“Drawn to the Womb”

playwriting

by Erica Bennett

I drove up to Studio City for a quick visit with friends over coffee and chocolate croissants. And, as per usual, I lost track of time when the discussion turned to the topic of his dissertation. But, kindly reminded, I pulled myself away, hit the road, and wound my way through Laurel Canyon to my second stop of the day, the LAFPI gathering at Samuel French Film & Theatre Book Shop. I arrived late by nearly an hour, found parking in back, and took that for a positive sign.

I found myself walking down Stanley to Sunset and east, feeling this sense that I was going somewhere. Certainly, I had the numbered address, but as I walked, I ruminated over having attended the first LAFPI meet (back in the day), and realized that I missed far too many gatherings over the years. So, it was that I approached the bookstore entrance feeling a little like an excited kid and an alien being called home, at the same time.

A gentleman held the front door open for me. I walked in, and was greeted by a friendly bookstore associate who directed me to the back of the store. After walking up a short flight of stairs, I stood in the back, was offered a seat by a lady, sat, and I wallowed (mouth slightly ajar) at the sight and sound of the funny, profane, charming, loving, inspiring, powerful and encouraging female (and male) playwrights, directors, and producers attending the event.

Many of the attendees are participating in the 2015 Hollywood Fringe Festival, as Fringe Femmes. This was their moment to bring in 1-page samples of their work to be heard, and in turn, talk up their needs and wants. And, shine they did.

Then Joanna Bateman spoke of being drawn to the gathering, as if “drawn to the womb,” and I thought, that’s it. That was my feeling. That encapsulated it.

I cannot remember being in the presence of so much loving acceptance from any group. Thank you, Jennie Webb, Robin Byrd, and all who make LAFPI possible.

Write. Write. Write.

LABOR

playwriting

by Erica Bennett

I’m beginning to feel the itch; the push; the nudge; my water is about to break. I need to write. Maybe it’s the beat of the bluegrass music egging me on. Maybe it’s Dave’s sad eyes. Maybe it’s Robin’s blinding faith. Maybe it’s Rikki’s unrelenting kindness. Whatever it is, I feel the tug from ambition to write something quick and dirty (funny), but there is Joel’s imagined voice, yelling at me again, DO THE WORK.

Okay. Checking out until my gathering and Throw Me On the Burnpile and Light Me Up posts.

Ruiz’ Four Agreements

  1. Be impeccable with your word
  2. Don’t make assumptions
  3. Don’t take anything personally
  4. Always do your best

Survival

playwriting

by Erica Bennett

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

playwriting

by Erica Bennett

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

playwriting

by Erica Bennett

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

playwriting

by Erica Bennett

  1. 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.)
  2. 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.)
  3. 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.
  4. Thinking, if I’ve read a ton of books, I’ve read a million plays.
  5. Realizing that I exaggerate a lot.
  6. 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.
  7. Bambi.
  8. Tennessee Williams.
  9. If there are no new stories, what are we writing for?
  10. Puppets. Massive puppets. Massive puppets shaped like horses will do.

15 True Lines of Dialogue.

playwriting

by Erica Bennett


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  1. I love you.
  2. I don’t know what to say.
  3. You don’t mean that.
  4. I don’t want to know.
  5. I love you, too.
  6. I had a really great day.
  7. You suck.
  8. I love huevos rancheros.
  9. I miss her.
  10. You’re a slob.
  11. My thighs are fat.
  12. I had big dreams.
  13. The Earth is round.
  14. I love you to the Moon and back.
  15. To infinity.

 

Doing the Work

playwriting

by Erica Bennett

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…

LAFPI, Playwright, Production, , , , , , , , ,

#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!

Theatre Ticket

 

 

 

 

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!

Playwright, playwriting, Production, Theatre, Women, , ,

By Tiffany Antone

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.

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!