All posts by Diane Grant

To Thine Ownself…….

I’ve whined in here before about my difficulties with readers who look at my play, The Last Of The Daytons, and find the tone inconsistent. They have very kindly suggested that it’s two plays, one a comedy and one a drama, and that the two do not belong together.

I’ve been chewing this over for some time.  I’ve tried making changes but keep returning to what I think of as a final draft.  Having reworked the play several times, having heard it in staged readings several times, knowing in my mind what it will look and sound and feel like when it’s on its feet, I think, “Leave it alone.”

One of these, so far only imagined days, I tell myself, I’ll get it on its feet.  If I’m wrong and it doesn’t work, I’ll see it.  Until then, I’m not going to change a thing.

Nicholas Kazan posted this in the WGAW and after reading it, I felt very good about that decision. I hope many of my fellow playwrights will also be encouraged by it.

Here’s the link:

And here’s the copy. Enjoy.

On Receiving “Notes”
Nicholas Kazan
Why Arthur Miller never wrote Free and Clear.

This harrowing story is the most instructive one I’ve ever heard about script notes. I repeat it to every producer and studio executive I meet.

The story reflects poorly on my parents. As a matter of privacy, I don’t normally reference my family. In this case, it’s unavoidable. My father was director Elia Kazan. He died in September 2003, a few weeks after his 94th birthday. When I flew to New York for his funeral, I heard that critic Martin Gottfried had just published a book about Arthur Miller and was giving a reading. Out of curiosity and perversity, I went, hoping to see Miller there and invite him to my father’s service.

Miller was not in attendance, but this story was waiting for me.

In 1947, Miller’s play All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics prize for Best Play, besting Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. (No comment.)Everyone eagerly awaited Miller’s next play. In anticipation, a Broadway theater was booked and a production company formed.The most eminent producer in town, Kermit Bloomgarden, wanted to produce the play.Many prominent investors, including the famous producer and director Joshua Logan, lined up to put money into the production.

Miller finished his new play, Death of a Salesman, and gave it to Elia, who loved it and agreed to direct it. Bloomgarden was equally enthusiastic.(Another prominent producer, Cheryl Crawfold, had right of first refusal but read the play and turned it down, paving the way for Bloomgarden. Crawford was the first of many experienced readers to misjudge the text. She wept at opening night, both in response to the play and to her own poor judgment.)

Having pleased his director and producer, Miller gave the play to the investors. To everyone’s shock, Josh Logan and others were horrified. They said they were withdrawing their investment because the play was “unproducable.” Not flawed. Unproducable.

Their reason? They said the audience would be unable to follow the story, unable to distinguish what was in the past from what was in the present.

Miller was plunged into despair. He consulted Elia, who now agreed with Logan’s assessment. Elia suggested Miller consolidate the impressionistic “flashbacks” into one section.Bloomgarden agreed. Miller then consulted my mother, who was a mentor to him and other playwrights; she suggested he eliminate the flashbacks altogether.

Fortified with this abominable advice, Miller rewrote his play. No one quite knows what Miller did, but when he finished, everyone agreed the result was god-awful.

Miller decided to stand by his original text: “If it’s going to fail, let it fail the way I wrote it, rather than the way I rewrote it.” Elia changed his mind again and decided to direct the play in its original form. Bloomgarten produced it. I don’t know whether Josh Logan remained an investor. I do know some investors dropped out and the financing became shaky. Miller’s former agent Leland Hayward (another extremely experienced theater person) had, sight unseen, signed on to put up $4,000; after reading the play, he cut his investment to $1,000.

Before the play went into rehearsal, there was another bump in the road. Bloomgarden decided audiences wouldn’t go see a play with death in the title. He suggested some- Thing sunnier: Free and Clear (a phrase from the play’s final scene). Those involved conducted an informal poll. According to Miller, 98 percent of those asked said they would not go see a play called Death of a Salesman.

Miller refused to budge, and this time Elia supported him.We can ask ourselves now: What would this play be if we didn’t know from the outset that Willie Loman was going to die? Would it still feel tragic? Would it work at all?

The play opened with the original structure and title, and the rest is history. The audience on opening night sat in silent shock and then exploded, rising to their feet and applauding, hooting, screaming. Many continued to clap long after the actors had finished their curtain calls. Others sat in their seats, stunned or sobbing, unable or unwilling to leave the theater.

Since then, Salesman has been done thousands of times, in virtually every country in the world. By almost any standard, it is one of the five best American dramas of the 20th century.Many critics consider it the best.

And no one has ever been confused about what was in the past and what was in the present.

I am sure you can see my questions:

—If the most successful producer of that era wanted to change the title, and if he and two of the leading directors of the time considered the play “unproducable” and further agreed on what the problem was, and if all these “experts” were wrong in every respect about a play regarded as a masterpiece, how does anyone ever dare to give notes?

—Why is it that, in Hollywood, every producer, studio executive, and development person just out of college feels entitled to make suggestions on every script they receive? How can they be so confident of their opinions? Are they truly unaware of the damage they can do?

—Why is every draft from every writer considered just a “work in progress,” a rough approximation waiting to be improved by the wise counsel of a dozen or more readers?

—Why do we writers accept notes that will destroy what we have so painstakingly created?

—And if we refuse to make destructive changes, why are we considered “difficult” rather than “principled and passionate”? Why are we not considered experts, both in general and, most especially, on the distinct universe of the script we have written?

I told the preceding story to, and asked these questions of, a friend who runs a major studio. She said, “So what does this mean? Are we supposed to give no notes at all?!”

I said, “No. Give notes, but as suggestions, not mandates. Feed the writer. If the writer is inspired by your idea, great; if not, drop the subject because the note is probably wrong. The writer may not be able to tell you why it’s wrong, but trust him or her, it is.”

The fact is: We know. We live with a script for months, often years, and we know what a script wants to be—and what it doesn’t. We also know that if, with the best of intentions, the DNA of a script is altered, the animal that results will not be pretty to look at.

I made another suggestion to my friend at the studio: “If a writer you respect believes in the script, hold a reading.Hear the text. Before you say with confidence that something doesn’t work, find out what the movie is. It’s drama, it’s alive: Give it a chance to breathe.”

Of course, a reading won’t always validate the writer’s view . . . And that’s its beauty: It simply exposes the text, usually revealing problems of some sort—either the same problems the studio sees, ones the writer fears, or problems neither anticipates.Regardless of the “result,” a reading is always a valuable and revelatory tool. It should be standard practice.

Let me be clear. I don’t mean to suggest here—to do so would be absurd—that every screenplay is a cinematic equivalent of Death of a Salesman. But accomplished and experienced writers work for months or years on a screenplay and then are given notes by executives who have to read three or six or nine screenplays over a weekend and are expected (or expect themselves) to give detailed, helpful, and well-considered notes. A lot of good work and careful thought can be overlooked by tired or overwhelmed executives.

There’s one more lesson to be gleaned from this story. Salesman broke new ground, and that was part of the problem: Being unfamiliar with what the play was doing and how it worked, readers thought it wouldn’t work at all.

Similarly, it often seems that the better a script is (the more novel and daring its approach), the less likely it is to be properly read and understood. Again: I don’t mean that every “daring” script is good or unappreciated. I do mean that the best scripts might have the most difficult time being recognized.

So the next time someone reads your script and either really hates something that you know works or makes cavalier and foolish suggestions—“just spitballing”—perhaps you should ask them: Did you ever hear a song for the first time and hate it and then two weeks later find yourself singing it?

Nicholas Kazan’s plays include Mlle. God and Blood Moon.  Among his numerous screenplays are Frances, Reversal of Fortune, and Dream Lover.

MARSHA NORMAN AND PAUL SIMON

The ICWP list posted this. Many of you may have seen the 2009 Marsha Norman essay:

http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/nov09/women.cfm

But it’s worth looking at again.

And if anybody is working on a rewrite, check out Paul Simon’s new tune REWRITE. It will keep you going.

ALWAYS A BRIDESMAID

I have a problem with one of my plays. I keep submitting The Last Of The Daytons to contests and theaters. I’ve been doing it for a long time. It has been an ATHE finalist, a semi-finalist at the O’Neill and Ashland. It has had many nibbles but no bites. Recently, Luna Stage asked to see a rewrite but then rejected it.

Because I love the play, I’ve always thought that I just haven’t found the right place for it yet. I know the story. I know the characters. I know how they talk and feel. I’ve been with them now for years and have seen them change and grow with each draft. The draft I send out now must be the sixth or seventh. Or eighth.

I thought for a while that the nature of the characters was the problem. The people could be considered out of the ordinary but many of us are out of the ordinary. I think it was John Steinbeck who, when told that his characters were too eccentric to be real, said that the disbelievers had probably not taken the time to get to know their neighbors.

(This an aside but one hard to resist. Stephen King, in his excellent book, On Writing, talks about a man he worked for who had two hooks for hands. He would put one hook in cold water and one in hot, then clamp them on someone’s neck.)

I recently received a thoughtful critique from readers at the Women’s Work Festival at White Rooster Productions in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, which they gave me permission to quote.

They didn’t have a problem with the characters.

“I like the characters in this play, they are very normal in their abnormality (talking to invisible friends, escaping from hospitals in their pajamas, etc) and that works well.”

What did disturb them was the tone. “I started out reading it as a comedy (perhaps not what you were going for?) but the climax turned violent.” It read like two plays that aren’t melding comfortably together and they thought that I should think about the tone. “Perhaps addressing the tone in the beginning and aiming towards the darker shades would be beneficial.”

Could the tone have been the problem for other readers as well?

The Co-Artistic Director, Ruth Lawrence, who is also playwright, suggested that the tone is important to tackle because “tone isn’t something you can explain to your readers. It is there on the page, not in your intentions. Especially to cold readers.”

I’m wondering how to do address this. I’ve done three staged readings and think, having seen them, that the tone remains consistent and that the end of the play is prepared for in the first two scenes – a search for a father who is never talked about and a dark note about a death in the Gulf War.

I’ll reread the play again carefully. But if I still think that the tone is consistent and the plot clear, what do I do when I send it out again? Do I add a note? A prologue? Should I keep sending it out? I have a DVD that I have offered to send along with submissions but so far, nobody has asked to see it. As a reader myself, I know that it takes time and effort to give the submissions the consideration they deserve and a DVD may just too much. (I’ll also have another look at the DVD myself.)

I’m very grateful to the White Rooster for giving me some insight into why The Last of the Daytons has always been a bridesmaid and never a bride.  If anybody out there has any ideas or has struggled with this problem, I would love to hear from them.

I would like to see this play off on a honeymoon.

THE PINNACLE

I had dreams.

Even though I’d read all the articles that assured me that creating something is a reward in itself, even though I knew I should bask in the glory of bringing life to the blank page, even though I’d been told over and over that looking at the finished work and finding it good is all a writer needs to be fulfilled, even though that Satisfaction is The Pinnacle; I was not convinced.

My heart beat with the hope that the finished work would bring joy to more than me. All the hours I’d sat in front of the computer would touch the lives of others. My play would be produced. Yes!  It would be produced in a big theater with lavish sets and costumes, brought to life by a director whose profound understanding of the work had been communicated to protean actors who every night and at matinees would speak my speech trippingly on the tongue. There would be huzzahs!

I would be in the theatre.

Now, I would just like to get to the theater.

I work until 6:30 pm and live in the Westside. Do you think I can get to a theatre in Noho on a weekend evening? One night a few Fridays ago, I tried to get to Peace In Our Time at the Antaeus Theatre.

My husband and I hopped into the car at 6:35 and looked at the 10 East on the computer. It was  solid red. We decided to take Sunset Boulevard and zipped along until we reached Kenter Blvd. Then we stopped. At 7:45, we hadn’t reached the 405 and sat, not moving, listening to KPCC. Our GPS (a girl named Olive who is very knowledgeable but who has trouble pronouncing street names) repeated that we were on the fastest route but wouldn’t get to theater until 9:05.

Finally, we called the Box Office, cancelled our tickets and turned (not an easy thing to do) for home.

The next week, a friend said that he had comp tickets for As I Like It at the Macha in West Hollywood. Could I join him? It was a Thursday evening. Surely, I could get to King’s Road in an hour and a half. At 8:35, I arrived. The door to the theater was locked. I banged on it (discreetly but persistently) and a very nice person showed me the door to the balcony. It was a short play and I was back down in the lobby not long after a found a seat.

At Theatre Palisades, the pre show talk in the lobby is not about the drumbeat for war, the fifty million without health insurance, the Lakers.  Magic words are whispered – La Brea, Topanga Canyon, the McClure tunnel. People sink exhausted onto the lobby benches, murmuring, “There were three accidents on the 10.” “I had to detour at Sepulveda.” “I’ll never do this again.”

Actors call. “There’s been a fender bender at Vermont. Please tell the stage manager.”

On summer Sunday matinees, we provide the customers coming up from Long Beach with cold compresses and Aleve.

I really shouldn’t complain. There are lots of good theaters on the Westside – Theatricum Botanicum, The Odyssey, the Edgemar, the Pico Playhouse, The Garage, the Morgan-Wixson, the Ruskin. This Friday, I saw A.R. Gurney’s The Dining Room at the 3rd Street Promenade Theatre in Santa Monica and it was great fun, beautifully directed and acted and full of good surprises.

Truly, I don’t know why I’m ranting. I could stop eating for a couple of weeks and buy a ticket to Beth Henley’s new play at the Geffen. (But that’s another blog.)

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

It’s hard to believe that the lafpi is already moving into its third year and I’d like to thank Laura, Jennie and Ella, who got us all together. I’ve met some terrific people as a result of this supportive group and am grateful for it.

The Holidays for me are always a time for thinking about family and old and new friends with gratitude and fondness. It’s a joy to reconnect with the good people who helped us keep going when we were watering the soup, and the ones who stuck around when we’d fattened up a bit, the ones with whom we share old stories and plot new adventures, who like to laugh.

That’s why I ask, “Why oh why are we supposed spend the holidays hitting the stores to buy, buy, buy?” (I know the answer to that. I’m just whining.) But, I mean, really. Television would have me believe that we are all going about giving new cars to our newest and dearest. With big red bows on the roofs. Whoa. Or purchasing big glittery pieces of jewelry. And big red toolboxes and big bottles of cologne and vodka (vodka, I can see.)

And why oh why oh why aren’t there more Holiday songs? Or fewer? (I know the answer to that, too.) When I’ve heard Winter Wonderland or worse, Deck the Halls, or even worse, Rudolph, the Rednosed Reindeer, over and over and over again in Ralph’s and Macy’s (you have to do a little shopping) on the TV and radio, or blaring from loudspeakers in open air malls, when I can’t wait for January, when I have to staunch my screams, I remember that there’s an antidote.

I go home, have a cup of tea and listen to Pete Seeger’s Precious Friend.

Now that’s a song for the Holidays. Come to think of it, for all seasons.

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to all.

KATORI HALL

Katori Hall

Katori Hall, whose two hander, The Mountaintop, opened October the 13th at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, has had an amazing and serendipitous ride to Broadway.

The thirty year old playwright, who has also acted and worked as a journalist, has a resume filled with accomplishments and awards. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, she did her undergraduate work at Columbia University, received a M.F.A. in Acting from Harvard University and studied with Christopher Durang at Julliard. She won the Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Playwrighting and Screenwriting, a Royal Court Theatre Residency,  and the Lorraine Hansberry Playwrighting Award. She was also a part of the Cherry Lane’s mentor program where she was mentored by Lynn Nottage.

However, when she finished The Mountaintop in 2007, she couldn’t get it produced. The play takes place on April 3, 1968 in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, just after Dr. King’s has delivered his famous “mountaintop” speech, and the night before he was shot dead on the balcony of that room. It portrays Dr. King as a man with flaws and doubts, who sniffs his socks and is dying for a Pall Mall. The maid, who is not who she seems, becomes his confidante. In an interview with Patrick Pacheco in the L.A. Times, Hall said, “I wanted to present a man who achieved greatness but who was really quite ordinary because when a person is presented with that, then it means that you, as an ordinary person, can achieve greatness too.”

American producers didn’t want to take a chance on a play that presented Dr. King as a person, rather than as an icon.

Then, Hall got a little help from a friend. She had acted in a play by British director James Dacre and emailed him the play. He convinced his theater to do it and the play opened in 2009. in Theatre 503, above a pub in London.

The London Paper said, “Director James Dacre’s production is nothing short of magnificent. I won’t reveal the twist, suffice to say you will laugh, cry and possibly leave the theatre a better person.

It then transferred to the West End and was the surprise winner of the 2010 Olivier Award for Best New Play.

Here comes the truly serendipitous moment. A Canadian independent producer, Marla Rubin, saw the opening night performance of the play at Theatre 503 and thought it was amazing. She brought in an American producer, Jean Doumanian, and they began to put it together for Broadway, which demands stars. They cast Samuel L. Jackson, who had been an usher at Dr. King’s funeral, and who had always wanted to play him. Halle Berry was first cast as Camae, but had to drop out and Angela Bassett took over.  Branford Marsalis wrote incidental music for the production.

Two and a half years later, The Mountaintop opened on Broadway and is still playing to capacity houses. “It been quite a journey,” says Rubin.

The play closes on January the 22nd but Katori Hall has moved on to her next production. The Signature Theater Company selected her to be part of their first so-called “Residency Five,” which guarantees at least three full productions over the next five years, and her new play, Hurt Village, will run at off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre Company, from February 7 through March 18, 2012, with an official February 27 opening.

NELL LEYSHON

In November, ALAP sponsored a panel about the fight for equal opportunities by women playwrights, with writers Jean Colonomos, Kristen Lazarian, Jan O’Connor, and me, moderated by Dan Berkowitz. One of the things we agreed upon was that women playwrights in the theater who make it to the top are the exceptions to the 20% rule.

I wondered who they were and how they made it into the rarified spheres.

Nell Leyshon at the Globe

One of the most rarified must be Shakespeare’s Globe in Stratford On Avon, which commissioned a woman, Nell Leyshon, to write a play for the theater for the first time since 1599. Bedlam, based on the real 18th century Bedlam lunatic asylum, in London, opened at the Globe in 2010, only 411 years after it began.

As the opportunities for women in British theatre don’t seem much different from those in L.A. – only 23% of directors are female and fewer than a fifth of playwrights getting work staged are women – I don’t know if I was more astounded to hear the Globe never had a play written by a woman or that they’d broken down and commissioned one.

However, Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe, seems to be on our side. He’s said: “There was a rather dull masculinity which was in favour in the 1990s. That was the fashion then, but women seem to be coming back in at the moment.” Leyshon says that women are benefiting from the “snowball” effect, and are being spurred on by each other’s success: “When you have women who do it, you get a build-up of self-belief.”

Of writing for the Globe, Leyshon says, “It’s something that had to be done. It’s like losing your virginity.”

I hadn’t heard of Leyshon, who was born in Glastonbury, England, and lives in the county of Dorset. She began writing short stories and novels while studying English at Southampton University and taking care of her first child at the same time. After she graduated, she had another son, took on teaching to pay the bills, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton.

She didn’t write her first play until she was forty.

When she started writing for theater, Leyshon recalls, people would say, “’She’s a woman writer,’ and I didn’t understand that. You’d never say, ‘She’s a woman novelist’ or, ‘She’s a woman journalist.’ But in theatre, you do.”

Before she began dramatic writing, she had her moments of despair. She says, “I think women often have problems with self-belief, which sounds a bit boring, but they do.” In 2000, she built a bonfire in her garden and burned all her early work.

When she wrote a radio play, she said, “The feeling was electric.” The radio play, which she co-wrote with Stephen McAnena, won the Richard Imison Memorial Award 2003 for the best dramatic work broadcast by a writer new to radio. She now writes regularly for the BBC. Her play Comfort Me With Apples won her the Evening Standard award for most promising playwright. Then her adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now opened in Sheffield in 2007, and transferred to the Lyric Hammersmith in London.

Bedlam got mixed reviews. Edward Glass of Online Review London, was one of the kindest, calling the play “almost worth the wait,” writing that “The whole would have been magnificent, if the author had pushed the boundaries more and the darker moments of the play really had been dark.”

It sounds to me like a marvelous spectacle. From Edward Glass again: “The play is packed with a wonderful rag-bag of humorous drinking songs, both Georgian and later, all complemented with ingenious choreography. The best were the song about a gin bottle (which goes astray in a marital bed) and the cheeky Oyster Nan, about a girl who shuts and opens like an Oyster…Characters sail through the standing audience in a two man gondola, and the bedlamites water the stage causing flowers to pop up from nowhere to the tune of An English Country Garden. The fan dance in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (my favourite scene of the play) provided a visual delight.”

I’ve now seen three Shakespeare plays from the Globe at the Broad in Santa Monica, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives Of Windsor, and A Comedy of Errors, and have been knocked out every time by the quality of the productions. The Broad is bringing over a Globe production every year and I’m hoping that soon, I’ll see a revival of Leyshon’s Bedlam in Santa Monica and more from women playwrights at the Globe to follow.

TAKING A RISK

Charles McNulty, of the L.A. Times, in an article about Nicholas Hytner, the director of Britain’s National Theatre, said that he believes that much of our theater is a result of “the crabbed and cowering bottom-line mentality that is turning far too many of our theaters into the equivalent of generic shopping malls,” and although I think that’s harsh, I have often thought that if I had to see yet another production of The Odd Couple (“It’s Neil Simon. It will sell!”) I would think first about wading far out into the Pacific with a brick in my hand.

Community theaters, in particular, are accused of producing only chestnuts, farces, musicals and murder mysteries.

This year, Theatre Palisades decided to buck the trend. A community theater in the Pacific Palisades, it mounted an excellent production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning drama Rabbit Hole.

Elizabeth Marcellino of the Palisades Post gave it a rave review. Under the headline, Theatre Palisades Delivers Great Drama, she wrote “Theatre Palisades took a risk in staging the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole, but that daring paid off as early as opening night, when the cast delivered an astonishingly strong ensemble performance. …Rabbit Hole is cause for celebrating the fact that Pacific Palisades has a local theatre able to put up such a great production, charging only $20 for the privilege of watching terrific theatre. Go see it.”

But people didn’t come. The theater advertised in the community and online. It offered half price tickets, twofers. Members of Sold Out Crowd and Theater Extras didn’t come. It didn’t pull Goldstar and LA Stage Alliance customers. People from the community stayed away. Theater members didn’t come.

Subscribers said, “Can I use my ticket for the next show?” One said, “Tell me this is good. My husband is in the car and doesn’t want to come in.” Several women said that their husbands wouldn’t come.

And everybody tried to figure out why.

Some thought it was because the economy is in such bad shape. People are struggling and they want to be lifted out of reality, want to hear about happy times. They want to laugh. It’s not a new thought. Last week, I heard actors rehearsing the next show, a comedy, Moonlight and Magnolias, by Ron Hutchison. One character was shouting, “People go to the movies because real life stinks.” There’s some truth in that.

I think that the subject matter kept people away, a subject that has nothing to do with economic hard times. As soon as people heard that it was about a family’s recovering from the accidental death of a four year old child, they balked, saying “We have enough sorrow in our lives. Why look for more?” “That’s too intense for me.”

Initially, I didn’t want to see it. I’d read it and thought it was very well written, with great parts for actors, but I didn’t know if I wanted to watch people in such pain. When I did attend, I was very moved, sometimes to laughter as well as tears, and went to see it again. In fact, most who saw it liked it very much. One audience member said, “Keep doing this kind of theater.” Subscribers who did attend also wrote to say how glad they were that they had come.

Go figure.

Rewrite

I need to rewrite. I want to rewrite. I will rewrite.

My comedy, A Dog’s Life, has been sitting in soft copy inside my Mac for several years, now.  Lately, it’s been calling me, over and over, bleating, “Rework me.” I can no longer ignore it.

I’m going to rewrite. Now.

I’ll start with Act One, Scene Two. I remember where the scene suddenly sagged and I can fix that. Here I go. I turn on the computer. I will not look at my email. Just a quick look at YouTube on the way to the file. Huh! Isn’t that astounding? All of Alice’s Restaurant is on YouTube. And Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger sing Precious Friend together. I’m crazy about that song. I wonder when the concert was? Well, I won’t look for it, now. I’ll just listen to Alice’s Restaurant and then plunge in. Though I should vacuum first. I’ve been putting that off. No, stop! I’ll just take the vacuum out of the closet and reward myself with a quick carpet clean after I’ve spent at least an hour on Act One, Scene Two. Best to get out of YouTube, now. Right? Who knew that Arlo Guthrie was still touring after so many years? And with his whole family! OK. To the file.

I should probably read the whole play through to see if the structure is more or less sound, see what kind of overall impression it leaves before I start cutting and reshaping. But, my God, look at the mess beside the computer. Why don’t I clear everything away first, so I can think clearly.

Oho. What’s King Lear doing here? I was reading it last night, well, I was reading it at work, if truth be told, and brought it home. Where was I? End of Act Three? I’ll just check. Is it a good play or what? Those disgusting sisters and that gory business with the eyes. Gross. It really is hard to put down and the thing is, I’ve never seen it or read it before. I saw The Dresser. Who wrote that? Ronald….I’ll look it up…Ronald Harwood…so I knew that the actor who plays Lear has to have a lot of stamina and a voice that can be heard over the wind machine. Where is that in the play? Here it is, “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” Great stuff. I should probably read a little more to warm up the brain. The Fool is the smartest one of them all, of course. Love him.  Wow! By the end of Act Five, there are bodies all over the place – Oswald’s dead, and Cornwall, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Edmund, Lear himself.

Huh! Do you know? I don’t know what happened to the Fool. Did he die, too? Let me look.

OMG, he disappears after Act III, Scene VI. Kent says to him “Thou must not stay behind.” And then he’s gone from the play. I mean, gone! I’d better take a second and google Fool, King Lear. Good thing the computer is still on.

Aha. Here’s what Schmoop says:

“The Fool disappears after Act 3, Scene 6, and nobody ever explains where he’s gone. The only possible reference to the Fool after that is in the final scene, when King Lear says “And my poor fool is hanged” (5.3.17). This could mean a couple of things: 1) Lear might be referring to Cordelia with a pet name, “fool,” since Cordelia has just been hanged by Edmund’s goons. 2) Lear could be literally talking about his Fool – perhaps the Fool was also hanged by Edmund’s henchmen or, perhaps he hung himself out of despair. It’s hard to say what really happens to the Fool. Some literary critics even speculate that the Fool and Cordelia were played by the same actor. They never appear onstage together, so some scholars hypothesized that the part was double cast, and that the Fool had to disappear when Cordelia came back into the play.”

That’s what Schmoop says. But you know what? I think that maybe, just maybe, Shakespeare didn’t do a rewrite!!!!

I hit the spacebar, the file comes up. A Dog’s Life. I begin.

ALCYONE FESTIVAL 3

Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes’s, The Forest Princess, was the inspiration for Jennifer Fawcett’s The Invaders.

Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes (1818-1863) came from an American theatrical family. Her mother and father were both actors, were ambitious for their daughter, and put her on the stage when she was in her teens. (Some things never change.) She got lukewarm reviews as an actress but learned to write plays.

Like many of us, she took her stories from incidents of the day. Octavia Bragaldi was developed from something that happened in Kentucky at the time and transformed into a story set in 15th century Italy. It also had a terrific leading role for herself!

She married another actor, E.S. Conner, and the two appeared and toured together in the play. She also recognized the public’s interest in Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, and wrote The Forest Princess, based on them, which became hugely popular.

Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion, was adapted by Coya Paz and called FA$HION.

Anna Cora Mowatt

Anna Cora Mowatt was born a year later than Charlotte Barnes and died in 1870. She, too, hasn’t been forgotten entirely. Fashion was also adapted by Bonnie Milne Gardner and produced by Ohio Wesleyan University in 2008.

Her life was full. Born in Bordeaux, France, she was six when her family returned to the U.S. She eloped when she was fifteen and was published by the time she was seventeen, using the pseudonym Isabel. She wrote two novels, using the name Helen Berkley, and wrote a biography of Goethe, as Henry C. Browning.

I wonder if she thought that publishing under a man’s name would make the book sell better? I’ve seen that discussion on many a list today. Like many of us, too, she took a day job as a public reader to make ends meet. (Edgar Allen Poe attended her first performance.)

She was also an actress, and toured until 1854.

In December 1853, her book Autobiography of an Actress was published.

 

Pauline Hopkins’ s Peculiar Sam, was the inspiration for J. Nicole Brooks’ Shotgun Harriet.

Pauline Hopkins

Pauline Hopkins (1859 – August 13, 1930), born in Portland, Maine, was an amazingly prolific, influential African-American novelist, activist, editor and historian, who is still studied and written about today.

The Pauline Hopkins Society, formed in 2009, continues to promote her work, including four novels, and numerous short stories, one of which is considered the first African American mystery. She, too, sometimes used a pseudonym, using her mother’s name, Sarah A. Allen.

Her novels were serialized in the Colored American Magazine, a literary journal for which she became the editor. Through her editorial work, fiction and non-fiction, she emerged as one of the era’s preeminent public intellectuals and one of its most prominent editors, using the magazine to write about black history, to promote racial and gender equality, and to fight for economic justice.

A follower of W.E.B Dubois, she ran afoul of a new editor of the magazine who supported Booker T. Washington’s policies of conciliation, and she was fired. However, she continued her writing and activism until she tragically died in a building fire.

She wrote only one play, a musical, first called Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad, and later revised as Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad. First performed in 1879, when she was twenty, it is one of the earliest-known literary treatments of slaves escaping to freedom. Perhaps, I say, speculating, it took the form of a musical, because into the 1880’s, she performed as a vocalist with her family ensemble, the Hopkins Colored Troubadours.

All five multi talented women shared a love of words and of the theater and I’m glad that Halcyon has given their works new life.