All posts by Kitty Felde

About Kitty Felde

Award-winning public radio journalist, writer, and TEDx speaker Kitty Felde hosts the Book Club for Kids podcast, named by The Times of London as one of the top 10 kidcasts in the world. The Los Angeles native created the Washington bureau for Southern California Public Radio and covered Capitol Hill for nearly a decade, explaining how government works to grownups. Now she explains it to kids in a series of mystery novels and podcasts called The Fina Mendoza Mysteries. Kitty was named LA Radio Journalist of the Year three times by the LA Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists.

A Third Ear

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Kitty Felde – January 22, 2011

It’s so helpful to have someone else read your work. 

I know that’s obvious, but I’m always surprised when I do share my plays with someone else.  They see things in it that even I did not.  And ask questions that either I’ve been avoiding or never thought of asking myself.

The challenging part is finding the right person and the right environment. 

We’ve all been in situations where the feedback for the playwright was less than helpful.  I attend lots of readings.  (Yes, I know it’s a theatre’s excuse NOT to fully produce new work…) It’s helpful to me as a playwright to hear how someone else is tackling a problem and getting themselves out of it.  Or not.  And it’s easier for me to look objectively at THEIR work and see what needs to be done.   I’m rarely shy about sharing what I think is a helpful observation.

But I cringe in a feedback session when an audience member gushes, “don’t change a thing!”  Few plays don’t need a thing changed.  That kind of feedback is almost worse than a critique.

The hard part is listening with an objective ear.  And discarding most of what you’ve heard.  Those few nuggets that ring true are the ones to hold on to. 

But perhaps the most valuable third ear is that of a trusted dramaturg, director, or fellow playwright.  Not too many of them.  Too many voices can confuse and cause you to shut down completely.  But find the ones you trust.  

I miss my LA playwriting group, which was my group of third ears.  I haven’t yet found a group here in DC.  But my weekly Skype meetings with Omaha playwright Ellen Struve are my lifeline.  She sees things I have missed and asks questions I hadn’t thought of.  And she knows when to leave it alone until I can figure it out for myself. 

Do you have a trusted third ear?

Caffeine, please

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Kitty Felde – January 21, 2011

Time and energy seem to be my biggest obstacles to writing these days.  I have a day job where I’m writing a lot.  And running all over town.  And shocking though it may be to admit, I just don’t have as much energy as I used to.  

I consume vast amounts of tea and chocolate to fuel my writing periods, but it’s just not enough.  There aren’t enough hours in the day for work, exercise (ballet and swimming), opening the door for the cat, and kissing my husband.  Oh, and many days I’d much rather be pursuing my other creative outlet: sewing.  I can spend an entire weekend at my sewing machine and plan entire trips to various cities just to shop their fabric stores.  (My last trip to NYC was split between seeing theatre and seeing the Balenciaga exhibit and the costume exhibit at Lincoln Center.)

I’m trying to take the long view.  I’ve written ten plays over two decades.  I don’t have to do it all in 2011.  I am entitled to just sit around and be a vegetable sometimes.  I don’t have to write everyday. 

But that’s the rub, isn’t it?  On days when I don’t write, I’m not as nice a person to those around me.  Growl.

Guess I’ll summon the energy to write a few lines.

A Dream of a Play

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Kitty Felde – January 20, 2011

Have you ever dreamed about writing a fabulous play?  Usually such dreams involve a Tony or a string of productions or actors like Alec Baldwin and Colin Firth fighting to play roles in your work. 

But do we ever dream about the actual WRITING of a play? 

I did.

Of course, I can’t remember most of it.  But even in my sleeping state, I knew that I’d forget 99% of the wonderful plot devices, character development, sparkling dialogue, etc, etc.  So I kept telling myself in my dream to remember one thing.  Just one thing.  And when I woke up, that one thing is all I remembered.  It boiled down to two words: vegetable juggling.  Which actually meant something to me and made its way into a scene I was writing.

It’s the only time I’ve ever had this experience.  How about you?  Have you found a way to tap into your subconscious?  Tips, please!

Act Two, Scene Four

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Kitty Felde – January 19, 2011

One other thought about writing this ‘trick myself into writing something’ play.  I’ve decided to try some of the techniques I admire in other plays but never employ in my own. 

I rail against ‘kitchen sink dramas’ all the time and crave a real theatrical experience.  But how often do I write them myself?  Not often enough.

Since this children’s play I’m writing “doesn’t really matter” (that’s what I keep telling myself to stop putting pressure on myself to make it FABULOUS) I can experiment, get outside my comfort zone. 

So here are my rules:

Simplify.  I’m always writing large cast pieces with complicated plots.  For this piece, I’ve decided to simplify the play at its core: it’s the story of a relationship between a girl and her grandmother.  All other characters come and go. 

Well, that was the first thought.  Now a best friend has cropped up for the girl and he’s threatening to become a more fully realized character.  But okay.  Everybody ELSE comes and goes.

Dare to offend.  I’m fairly polite and probably overly politically correct in my personal and professional life.  Why be that way onstage?  I’m going to RISK offending people.  Writing characters that are not from my background or life experience and bring troublesome images on stage.  Yes, in a children’s play.  It will go over the heads of the kids and drive the parents crazy.  Which is the point.

Make stage magic.  My Skype playwriting pal Ellen Struve described a very bad production of “A Christmas Carol” that was saved by one thing: it snowed – not just onstage, but also IN the audience.  Magic happened somewhere in that theatre.  That’s what I want to try onstage.  Vegetables dance.  Pictures talk.  We’ll see how far I can pull this off.  But just giving yourself permission to try things is fun. 

No judgments until you get to the end of the first draft.  I’m making notes about this or that (didn’t I already write a similar scene?  Isn’t this scene inappropriate for the age range of the audience?), but I’m not trying to fix anything.  Yet.  The goal is to get to the end. 

 Have some fun.  So far, so good.

Act Two, Scene Three

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Kitty Felde – January 18, 2011

I keep coming up with ways to trick myself into writing.

I have an act two problem with a play I’ve been struggling with for several years.  It’s the one about which my husband keeps saying, “why don’t you just let it go?”  But you know how it is.  It’s like the troubled kid you know you can see through the bad times so he’ll become an upstanding citizen when he’s done growing up.  So I know I’m committed to that play. 

But I’ve been stuck for months trying to finish act two.  And not writing a thing.

So I’ve decided to trick myself.

The very first play I ever wrote was a melodrama, “Shanghai Heart.”  As an actor, I had played a season in lovely Oceano, California with The Great American Melodrama and Vaudeville Theatre, playing 12 year old ingénues (I had just graduated college!)  Some of the plays were classics, some newer knock offs. 

Melodramas rarely get the kind of serious dramaturg attention that other genres get.  Even musical comedy is taken more seriously.  So when the urge came for me to write my first play, I chose a melodrama.  I knew the style.  But more importantly, I told myself, if the play stunk, no one would know.  It was a melodrama, for heaven’s sake. 

This kind of ploy worked pretty well when I was freelancing as a journalist for several years.  The days that my story ideas were rejected, I told myself I wasn’t a journalist, I was really a playwright.  When my plays came back in that sad, beaten up envelope, I told myself I wasn’t really a playwright, I was a journalist.  Schizophrenic, but it worked for me.

Of course, in my heart of hearts, I was going to write the BEST melodrama on planet earth.  And with a cast of ten (TEN!  What was I thinking?) I had a lot of characters to create and plots to keep straight.  But in the end, my tale of mistaken identity and love on San Francisco’s Barbary Coast was a hit.

The Los Angeles Times said, “Felde knows the melodrama form and has created an admirably intricate plot involving lost children, double amnesia, filched land deeds, a displaced Mountie, vamps, chorines, an evil foreigner, revenge and love triumphant.”

 Drama-Logue raved, “clever, talented and resourceful Kitty Felde…we should be hearing more from this versatile young lady.”

 I went on to write ten other plays. 

 And then got stuck in act two hell.

 So back to my solution. 

 I decided to choose another genre that’s gotten short shrift: plays for young audiences. 

 I’m a Helen Hayes judge here in Washington (kind of like the Ovations or LA Drama Critics Circle awards) and because I’m on the New Plays committee, I see a lot of new kids shows.  And unfortunately, a lot of them are bad.  (I know because the kids I’ve borrowed as my theatre companions tell me that on the drive home.)

 So I decided to write a kids show, using the same rationale I used to write that very first play: if it was bad, who would know?

 Now, before anyone gets all hot and heavy, I know kids’ theatre should be the BEST we have to offer.  Otherwise, why would kids ever pay the big bucks to attend theatre as adults?  And I have seen some WONDERFUL theatre designed for kids that’s MUCH better than the dreck offered to adults.  In my heart of hearts, that’s the play I want to write.  But I won’t admit it to myself.  Not just yet.

 www.kittyfelde.com

Act Two Hell, scene two

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Kitty Felde – Martin Luther King Day

Okay.  All that stuff I wrote a few months ago about tips to dig yourself out of Act 2 hell?  It didn’t work for me.  

I was cooking along on a long-delayed rewrite of a play that’s haunted me for more than a decade.  I’d even made it into the middle of Act 2, up to the big climax scene.  And then I fell apart.

I made the mistake of bringing 30 pages to my old writing group when I was in LA this past fall.  Turns out, it was a big mistake – mostly  because I hadn’t yet slogged through the rest of the first draft.  In other words, I hadn’t yet solved act two. 

The notes my old writing buddies gave me were terrific.  And made sense.  Unfortunately, knowing what I’d need to change in the second draft made going on to the end of the first draft seem overwhelming.  I lost heart.  I lacked courage.  Why write lines for characters I knew I’d have to excise in the next draft?  It seemed like a betrayal to those characters.  And if one of those main characters was going to change along the way, who knew if writing a first draft ending was even appropriate anymore?   And on and on and on. 

I know I’m overthinking this.  (A writer overthinking?  Shocked, I tell you.  Shocked!)  But I have come up with Plan B.

So here it is: I started a new play.

I know.  This is dangerous.  It’s like serial dating.  You might never get to the commitment stage…in playwriting terms, I might never get to the end of the first draft.   I’ll just add to my closet full of great ideas that never got finished. 

But I overcame my own warnings and moved ahead.  And I suspect it might work.  In fact, it might even work for you. 

Details tomorrow.

 www.kittyfelde.com

The dreaded “M” word – Marketing

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Back in the dark ages, when I was an actor, I spent most of my time marketing myself to get that next job. Pictures, postcards, showcases, it was exhausting.

And now, as a playwright, I spend so much of my limited time sending out plays, writing query letters, sending out – again – postcards, trying to let the world know about my plays. It’s exhausting.

I’d be curious to know your regime. Do you have a website? What do you have on it? Is it useful? Has it led to any productions or readings?

Do you send out postcards for every show? Who do you send them to?

I’m putting together a new postcard right now. I’ve got my pal Arnold (http://www.yelp.com/biz/arnolds-copy-and-printing-studio-city-2) to design one touting my many successes and I’m going to send it out to every theatre in LA and DC. And everywhere I’ve ever submitted. And every regional theatre in the country. But does anyone really read these things or do they go straight to the trash?

Got any other ideas?

www.kittyfelde.com

Skyping your way to a finished play

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Thank God for technology!

I still consider myself an LA playwright, but I spend most of my time these days in Washington DC. My day job keeps me on Capitol Hill. But the move east came at a cost. I lost not only the glorious year-round weather of southern California and my Dodgers and decent Mexican food, I also lost my theatrical community. Most particularly, I lost my writing group.

For more than a decade, I’ve spent every Thursday night with a group of writers under the umbrella of Ensemble Studio Theatre Los Angeles. I’ve watched plays grow and plays die. I’ve seen playwrights blossom and run with their plays. And I’ve seen writers ignore constructive criticism and their plays just sit there. Or worse, get produced and have critics print the same criticism that was voiced with love in the group. I miss that third ear, that deadline of having to produce pages to bring in. Writing is lonely enough. The Lab was my writing home.

So I’ve learned to improvise.

I was lucky enough to be invited to The Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska twice in the past couple of years. I’ve had two plays read there. But the most valuable part of the experience was meeting other playwrights struggling with the same act two problems, conundrums with directors, and panic about sending out scripts. I found another community. The only problem is that none of us live in the same city.

But then I discovered Skype. Now, every Tuesday night, my Omaha pal Ellen Struve and I have a one hour phone appointment. Every week, we email each other a few pages – a new scene or the rewrite of something we’ve been working on. And for an hour, we discuss the work. Half an hour for her, half an hour for me. I’ve been privileged to watch Ellen’s magical play REQUIRED READING FOR GIRLS grow and mature and take shape. She’s been there to talk me down from the roof when I was ready to hit the delete button and give up. We save time at the end to discuss plays we’ve seen or read – to find out what makes a play sing and shake our heads in wonder at the “hot” plays that do nothing for us. It’s my small theatrical community in cyberspace.

Technologically, we could add half a dozen members or more. And maybe we will when we’re finished with the plays we’re working on right now.

But if you’ve been unsuccessful at finding a playwriting group in your part of town, try a virtual group via Skype. Go see shows and readings to find the playwright whose work speaks to you, the person you could learn something from, the writer who you would trust with your work. Contact them. See if they’re also looking for a theatrical community of writers. And make a weekly appointment for an hour. And write that play.

www.kittyfelde.com

Lessons from a rough production

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For the second night of the production of my Bosnian war crimes play A PATCH OF EARTH, the whole kit and caboodle packed up and moved to the Noyes Museum, a charming art museum in the woods, near the seashore.

The stage was completely different. The museum is built on three levels, with all sorts of odd angles and such. The stage took over the bottom floor, crammed in among the sculptured pieces of art glass. But the compactness of the surroundings brought the audience right into the action, much more intimate than a proscenium stage.

Oh, there was one other new element to the show: a new actor was playing the lead Drazen Erdemovic tonight. On book. And he was terrific.

It wasn’t until after the show that I heard the whole story from the other actors in the show, all of them hungry to explain what happened. I learned the distracted actor of the night before who couldn’t remember any of his lines was no last minute substitution. He was the actor originally cast in the role. Apparently he never learned his lines. And then he disappeared a week before the show opened. Some speculated it was drugs, some suggested he spent those missing days in jail. But the director gave him another shot.

And the cast was furious. They said they felt particularly betrayed because they had poured heart and soul into telling the tale of a war criminal. And they wanted the author to be proud. After the performance the night before, they wanted me to know they could do better.

The morning of the second show, the director fired the lead actor. The assistant director stepped up to the plate, script in hand, and turned in an AMAZING performance. And the rest of the cast sparkled, thrilled to have the opportunity to create that world and make those characters truly come alive.

That amazing production at Richard Stocker College made me realize something important. It wasn’t about me. And “my” play. I remembered why I wanted to write A PATCH OF EARTH. Because a story I heard at the war crimes tribunal so haunted me, it wouldn’t leave me alone. And just using my skills as a radio journalist, I couldn’t get anyone else to care about this story and the questions his case raised. But I could do that through theatre. I wanted this story to affect and change people’s lives. To make them think about the nature and purpose of punishment. And to ask “what would I do if I were in his shoes?” I wanted the war in Yugoslavia to mean something to kids six thousand miles away.

I realized that the rehearsals, the extra curricular research these kids did on their own, the story itself, grabbed them and made them feel important and made them feel they were making a difference, were part of something important. This play changed their lives. And, judging from the audience Q&A, changed some lives out there as well. The play wasn’t about a Tony or an Ovation or a Helen Hayes award. It was about telling a story that changed lives. And in that sense, that particular production was an amazing success.

www.kittyfelde.com

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Watching a production of one of your plays is like revisiting your children.

You spend months, sometimes years, carefully helping a play to grow and mature. And then you set it free, submitting it here, there, and everywhere. If you’re lucky, the play has a production. Or two.

I’ve been very lucky with one of my plays, a courtroom drama called A PATCH OF EARTH. It tells the tale of a war criminal – from the point of view of the perpetrator. It’s a courtroom drama based on a trial I covered at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The play had staged readings from Key West to Carmel and finally premiered in Buffalo, where it won the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition. But it’s taken on a life of its own among college students, with productions in Detroit, Pretoria, Costa Mesa, and Sussex. It was published in a collection from the University of Wisconsin Press called “The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays About Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia.” The most recent production was a couple of weeks ago at the Jersey shore at Richard Stockton College.

I always try to go see the show. The only production I missed was in South Africa and I’m still kicking myself. It’s gratifying to hear how an audience reacts to one of our “children.” This play in particular generates lively debates over the nature of justice and punishment and reconciliation.

But seeing one of our plays is a reminder about the collaborative nature of theatre. And like the good parents that we are to our plays, it’s also a lesson in letting go.

This most recent production at Richard Stocker College was beset by calamity. One of the lead actors was going through chemotherapy. He felt strong enough to rehearse. But during tech rehearsals, he realized he didn’t have the strength to go on. Another actor in the cast was drafted to play two roles.

But that disaster paled compared to the saga of the lead character Drazen Erdemovic. Opening night, the actor played the role with a Bluetooth device in his ear. The director was feeding him lines. Unfortunately, she was so loud, the audience could hear her feeding lines – and then hear the actor spouting something completely different.

I had heard that the original actor had to leave the play – domestic violence, jail, drugs – it was left unclear. So I felt a lot of empathy for the actor who stepped in.

And I felt philosophical.

Watching the play was like watching it for the first time. Lines I never even considered came forth from the mouths of my characters. It was an adventure.

But in that wild performance, I realized that the power of the play wasn’t in the individual words. It was in the story, the characters, their struggles, and their choices. That’s what captivated the audience. And the actors. And even the playwright.

In the talkback session after the play, the audience asked the same questions audiences of this play always ask: what would I do if I were in his situation? What’s a just punishment for a kid who confessed to killing “no more than 70” of the 1200 people shot at that farm outside Srebrenica? Why are his commanding officers still free and unindicted by the Tribunal?

I also witnessed the effect this story had on this troupe of actors. In their bios, they wrote of “the honor” of being part of this “important project” and “doing justice to the story.” What better tribute to the power of what it is we do for very little money and even less recognition?

But there’s more to the story. The next night, the entire production was moved from a college auditorium to a local art museum.

And the production would feature a brand new lead actor in the role of Drazen Erdemovic. That story tomorrow.