All posts by Chelsea Sutton

Strange List of Writer Phobias

playwriting

as completely made up by Chelsea Sutton but also like….not really made up?

agnoiaphobia n. the fear that everyone else knows how to do this but you, that there was a day in your writing education (whatever that might look like) where they laid out the fundamentals of a writing life, helped your peers define that elusive “practice” always asked about in residency apps, ran them through how to cleverly answer the question “what are you working on right now” without sounding like a rambling idiot, how to keep moving forward without feeling like you’re standing still, and no one shared this knowledge with you and are, in fact, laughing at you right now; from the Greek word ágnoia meaning ignorance.

frausphobia n. the fear that you may never write another good and/or acceptable play (short story/novel/screenplay) again because you are a damn fraud and have been coasting on luck this whole time; from the Latin word fraus meaning a delusion, a fraud.

miseratiophobia n. the fear that everyone knows you’re actually not very good but collectively decide to humor you, to throw you a bone every once in a while like the stray dog that you are, because it can’t hurt, they decide, because she tries so hard, just look at her little hands, typing away, how adorable; from the Latin word miseratio meaning pity, compassion.

telosphobia n. the fear that you don’t know what success is as a writer, or at least what it looks like for you, that you have wanted to be a writer for (however long), but the more you learn about this life, the more you run the numbers of possible (productions, publications, staffing) and all the money that comes out of it (very little) the more it all seems impossible, even very silly, to think that being a “writer” is all you can be, that being a writer is actually being a Hyphenate (writer-teacher, writer-accountant, writer-marketer), which is fine, you guess, but will you be happy if you write your little plays that no one sees as you work at the Bed Bath & Beyond (beloved by staff and customers alike) or do you really need to get that Oscar to feel worthy, you greedy writer, you?; from the Greek word telos meaning end, purpose or goal.

anyparxiasphobia n. the fear that when you get that Oscar it won’t be enough either, that nothing is really enough, that life is not long enough, and also too long, and this desire for more is simultaneously your greed and also your complete infatuation with Life and those in it, and so you hold onto everything and probably cry a little every day, and maybe that holds you back, but you also know that whatever you might feel getting an Oscar will pale in comparison to how you felt as your grandmother read the little story you wrote in crayon about the Easter bunny and smiled and scooped you some ice cream, because damnit she’s not here to hear your acceptance speech so, like, what does it even matter anyway?; from the Greek word anyparxía meaning nothingness.

kenophobia n. the fear that you won’t become who you thought you’d become in time to share that with your (parents, aunts, other important people) before they are gone, before you can say do you see – i made good choices, before you can say see – i’m okay, before you no longer have anyone watching your life from afar and its just you, making yourself happy, which is totally and utterly not possible; from the Greek prefix keno meaning empty.

anonymosphobia n. the fear that you don’t know who you’re trying to become or want to become and you might just stay the person you are right now and, frankly, you’re not sure how you feel about that; from the Greek word anónymos meaning nameless.

hamartiaphobia n. the fear that your one chance or shot was handed to you already in a moment that perhaps you can or cannot pinpoint, but that you didn’t take it or it was taken from you, and now that chance is gone forever, never to return; from the Greek word hamartia meaning to miss the mark, most often used in reference to tragedy.

vetulaphobia n. the fear that you’re already too old to do this; from the Latin word vetula meaning old woman.

nigomaephobia n. the fear that you have nothing to say, actually, and the simple act of even thinking about writing is taking up space for more worthy voices; from the Greek word pnigomai meaning choke.

penthosphobia n. the fear that this is actually what being a writer is, and now you have to deal with it; from the Greek word penthos meaning grief or lamentation, also the name of the ancient Greek God, who was late and got the cold leftovers.

Be a fool.

playwriting

By Chelsea Sutton

My turn at spewing words on this blog always seems to hit during weeks when something in my world or the world at large is radically shifting. Perhaps that’s a false correlation, but my memory insists that is correct. And it is right at least half of the time.

This past week I had my first real whirlwind of non-stop in-person theatre activity. I spent Saturday through Tuesday in close quarters with cast and creative team for filming, audio recording, and photography for the immersive postal play I’m directing, Welcome to Meadowlark Falls: The Very Merry Christmas Contest. I spent Wednesday seeing Hamilton at the Pantages after 3 reschedules over the last two years. And Thursday through Saturday rehearsing and producing a live haunt in Little Tokyo at East West Players with Rogue Artists Ensemble for a narrative app I co-wrote, Kaidan Project: Alone.

I’m coming out of that week in a reflective mode. I had bursts of wonder and wondering during that time. Wonder at our ability to create stories out of cardboard and sweat. And wondering at…why am I doing this? Am I actually, even, good at this?

To be an artist, you have to, in many ways, be a fool. You have to be foolish enough to think that you can make a living at this – or, better yet, a life. You have to be foolish enough to think that you have something to say and talent enough to pull it off. You have to be foolish enough to sweep past disappointments and head onto the next batch as if nothing could touch you.

But there has to be a limit to the foolishness. I think that is what we’ve all collectively pondered over the last year. The foolishness that makes us think that we have to break our backs and neglect our wellbeing for the notion of a dream. The foolishness that hopes the same leadership that has hurt you in the past is going to change their ways, that makes you go in circles trying the same strategies over and over expecting something new. The foolishness that makes us think we have to pay our dues for 30 years only to be met with gatekeepers that never intended for us to enter, ever.

I’m a fool. For sure.

Last December, when my blog time came around, it happened the week my grandmother died, after she and I both contracted COVID from the same person.

Just before September 11 this past year, I went to her house for the last time. I went late at night after work and traffic. I lit a purple candle and brought a picture of us in the house. The house was completely empty. My father had redone it over the last 6 months and in many ways it no longer looked like the home of my childhood. But something fresh. And new. Something the light could more easily reach.

My last photo of the house.

I stayed for maybe an hour. Sitting and thinking and crying. Walking from room to room, kissing my hand and touching it to the walls. I tried to say goodbye to every inch.

I felt very foolish. Like an idiot. But I knew I had to say goodbye in this way. I knew I had to feel foolish to feel anything at all.

And if I’m really honest, once I walked in, I didn’t feel foolish anymore. I only felt like I was coming home.

My playwright brain always attaches to PLACE. How it transforms itself. How it transforms who we are. How every house is haunted in one way or another.

Returning to theatre feels like walking into that empty house. It is the same, yet not. I am mourning parts of myself while having hope for something new. I am trying to make space for what is next.

My love is like a haunted house. I don’t know how to love any other way.

I am a collector of words. I have a folder on my desktop with saved words that I stumble across. This blog has turned into a kind of meditation, so, I thought sharing some of my collection might help you, as they have helped me.

First…

…This poem by Caitlin Seida

…And then the queen Rachel Elizabeth Cargle….

….and this meditation on grief….

…And finally, the late and great Anthony Bourdain…

Be a fool.

To Not Hiding & Vulnerability Nuggets

playwriting

by Chelsea Sutton

I don’t know about you, but I write fiction and plays because it allows me to hide.

I seldom write non-fiction (this blog not withstanding). When I do, it is usually couched in humor and non sequiturs and other distractions so that you won’t look at the big VULNERABILITY NUGGET dropped in the middle.

HERE’S YOUR DISTRACTION:

But during the pandemic, I started a little project with a couple friend. Yes. It’s a podcast. Because everyone has a podcast now. I’m so basic.

My new headshot. Super basic.
(Are you distracted still?)

The thing with the podcast is that it is NOT fiction. It’s three of us talking about our REAL opinions about subjects that affect us, and particularly women, and how we live as humans from day to day.

So like…I have to be me.

I struggled with this, and desperately wanted some FORMAT to help STRUCTURE MY CHARACTER or come up with a hook that allowed me to hide.

But I don’t get to hide much. Only really as far as I do research or drop little tidbits of knowledge I’ve collected somewhere, somehow.

Usually when I’m writing a play or a story, when I feel like I’m showing too much, I can have a ghost or monster or some other weird thing pop in. As a friend once said, if this is a Chelsea Sutton play, where are the dead people?

Though I think what I’ve really discovered is that the old Flannery O’Connor quote about not knowing what you think about a thing until you write it out….is definitely true for me. I didn’t know I had such strong opinions about certain things until I was tasked with being in a 45 minute discussion about it.

Anyway, I recommend sometimes being vulnerable. Launch that vulnerability nugget into space, my friend.

If you want to listen, the podcast is called THE NICE GIRLS. It’s on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and all that stuff.

Here’s a trailer from our episode 8 about FAILURE. Which I know a lot about.

Look at me. Not distracting you.

No. No no no don’t look at the VULNERABILITY NUGGET.

Damnit.

On Sea-Monkeys, Monologues + Producing Your Own Work

playwriting

by Chelsea Sutton

I love a good monologue. My first full length play, 99 Impossible Things, was FULL of them. Too many, in fact. Far too many. I directed and produced that play in January and February of 2011, and at the time I was working at Garry Marshall’s theatre in the Valley. He read the play, and, in a few margin notes, reminded me that while monologues are great, don’t underestimate the power of a look or a gesture or silence to express everything a half page monologue can, almost always more succinctly, and sometimes in a way that words can never reach.

I’ve tried to keep that in mind when approaching each new play; though I never write a play without that ONE monologue. I have to have ONE somewhere. Maybe it’s a bad habit.

Harold and the Sea Monkey in 99 Impossible Things.

It’s now been 10 years since 99, the first thing I directed and produced and wrote in LA. The first thing that was unequivocally mine. There was nowhere for me to hide. Even though I had amazing collaborators, designers, and actors, there was no doubt that this THING you were seeing would be blamed on me.

Let’s be clear that it wasn’t a particularly good play. It was probably too long. It probably had too many characters and storylines. The monologues, as much as I still love them, were a bit on the nose. Playwright me NOW would rip it apart.

A sea monkey was a character. And it was about a group of people processing grief. 

The critics as a whole did not enjoy this play. And I got a lot of crap for being 25 and having the gall to both write AND direct a play while being a woman. I had to process the feeling of working very hard and putting my own money and all this time into something that could be so easily dismissed. But it was an exercise in gratitude. 

People were coming and watching and having thoughts about the play, after all. Writing things about it. Spending their time on it. It’s really the most a writer ever wants. I made a lot of people cry at the end of the play. Always my goal. I did have a lot of people personally tell me how much they connected to it, enjoyed it, were touched by it.  So while I didn’t get a critic’s choice in the LA Times, I got encouragement to keep going, and a lesson in the importance of and sticky art of criticism.

One of the best notes I got was from a professional psychologist, a family friend, who told me how truthful it was, to the process, to grieving specifically, and how could I already know those things?

My answer right now is that I think most of us already know these things in our bones. Some of us are forced to confront things sooner than some. And some spend their whole lives avoiding the silence that will make them have to face, well…anything uncomfortable.

In the play, the most uncomfortable character comes in the form of a Sea Monkey, who silently haunts the character of Harold, and whose silence and final lines of the play speak volumes more than many of the monologues. A Sea Monkey who represents something that was lost, something that will never return, no matter how much you want it.

This is a piece of a monologue from the play that feels most resonant right now to me: 

“There’s this spot on the wall in my kitchen – I have this awful olive green paisley wall paper from the ‘60s that was there when I moved in – and there’s this spot where the seam is, where they ran outta paper and patched it, and the design doesn’t quite match up, the little dots and twirls just end abruptly, sorta lost to the infinite void all of a sudden. That’s how things are usually – there’s no smooth exit, no gradient shading us out. So whenever I feel like I might explode, I sit on the counter and I stare at that spot in the kitchen, and I try forget.” – Harold, 99 Impossible Things

I feel like I’m living in that weird patched up wallpaper right now. And, unlike my character Harold, I’m trying not to forget.

To make sure I don’t forget, I decided to create and produce a play again on my own. Well, a kind of play. A play through the mail. A play made up of interactive fiction, audio drama, found objects, and phone calls. A “play” of disparate voices, alone, trying to find what is lost.

An image from Spite & Malice, the postal play.

I’m a little bit terrified of putting this into the world. It’s deeply personal, I’m processing things as I’m creating, and it’s a kind of thing I haven’t really created before. It doesn’t feel particularly safe. I can’t promise anything when it comes to the outcome.

But when I did 99, it was also new to me. I’d written it as a final project in college and my little theatre group and I put up our college production. That was scary, but it was a safe space. I could easily dismiss it as a thesis, as a work in progress. Producing it as a main stage show in 2011 seemed to be saying: hey all, come look, this is finished, come have thoughts.

And so, here I am again.

And yeah, there will be monologues.

Perhaps, though we need a reminder from the Great himself:

I had a reviewer friend come see 99 and wrote me an email comparing it to The Time of Your Life by Saroyan. I still have not read that play, but I offer this quote, to those who could use it. It is a cousin in sentiment to a the Mary Oliver poem “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver, which I read at my grandmother’s funeral on December 23, 2020:

In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches…Have no shame in being kindly and gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret…In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.” ― The Time Of Your Life

I have no concluding thought for this. This monologue has already been long enough. There is, perhaps, no conclusion to draw from the moment we’re all in except to keep creating, keep living, keep doing and being the best you can.

This is the sad post.

playwriting

by Chelsea Sutton

Yesterday I wrote a happy post. I warned you there’d be a sad post.

This is it.

As writers, we are trained to find patterns and story in our everyday tragedies and tribulations. We look for meaning. We look for bad guys and good guys. We look for connections, arcs, morals, lessons.

This is both a blessing and a curse.

Theatre artists will work long hours for little to no pay because we believe in what we do. Because we think we’re lucky. Because we have glorified the starving artist trope. Because we have to pay our dues, which we have interpreted to mean that we have to be okay with being treated like shit or underpaid or burnt out and so exhausted from working on other people’s visions that we have no time for our own.

There’s a whole thing going down about The Flea in New York right now, about their practices doing exactly what I described. I never worked with them, have no intimate knowledge of what happened. But this particular exchange hit me as truthful in a universal way:

I used to wonder if I should have moved to New York to be a playwright. At some point I blamed my choice for staying in Southern California as the reason I had no real playwriting career. Whatever the hell that means….I mean really. I don’t know. Do you? I used to think playwriting could be a career and now I’m not so sure.

I stayed here for many reasons. Not the least of which I was afraid, yes. But I also had a grandmother who I was very close with, already in her 80s by the time I graduated college. And a younger brother turning 7. I wanted to be a part of their lives. For her, it was the last decade of her life. I was already projecting into a future of grief, and I wanted to plan for that. I could be a granddaughter and sister across the country. But not in the way I wanted to. I figured I could still be a playwright here just as well and still be the person I wanted to be. So I stayed.

I used to wonder if I should have gone to NY to work at places like The Flea. But if I had made that choice, 13 years ago when I was leaving undergrad, I would still be here, in the middle of a pandemic, the whole industry shut down and scrambling, and sins surfacing because we no longer have anything to lose.

And I’d be alone in a little apartment in NY. Maybe with another production or two under my belt. Maybe. But just as broke and confused and wondering if I should have stayed in LA all those years ago.

And I’d be grieving my grandmother just the same.

Because she died yesterday.

It’s a long story that I don’t think anyone wants to read. But she and I both contracted COVID from her caregiver, who we had just hired to come in to my parents home, where my grandmother was now living, to help her exercise and eat and be well a few times a week. I’d met the caregiver that first day and spent a lot of time showing her around. She didn’t know she’d been exposed before coming to us.

So my grandmother and I both got sick. It has been a very long month.

Here is where the blessing of the writer species comes in. I look at the whole arc of the story, and I’m grateful I stayed close by. I was able to be close with her, help her where I could, and be next to her while she died at home yesterday afternoon. So many people do not get that small gift right now. To be able to say goodbye. To know you did something, even if it was not enough to conquer death. I’m glad I did not give up who I hoped I could be for the chance to work at The Flea.

Here’s the curse.

I’m angry. I’m angry at everyone refusing to wear masks, who take risks that are intentionally exposing others. For companies who do not, after 9 months in a pandemic, have even the minimal amount of education and systems to at least find proper protection.

I’m angry at the idea that art can only be made on a little island on the east coast. I’m angry at everyone who has exploited others, including myself for buying into it and working in that system.

In my happy post, I wrote that the pandemic has shown how racist, selfish, lazy, entitled, self-driven rather than community driven we all are. And I stand by that. And I’m angry about it.

But, my default is to look for meaning and clarity in all this, to organize it into a story I can understand. But my anger does not work like that. I am going to spin my wheels on that search for years. I will never have an answer that feels like enough.

I think every grief is different. For each person, and each loss.

We’ve been grieving the loss of theatre for 9 months. It has looked different for everyone.

I’m still figuring out what my grief looks like right now. It has been almost 28 hours.

This is going to take a long time.

This is the happy post

playwriting, , ,

by Chelsea Sutton

Coming Soon: Welcome to Meadowlark Falls – Christmas At Home

There will be a sad post. That will come next. Because it always does.

But this is the happy one.

There are things that make you hopeful. New government leadership. The blessing and land acknowledgement before the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. The Bath & Bodyworks candle sale. You know.

When it comes to theatre, I’m happy that many of us theatre-makers have been trying to innovate, trying to find ways to connect through the digital world, trying to make accessibility something that is baked into our new structures in the new chapter of theatre, whatever that turns out to be. As someone who has always been a cross-genre writer and interested in the expansion of universes, this has been an intellectually interesting time.

This has been one of the worst years in recent history, for sure. All the memes would agree with that.

In many ways, this year has showed us our worst selves. We are racist, selfish, lazy, entitled, self-driven rather than community driven. Right now, my state of mind wants to focus on these things. It really does. But I do have a bad habit of wanting to find the good in the shit. I think it is a survival mechanism. I want there to be meaning where there is none. And often, there is none.

This is the happy post. Just a reminder.

To focus on theatre here, I think most of us felt, in our cores, that the ways things were running were not good or sustainable or even what we wanted. And this moment, if it’s anything at all, is a time to experiment, to not lean on our old habits but try new ways of telling stories.

One way I’ve been starting to explore alternative ways of theatre is through postal plays. There is a national wave of postal plays coming up in the new year. Read all about it here in American Theatre Magazine. I’ll be writing and producing my own play for the wave. Postal plays use either in total or in part the US Postal service to tell their story. The universe of the play becomes a tangible object that arrives at your door. These plays can allow for multimedia inclusion, audience interaction, and immersion, all in the safety of the home.

For the Christmas season, Tin Can Telephone Productions (artist Lori Meeker) has created a postal play made for those of us who binge those holiday Hallmark Christmas movies. Last year, Lori started to create the universe of Meadowlark Falls, the small picturesque New England town where Christmas is exactly how you see it in the movies. It’s a little bit good-hearted spoof too, and working toward updating some of the dated qualities of Hallmark movies in general. We did an in-person workshop last Christmas of one story in the Meadowlark Falls universe, but this year the postal-play brings Christmas to your doorstep in Welcome to Meadowlark Falls – Christmas At Home.

I directed the workshop last year, and for Christmas At Home, I also took on the role of director, but really the creation and organization of all the story beats and elements have been a group effort between Lori, myself, our production manager Alexis Robles and video and audio editor Sara Haddadin. It has truly been a collaboration in many ways that “normal” theatre sometimes isn’t. We’re selling packages now through December 11. There are only a limited amount available, so I hope you check it out.

The Meadowlark Falls Town Council Meeting does not go as planned. Top Left to Right: Roman Dearborn (Amir Levi), Trish Blish (Keiana Richard), Douglass Patel (Anil Margsahayam). Middle Left to Right: Genevieve Snow (Taylor Ashbrook), Andy (Samantha Frontera), Noel (Nicholas McDonald). Bottom Left to Right: Jenny Snow (Carley Herlihy) and Whitney (Carene Rose Mekertichyan).

This is a light-hearted holiday experiment, but I think this is only one of many ways in which theatre can continue to explore interacting with audiences in new ways, even if those old ways are as old as the post office. Sometimes it is not only about creating new tools, but finding new ways to use the old ones.

That’s what makes me hopeful. There are a lot of terrible things to throw out and rebuild. And there are a lot of old things can be repurposed, reframed, and reused.

It sometimes takes extra work. And extra energy. And sometimes you don’t have that in a pandemic. But we have to be fools sometimes. And hopeful.

The Ritual of Self-Destruction

playwriting, ,

by Chelsea Sutton

I’ve been having a hard time focusing my thoughts lately. When they do coalesce, they tend toward the negative. My ego has been battered and beaten in the wind. About a year and a half ago, I had a decent sense of who I was, what I wanted to do, and where I was going.

Now? I spend most days swirling in negative thoughts.

I’m very sure my friends are tired of asking how I am and what they get is a heavy sigh and a “Oh, I’m fine…” thick with the drama of someone who has just survived an island of dinosaurs.

And while negative thinking does not help one feel particularly motivated or empowered to write that next Great American Play that could not possibly be produced before 2025 at this point, positive thinking feels rather naive right now.

Look at the Goldblum and forget.

But it is not positive thinking I need. I’m realizing that before the pandemic – and actually months before that, in spring 2019 – I was doing okay because I had ritual and routine in my life.

I grew up Lutheran and did the Confirmation thing and the teaching Vacation Bible School thing and mostly hated it all, but continued to pray up until maybe my early 20s. Theater became my new church around that time – it was my ritual, my routine, the way I connected with myself. And now…?

Before the pandemic, I was struggling with finding some solid ground in this new chapter of life. But one thing I kept doing was driving to my grandmother’s house is Anaheim once a week and spending 12 hours shopping, cleaning, doing laundry, etc. She needed the extra help, and I felt useful. Since the pandemic, she is living at my parents’ house (which was always the plan) and that routine fell away…

I didn’t stop praying because I stopped believing in God or the interconnectedness of the universe or ghosts or whatever. I’m skeptical, but I also just bought two Tarot decks and watched the whole of the new Ghost Hunters on Hulu. So, you do the math. But the ritual of praying stopped having meaning for me. Before the pandemic, going to a theater had started to wane in meaning too. Even the act of writing feels more like work than magic.

I’ve defined my life in terms of being “a writer.” My whole identity is wrapped in that. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when certain things don’t work out, when Theatre seems to have said “no thank you” to me in general, and when our industry is on a perpetual pause, AND the film industry, AND all of our terrible dirty laundry is being aired out, one has to wonder if defining oneself by THIS is such a good idea.

My routine these days is just my to do list. Endless check boxes that lead to nothing.

When all your meaning, ideas of success, and curiosity is wrapped up in things that are outside your control, where does that leave you?

We are in a period of self destruction. And rebuilding. On both macro and micro levels.

I have had these three tabs open for the last couple days in preparation of writing this blog.

Highest grossing movie this week was Jurassic Park. A movie nearly 30 years old. An indication that the Hollywood machine has halted….and that stories of self destruction are pretty damn relevant.

This week, Center Theater Group laid off half of its workforce.

The PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, which was a life-changer for my career and, well, life, has been canceled for next year. It’s unclear if there will ever be the money and support to get it going again.

These are all twisted up together in my head. It has something to do with finding meaning and priorities and community. Something to do with a ritual of destruction. Something to do with the T-Rex in Jurassic Park actually being a hero and not the villain like we are led to believe.

Last time I was at my grandmother’s house, I found this photo (below). This, perhaps, more than anything else right now, feels like this moment to me. A world overexposed and erased. But enough of an airplane left to fly into the fog.

Life finds a way.

The FPI Files: Puppets, Prose & Pandemics

playwriting, ,

By Chelsea Sutton

In 2016, I was a writer in the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship. It was a life changing experience for me. I had always been a fiction writer, but that Fellowship gave me tools and confidence to finally embrace that part of my career.

Of course I have this whole other “career” as a playwright too. And I have been wondering, since 2016, how I could find ways to merge the two worlds and help amplify the program and the writers involved.

So last fall I pitched an idea to Amanda Fletcher, the Emerging Voices Fellowship Manager, for a live reading night called Puppets & Prose – during which we could get puppets and puppeteers to read written work from EV alum. It would be the weirdest reading night ever, but we were both super excited about it.

And then a pandemic hit. And there would be no live in-person puppet shows for a while…

But then…why not do it online?

So in April, when all the world was shutting down, I poked and prodded at Emerging Voices writers to send me some 1-3 min written pieces. And I worked with Rogue Artists Ensemble and the LA Guild of Puppetry to put a call for puppeteers, performers and visual artists who might want to take a piece and interpret the work into a short video.

The response was overwhelming – so much so that each of the 17 written pieces I got had TWO artists assigned to it – resulting in 33 final micro films. It took me almost a week to figure out the pairings!

All the films still live on our website and YouTube channel – but I wanted to share with you a few pieces that ended up being very fem-tastic – the writers and artists identify as female artists, and the results are amazing…

Granted, all I ever wanted were a few weird puppets looking into the camera and reading poetry to me, so maybe I have a low bar. But I think you will enjoy.

No video is over 5 minutes – so enjoy. And if you like these, watch the rest on the Rogue Artists Ensemble website.

Written by Jessica Shoemaker
Designed & Performed by Jaime Lyn Beatty

Written by Sandra Ramirez
Designed & Performed by Audrey Densmore

Written by Claire Lin
Created & Performed by Rachael Caselli

Written by Michelle Meyers
Designed and performed by Amy Judd Lieberman

Written and read by Amanda Fletcher
Designed and performed by Léonie Zikos

Written and read by Libby Flores
Designed & Performed by Mariasole Piccininno

https://youtu.be/XjBq90olD0U

Written and read by Wendy Labinger
Art Direction and Sound Design by Lori Meeker

Written by Natalie Mislang Mann
Designed and performed by Sarah Kay Peters

Written by Marnie Goodfriend
Designed and performed by Gina Sandy

Written by Carolina Rivera
Designed and performed by Kelly McMahon

Written and read by Marytza Rubio
Designed by Lelia Woods

Written by Wendy Labinger
Designed & Performed by Gretchen Van Lente
Read by Serra Hirsch

Story by Chelsea Sutton
Co-Created by Cinthia Nava & Danielle Haufman

Know a female or FPI-friendly theater, company or artist? Contact us at [email protected] & check out The FPI Files for more stories. 

Want to hear from more women artists? Make a Tax-Deductible Donation to LAFPI!

Donate Now!
Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non‐profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of LAFPI must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax‐deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Writer Responsibility 101

playwriting,

by Chelsea Sutton

Back in the olden days, when people gathered together in musty lecture halls to discuss the “literary” canon, I was a TA for a large literature class whose professor loved to include novels involving navel-gazing male protagonists. I was in charge of roughly a quarter of the 130 eager undergraduates, many of whom were aspiring writers themselves.

In my sections, I made it very clear that these students were under no obligation to LIKE any of these 10 books we were reading and that, in fact, I HATED some of them as well. Just because a professor is telling you it’s good does NOT mean you have to agree, I said. But agree or not, you better be able to tell me why you feel that way.

See, it’s my philosophy that you can learn just as much about writing from reading a book you hate as you can from reading one you love. Maybe even more so.

I had to teach Greg Jackson’s book of short stories Prodigals both times I covered this literature class. To spare you the details, most of the stories in the book are about terrible privileged people doing terrible privileged things. But of course, one could argue that most stories are about terrible people. In my house, we don’t say: hey, do you want to watch Avenue 5 tonight? We say: hey, do you want to watch Shitty People in Space tonight?

I do not enjoy Prodigals. Though there are a few sentences I wish I had written.

So Fall 2018 rolls around and we get to Prodigals week. One of my students does not like the book. Why, I asked. He doesn’t agree with the morality of the book – how the characters behaved and treated each other. Doesn’t writing about that behavior condone it? he asked. Wasn’t it the responsibility of the author to expose bad behavior or offer positive role models and morality?

I mean, what a fucking good question.

Let’s get real: no one really likes Aesop’s fables. Not all the time. We don’t want Breaking Bad to wrap up its series finale with: the moral of the story, kids, is don’t become a meth dealer in New Mexico!

But I’d argue that an author has an obligation to read the damn room, to have a larger understanding of the context in which the writing is presented and read, to understand that nothing exists in a vacuum, and to do their due diligence.

Don’t ask me how we got there, but we compared two television shows to explore this line of thinking: Man in the High Castle (based on the novel by Phillip K. Dick) and one that was in development at the time – Confederate, supposedly going to be penned by the Game of Thrones guys, who, you know, never caused an issue (eye roll).

Man in the High Castle is an alternate history in which the Allies lose WWII and Germany and Japan occupy the United States. Confederate is an alternate history in early development at HBO in which the South won the Civil War – so slavery was still a thing in its universe (this was going to be helmed by WHITE MEN, as a reminder.)

At first, the students didn’t see the difference. Two wars, two alternate histories, so what? I am not a history expert nor well-versed in either of these shows, I said. BUT…

Let’s look at the context and the general narratives surrounding both wars, I said. In this country we have oversimplified the WWII narrative to be about good vs. evil. Sure, you could quibble about this or that, but The Good Guys won. So we take that context with us when watching the show. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t think that the correct people won that war, except maybe Neo-Nazis and aluminum foil-wearing conspiracy theorists, but do you really want them on your side?

No thanks, they said.

Now the Civil War. That’s another thing. We seem to have an ongoing debate in this country surrounding what that war was about (slavery). Many people argue that it was about state’s rights (it was slavery). Many states in the South still have statues of Confederate war heroes (slave owners) and fly the Confederate flag (you know, about slavery).* There are still people in this country who are not convinced that slavery is a bad idea. WE DO NOT HAVE AN AGREED UPON NARRATIVE SURROUNDING RACISM IN THIS COUNTRY. And that carries with us as we watch the show. Would you agree?

Oh shit, yeah, they said.

So back to morality and responsibility. You’re writing a show like Confederate. If you’re going to write a good story, then you’re going to have fleshed out characters, right? That means the slaves and the slave owners will have nuances and good qualities and tragic flaws and we will FEEL for them. And they will exist in a complicated world. And maybe there will be an Emmy-contending monologue in act 4 of the pilot that offers a damn good argument for slavery.

Sounding worrisome? Or at the very least…delicate? In need of a deft hand?

What is the danger of offering up an empathetic slave owner in a society in which we still have not achieved true equity, have not done the work required to actually deal with these sins in a way that uplifts, creates anti-racist policies, and gathers the country into a narrative we agree on?

Especially if that story is offered to us by people who cannot and DO NOT CARE TO understand racism in the way that the Black actors, Black crew members, and Black viewers would understand it. We’ve all seen Game of Thrones. What do YOU think would happen?

Light bulbs flipped on all over the room. These kids had so much to say.

I might be wrong and obtuse about all of this, I said. And please, question me. Question me, question your own thoughts and biases too. Maybe Confederate could be done really well. But look at who is telling the story and why. Who is invited into the room and who is not.

You cannot control how everyone is going to read your writing. It’s simply not possible. But I believe that our responsibility as writers is to first ask ourselves the hard questions about our characters, our narratives, and the larger world in which they will be interacting.

It’s our job to ask the hard questions even when we don’t know the answers. ESPECIALLY when we don’t know the answers. And to confront our own biases and blindness. To show shitty people doing terrible things and sometimes even BE shitty people doing terrible things, but to learn from those stories, to let the stories maybe, somehow, help us build a world that is better than this one.

But that still doesn’t make Prodigals any good.

P.S. Here are my favorite books from that class (both written by Black authors.) Read them. I’m available for discussion at my office hours posted in the syllabus.

Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

Also, Lindsey Ellis’ video essay about Mel Brooks and the Ethics of Satire is required watching.

*Fucking hooray to all the statues and confederate flags being burned and removed.

But does it matter?

playwriting,

by Chelsea Sutton

It’s the usual setup for a scene (these days): two friends are on a Skype hangout on a Saturday morning. One friend proposes to the other this question: does any of these things we do in our lives (our successes, relationships, failures) really, ultimately, matter?

It’s a question that I think about a lot, especially when it comes to things. The stuff we collect, pin up on our bulletin boards, pack into scrapbooks. I’ve spent that last year systematically going through my grandmother’s stuff and (with her) deciding what should stay and what should go. All these things that were once so important being packed away, sold for pennies, sent to the dump.

I just spent this Pandemic Sunday cleaning through my desk, reorganizing my space for increased at-home work, and doing a similar exercise. My apartment has a grandma feel to it – there are lots of things around (though I like to think that I have arranged them in more of an “artistic” way than a “ohmygodtheclutteryouhoarder” way). I tend to hold onto notes and photos, gather small items or images from my travels, buy books I have no time to read. I like having things around me that remind me of beautiful times, of people I love, of the person I hope I’m becoming. And I often think of the day I die – someone coming into my space and seeing the same things and seeing mostly junk, wondering why I would hold on to these things. I imagine all of these precious items being thrown into the dump.

My current bulletin board after a purge.

And certainly the meaning of some things change. I just tossed away some letters from grad school that already gave me what I needed (but the emotion attached to them a year ago – can you imagine!) My grandmother and I threw out a lot of things she gathered on her travels (who knew porcelain plates used to be the BIG thing in souvenirs?) And now, those things are just in the way, signifying nothing.

What’s that Macbeth quote?
“It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

But I often hold onto things because I don’t trust my memory. I want to be reminded – I need my memory backed up to a hard drive of sorts. Journals can do this, I suppose, but even as a writer I started to feel how little a simple journal could hold.

And in some way, the work we do as writers is reaching for that – the holding on to some Beauty or Truth or Whatever and preserving it and preserving ourselves in some way too. We all want to create something that matters.

But it is debilitating and useless for that to be the goal. It is too big, too nonspecific to be helpful.

So, back to the scene on Skype. Back to the question: does any of these things we do in our lives (our successes, relationships, failures) really, ultimately, matter?

If the moment we’re in now tells us anything it’s that our choices have ripple effects. How we choose to conduct our lives affects others. Our world has taught us to be so focused on individual success, to place us in constant competition, we forget that we do, ultimately, matter to each other.

Are we all going to be Superman and single-handedly save New York? No. And why would you want that? Sounds exhausting. I’d much rather be the Guardians of the Galaxy, fighting alongside friends, for better or worse.

Saw these guys in San Francisco before the pandemic.
Sometimes its not worth being preserved forever.

So does any of it matter? Yes and no.

Yes because the work we do, what we put out into the world – you don’t know who its going to change, affect, transform, inspire, scare, motivate.

No because each individual thing is just part of your longer story. When we read or watch stories and fall in love with characters – remember that we tend to not judge characters so much on their failures, but on what they choose to do in the collective whole.

It is all equally meaningless and meaningful, beautiful and two feet away from the dump.

But I think that’s why it is all meaningful. Because it can all be taken away so quickly and become so meaningless.

That’s why I hold onto that rock I found on the beach on the Isle of Mann, or those plastic pearls my grandmother used to wear all the time, or the Valentine my mom wrote me just a month ago.

So go make something meaningless.