All posts by Jen Huszcza

But. . .But. . .But

Playwright, playwriting,

Last month, Tiffany Antone put her writing heart on her sleeve on this blog. She kept coming back to the phrase but I’m not writing full length plays as she talked about everything she was doing—and she does some great stuff.

I totally understood her pain. She was going through the Buts. Yes, I have the buts too. I might be writing away and kicking ass on a new play,  but. . .but. . .but. I might have sat through a really successful production of a short play I wrote, but. . .but. . .but.

The Buts have caused me to start smoking (which creates real butts, hahahaha), drink too much, and curl up into a little ball with my eyes tightly closed and my fists clenched.

How do you fight the Buts? I do not recommend smoking, drinking too much, or curling up into a little ball. I fight the Buts by doing yoga (skipping the little ball part), sailing, and just plain getting on with it.

Sometimes, you just gotta get on with it and say, okay, what next? Actually, that might be a good phrase to counter punch the Buts. What next? Also what can I do now?

And Tiffany, don’t worry about them full length plays. According to Wikipedia, Chekhov wrote less than ten full length plays. Less than ten. Okay, so he was a prolific short story writer. Okay, so five of those plays are considered classics. Okay, so he was also a doctor. Okay, so he died young. Still, he did the work. Remember it’s quality not quantity. Insert inspirational quote here.

It’s your time now. What are you going to do with it?

More Fun Writing Men

playwriting

I finish my blog week with something for the boys. As always, it has been a delight.

Back when I was a little girl making up adventures, all my stories had a female protagonist standing in for me.

Then I got older, and two things happened.

First, I had adventures of my own, so I didn’t need to make stuff up.

Second, I started writing male characters and kind of dug it. Then, the male characters started getting deeper and more complex.

In As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson’s character is asked how he writes women so well. His answer is: I think of a man and take away reason and accountability.

My answer to how I write men is not: I think of a woman and take away reason and accountability and tits. I work a little more intuitively.

Men are just guys. They do their guy things. They might do wrong. They might do right. They might have the house fall down around them.

I’m interested in what drives them. What sends these guys hurtling forward to their triumph or their doom? Sometimes they don’t even know. Sometimes they think they know, but they are wrong. Still, they’re a gender that’s interesting to watch.

And there are a lot of great male actors out there looking for parts to play.

Two Hundred Grand and Silliness

playwriting,

This week, I am lucking out on playwright news items. First, it was the Drama Book Shop, then Eve Ensler, then yesterday, a director friend sent me a link to a news item about David Henry Hwang winning a two hundred grand playwriting award. When are you gonna get yours? She asked in a half-joking/half-serious way which I translate as God I hate my day job.

I’m glad someone somewhere is giving playwrights a bucketful of cash. In fact, more people should give playwrights cash. Just give us money. We promise not to spend it on frivolous things like houses.

I just realized that the three news items I dealt with this week were about exhibitionism, rape, and money. How very American.

But enough of current events. I have a blogging plan, and I must follow it. I wanted to talk about a very serious topic, silliness.

Sometimes I’m writing along and singing my song, and I come up with an idea that is just plain silly. Decades of writing have taught me not to fear the silly. If an idea seems silly, I just go with it.

Over the years, I have encountered people who fear the silly. They don’t like silliness. It’s irrational. It’s too childish. Not serious. Everyone knows that theatre should be serious. Who would pay a hundred bucks to see something silly?

As playwrights, we like it when people think we’re smart. We like it when our writing shows off our intelligence and learning. However, we don’t have to be intelligent all the time. We’re not negotiating world peace or finding a cure for a disease. We’re writing plays. We can dive into the irrational.

As a theatre goer, I don’t always want to see logical plays with everything laid out smoothly. Let’s have some fun. Let’s get the folks to laugh so hard they spill red wine on their dry-cleaned shirts.

If you really want to have folks lose control, make them laugh. Pies in the face still work. Walking into walls is still hilarious. Stumbles, prat falls, or an odd farm animal.

The odder and sillier it gets, the more the audience will laugh for more.

 

New Ways To Kill Your Mother

Uncategorized, ,

So my plan for my LAFPI blog posting today was to recommend the new Colm Tóibín’s book of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother. I will get to that in just a minute.

But first, this is a blog about women playwrights, and over on Huffington Post, Eve Ensler wrote a response to the Todd Akin rape comments. You can read it here. Please Eve Ensler, get some sleep.

Now, I want to talk about a man who writes with intelligence instead of a man who speaks with stupidity.

I recently read Tóibín’s new book of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, and I highly recommend it.

Many of these essays have been published before, but together, they explore the ideas of writers and family both in work and life. For example, the aunts in Jane Austen’s novels had more power than the mothers. Many writers had dominating mothers or strained relationships with their children. How do the power dynamics within families play out in novels and dramas?

In the course of the book, Tóibín explores the work of writers fromIrelandand elsewhere. The list includes Jane Austen, Henry James, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Brian Moore, Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, Hugo Hamilton, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, James Baldwin, and Barack Obama.

As a playwright, I was happy to see several essays on playwrights. In addition to Samuel Beckett, there were essays on Sebastian Barry and Tennessee Williams. I thought the essay on Beckett and his mother could have gone a little deeper into his women plays such as Rockaby and Footfalls. However, I liked that he gave me a whole new way to look at the plays of Williams as well as insight into how an audience reacted to a Sebastian Barry play. Who owns our public figures? The public or the artist?

Reading this book, I also started thinking about the question of privacy. How much of writer’s biography is relevant to the work we are reading? A writer can draw from his or her own life, but does the audience or reader have a right to know about it? How much of an artist’s identity is beyond his or her control? How much are we the result of the savage loving of our families?

 

How Much Is That Playwright In the Window?

News, playwriting,

 

Usually a week before my blog week on LAFPI, I open up the yellow idea folder and start compiling the blog postings. I try to find a nice mix of entertainment, theory, criticism, and stuff that’s happening to me.

Last week, a really nice bloggable topic fell out of the New York Times and into my lap. The article in Saturday’s Times was about the Drama Book Shop having playwrights sit in their front window and work.

Perfect! I thought. I loved the absurdism of it.

Then, I realized that it was a sincere project.

Oh, you’ve got be kidding. I thought.

But the New York Times does not kid.

The project is called Playwright Working (which reminds me of Dead Man Walking), and Playwrights sit for two hours at a time in the window and work or browse facebook or play spider solitaire. Yes, it’s playwriting as reality TV without the TV part.

Am I jealous that these writers get to show the world how they pursue the glamorous art of playwriting? Uhm. No.

I wonder how much performing instead of actual writing the playwrights are doing. In such a situation, I would not be writing. I would be Jen pretending to write. In other words, I would be acting. Why would I want to do that? Acting is even less glamorous than playwriting. You have to put a lot of junk on your face when you act.

The whole reason I became a writer was that I didn’t want to deal with people. If it works for some writers, fine. Personally, I would rather write alone. I can play with my hair.

Hello Again Hello

playwriting, ,

 

Happy Week one hundred and twenty three, LAFPI Blog!!! Woohoo! Has this blog really been up for over two years? I swear, it doesn’t look a day over six months.

When I first started blogging for LAFPI, I figured I would stop when I ran out of ideas. Well, this is my eleventh time blogging here, and I’m still going. I wonder how many times I have to blog in order to get an LAFPI baseball cap.

My playwriting coffee has been percolating nicely. Last month, I traveled to Prescott, Arizona for yet another theatrical extravaganza produced by Tiffany Antone (producer, playwright, fellow LAFPI blogger, and the more I know her, the more I am tempted to put the words, ‘the great’ in front of her name).

My short play, POP, a meditation on the financial crisis told with balloons, was part of an evening of short plays called From the Mouths of Babes. It was great fun returning toPrescott for a second time and seeing folks I hadn’t seen in a year.

POP was directed by Cason Murphy who directed my play last year. Once again, he made a production that was dynamic and exciting. I just sat back and delighted in it. It was a moment in time that happened and then popped like a balloon. Yes, it was good. I was a happy playwright.

Cason also wrote about directing my plays, and you can read his words here.

This week, I plan to put up new posts every day Monday through Friday this week, so check back for more playwriting fun. I promise there will be no posts about how difficult it is to write because it’s August and too darn hot for any of that.

Sailing Women

Uncategorized

Almost two years ago, I wrote a blog post for LAFPI about sailing as a metaphor for playwriting.

Metaphor became reality as I found a bunch of women’s sailing organizations and got on boats. So now, I hope unite two of my passions—sailing and playwriting. Yes women playwrights, let’s take to the seas, and. . . .(okay haven’t thought that far ahead yet).

First of all, if you want to learn to sail, I highly recommend the UCLA Marine Aquatic Center. You don’t have to be a UCLA student to take sailing classes there. In fact, the majority of students in my Capri 14 class were adults in their thirties.

My sailing instructor at UCLA told me about the Women’s Sailing Association (or WSA). It’s a sailing club dedicated to women’s sailing (although men can join too). They sponsor day sails and cruises. They can even get you into racing.

Before I knew it, I was going out on day sails, starting regattas, and dancing in a pink wig on the bow of a catamaran in the Christmas parade (theatre on the water). Because of WSA, I’ve met a lot of great sailors who were generous with their time and boats and willing to teach me sailing. Also the stories are awesome.

There’s also Sea Gals down in Long Beach. Sea Gals was created to get more women out sailing. On a Saturday or Sunday, you get to sail a Catalina 37, a large race boat. You go out with an all-women crew. It’s a super supportive environment, and there’s no yelling. The boats stay in Long Beach Harbor, so there are no rolling waves.

So if you’re thinking, gosh, I’ve always wanted to sail, but I don’t know how to go about it. Or if you’ve been sailing and nobody told you  how a boat works. Or if you just want to try something different, check out these organizations. Here are their websites:

UCLA Marine Aquatic Center

Women’s Sailing Association – Santa Monica Bay

Sea Gals

And that’s the end of my blog week. As always, it’s been a delight.

Oh I Could Never Why The Heck Not

News, playwriting,

Or the post where I try to be inspirational.

I am trying to eliminate the phrase, Oh I Could Never, from my mental vocabulary. It’s not in my writing process, but I’ve been trying to eliminate it from my life thought process as well.

Oh I Could Never. It’s such a simple thought. It can be used ethically. Oh I could never shoot someone. That’s a good thought to have. Please, my friends, never stop thinking that thought.

But Oh I Could Never could also be used in negative ways to eliminate possibility. Oh I could never go and try that new thing. Oh I could never go two days without a shower.

We all have standards that we hope to live our lives by. But what about the possibility of something new? What if I stepped off the curb of Oh I Could Never into the puddle of possibility?

So whenever I think Oh I Could Never, I add the phrase Why The Heck Not. I prefer heck to hell because in this context, heck reminds me that it’s so simple that I don’t have to swear.

Oh! I almost forgot. I have to plug stuff today.

If you are in Prescott, Arizona in April, my monologue “Cake” is being performed by fellow LAFPI blogger Tiffany Antone as part of an evening called Love Makes The World Go Round. Here’s the website.

I will not be in Arizona in April, but I’m sure it will be a fun night.

 Speaking of Tiffany (who is definitely in the WTHN zone), she’s producing another festival of women’s plays. I recently blogged over on her website.

 

Comment Feedback

Audience, playwriting

We’ve all been there. We’ve all received feedback for a play and gone huh? We writers want to be diplomatic and open, but at the end of the day, some things we hear are just plain stupid.

When we receive those little gems of stupidity, we nod, smile, and say, yeah, I see. Then, we promptly forget it or put the comment on auto repeat as we drink ourselves into a stupor or walk away with our hands on our hips whispering what the f*ck while wondering why we even allowed that person to talk to us in the first place.

I won’t go into all stupid comments I have received over the years. I actually have forgotten many of them sometimes without the aid of the drunken stupor. However, there are a few that I just have to share.

Diplomatic Disclaimer: These are comments I have heard repeatedly over the course of almost twenty years, so if you think you may have said something similar to me, I have no memory of you saying it specifically. It’s not you, it’s me. All me.

You are crazy for writing that.  Wow Jen, you write crazy. Whoa, crazy stuff.

 Sometimes this comment is meant to be a compliment. Still, the implication is that I am out of mind when I work. This is not true. I am focused. I am working with an awareness of both the mental and sensual. I don’t write for therapy either.

 I don’t get it. I don’t feel it. I dig it. I love it! IIIIIIIII. . .

 The interesting thing about I-comments is that they are about the speaker saying them. They’re not about the work in question. That’s nice that you get it or don’t get it, but if you really want to engage a writer about her work, ask her a question. Questions lead to communication. That’s good. Communication is good.

It’s like Beckett. It’s Beckettesque. Very Beckett.

Beckett didn’t write my stuff. I wrote my stuff. Beckett wrote his own stuff. I respect Beckett. Usually when someone uses a term like Beckettesque (or Pinteresque or Chehovian), she (or he) can’t speak deeper about such a comparison which is not interesting to me anyway.

So what is a poor play viewer to do when she or he encounters me?

If you see me in person and want to tell me that you like my play, simply catch my eye and point to your nose with your right index finger. That’s all you have to do. I’ll know.

And if you want to compliment me, compliment my shoes because deep down, I am a girlie girl.

On Pseudonyms and Pen Names

playwriting

When the Bronte sisters were first published, they were Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

Pride and Prejudice was first written by the author of Sense and Sensibility, and Sense and Sensibility had A lady listed as author.

Nowadays, women can publish under their own names. My favorite author name for a woman is Lionel Shriver—her name is actually Lionel—she named herself because she liked it.

I have a lot of different pseudonyms. I write plays under Jen Huszcza, but I blog under different names. When I work in different forums, the voice comes from a different place and my mind works in a different way.

I’m not going to tell what my pseudonyms are. I’m not that easy.

Are pseudonyms career suicide? Shouldn’t I make ‘a name’ for myself? Shouldn’t I be a ‘brand’? Shouldn’t I let everyone know everything about me? Shouldn’t I be easily found on facebook and twitter and in the blogosphere?

I won’t insult your intelligence by answering my own rhetorical questions, gentle reader. I will say that in this age of instant access to too much information, it’s nice to be a bit elusive. I can slip in and out the backdoor without being noticed. I can steal kisses in the shadows and pick wallets out of pockets. Was I here? Was I there? Where was I?