Last month I was surprised when PHISHING called out to me from the drawer begging for air. The 2008 play is set post-Katrina on a Louisiana bayou, and is centered on a young woman, J.J. (Justice Jaeger), an expert computer hacker, who is hired by a Presidential candidate to “fish” for dirt about a much hated rival. The story starts there revealing J.J.s traumatic youth and search for self. The time is now.

However PHISHING is challenged by a whole new set of dramatic circumstances today; we’re now post-2008 Presidential election, post-2010 John Edward’s baby/mama reveal, and only beginning to realize the full tragedy of the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill disaster. Three weeks ago I decided to cut the songs, alter the antagonist’s gender from male Janus to female Janis, change one character’s ethnicity from Black to Latino, and gender-bend another; male or female. Yet how these events change and shape character arcs and motivations, I have yet to imagine.

Whatever PHISHING finally turns out to be, I begin the rewriting process today. I am leaving the house soon to meet with a group of young actors and their instructor in the Los Angeles environs to witness a performance and discuss casting. On Thursday, June 10^th we read from the play, and discuss it. I am invited to return on Tuesday, June 15^th with revisions.

I look forward to sharing my reflections with the LAFPI blog as I begin the process of rewriting a work so representative of old heartache, as well as revitalized hope and vision for its and my future.

More tomorrow…

Erica Bennett

In December 2009 I also began a new play, WATER CLOSET. It is about two women of Dutch-German descent, who are dealing with the effects of two wars nearly sixty years apart; a revised draft was completed in May, and submitted to several theaters and contests around the country.

In the summer of 2009 my cowboy play in one-act, JOLLY AND BEAN, was stage-read at the Newport Theatre Arts Center for the Orange County Playwrights Alliance of which I am an active member. In the fall of 2009 my play about a young Asian-American woman whose life is flashing in front of her eyes, FREED, received a staged-reading at the 2^nd Annual Laguna Beach New Play Festival, and at the LA Women’s Theatre 20% New Works Festival.

The last three theatre experiences are particularly remarkable in that they all began similarly to PHISHING. One, I chose the directors; the last three were all led by the same professional female director, PHISHING was led by a different professional female actor/director. In all four cases I worked with and assisted the directors as Producer, and revised the scripts. In all four cases, we made casting decisions together, as collaborators. In all four cases, we also determined together that I would only go to the rehearsals to which they invited me.

However, the last three theatre experiences sharply differ from PHISHING in that they were all allowed to develop and grow naturally over time without the gross interference by a non-professional without any apparent formal theater training or education.

For after my faith in her direction of my words and story was securely understood by all, those three theatre experiences actually grew to the point where I was invited by the director to give notes to her actors. She clearly understood that I was working only to support her vision of my material, because I had collaborated enough in its development to trust that she was working toward achieving mine. Bingo: faith, trust, collaboration; that’s what I had been seeking all along.

While it’s also pretty clear that I haven’t been sitting around for two years wallowing and worrying about my 2008 OC storefront theater failures, it was only after those three last awesome theatrical experiences that my PHISHING wounds finally began to heal.

More later…

Erica Bennett

I began writing plays in 1999 to escape the horrors of chemotherapy. Ten years later I remain a dedicated librarian and archivist who writes plays. I was informed just this past Thursday that I am also ten-years cancer-free from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. However, I am not certain that cancer survivors can ever really turn off the ticking clock.

Earlier this year I decided that I no longer write for anybody else but me; no short contests, or 24-hour festivals. I am freshly committed to writing dramatic plays about American women, regardless of ethnicity or country of origin, and the quintessential issues that confound us: men and babies, or lack thereof. LOL.

However by the fall of 2008 I was just fairly recovered from my PHISHING experience, and I began directing and producing the first production of my 2006 one-act play for students, EL PRIMER DIA DE CLASES. Over the 2008/2009 academic school year the play was co-produced by several and featured twenty or more community college students, who were taking classes in my college’s Ethnic Studies Department. This unique group of young adults had organized, discovered and read my play, and decided to adopt it as one of their several projects. I was extremely grateful to be honored in this fashion.

The play was actually the culmination of my 2002-2005 work as a UCLA graduate student in library science where I also achieved an emphasis in archival studies. It was while researching a classroom assignment that I first connected viscerally to the story of a young Orange County Latina, Sylvia Mendez, who was denied entrance to an all-white elementary school in the mid-1940s because of the color of her skin. It became my mission to bring her story out of the archives for the benefit of the community, who I thought would benefit most from its retelling.

For those unfamiliar with it, Ms. Mendez’ story grew into a matter of national historical significance. Her father, Gonzalo Mendez, led a group of five fathers representing 5000 children of Latin or Mexican descent in a class action lawsuit entitled Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al. in the California federal courts in 1945. The case won on appeal in 1947 ultimately desegregating California, and setting the precedent for Brown vs. Board of Education, which desegregated the United States seven years later.

Early in 2009 my play was chosen to be included in the new California Social Studies Civil Rights curriculum for primary and secondary school teachers. I followed up in the spring of 2009 by writing formal oral history interview questions with students and with the college produced, and directed the videotaping of memories of as many of the surviving family members related to the case as I was able to contact and coordinate.

In the fall of 2009 I cut a forty-minute documentary film with a talented student editor that wove together video of the play’s production with the oral histories. TALES OF A GOLDEN STATE: THE MENDEZ V. WESTMINSTER STORY screened in November 2009 for the community, and was submitted to a local public broadcaster. We were invited to share the film in full and in part with audiences at the Nixon Presidential Library and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles in early 2010.

More in a second or two…

Erica Bennett

In December 2007/January 2008 I wrote a play with music entitled PHISHING for what the OC terms a “storefront theater” whose main requirement was that it be set on the same set as their A-show scheduled in the 8pm slot. It was selected for production, my third at this theater. However, two weeks before it opened, after the second rehearsal on the set, I recommended that it be pulled from production after witnessing and being a party to a perfect theatrical storm. It was.

Long story short, early in pre-production, with the infinite wisdom attainable only from years of labor as a kitchen cabinet refinisher, storefront theater actor, guitarist in a touring band, and so much more, the music director I had attached to the project, who I considered a friend and who was also an insider at the theater where the play was being produced, told me that I had written a “good” play, but that I needed to “go away”, so that he and the director could make it “great”. Our relationship never recovered.

My happy baggage includes a BA in Theater with an emphasis in Acting and an MLIS with an emphasis in Archival Studies. I have read some more than once of the great playwright autobiographies, including Moss Hart’s ACT ONE, which had an indelible impact on me. I’ve read a great many plays, acted in and witnessed many more.

I actually pursued a career in the entertainment industry working as a writer’s assistant with dramatic television writers, several of whom are female show runners. I worked in LA in this capacity for approximately ten years before leaving to reeducate myself, and finally achieved my position as a community college faculty librarian in the OC in the fall of 2006.

Thus I came to this theater specifically in early-2007 hoping not only to become involved with the community I had just moved into, but also with the naïve? understanding that in the professional theatre at least, the playwright is considered an important collaborator.

What I was told directly, and indirectly when I didn’t “go away” because I was attached to the production as Producer, was that storefront theater actors are intimidated by the presence of the playwright in rehearsal. In other words “actors get confused about who’s in charge”, and that their theater is a director’s medium.

While I am trained to understand this to be true in film, in my experience television is very much a writer’s medium, and I believed that the theatre was sacrosanct. I am a trained actor, yet conversely, I always longed for access to the playwright. So theirs were philosophies I didn’t understand, even as much as I agree that the prospect of meeting the playwright is daunting.

Ultimately, however, the result was that this theater and I had extreme difficulty reconciling my expectations and training with theirs, so I pulled my other new drama scheduled for production in the fall of 2008, and walked away.

More tomorrow…

Erica Bennett