New Play Festivals: GO!

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by Kitty Felde

I’ve done the ballpark tour: planning vacations to cities with interesting baseball stadiums, trying to visit every one of them. Unfortunately, new stadiums were being built at a rapid rate and many of the old ones I’d visited were being torn down, so that goal of seeing them all went out the window.

But I’ve started a new vacation tour: new play festivals. And fellow “emerging” playwrights, I highly recommend it for several reasons:

– The Work: It’s like Fashion Week. You get the opportunity to see who’s hot (or for cynics like me: which MFA playwriting program is currently churning out kids with promise), spot trends (gimmick plays, in case you wondered), and see plays that aren’t perfect – always a wonderful opportunity to practice your writerly skills and imagine how YOU’D fix the play.

– Ego Boost: Seeing new work can also be a real confidence builder. You realize that the quality of your writing isn’t lacking; you know you can turn out work equal to or much better than anything you’ve seen. It sends you home to your laptop with real determination.

– Relationships: In a business built as much on who you know as the quality of writing, these weekends are grand opportunities. This spring, fellow DC playwright DW Gregory persuaded me to join her in Louisville, Kentucky for Humana. They have two “industry” weekends, which I discovered means that artistic directors, dramaturgs, university theatre professors, and literary managers from all over the country show up. Very few playwrights. The schmoozefest began at the airport where – because there just aren’t that many flights to Louisville – half a dozen DC theatre folk were on the same flight. At Humana, there were pie meet and greets, seminars, and lots of drinking. Because there were so few playwrights, the opportunity to have actual conversations instead of 15 second elevator speeches was priceless.

– New Play Festival 101 – I also attended CATF – the Contemporary American Theatre Festival at Shepherdstown, West Virginia – this summer, again with local writer DW Gregory. This time, we brought our husbands, lured with the promise of bike rides along the C&O Canal. We saw two very good and one just awful play. How could that happen? We attended a Q&A session one evening after a show in a local restaurant (again, the alcohol flowed freely…) and got to ask how they pick their plays. The artistic director is the main guru, making final selections after others at CATF have sifted through the submissions from agents. (Alas, having no agent myself, that counts me out for a while.) But the one klunker we saw: it was an actress they had worked with previously. Her husband directed this particular show (by one of those hot young playwrights) in New York and they brought it down to CATF intact. Aha! That’s the way the theatre world works. Which takes us back to relationships and ego boost…

– Californians: I live in DC now, but I miss California – the beaches, the produce, the weather. But I also realize I miss Californians. At every new play festival I’ve attended, for some reason I find myself gravitating towards Californians. We think differently, perhaps we’re more open. And because we have SO much theatre, there’s a lot of us at these festivals.

– The Unexpected: the highlight of Humana for me was meeting Paula Vogel in a drink line at a loud, local bar. And SHE was excited to meet ME! Alas, not because of my playwriting, but because of my day job on public radio. But that led to a lovely conversation and subsequent following of each other on Twitter.

You lucky folks in LA have several new play festivals within driving distance: South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival, the Ojai Playwrights Festival, Playfest up in Santa Barbara. They’re on my list. Look for me in the audience next year.

Dramatists Guild National Conference

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Next week the second Dramatists Guild National Conference will be held in Chicago, IL, August 22 – 25, 2013.  For more information please go to the National Conference information page on the Dramatists Guild website (www.dramatistsguild.com).

 

The Art of War or the War of Art…

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by Robin Byrd

 

I love to read The Art of War by Sun Tzu – it keeps me on my toes and it translates to every area of my life especially the writing life I am trying to have.

Recently, I ran across a writing book titled The Art of War for Writers by James Scott Bell.   I am having a lot of fun going through it even though it is basically for novel writers but writing is writing.  It deals with reconnaissance, tactics, and strategy and it’s a very interesting read.

Reconnaissance – covers the mental game of writing,

“1.  The writer who observes the battlefield before entering the fray will be better equipped to plan strategy and tactics.”

Tactics- covers craft,

“35.  The use of a voice journal will keep characters from becoming little versions of the writer.”

and Strategy – covers publishing.

“71.  Always be ready to talk to someone in the elevator.”

There are nice quotes, observations, a few exercises and other tidbits. 77 points in all interspersed with quotes from Sun Tzu.  And, it’s easily modified to fit a playwright’s world of “stuff.”

It takes a lot to stay the course after rejection; it’s an ongoing battle to stay focused.  I like this book because it’s small and easy to pick a random point and get a lot out of it.  It costs about $15.00 US and is worth the money.

Cemented in Riverbed…

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by Robin Byrd

I live by the Los Angeles River.  Until recently, I thought it was a drainage ditch (the sign was missing).  It has been cemented in and down the center of the cement slabs runs a stream of water – the river.  It bothers me every time I cross the bridge that is built over it. Why?  Because sometimes I drive several miles just to see the ocean or a lake because bodies of water have a calming effect and help me when I am writing.  With the exception of the drainage ditch otherwise known as the Los Angeles River, I usually come away from the ocean, river, lake, or even fountain refreshed.  To think that I am two blocks away from a river that doesn’t look, smell, or flow like a river.

There is a certain expectancy where rivers are concerned – greenery/the presence of nature for one.  New life…  I have read that this river suffers pollution from agricultural and urban runoff.  I have also read that there is talk of removing the concrete to allow the restoration of natural vegetation and wildlife.  It’s out of place this river in the city; it’s not allowed to be its natural self.

I feel like that river sometimes – stuck beneath preconceived notions of story and the telling of such – ever fighting runoffs.  I am tired of hearing that there are no stories for female actors, no good female writers or no female directors specifically regarding persons of color.

We’re here just under some damn cement; if you look closely you’ll see we’re chipping away at it from the underside…

Getting the Goal

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by Jessica Abrams

I’ve been musing about something for a while now, so when I realized it was my turn to blog, I jumped at the opportunity to make those wayward ramblings of my brain public.

A few months ago I submitted a play to a friend of a friend who was looking to produce some theatre for herself and a handful of actor friends.  She wanted “women’s stories”, she said, something different from HBO’s “Girls”, which she didn’t really connect to; something that spoke to her in a truthful way without the glibness and arch that categorize so many current female-driven mass-produced stories.  I sent her a play about a woman who finds out she’s pregnant and the various people in her life she tells.  She liked it, she said, but it wasn’t for her.  Where are the stories about women being empowered, she asked.  Where are the stories where women are actively pursuing a goal and being the driving force in their own lives?

I’ve thought quite a bit about that lament, probably more so than usual because the taste of rejection was still lingering on my tongue.  But the truth is, not long before I’d seen an article written by a literary manager of a well-known theatre (it was a while ago so specifics are blurry) whose argument for the gender disparity in American theatre was the same cri de coeur: women are not writing about women who are active participants in their own lives. Women are not driving the story.  Female characters are too passive.

This, of course, is up for debate; but it got me thinking not only about my own characters but about the characters that, across all storytelling mediums, I’ve loved and connected to.  I happen to love “Girls” myself, and what I enjoy most about it is Lena Dunham’s Hannah, who is anything but clear-sighted and goal-driven.  Look at Blanche Dubois and her conflicting desires.  Liz Lemon.

The truth is, I find the conflict that is at the core of our being, the struggle to reconcile certain biological imperatives with the world in which we live, to be endlessly fascinating.  That’s obviously a matter of taste, but it does pose a broader question: why insist on telling  male-driven, goal-seizing stories when our biological, social, emotional, and spiritual make-up lends itself to a different experience? That’s not to slap on a set of stereotypes for either gender, but to allow for the innate differences in each, and allow those differences to be reflected in the creative work that each brings forth.  By mandating that women should be a certain way, and that way has typically been more associated with men — male protagonists and men in general — blurs the lines that make our differences, as people, artists and characters in stories, so sublime and rich.

In theatre especially, where the truth of our existence has a better chance of being mirrored back to us, I believe it’s even more important for women to stay true to the types of stories we want to tell, whatever level of “activated” and “empowered” our characters may or may not be.  And I don’t scorn those words by any stretch, I simply yearn for the day when those labels are not the deciding factor in having our voices heard in as broad a scope as possible, and for us to be given the chance to be the fearless storytellers we were meant to be.

Considering Consciousness

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By Cynthia Wands

Some of my most profound moments of consciousness have been in the theatre.

Espcially when I’ve been surprised. I love the moment after I’ve been changed by a surprise and I’m conscious of the “before I knew” and the “after I knew”.

John Searle studies consciousness. Consciousness is a subject that makes scientists huffy (they see it as something subjective) and that makes philosophers uncomfortable (since it speaks to the mind and body being of different realms).

In this TED talk, Searle lays out a simple way to understand this complex phenomenon: as a condition of our biology. As he puts it, all states of consciousness are the result of neurobiological processes in the brain. “Consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis, digestion or mitosis,” he says. “Once you accept that, most though not all of the hard problems about consciousness evaporate.”

Searle debunks some commonly held ideas about consciousness — like that it is an illusion, that it is a computer program running in the brain, that you can’t make objective claims about something that is subjective.

http://blog.ted.com/2013/07/22/4-talks-on-a-strange-phenomenon-we-all-experience-consciousness/

There were a couple of surprises in his talk.

vladimir_kush_015_metamorphosis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 31 Plays in 31 Days Project

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by Cynthia Wands

I have a chance to share this opportunity with our readers, and I want to champion those of us who would like a challenge to pursue this opportunity!

(I’ve done something similar to this before and it was a great discipline to get a project going and done!)

The 31 Plays in 31 Days Project is a chance for playwrights to push themselves to write a new play every day for the month of August. The plays must be a minimum of one page. Are you up for the challenge?

Why?

The 31 Plays in 31 Days Project is based on the idea that to become a better writer, you must write. You must write a lot. And you need to practice experimenting with your writing form constantly. The pressure of this goal will allow you to set aside preconceived notions of what you should be writing and how you should be doing it. You will not have time to overanalyze your work, you will just have to write, write, write and be surprised by what comes out of you. You may love your work some days and wonder what happened on others, but by the end of the month, you will have amassed 31 new plays. Instead of waiting for the breeze of inspiration to blow your way, you will see that writing is a craft that can be called on at any time.

When?

August 1st at 12:00 am until August 31st at 11:59pm

Where?

Anywhere and everywhere!

Who?

Playwrights who are crazy enough to write 31 Plays in just 31 short days!

Finally…. How?

Register here. We’ll send you instructions on how to submit your script daily. Or, you can just write a play a day on your own and not tell us about it! We encourage all participants to comment on their progress often, and their experience throughout the month.

31 Plays in 31 Days is sponsored by Play Cafe, a Berkeley based playwright group.

Code of Ethics & Guidelines

A lot of writers are wondering what the rules are for the 31 Plays in 31 Days project. We really only have one: write 31 plays within the 31 days of August.  The 31 Plays in 31 Days project exists to serve your needs as a writer. We’re providing you with a challenging and structured opportunity to write while giving you the flexibility you need to be successful. The following Code of Ethics and Guidelines are designed to give you parameters within which to work. Rachel and I are busy moms and we don’t have time to carefully monitor every playwright and still write our own plays. With that said, we are moms and we have ways of knowing if you’re behaving or not …

CODE OF ETHICS

1. No plagiarism. Seriously, what’s the point of doing this project if you’re going to copy someone else?

2. Submit only new plays written in August. It’s one thing to write a play based on ideas conceived earlier, but this is not the time to tweak a play you wrote, workshopped, and produced two years ago. If you’re really stuck on revisiting a story you’ve written before, consider how you can retell the story in a completely different way (maybe all of the characters are dogs, the setting has changed from a WWI battlefield to a modern high school, etc.).

3. Treat this challenge as an opportunity to bump up against some walls and break through them. When facing self-doubt and self-sabotage, provide yourself with excuses and opportunities to succeed. We will offer writing prompts to help you move beyond writer’s block, and we’ll post encouraging messages to help you continue on this journey.

GUIDELINES

1. Each play should, by your standards, have some semblance of being a complete play. The length, structure, presence (or lack of presence) of a through line, and all of the other “rules” about what makes a “good” play are all subject to your whim.

2. Submit the work that you’re not happy with. We don’t care if your characters are believable, if your plot is plausible, or if your ending is satisfying. We just want you to write a bunch of stories in a fixed period of time. We won’t publish or perform anything without your permission.

3. Do your best to submit one play per day. Although you will be able to submit everything at the end of the month, you’ll be more likely to keep up with the project if you submit frequently and regularly.

4. Create space in your day to write. Consider scheduling specific times to write each day or writing alongside a friend to make sure you follow-through on your commitment. (Yes, you can collaborate on plays with other writers, and you can each submit the same play as part of your 31 plays in August.) We are really excited that you’re interested in participating in this writing challenge. We’re as nervous as you are about figuring out ways to succeed in writing 31 plays in 31 days, but we know we can do it, and we know you can, too. Honestly, this project is about helping us overcome the things that get in our way. Whether or not you follow our guidelines or write 31 plays, this project will give you a chance to stretch your playwright’s muscles. Go for it!

 

Visit this link for more information:   http://31plays31days.com/about

 

 

 

 

Advice for Aspiring Playwrights

Play, playwriting,

By Jen Huszcza

Recently, the LA Times reported about a meeting between a young novelist and Philip Roth in a deli. The novelist, John Tapper, had passed on his first novel to Roth and was looking for advice and inspiration.

Roth reportedly said:

Really, it’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say stop now.

Likewise, I would say to folks who dream of being playwrights, stop. If you gotta do it because of some fire in your belly or blinding light in your brain, well, you’re doomed. If you throw crap out into the world, you’ll feel like a sellout. If you work hard on something with all the best intentions, you will probably be ahead of your time.

Whatever you do, you will probably despise some aspect of your work or yourself. Sure, there’s drinking, drugs, facebook, and therapy, but none of those will put the words on the page for you.

Sure you might love language or love the theatre or love cinema. But at some point, you will hate all that, and you’ll only be left with yourself. And you’ll wonder, why the hell didn’t I become a rocket scientist? I had the grades. 

Still, the writing continues. It has to continue because you have no choice. You have to finish one play because there is something in it that will help you write the next play. You have to finish another play because you promised it to an actor friend of yours who is super talented. You have to think about that next play because it’s a thought that’s interesting. Then, when that is done, then you can stop. Of course, unless, something else has to be written.

Tracy Letts: Groundbreaker

Playwright,

By Jen Huszcza

I must confess that I don’t follow Broadway too closely anymore. I don’t live in New York, and I have other things on my mind like what the heck do I name my third character in my three character play and why are theater curtains usually red.

This year, I caught some of the Tony Awards on TV. Actually, I only saw the Best Lead Actor winners. Billy Porter’s acceptance with pink index cards became something beautiful when he talked about his mother’s unconditional love.

However, when Tracy Letts beat Tom Hanks and won best actor for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, I felt I was truly watching something groundbreaking. A playwright had won an acting award. A playwright! How great is that.

Okay, yes, I should also point out that women won both directing awards as well as best original score of a musical, and Cyndi Lauper had some awesome red hair. You’re never too old to dye your hair.

But I want to return to the Tracy Letts triumph. For years, centuries even, playwrights have written plays, and actors have acted in plays. Occasionally, an actor might get all creative and write something. Then, there are the special ones, the over-achievers, who write and act usually in a one person show. But rarely, do you see a playwright jumping in and acting in a play he/she didn’t write.

Feel free to give examples of other playwrights acting or raise the question of whether Tracy Letts was an actor first or a playwright first in the comment field below, but please keep reading.

Yes, playwrights can act. Not only can playwrights act, but playwrights can win awards. Please theatre community, embrace playwrights as actors. We have brains. We can memorize words.

 Playwrights understand story as well as how plays develop and build over the course of two hours. We understand how the scenes work. We understand process. We understand moments. When in doubt, we can fake it.

 So yes mainstream theatre, there are lots and lots of playwrights out there who can show up to rehearsal on time because they know what a pain in the ass it is when an actor is late. There are lots of playwrights who know the weight and power of the words they say. There are lots of playwrights who can walk across a stage and not freak out.

 Find us. We’re out there. We’re ready. We’re cheaper than Tom Hanks.

LA Stage Day was Fun

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By Jen Huszcza 

Hello everyone, I’m delighted to be back blogging on the LAFPI website. I want to begin my blog week by talking about a theatre event I attended back in May, so I’m setting the blogging time machine back (wayyyy back) to May 18th and LA Stage Day.

LA Stage Day was a one day event put on by the LA Stage Alliance and dedicated to theatre in LA. It was held on the campus of Cal State Los Angeles on a bright and sunny Saturday.

To summarize: I went and I had fun.

I found out the event needed volunteers, and the volunteers could get in free if they volunteered three hours of their time. Sweet. I thought. Sign me up.

The volunteer email said that I would have to pay $6 for on campus parking, but some clicking on LA’s Metro website showed me that I could take the Expo line from West Los Angeles and connect with the Silver Line in downtown LA all for just $5 for a day pass. It turned out that the Silver Line was a bus that had its own special bus lane next to a freeway. Yes!  

After being greeted and given a black T-shirt (theatre people definitely came up with the color scheme), I sat with other volunteers and explained twitter to folks. It’s cool really, it is.

As volunteers, we had to set up the rooms for two workshops. We could stay for whatever workshop we were at or go to something else once everyone was settled.

The first workshop that I helped set up was called Learning to Love the Arts, and it was conducted by Abe and Charley from Arts for LA, a nonprofit which advocates for all arts (not just theatre) in LA. By the way, Charley is a poet. Along with playwriting, poetry is one of the writing forms most likely to get the reaction, you do what?

Just as I was helping Abe and Charley set up in the lobby of the theatre, a playwriting workshop showed up to be in the theatre space. For most of the Arts Advocacy workshop, I had to quietly herd the playwrights into the theatre. Playwrights are so needy when they’re confused—like lambs off to slaughter.

The Arts Advocacy workshop was about changing the narrative of how arts is talked about and how all art is vital not only culturally but economically as well. What do you say to someone who says artists should get real jobs? How do you turn that conversation into something positive?

After their workshop was over, I congratulated Abe and Charley on a job well done and was able to snag some handouts from the playwriting workshop. Jon Dorf and Dan Berkowitz (of ALAP fame) had done the playwriting workshop. I had seen them talk before, and they usually had excellent handouts.

The second workshop was going to be on social media and the rehearsal process. The three guys moderating were two guys from SDC and Michael Michetti of Boston Court. The two guys from SDC were east coast based, and you could tell they were loving on the Cali sunshine.

I helped them arrange the chairs into a circle because they wanted to do a discussion, and slowly folks trickled in and started to talk. Apparently, Actors Equity recently loosened its restrictions on videotaping, and this has left other guilds scrambling to come up with some way of drawing a line about taping.

Additionally, theatre companies tape rehearsals and parts of productions to promote their shows online, and there was a discussion about how intrusive that was in the rehearsal space.

Meanwhile, as we were discussing whether taping was intrusive, a girl with a video camera came by to tape us discussing, and the workshop took on a post-post modern vibe.

What I also really liked about the discussion was that there were lots of different people in the room. There were actors, directors, stage managers, producers, playwrights. We all could sit down and discuss something from our different points of view and find common ground. I think this is how politics use to work.

After that session, I went over to take a melodrama acting workshop with Debbie McMahon of the Grand Guignolers. The blurb in the program said that non-actors were invited to come and participate. After herding playwrights and sitting and thinking, I was anxious to get up and move around.

True to its name, the workshop was MELODRAMA!!! (apologies for the caps and explanation points, I’m going for feel). Yes, there was highly dramatic music (think silent films). Yes, we were allowed to make big gestures in extreme situations. Yes, I crossed the pit of molten lava on a rickety bridge, and let me tell you, it was terrifying.

I was physically exhausted when I left the workshop, so I caught a bus back.

Basically, I went to three sessions, but there plenty more at LA Stage Day. There was a courtyard filled with information tables and plenty of socializing events.

I liked the idea of folks volunteering and getting in for free. I thought it opened up the range of people who were there. Besides, as a volunteer, I got a really cool t-shirt and some cookies. Yes, I will volunteer for cookies.

I hope the LA Stage Alliance puts on another LA Stage Day. LA is a giant sprawl, and the theatre community is very spread out, so it was nice to experience the LA theatre community all in one place even if it was just for one day.