Interview with Playwright Nancy Beverly

Interview, LAFPI, Playwright,

Nancy Beverly answers 20 questions:

Nancy Beverly
Playwright Nancy Beverly has blogged for LA FPI since the beginning of the blog in April of 2010. Nancy is a diverse voice that you don’t want to miss.

1.  How did you become a playwright?  What brought you to theater?

Mad Magazine.  No kidding.  My friend Gena and I would read it out loud into a tape recorder.  We’d also make up our own stories and fake ads and tape those as well.  I also got tapped on the shoulder (literally) by my grade school principal to be in a stage presentation (it wasn’t exactly a play, more like a patriotic celebration) because he’d seen what a live wire I was just in the hallways of school.

2.  What is your favorite play of yours?  Why?

It’s always the one I’m currently involved in — in this case it’s my nutty comedy called COMMUNITY.  When I’ve heard it out loud and when I read it to myself, I just fall down laughing.

3.  What is your favorite production of one of your plays?  Why?

Too hard to pick.  It’s more like I have favorite moments — Lisa Temple doing the monologue “My New Best Friend” — again, I literally fell out of my chair laughing; Hannah Crum and Mandy Dunlap doing “Happy Wanderer” and I’m brought to tears…

4.  What play by someone else has moved you the most and why?

EXTRAORDINARY CHAMBERS that I saw at the Geffen (Robin & Jennie were there that night!).  Horror was conveyed so simply (a monologue near the end of the piece with hundreds of photos on display behind the actor).

5.  Who is your favorite playwright?  Why?

Don’t have one, I just enjoy plays on a moment by moment basis.

6.  How has your writing changed over the years?

Yep.  A lot more depth now.  I’m not afraid of emotions like I was when I was a kid.

7.  What type of plays do you write?  (Dramas, Comedies, Plays with Music, Musicals, Experimental, Avant-garde …)  What draws you to it?

Dramas filled with comedy.  I like linear storytelling, so my stuff isn’t avant-guarde or experimental.

8.  Do you write any other literary forms?  How does this affect/enhance your playwriting?

I’ve written screenplays, a webseries, a lot of essays… the truth is the truth.  Still trying to figure out how to be effective with the screenplay, though.

9.  Why did you become a blogger for LA FPI?

The energy in the room at Topanga during our first meeting, all of us crammed together in a dressing room, shivering, and yet in high spirits.  What a great group.  I wanted to be part of it.

10. What is your favorite blog posting?

Can’t pick just one, but the moments when I learn something about myself when I’m writing the blog come to mind.  (Same is true of my plays, I always end up learning something.)  That said, one that I wrote last year called “Less is More” about a final rehearsal of OF MICE AND MEN where they had no props, no costumes, no furniture and yet I was a puddle of tears at the end… is a fond one for me.

11. Who do you consider an influence where your writing is concerned? And, why?

Whatever play I’ve just seen.  If something’s really good, I’m in my theatre seat thinkin’ “Oooo, I wanna do that!”

12. When did you find your voice as a writer?  Are you still searching for it?

When I wrote A NEW YOU, my first produced full-length.  The voice is always a work-in-progress, and actually, writing is more about finding the voice of the characters in the play, not about finding MY voice.

13. Do you have a writing regiment?  Can you discuss your process?

If I’m working on a play, then every free night and several hours on the weekend get devoted to it.  I have a quote on my desk from Woody Allen that I’ve had posted since grad school.  In part it reads, “It’s the steadiness that counts.”

14. How do you decide what to write?

Man, it really has to GRAB me.  If an idea is superficial and won’t take me deep into the water, then I won’t work on it for all of the months it takes to make something good.  It has to be a puzzle to figure out, not pre-digested and formulaic.

15. How important is craft to you?

Very.  I re-read parts of Buzz MacLaughlin’s The Playwright’s Process every time I’m working on something new.

16. What other areas of theater do you participant in?

I’ve done performance art and took classes to develop pieces with Danielle Brazell (former Artisic Director at Highways).  Loved it.  Loved creating something in the moment inspired by just the slimmest of suggestions.

17. How do you feel about the theater community in Los Angeles? 

It feels like a real community — witness the Fringe Festival last year.

18. How do you battle the negative voice?  (insecurity, second guessing)

Go see inspirational theatre.  Go to my writers’ group Fierce Backbone every Monday night in support of my fellow writers.  “It’s the steadiness that counts.”

19. Do you have a theme that you come back to a lot in your work?

Yes — there is joy, love, contentment, satisfaction in the present moment.  Not the past, not the future.

20. What are you working on now?

Finding a director (AGAIN) for my film SHELBY’S VACATION.  And keeping my fingers crossed for the production of my play COMMUNITY.

 

To read all LA FPI blog articles by Nancy Beverly go to https://lafpi.com/author/nancybeverly/.  Her very first blog article is titled “Go On Anyway” dated April 25, 2010.  You can find it here. 

Nancy’s Bio

In addition to Cloud’s Rest,which is part of the 2012 Hollywood Fringe Festival through the writer/actor group Fierce Backbone, Nancy Beverly’s most recent theatrical adventure is her play Community, a comedy that takes place at a community theatre, where, on opening night, everything that can go wrong, does. It’s slated for a full production from Fierce Backbone in 2013.

Her most recent award was the selection of her screenplay Shelby’s Vacation for a staged reading in July 2011 in Randolph, Vermont, under the auspices of Pride Films and Plays which operates out of Chicago – and the same script made the semi-finals for the Chicago readings.

In 2010 her one-act Chicago (a.k.a. The Happy Wanderer), was part of “Shorts and Briefs,” a sold-out afternoon of play readings at the Stella Adler’s Gilbert Theatre that were all written and directed by women. The venture grew out of a discussion she, Jan O’Connor and Mary Casey had earlier in the year about the sorry state of women getting their plays produced. They decided to do something about it.

“Shorts and Briefs” was produced under the banner of The L.A. Women’s Theatre Project. Additionally, Beverly’s full-length play Handcrafted Healing was featured in L.A.W.T.P.’s dynamic weekend of play readings in October 2009 – again, all written and directed by women. Beverly developed Handcrafted Healing through Playwrights 6, a writer-run group in Los Angeles, where she was a member from 2001 until 2009.

In August 2007, also in conjunction with P6, Beverly produced her drama Godislav at the Miles Memorial Playhouse in Santa Monica for a month-long run. Additionally, Godislav had the honor of being chosen in 2006 to be part of the Playwrights Showcase of the Western Region in Denver.

West Hollywood’s Celebration Theatre gave Beverly’s coming-of-age dramady A New You its world-premiere in the summer of 2001.

Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Beverly worked at Actors Theatre of Louisville as the Assistant Literary Manager. While at ATL, she had several short plays produced in ATL’s twice-yearly short play showcase. Attack of the Moral Fuzzies, one of those 10-minute comedies, was published in an ATL anthology of short works and has been performed several times a year for 25 years by theatres all around the U.S. and Canada.

Beverly has also written for the Showtime series Women, knocked out 70 articles for the how-to website ehow.com, conducted radio interviews for KPFK’s weekly show IMRU, and gotten up and done performance art under the direction of Danielle Brazell, the former Artistic Director of the performance space Highways in Santa Monica.

She’s also worked in network television as an executive producer’s assistant on and pitched stories to such hit shows as Desperate Housewives and Ghost Whisperer.

HAPPY 3-YEAR ANNIVERSARY LAFPI BLOG!

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The Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative Blog has been going strong for 3 years.  The blog started April 19, 2010 with our first blog post of “Being a Playwright, Being Female“.  The purpose of the blog is to give the Los Angeles theater community a place to come to get to know the playwrights.  We thought it would be nice to ask them all a few questions about their lives as playwrights and this week we will post the responses.

The authentic voice of a playwright is worth its weight in gold yet it is hard to measure when it is not given a place in the miner’s pan… 

Enjoy. Thanks for reading.

 

Wild Women

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I have just three bits of business before I finish up my blog week.

First of all, I highly recommend Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s called Wild, and it’s a fun read. I saw Cheryl Strayed read at the Central Library downtown as part of the Aloud Series this past Wednesday, and it was great fun with a room full of adventurous folks.

I have a story that I want to share. The event was free, but you had to make a reservation online. However, all the reservations were booked, so you had to show up and get a standby number. When I showed up forty minutes before the event, all the standby numbers were taken and there was a long line of people with reservations. Since I didn’t have to be anywhere else, I decided to just hang out and see what happens. So I was leaning against a wall and talking to people when a woman in a gold shirt came up to me and gave me her ticket. It wasn’t a standby ticket but an actual ticket ticket. I thanked her profusely and walked in. Sometimes I should not ask how or why. Sometimes I should just go with it. Thank you lady in a gold shirt. Nice top by the way.

In other news. I had mentioned at the beginning of the week that I had no playwriting stuff happening until Tiffany Antone emailed me. I do have other writing stuff happening. I recently launched my second ebook. It’s a book of short stories about women in Los Angeles, and it’s written by my internet superheroine persona. It’s available exclusively for Amazon Kindle, and you can find it here.

Finally, looking ahead to tomorrow (Saturday), I plan to be at the LAFPI gathering at Samuel French Bookstore on Sunset in West Hollywood. It’s happening 1-4 in the afternoon. The first person who says the word, Tundra, to me gets a quarter.

Joy by Regina Leonard

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When I’m writing, I sometimes take a facebook break. I don’t stay on facebook too long, but I figure a facebook break is healtier than the cigarette breaks I used to take back when I smoked.

One day recently, a link to a youtube video of a song that my friend Regina Leonard (a great singer/songwriter) wrote popped up on my facebook. I clicked and watched. By the end of the song, I was in a happy place.

Regina Leonard is one of those awesome people that one meets every so often. I met her a few years ago at the Lost Studio. She’s fearless and fun as heck too. It is not surprising that she wrote a song called Joy.

So if you need a break from writing, here’s a great song to listen to:

Here’s the youtube link and her facebook page. Happy stuff

My Awesome Place: An Autobiography of Cheryl B

Poetry, ,

I recently read a great book that I just have to recommend to you all. It’s called My Awesome Place: An Autobiography of Cheryl B, and it’s an excellent portrait of a young writer finding her voice and her awesome place in the world.

I knew Cheryl B back in the nineties at NYU. She went on to become a playwright, poet, and spoken word artist in New York. Sadly, she passed away way too soon in 2011.

When I finished this book, I felt I had to pass it on. It’s the kind of book that should be passed around. Then I started to get all poetical in the head. . .

This book is for that girl, that girl who’s too fat, too shy, not a straight A overachieving high school student. This book is for that girl who gets told she’ll never be anything except a toll booth fare taker. This book is for that girl whose parents don’t understand or maybe sort of do but can’t talk about it because the words don’t come out right. This book is for that girl who dreams of being more than what everyone around her thinks she can be even though she doesn’t know how to do it exactly. This book is for that girl and her friend and her friend’s friend. This book should be passed around while music’s blasting and the pages should get stained with beer, cigarettes, weed, and aquanet. This book shows that girl how to get to that awesome place.

You can get My Awesome Place on the Topside Press website.

Most Unsuccessful Playwright Ever

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Yep, right here. Most unsuccessful playwright ever. And I hate superlatives.

Hello Lafpiers,

It’s my blog week here on LAFPI. So I had a whole big comic riff planned for my Monday post. I had planned to talk about how I had absolutely nothing happening in my playwriting world and how I was now aiming for a lack of success instead of success and how once I realized that I became a happier person even though to desire a lack of success instead of success is very un-American.

Then last week I got an email from Tiffany Antone. Darn you, Tiffanyyyyyy!

Tiffany is producing an evening of plays about pets, and I had sent her some monologues which I had totally forgotten about. Anyway, she’s putting my monologues in her pet play evening and would I be interested in writing another monologue?

Of course I wrote another monologue. So now, I have something theatrical happening and I can no longer be the most unsuccessful playwright ever. I’m bummed. I’m seriously bummed.

Meanwhile, on the cover of the most recent LA Weekly was a drawing of William Shakespeare with a laptop and the headline: Why Be a Playwright in LA? Inside, Steven Leigh Morris wrote a very engaging profile of four Los Angeles based playwrights. The article can be found here.

Personally, I’ve never been very good at being a playwright. I can’t figure out the secret handshake, and my wardrobe is all wrong. I just like to write plays that are crazy, sexy, cool.

But I could relate to the LA part of the headline. I’ve been looking around LA and asking myself why am I here? Sure there’s a great acting pool, but great actors can be found all over the world. Sure seventy degree February days are nice, but so is rain. Why am I in LA? I don’t have a witty answer for that one. I just know it’s April 2013, and I’m still in LA.

SNAPSHOT: A True Story of Love Interrupted By Invasion

Playwright, Uncategorized

Sinnott 2 higher res

Mitzi Sinnott has a big story to tell.  Mitzi Sinnott has the kind of story that a writer would kill for, a story that makes most other personal journey tell-alls seem somewhat trivial.  But like all big stories one lives through, the price paid for doing just that — and coming out on the other side — makes the gift of the story that much more deserving (even to those envious writers among us).

In her one-woman show, Snapshot: A True Story of Love Interrupted by Invasion, Mitzi Sinnott tells the story of growing up in the South as the daughter of a white mother and black father.  There’s enough story right there for a novel and sequel, but Mitzi’s father was sent to Vietnam, and the man that returned was not the vital, artistic, loving man she knew, but a haunted shell who was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia.  Mitzi’s attempts to get to know her father led her to Hawaii where he was living and to coping with the death of the man as she knew him.

She tells this story through re-enacting moments of her childhood: of facing schoolmates who taunt her for being the product of a mixed marriage, of a mother who does her best to keep it together in those challenging circumstances.  She gives us a glimpse into her father’s days in the all-black barracks as he sends letters — and love — to his family back home.  She deftly moves between the roles of unsure enlisted, worried mother, bullying schoolmate, scared little girl and confident storyteller.  And she does it with humor and levity.

That’s the thing: despite the weighty subject matter, Mitzi never asks for our sympathy or pity.  Rather, using various tools to tell the story (projected images, the re-enacting of key moments, even dance), Mitzi shares this rocky journey as opposed to dumping it mercilessly.  It helps that the woman we see in front of us is a sheer delight, brimming with confidence, glowing with the desire to let us in, because we know she made it through to the other side, a better person — not to mention, storyteller — for it.

The gift of her burden will pay her, and her audience, back many times over.

Snapshot: The True Story of Love Interrupted By Invasion plays Thursdays through Sundays through April 21 at the Greenway Court Theatre.

— Jessica Abrams

Finishing the thought

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Back in the day when I was limber and shoulder pads were in, I used to cool down from ballet class to Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. I am listening to it now and I finally hear music and it feels good… There, I’ve said it. Tonight, I feel good. And even as a twinge of anguish for the loss of my friend sweeps down my spine, I am drawn back into the music and with it toward new feelings of hope and anticipation for the future.

I kicked off the evening with Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game after an amazing drive to Walnut with a friend to shop for rugs, of all things. But it was fun. Then, sitting, drinking juice and eating a bowl of soup, watching him play with my dogs, talking, enjoying the weather, the sunset, I used the word “faith” in the context that I believe things are going to be okay.

I thought faith is a simple enough word, but then I use words liberally, like I’m icing a big, sloppy cake. Am I able to reconsider the words I use, know why I am using them, apply a logical thought process and be able to defend them? He wants to understand Me… No different than a reader of one of my plays.

Finish the thought, Bennett. It’s a good note.

Porch light

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I had a dusk-to-dawn porch light installed because she is not here to light the candle in the window. I had a motion detector light installed under the garage eave because it gets dark at night. I am surrounded by light. I am also immersing myself in noise to staunch the quiet. I would say (write) music, rather than noise, but I don’t hear it yet. I hear dry, but connected, tones that do not move me. Music used to move me… lying on the living room floor with my eyes closed, Really listening to “Hotel California”… Playing the grooves out of “Rumours”… Rerunning my “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” 8-track tape.

I wrote a play with music in January. I’ve titled it “Bender”. I wrote original lyrics and convinced playwright Karen Fix Curry to write the (lovely) music. The play started as an experiment in dialect. I determined to write three connected one-acts but they blossomed into a full-length instead. It’s about three women who discover their individual, unique voices once they finally accept each other’s friendship and themselves for who they are. It was selected by OCPA Studios for a reading on April 27, 2013 at Stage Door Repertory Theatre in Anaheim. But she won’t be there to experience it. So I’ll dedicate it and the day to her. And the next day I’ll rest, meditate and pray for the strength to get out of bed.

From a distance

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I mean, can you have this much stuff? Surrounded I was. Walls coming down on me. The smells of her and dust and filth. Uncluttered I am now after disposing of… so much. Yes, it’s freeing. I’m pondering, releasing, transitioning more every day. Write a play, some say. It’s too soon… feels hinky. Or is it? I do feel the stuff zooming, hiding when I turn to peer around at it, skirting my subconscious. God dammit. I know there will come a day when I sit down in the freshly laundered purple pjs she bought me from Bloomies, my first, but where she spent her young professional years shopping. Sitting in a newly painted room with slide guitar playing in the bg to cut the unnatural silence of me not yelling because she was hard of hearing. It feels usury to think about it now. The wound is too deep. It’s too soon. But i know, someday, I’ll write. And it pains me now because it means I am that much farther away, removed, which makes me madder — even as I know I’ll be cherishing, paying homage to her… It’ll be from a distance.