also in top readable shape.
- Contrary to popular belief, we don’t just select the “very best” pieces. If I’m creating a festival line-up, I’ve got to build a satisfying one – and that means a mix of genres and topics and tones… I may have nine FABULOUS dramas, but if I produce an entire evening of dramas, my audience is going to be exhausted. The same holds true if I have multiple pieces that tackle the same subject: even if they’re fantastic, I’m only going to put one of those in the line-up because including too many similar pieces in one night can feel redundant.
- I like to use monologues in my fest, so I do. Monologues have been a really nice addition to our festivals – they are perfect curtain pieces that keep the audience engaged while we set the stage for the next piece. So, when I select my final line-up, monologues are something I put a lot of energy into. The other fabulous discovery I’ve made as a producer is how incorporating short scenelets (a 10-minute play comprised of several mini-scenes) into our fest between plays can provide a delightful through line in what is usually a fractured event. This is just my own preference – and other producers will have theirs. The reason I mention it is that if I’m selecting 5 monologues to help cover set changes, I might not be able to include that 9th totally awesome play in the line-up.
- “Best” is relative. This one is a no-brainer, but I still mention it because I think even though we all know it, it helps to be reminded once in a while. Personally, I like plays that feel like they can only live on the stage. I like plays that challenge or delight me, plays that feel fresh and unique and unlike anything I’ve seen or read before… But what’s the common thread in all that? Me, myself, and I. What’s “fresh” to me isn’t guaranteed to feel fresh to she/he/you – so it’s an unpredictable factor that a playwright can’t control and shouldn’t fret over. What I like about our peer-review process is that it identifies a broad spectrum of work that is outstanding – not just from my own personal perspective, but from a variety of eyes – but as I winnow that list down to the final selection, my perspective comes back to fore. You could take our same group of 2015 semi-finalists and create a multitude of awesome festival line-ups, each uniquely reflective of what different producers were looking for… and there’s just nothing a writer can do to change that. Which is why the best thing a writer can do is write work they believe in, send that work out in the best shape they can get it into, and repeat. Meanwhile, we’ll be here sifting through the incredible amount of awesome work, trying our best to create a line-up that we feel best matches our mission, our audience, and—sometimes—our own personal aesthetic.
And there it is – my ten cents on festival selection. I hope it’s of interest and of help to you, my fellow writers!
