I’m not sure I ever mentioned but writing these blog posts are torturous for me. Am I being honest… No. I am not trying to suggest I don’t (secretly) enjoy writing them, as well, but my stage fright can grow extreme to the point that I am compelled to expel. Is that true? Well, only when I was an actor… But really, who cares what I have to say? And why should they? I mean to write, sure, every once in a while I may hit upon some bit of truth, but more often I am flailing around, trying to understand, reaching out blindly to a population of readers I may never meet. And does that matter?…
How does one write for an audience? I used to worry about that a lot. How will I make the reader like me and want to do my play?… But with Bloodletting and Poe, I wrote from absolute grief with an eye toward art. Apparently, there was something about me writing that poem because it reached several people who are important to me. In it there was no time to play life’s victim, I just got the illustrative words out there and keep on hitting my larger message.
That is my mantra to myself this eve before the purging of my garage. Through my tears and protestations tomorrow, my lifetime will be sorted and much of it discarded. That I may be able to hang on to some memories by writing about them is my shred of hope for the weekend. Have laptop, will travel. Sigh.
Too sweet. As in vomitus or satisfying? I should ask him which he meant, but I am certain it doesn’t matter. In either intention, he is correct. And I love the challenge that he presents. Was I writing with sincerity, I have to ask myself… Yes.
What about this case?
On the afternoon she died, because I couldn’t find her hearing aid in the shuffle of her unconscious body
Or
On the afternoon she died, because
I couldn’t find her
Hearing aid in the shuffle of her unconscious body
There is a difference; an intentional difference. He wants to respect that difference, because I intended it that way. He taught me that the other night. He is a director.
I’m almost embarrassed enough not to write luscious, because it’s a big, fat, sexy word, but I have taken a vow to write what scares me. So, luscious is how the words of praise I received in rehearsal for Bloodletting and Poe feel comingfrom its director. It took me threeish years to write a piece that spoke to him. While the child inside jumps for joy, old Erica accepted his words with humility. Even though it felt really good, that I had found a perfect collaborator, at the same time I knew this moment may never happen again. I mean that sincerely. It’s hard to tell. We spoke about having that moment, that moment of perfection. We had both experienced it as actors. But can I, as a writer, recreate that perfect storm of insight, skill, and abject need to communicate? Yes, and I don’t know. And it does not matter. Because experiencing it once is good enough. And ironically, in experiencing it once, I now know how it feels and it feels like I can recreate it. So, I am not afraid. Now off to the next one. Happy Friday!
I heard slam poet and activist Andrea Gibson state she was challenged to write only what most scared her. She said, as a consequence, she wrote nothing for six months. But the stuff I’ve seen her deliver, videotaped and uploaded onto Youtube, is so personally challenging, I have to wonder, are her parents still alive? I mean no disrespect. I heard her perform a poem filled with such pain, yet, acknowledge her youthful silence was for the love and sake of her family. When does the unsilence begin? Is it with the death of the family? Or is unsilence, a possible rebirth of the family?
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my quest to cure, or at least temper, my marketing phobia. I would have easily lived peacefully with humdrum marketing anxiety for the rest of my days, until I wrote a play…and decided to produce it. I scoured the web for marketing tips that were suitable for theatre and settled on Clay Mabbit’s blog: Sold Out Run and his marketing kit: Reaching A New Audience. Over the past few weeks, as my team and I promoted, Take Me To The Poorhouse (our show at the 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival), we applied Clay’s marketing strategies in Reaching A New Audience.
I am happy to report that the experiment proved successful.
Our efforts culminated in sold out shows almost every night of our run, not to mention a few laurels and an invitation to extend the run. (BEST OF FRINGE EXTENSIONS, BEST INTERNATIONAL, DUENDE DISTINCTION award nomination for excellence in acting)
How did it happen?
A combination of Clay’s Mabbit’s excellent suggestions and a darn-good, dedicated team.
Foundation (marketing basics to create a well-oiled machine)
Your Perfect Audience (how to identify and tailor your marketing niche)
The Schedule (a detailed marketing calendar with suggested tasks)
Worth A Thousand Words (“visual ammunition”)
Use Your Cast (tapping into the talent you already have)
We tailored Clay’s ideas to fit a one-person show, along with our mix of flair–like a step-and-repeat for audiences to take pictures after the show, and raffles/token giveaways related to the story.
We varied our social media content so it wasn’t always focused on promoting ticket sales (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).
We produced a pre-preview night generate pre-festival buzz.
We committed to a strong involvement in the fringe community by comp swapping, filling seats for other shows, seeing as many shows as we could, engaging in “fringeships” on twitter and in person at Fringe Central.
Identifying our audience and reaching out to target groups within and outside our networks (ex: African Artists Association, Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative, Directors Lab West, Actors Mastermind Group, friends in and out of the industry, and of course, family members)
We attracted press to (podcasts, radio, blogs, print) to every show, even with almost 200 shows running simultaneously.
Weekend evening shows were easiest to fill, so we brought all hands on deck for the weekday afternoon shows. With consistent and varied marketing, we sold out almost every show.
On June 8th and 14th–we oversold and added an extra row of chairs
June 16th–full house without many advanced tickets but lots of walk-ups
June 19th–slow sales. Reached out to fringe community and Directors Lab to fill house. Quite a few walk ups as well.
June 21st–sold out. Extra row of chairs.
June 28th–full house.
Misses:
None.
Well…there is the price of the kit, which currently retails $147. You do have to carefully weigh the cost of the Reaching A New Audience with your production goals. For example, depending on the size of a production, one could rationalize the purchase as the cost of 10 seats at $15 a ticket, to get practical, effective, and organized tactics to help build an audience. In my opinion, the price would be too hefty for a one-show run.
Finally, nothing beats the power of a strong team to help you get these marketing ideas off the ground and running, and even playing with your own variations along the way. That’s the best part…when marketing becomes a fun game.
And so starts, BLOODLETTING AND POE, a slam poem I’ve written that expresses my grief over the loss of a recently deceased long-term… friend; for lack of a more descriptive word. I have heard, “write what you know.” In this, my experiment with form, I wrote what I was experiencing. I’ve always thought I immersed myself in my work, but this was the first time I actually “knew”, in the moment, what I was writing… I won’t, can’t, go back.
Fire: The rapid oxidation of a material. The exothermic chemical process of combustion. The release of heat, energy, light and various other reactive products.
Meghan Brown’s disposition is reflected in her clear blue, kind eyes much like the sky reflects the ocean. During our interview, Brown’s self-knowledge is as apparent as her self-confidence, which translates into the ability to be vulnerable. A self-aware artist who also has the ability to embrace her vulnerability is what ultimately distinguishes the average from the extraordinary creative being.
Brown’s ability to create an extraordinary netherworld is a testament to her old soul. The Fire Room is a well versed, visually poetic confession of grasping at true love beyond the grave. Here ghostly protagonists navigate through combusting emotions as the narrator and her silent chorus bear witness to the release of love’s undeniable heat.
In graduate school, I studied award-winning films in a specific manner because I was sure it would help me become a better screenwriter. First, I would watch the film as anyone would; second, I would watch with the filmmaker’s commentary; and third, watch with the sound off because, after all, film is behavior. Due to its visual ardency, if you had to, you could watch the Fire Room with the sound off.
I don’t know about you but I periodically think someone else has Things Figured Out. Y’know, the perfect balance of creativity, money, job stuff, and time to write. I’m a fan of Ellen “EM” Lewis and yep, I thought she had Things Figured Out. A few years ago she was awarded a fellowship to WRITE FULL-TIME — score! But recently she mentioned in a Facebook post that while she managed to stretch that one year into three years of writing full-time (three new plays to her name!) by living lowcost, doing a few side teaching gigs and getting some commissions, she’s now realizing her meager earnings are not covering her expenses. So she’s looking for a full-time teaching gig and asks if this is the right thing to do, if it’s the right time… and admits she’s winging it.
She posted her musings at a time when I’ve been swamped at my day job and worried I’m losing my soul to accountants and checks and scanning journal entries (what the fuck are journal entries?!) in the financial world of UCLA. Up until now, this job has been super good to me — excellent pay, benefits and a fair amount of downtime at my desk to Do Other Things. But not the past few weeks and I don’t know when or if Things Will Get Back to the Previous Reality.
So neither Ellen nor I have Things Figured Out, which is to say life once again reveals itself not to be perfect, and yet, I’m excited because I have rewrites on my screenplay SHELBY’S VACATION to get to because (FINALLY!) I have a director who is going to stick with my project and we’re giving the script this weekend to an excellent script consultant to read for feedback.
I would write about the wonderful Hollywood Fringe Festival, but honestly, I’ve only seen three events (THE BEATING, DOWN IN FRONT, and a slate of shorts from We Make Movies) and I loved them all… but I don’t have time to write about them and I don’t have the time to see more, alas. So, only one blog from me this week.
And now, back to my script. Hope your rewrites are going well!
I like dreaming – and I remember my dreams vividly, and enjoy analyzing and talking about them. It could be a narcissist quirk, or I’m just hoping to unearth some answers to the eternal question, ‘what’s wrong with me?!’ So I’ve been reading up on dream interpretation. I learned that C.G. Jung and Freud differed on the subject of dream interpretation and techniques. Freud claims that dreams are rooted in sexual desires and repressions; while Jung sought to explain themes and characters in dreams as archetypes rooted in mythology.
“The Miss Julie Dream Project” straddles the real and surreal world of which is indeed like lucid dreaming.
On opening night, Mina, an actress who plays the classic heroine of Miss Julie, faces the heroine in the surreal world. Miss Julie refuses to surrender to her written fate. Her rebellion leads to a missing actress while her ensemble of actors and a director fumble through a performance without the lead character. The dream weaves in and out of the dream world and the non-dream world. The actors playing as actors travel through a worm hole subjected to immense gravitational forces that collapses and expands bodies and minds as its pulled and pushed between two parallel worlds.
It’s a fresh theme that the Fell Swoop Playwrights developed based on August Strindberg’s plays “Miss Julie” and “The Dream Project”. How daunting it must be for 9 playwrights to collaborate on writing one piece about two different plays. I’m not a numbers person, and so 9-1-2 is already a lot of numbers in one sentence. But it really worked with “The Miss Julie Dream Project”.
I watched the play at the Three Clubs theatre. We were a tad late (sorry…), so I missed the first 2 minutes. Miss Julie and Mina were already arguing. Walking into the show late then trying to figure out what I had missed was doubly challenging. The extra challenge after “I got it” was realizing that I’ve walked into Mina’s dream. Miss Julie does not want to die again like she does every night of the performance.
In the midst of their conversation, the troupe enters with the director shouting “directions” of course. The action moves quickly from “Where’s Mina?” to “Oh, they’re here” – the audience… “What do we do?” It’s a quick but very subtle movement from dream to reality and then back to dream when Mina tries to tell them “I’m here”, but she’s trapped with Miss Julie who won’t allow her to return to the stage of reality.
The interplay of the characters moving from real to surreal is like seagulls beating their wings to catch the air current that allows them to soar and float effortlessly.
What does Miss Julie want, if she’s refusing to fulfill her playwright’s designed demise? She wants to feel alive, and what could be more alive than having an affair? Like any willful heroine she gets what she wants, but at what cost? Who’s going to have the baby and in which life will the baby be born? You know all these questions aren’t going to be answered in the dream. The answers only come to blossom after the images and words have stewed in your subconscious for several days. And this is what has happened to me. It’s Wednesday, the fifth day, after seeing the play. Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate what’s happened until after its taken effect – kind of like the absorption time needed to learn a new skill.
“The Miss Julie Dream Project” is a fun brain teaser. There are 3 shows left: Thursday, June 20th; Saturday, June 22nd; Wednesday June 26th at Three Clubs.
Women on the Fringe!
LA FPI Video Blog featuring female playwrights @ the Hollywood Fringe Festival
In ancient Greece the playwright was poeisis: the act of making plays and the root of the modern word, poetry. It is said that poïetic (Greek for creative, meaning productive or formative) work reconciles thought with matter and time, and person with the world (Wikipedia).
The Hollywood Fringe harkens back to the 5th century’s annual Athenian competitions where notables such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes established theatrical forms, which modern playwrights still rely upon. A lot has changed since these male playwrights, with their all male cast and crew, occupied the festivals of ancient Greece. With the hopes of uniting its colonies and allies, Athenian politicos exported the “festival” to help promote a common cultural identity. Today, LA FPI promotes “Women on the Fringe!,” with the hopes of uniting and supporting women playwrights.
Thought, matter, time, person, world – words poetics in their own right – remind me of my first interviewee, Jeannette Rizzi, and her one-woman show Blindsided. Jeannette is all heart. She kindly met me outside of the Hudson Theatre to assist me with parking. She warmly introduced me to her all male crew (some things never change), and eased into rehearsal as my camera rolled
Aspectabund and luminous, Jeannette graciously reveals her-story and altruistic nature in thought, word and stage presence. Throughout, she holds a mirror-like inner-strength reflecting confidence coupled with gratitude, attributes only those who practice self-love can embrace, as her comedic foothold sets the tone.
Thought, matter, time, person, world—inspiring, comedic, altruistic, confidant, gracious and self-love, these words resonated within me as I left the theatre. Blindsided is a gift of truth and beauty from writer and performer, Jeannette Rizzi. Enjoy the video.
