My husband, Kerry Feltham, is a filmmaker who specializes in documentary films. I’m blogging about one of his films today because it is about the late Karen Black, who died on August the 8th, 2013. Called KarenBlack Acting On Film, the film is up on Amazon Instant Video – $1.99 to rent and $7.99 to buy – and is really worth watching.
He and I followed Karen around as she made films and friends, talked about life in show business and shared her insights into acting technique. She had a prodigious natural talent but was also so disciplined and skilled, she made it look easy.
And it isn’t.
What is so good in the film is her understanding not only of acting, particularly on film, but about the courage and energy and strength it takes to keep going in show business, pushing through on the rough days, having fun on the good ones. The latter is pertinent to all of us, whether we are acting, writing, or producing in either film or theater.
Even when she was no longer at the top – and she had been for a long time in such films as Trilogy of Terror, The Day Of The Locust, Nashville, The Great Gatsby, FiveEasy Pieces – she continued to work. Character work was her forte and she created wonderfully full characters, some odd, some funny, some sad, but always full.
Lately, I’ve thought quite often about packing it in. How many plays can you have in the drawer? How many staged readings of plays you long to see on their feet can you sit through? How many submissions can you make in a month? And to whom? Didn’t you submit that one to that contest in 2011? Or was it that one in 2012? Should you keep all those email rejections?
And we all tell ourselves the same thing over and over. It’s the work, the doing of it, the joy of doing it.
Every once in a while, you come across a work that knocks your socks off.
In September of last year, I saw a performance of Mary Lou Newmark’s Breathing Room at the Zephyr Theatre on Melrose. The play was filled with beautiful music. The language and situations were fresh and arresting and I still think of that evening with pleasure.
Billed as A Chamber Symphony for Two Actors and a Musician in Four Acts, it was written and composed by Mary Lou, directed by Dan Berkowitz, with movement by Gary Thomas.
The other two performers were Joshua Wolf Coleman and Eileen T’Kaye who played two neighbors in a Los Angeles suburb – Marilyn, an artist, and the Professor, a high school science teacher.
This is from her website: The two of them struggle with “modern technologic vertigo” as they negotiate living with hummingbirds, meatball eating bears, coyotes and backyard chickens. With evocative music performed live on stage by Mary Lou, they explore personal relationships with nature, quantum physics and embodied spirituality through playful, humorous storytelling.
(Shallow creature that I am, I particularly enjoyed a segment on Bed, Bath and Beyond.)
Mary Lou plays a green acrylic 5-String Electric Violin and uses an Eventide Ultra-Harmonizer.
Here’s a photo so you can see that wonderful violin.
Mary Lou Newmark and the neon green electric violin
In a clip from Breathing Room on her website, you can also see the instruments that stand in for an entire orchestra.
Breathing Room was at the Zephyr for only one night and Mary Lou is looking for a long run. I hope she finds that production because I’d like to see it again.
Did I talk about this before? It’s still on my mind. I teamed up with a composer, Andy Chukerman, and have been writing lyrics for a play that he’ll put music to. We’re transforming my romantic comedy, The Piaggi Suite, into a play with music. Andy says that a musical has a formula that a play with music need not have. “It’s new,” he says. “It’s fresh.”
So I’ve been traveling into new territory.
Writing lyrics hasn’t come easy. I don’t know why. I sing. I write poetry. But for this exercise, the words have incubated for a long time. My admiration for Paul Simon, which has always been great, is now huge. And how did Billy Joel come up with “car” and ‘guitar” (easily) but “Zanzibar?”
So, of course, I used the rhyming dictionary on the Web and have spent hours looking at it, just because it is so much fun. There are words of one syllable that rhyme, two syllables, three syllables, words that almost rhyme but not quite, words that sounds like others, etc.
Here’s just one example:
Words and phrases that rhyme with love: (89 results)
89 Results! I wish I had needed to use uncharacteristic of.
(Whoever wrote this particular rhyming dictionary was crazy about Bob Dylan and used his songs all the time.)
However, in order to rhyme something, you have to have other words for words to rhyme with. How to say in song what you want to say? What do you want to say?
I asked for advice. A colleague from ALAP, Eugenie Trow, advised me to write everything in prose first, then go for the rhyme and rhythm after. The composer said to use dialogue already in the script.
There’s advice you can buy – books on Amazon like Successful Lyric Writing by Sheila Davis, Writing Musicfor Hit Songs by Jai Josefs, Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison.
I found a terrific book online called Teach Yourself Songwriting by Sam Inglis. He talks about hooks, those lyrical phrases that repeat in the chorus or open the song that catch you – that hook you. Like The Beatles singing Let it Be, or Kate Perry’s You’re Hot, ThenYou’re Cold, Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. The hooks have to fit the rhythm, the melody, and the mood of the song. They’ll tell you what the song is about and if they’re good, they’ll stick with you.
Start with the hook, he advised, and go from there. Listen for them in music and conversations, look for them in the news, hear them in your head.
So, I started listening for the hooks.
This is one of my favorites:
Hooks were just the start but I now have 8 finished lyrics and hope they’re good. Sugar, yes, please.
I’m adding this notice to my blog today because I saw GLO 2014 at the Miles Playhouse last night and thoroughly enjoyed the plays.
They were varied, surprising and fresh – lovely writing. (I loved Buying A House, Jennie. Nothing beats a good rant!)
I thought the use of the space was very clever and was impressed by the sound and the lighting and the swift changing of the scenes. Congratulations, directors and crew! And the actors – women and men – were delightful!
The place was packed and I met two friends outside who were waiting to see if there were no shows so they could get tickets.
It is so heartening to have a group dedicated to female playwrights and I’m looking forward to their next production.
I’ve been thinking about Andie Bottrell’s excellent post about Expectations and about “how things shake out and the millions of variables that go into anything that happens in life.”
I am in about my third or fourth go round of a career, having been an actress and a director – who actually made her living onstage – a playwright – produced and published – a mother – a very happy one – a screenwriter and NOW a ticket lady in a community theater. (It’s a good theater, I’ve had a couple of productions there and do many other things, but I what I’m hired to do is run the box office.)
Here’s just one story from that journey: My husband, Kerry Feltham, a first class film maker, made a short film from a script I wrote that won us the jury prize at Cannes and a gig to write a film at a major studio. The woman producer, a wonderful woman, got us the job and my husband chose a film to rewrite from the studio vault. We wrote a script about a couple of con men and we all thought it was pretty funny.
Then, one of the million of variables that happen did. The head of the studio quit and the woman producer did as well and the people who came in passed the project on to the new guys who turned it into a major hit! Without us. End of story.
And here’s another story that still raises the hackles on the back of my neck and the one Andie made me think of. I had auditioned for a part in television. I thought I had aced it and waited breathlessly for a “Yes.” “Ah, said the producer, “that was very nice but you’re too short for a two shot.” I didn’t get any taller.
And I don’t think it ever gets any easier.
There was an article in the L.A. Times this Sunday, the 2nd. Bob Rogers, the founder and chief creative officer of BRC Imagination Arts, ran into Ray Bradbury just before he died. Mr. Bradbury pulled two pieces of paper out of his briefcase and held them up. He said, “These are rejection letters. I still get them. They arrived this week…and they are form letters.”
My husband keeps making films, I keep writing and sending out my plays, and I think the only thing that has really changed are my expectations. I’d love to have another production, a good part in a good play, but every day I really look forward to my coffee in the morning and a glass of wine at night.
The ten minute play is still a relatively new phenomenon. Jon Jory of the HumanaFestival of Actors Theatre of Louisville started the trend in the eighties, as a way to showcase many different plays at the festival. It made sense. The performances could address a variety of themes, could present different voices, and, if the audience didn’t like a play, it just had to wait for ten minutes to hear another one.
Now every playwright alive is trying her hand at it and there are Ten Minute Festivals all over the world.
The ten minute isn’t easy to write – often playwrights end up with a sketch or a character piece – but Mary is a whiz at it. She says, “I like the immediacy of it, although I just cottoned on to it, as you say up in Boise.” “The ten minute play is just my friend…it seems to be my place in the world.”
She thinks it is a discipline in itself and says, “You have to say what you mean very quickly,” and start the conflict right away. “You don’t have time to go, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ ‘Oh, fine,’ ‘Hey, what did you do today?’ ‘Well, let me see…’”
Even the setting has to be in the dialogue. You have to catch someone in a moment and that moment has to very important.
Happy and Gay, which was part of this year’s Hollywood Fringe, captures that moment with the first line – Straight or kinky? The play is about two church ladies in the church basement decorating for the church’s first same sex marriage. Mary was originally going to write about two mothers trying to deal with the marriage but the characters spoke to her. She said, “Oh, my God, what’s going on with these ladies?” then realized that they were stringing up crepe paper. They didn’t know how to decorate for this new thing. It wasn’t a funeral or a shower or an ordinary wedding and they are having a stressful moment.
As with Happy and Gay, one of the virtues of the ten minute is that is allows the playwright to open a window into contemporary issues, or to catch a fleeting moment.
Behold A Pale Bronco came out of the pursuit of O.J. Simpson on the 405 Freeway. Mary and a friend were watching a basketball game when the chase appeared in the corner of the screen. Before the game was over, it was in the corner and pursuit was full screen.
Mary, who had previously seen actors auditioning for the part of O.J. Simpson in a movie, was struck by our fascination with celebrity.
Then she thought about a man who was living across from the 405 and wrote about his dilemma. What if this character liked television a lot and what if he has a choice of going out on the balcony and maybe being on CNN? However, if he were on CNN, he wouldn’t be able to see himself live. He’s taping over his girlfriend’s copy of Beauty and The Beast, putting it on VHS. But that’s still not the same. He has to make this moral decision – TV, real life? TV, real life? What would be better – to look at it or look at himself looking at it?
“The Miraculous Day Quartet” was written immediately after September 11, 2001. Wordsmiths was meeting on 9/11 but the city buildings were closed that night. Mary called all the playwrights and said, “Hey, you know what? This is terrible so why don’t we all write a play about 9/11 and bring it next week?” She procrastinated until an hour or two before the meeting but knew she had to write something. Then, she said, “I had one of these moments when the universe sang to me.”
She was listening to KUSC when The Bells of Saint Genevieve, a baroque piece by Marin Marais, started playing. “And I heard, ‘I screwed up. I stayed in bed instead of going to work. I screwed up. The apartment wouldn’t let me out. I screwed up. My assistants screwed because they gave me the wrong time of the airplane.’
And I was suddenly writing these stories, not about the people in the building or in the plane but the ones who were late. They were late and they survived, including one of the terrorists who prayed too long that morning and did not catch the plane. That was really creepy because I found out later that there was one of the twenty who didn’t make it. So…that made it all the more chilling.”
Mary has many more ten minute plays and says that she now has a hard time writing full plays with any conviction.
However, the church ladies continue to interest her and she’s written about one of them in Dancing With Miss Liza. Perhaps there is a series of plays about Veronica and Betty or perhaps an evening of ten minute plays strung together like a pearl necklace – one of those necklaces in which pearls can be removed or added.
Mary Steelsmith, an L.A. playwright, whom many of you might know, is one of the new vice-chairs of ALAP. We met at Googie’s (recommended – you can sit for hours and the food is great) in Santa Monica to talk about her plays and playwriting career.
One of the things we talked about is where the impulse to write plays comes from. How do we start making up stories? Why do we start thinking about plots and dialogue?
Mary started early. She was a solitary child, the last of five much older siblings. Her Dad worked for the state auditor’s office in Boise, Idaho but also ran a working farm with cows, horses, and chickens. The family lived outside of town off a dirt road at the end of the main drag called Broadway Avenue, two fields away from the Broadway Drive In movie theater. Mary says, “You could actually see the screen from my bedroom window.” She couldn’t hear anything but would watch with fascination. It was her entertainment. She could see a movie five times in a row until the feature changed and become very familiar with the narrative and the characters. She says, “Snow White and The ThreeStooges were dear friends of mine,” and because she couldn’t hear what they were saying, she would make up stories about them. And put herself in the story.
The storyteller and the ambition to be a playwright were born.
She left Boise in 1976, and always enterprising, adept at making something out of nothing, she came as a babysitter for people who had a time share apartment in L.A. The people she was with didn’t like L.A. and left but the new tenants let Mary stay in a little back room for the $50 a month.
She kept writing but also she says, “wanted to see if the fat girl could become an actress.” She started getting extra jobs, was on the movie lobby card for Kentucky Fried Movie (got her friends in to see it), worked with the L.A. Connection improv group, putting out the hat on Sundays at Venice Beach, worked at an answering service at night and auditioned during the day. She got into the movie, Rabbit Test, with “this kid named Billy Crystal.”
Though she continued to act, she was always looking for places to put her plays. In Dramalogue, she saw a small ad for a workshop called Wordsmiths, a group that met once a week in the vault of what once was a bank building at 6th and Spring.
The deadline for submissions was close – “like the next Tuesday,” and Mary had to write something fast!
In the mid 1980’s, she had had a dear friend with AIDS, whom she almost married. The fear of AIDS was at its height and when Mary visited his hospital room, she had to wear yellow paper overalls, a hat and a mask and gloves. After he died, she became involved with Louise Hay’s Hay Rides, a support group for people living with H.I.V. or AIDS.
Hay’s initial meetings had grown from a few people in her living room to hundreds of men in a large hall in West Hollywood. A friend took Mary there one night and there were twelve hundred people in the room.
Hay, a spiritualist, had a simple message: “You are loved.” Mary, who had no training in the health field was told to “stand there with them,” which she did. “I would put my hands on their arms and say, ‘I love you,’ and that very night I looked over at the window and was sure that for a flash I saw my friend, Mike. It was so beautiful because I was sure I was in the right place.”
She continued to be involved and when the ad for Wordsmiths in Dramalogue appeared, had spent many nights with another friend, comforting him and taking care of him. To her surprise and sadness, at his funeral, she wasn’t acknowledged.
That experience become a thirty minute play called Bedside Companion, which she wrote in one weekend. She submitted it and was accepted into Wordsmiths.
The workshop was Mary’s first playwriting class. There was nothing like that in Boise and she had learned to write from “doing it over and over and over.”
The group would sit around a table after fighting for the good chairs, “that didn’t bend back,” and read each other’s plays out loud. Listening to playwrights reading her work was painful and instructive. When an actor sees a mistake in a line, he or she fixes it, “playwrights don’t know any better.” She heard rhythm, the sound of her dialogue, the movement of story. And she learned to rewrite.
The Wordsmiths moderator, the experienced and published fellow playwright Silas Jones, didn’t mince words and would say, “Oh, this is crap. I hate this play. Your play is not a play.” “Did I rewrite something? Oh, yeah.”
Wordsmiths has disbanded but Mary’s plays have gone on to many productions and awards. Her The Old Man and The Seed won first place in the Hewlett Packard 10 minute play contest and took her to Singapore where it was produced. Her full length, Isaac I Am, won the Helford Prize and was produced by Jacksonville University in Florida and in 2012 she was a delegate to the 9th International Women Playwrights Conference in Stockholm.
I discovered the LA Women’s Shakespeare Company very late in the game so for many of you, this is old news!
The LAWSC was founded in 1993 by Lisa Wolpe, to encourage, as it says on their website, “women and girls to transcend gender and cultural differences, and embrace a broader awareness of their enormous capabilities not only on the stage, but in all areas of their lives…” and “to provide a strong and positive example of an all-female, multi-cultural collaboration that is innovative, professional, and creative.”
It has produced all female, multi cultural productions of many of Shakespeare’s plays, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth – I’ve probably left some out – and Hamlet, which I had the good fortune to see at the Odyssey last year.
I was knocked out by the production. The set and lighting were superb – I jumped when the Ghost appeared out of nowhere. The costumes were excellent. But it was the performances that blew me away.
You forgot that the roles were played by women. (Two women behind me whispered, “I can’t tell, can you?” The other said, “Look at their hands. You have to look at their hands.”) Every one was convincing and right in the moment. Chastity Dotson’s Ophelia was the best I’ve seen, fresh and heartbreaking. Natsuko Ohama as Polonoius got every laugh.
Lisa Wolpe’s Hamlet moved me to tears. Every line was crystal clear and spoken to convey meaning and emotion. I’ve heard so many plummy readings of “To be or not to be,” in which the words come drippingly off the tongue and you can sense the actor’s delight in the sound of his own voice but when Lisa sat down and said, “To be or not to be,” I listened. I heard a person working through his thoughts, weighing his options, torn and tormented. But quiet about it.
And the physical work knocked me out. Almost literally. I was in the front row and the swordplay was fierce and fast close to my feet. Very exciting.
And how marvelous, I thought, that women would have the opportunity to play some of the best characters ever written and to speak that glorious language. I knew that Sarah Bernhardt had played Hamlet, and Helen Mirren, Prospero, but I don’t know if I’ve heard of another Shakespeare company composed entirely of women.
So I’ve been waiting for the next production. When I didn’t see one announced, I emailed Lisa Wolpe. A busy woman, who directs, teaches, acts, has studied at the Globe Theatre and who also has a one woman show called Shakespeare And The Alchemy of Gender, and a documentary on the group in the works, she said that Hamlet may be her last production in L.A.
I hope not. If there is one, I’ll be there.
To see a rehearsal of Hamlet, go to http://youtu.be/buUv-UQNfdg.
I opened up my email yesterday only to discover that this was my blog week. I thought, “Oh, Robin, Robin, Robin, I’m not ready, I’m not ready.” It isn’t as if I hadn’t been forewarned. Our excellent Blog Mistress posted the schedule some time ago.
But I was going to wash the kitchen floor today, do the laundry, and go grocery shopping. And I’m cat sitting. (I’m crazy about this cat but those of you who have ever cat sat will understand that it takes some adjusting. My daughter’s cat likes to sleep with me and on me and isn’t that fond of my husband, for example.)
Lately, my life seems to be so bitty – each day becoming a series of unconnected chores that once completed lead on to the next. I’ve lost the daily practice of yoga and so admire Jessica Abrams’s morning routine. (And her web series.) I don’t write in my daily diary. Not daily, not even weekly. I don’t know when I’m going to get to the Fringe.
When I do sit down to write, I stare at the screen. It stares back, emptily.
Not long ago, I was exhilarated and full of energy. I had worked long and diligently on my latest play, Rondo a la Condo, and the characters finally broke through. The plot flowed. It worked!
Then, I had a staged reading of it.
The actors were very good and it was thrilling to be onstage, playing one of the characters. The audience seemed to like it but after it was over, I sensed that the response was not overwhelmingly positive. One man said, “It was all right. It was confusing and you really couldn’t follow it. And the narrator was hard to hear.” Others said, “Umm hmm. I enjoyed it.” Etc. My husband said, “I like it but the one I really like is your The Piaggi Suite.” One friend said he thought it was great and lifted me up by saying that I wrote about “the magical in the everyday.” Well, I thought, “How nice.” And he, of course, is perceptive and highly intelligent. Then, night and silence.
I know I’ll pull up my socks. I know I’ll start sending Rondo out. Start looking for someone who adores it as much as I do. I know you can’t please everybody and every audience is different. Laughs got one night get none the next. Some say tomatoes, some say tomahtoes.
But at heart, I agree with Colin Firth who said, “You can be very susceptible to the slings and arrows. It can be one word in a review or something somebody said. Somebody can come up to you and shower you with wonderful words and the last thing they say as they walk away ….’Wait, you like everything except for what?’ That’s the one thing that sticks in your mind.”
So, for the moment, I’ll wash the kitchen floor, pat the cat, and be happy to have the pleasure of writing in here.
Looking back at my blogs, I realize that I have been whining about Writer’s Block (I do think it should be capitalized, don’t you?) since May 10, 2010!
I’ve done a number of things since then but this one play, Rondo a la Condo, would not talk to me. I’d written it as a one act a few years ago and I wanted to expand it into a two act because I loved the characters. And I knew that a two act has a better chance at being produced than a one act. I could do it but How?
“How? How? How?” I asked, and… NOTHING! I had an idea or two. I knew that the first act would be in 1979 and the second act in 1994. I knew the last line would be “What took you so frigging long?” I knew that a new character, Edward, would arrive. And that’s about all I knew.
Yep. For two years. A long gestation period.
I even had a director interested in producing, actors who wanted to see it. But … NOTHING.
Writing is such a mystery. There seemed to be no way to make the words appear on the paper. I tried all the block breaking exercises, meditation, brisk walking, a glass of wine or two. But… NOTHING.
I kept thinking about Edward. I’ve never been one to write biographies of characters but I wanted to know what he looked like. What did he want? Where did he come from? When I knew he would never be called Eddie, I had a glimmer into his attitude. A hint.
Then one day a few weeks ago, he walked in! Talking!
And I banged out a first draft. I don’t know where it came from. I gave it to my husband, the world’s best editor, who gave me notes and asked questions. I thought about them and then I knew what the play was about!
The words flowed from my fingers. Last week, I wrote THE END and I had only one more question left. What took me so frigging long?
