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 few more thoughts about playwriting from David Henry Hwang

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Playwright David Henry Hwang had a few more things to say about the craft of writing when he dropped by a revival of his play “Yellow Face” in Washington DC this weekend.

He says it’s his practice to write the first act as a comedy, which allows the audience to more fully embrace the more difficult, serious topics of act two. Ah, the old “give the kid dessert first” technique I used to employ as a babysitter.

He also poked fun at one of his own less-than-successful plays, even presenting a snippet on stage that could make your teeth hurt. Would I be brave enough to publicly expose my own writing foibles night after night? When I write a lousy play, I want it to disappear.

And for a play that debates race appropriate casting, the play itself demands the director and producer make hard decisions about which actors of which races are appropriate for playing the characters in “Yellow Face.” Can a non-Asian play the mother of Henry Hwang? What does it say to the audience if he’s not? The multi-cultural casting was fun, but it was even more fun to hear the producer Ari Roth and David Henry Hwang talk about the hard choices. It was a debate the audience also joined in on. What a wonderful idea to find a way for the audience to see the political questions of a play at work in front of them, forcing them to ponder the same questions!

Tomorrow, I fly to Denver for the Colorado New Play Summit. Stay tuned for updates from the Mile High City on a new Matthew Lopez play and more!

Playwriting tips from David Henry Hwang

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by Kitty Felde

Theatre J here in Washington DC just revived the 2007 comedy “Yellow Face” and I was lucky enough to hear David Henry Hwang talk about his writing process. Hwang is about to open a big off-Broadway show – “Kung Fu.”

As you know, Hwang makes himself a character in “Yellow Face” – a technique he says was inspired in part by all the times he’s been asked to play himself in small, indie films. Why not try it in a play?

I can’t quite imagine writing Kitty Felde as a character, but it’s something to chew on.

He says he knew two things when he sat down to write the play: he wanted to start it with the controversy that enveloped the Broadway opening of “Miss Saigon” where Cameron Mackintosh cast Jonathan Pryce as the Asian Engineer. Hwang was outspoken on the issue and became embroiled in the debate over colorblind casting. He also knew he wanted to end with a “New York Times” article suggesting his banker father had broken the law. How those two events were connected, he wasn’t sure when he sat down to write the play.

Whether he successfully connected the dots is for you to decide, but what a terrific way to attack a play!

He also knew that the emotional spine in the middle of the comedy and political commentary was his relationship with his father. The humanity shone in those scenes.

Again, a good lesson to learn: what’s the emotional spine in our plays?

An evening of theatre and a playwriting class for one ticket! Quite a deal!

REPORT FROM SAN DIEGO: THE NATIONAL NEW PLAY NETWORK FESTIVAL

Conference, LAFPI,

I spent the weekend in San Diego – in the basement theatre of San Diego Rep, to be exact – for the National New Play Network festival. It’s my third new play festival this year (I also went to Humana in Louisville, Kentucky and the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in West Virginia.) As I’ve written before, it’s INCREDIBLY helpful for us as playwrights to see new plays.

New play festivals are a bit like Fashion Week – you get a preview of the new season – not what will be hanging on the rack at Nordstrom’s, but what will be listed in the season ticket brochure at theatres around the country.

You can also spot trends. Not exposed zippers and the Pantone color of the year, but what playwrights are doing in their work that keeps showing up all the time.

Here’s a few of the emerging trends spotted at the NNPN’s festival:

–          Direct Address: several plays used this device. It works as shorthand, delivering internal monologues and exposition in an efficient manner. Though to me as an audience member, it doesn’t have the same resonance as a scene between two characters. There’s blood on the floor when characters are confronting each other. You can’t look away. The energy literally bounces off the wall. When there’s sexual chemistry, we’re right there as peeping Toms, blushing and getting aroused and wondering what’s going to happen next. And even long monologues delivered to another character seem fuller, richer, more punchy than directing them to the audience.

–          Humor: nearly every one of the six plays I saw was funny. Not necessarily knock down physical humor or an evening full of zingers, but lines that made you smile or surprised you and made when you laugh out loud. Even the stage directions were funny! Serious topics handled with humor made an audience want to stay through the painful parts of the story.

–          Obsession: several plays had main characters who were obsessed. Two were trying to find absent ancestors. (I’m not sure I understood WHY these characters were obsessed, but boy, is that a handy tool for getting your protagonist moving! Other characters tell them they’re crazy, but they just keep keeping on. They were like bulldozers, ploughing through obstacles on their way over the cliff.)

–          Larger casts than you’d think: I know. We’ve all been told don’t dare write a play with more than three characters if you ever want to harbor a hope of production. That wasn’t the case at the NNPN’s festival! Several plays boasted of more than half a dozen actors playing lots of characters. And these are plays that at least ONE theatre wants to produce!

–          Slavery: Two of the six plays dealt with slavery – one a highly comic, stylized piece set at the deathbed of Martha Washington; the other a search for the ancestor who jumped a slave ship. A third play dealt with racial injustice of the 1960’s, the generational remains of slavery.

–          Absent fathers: Lots of missing parents in these plays. A father in jail whose teenager ends up in foster care, a biracial girl looking for her African-American father and grandfather, an obsessive compulsive painter who wasn’t looking for his absent father directly, but certainly his abandonment of the family fed son’s condition. Slaves sired by white masters were also fatherless. One father who seemed to be missing in action was merely hiding out in the den until he was needed to deliver the best monologue I’ve heard in a while about how you want a bitch of a mother to be on the front line fighting for you. I’m not sure what this says about our society today with all these missing dads.

–          Theatricality. Not every play reached beyond the naturalistic, but there were elements of theatricality in everything. One used the tinkling of a bicycle bell to spur memory.  Another structured the play backwards to forwards. One play included actors carrying on in a bad TV movie behind the main action. There were game shows, swimming fish, even a Viking ship onstage. The most successful pieces took a chance on larger-than-life happenings.

Never heard of NNPN? It’s basically a way for playwrights to get not just a world premiere, but also a second, third, and on and on – future productions. Pick a NNPN theatre. Submit your script. Next year, it could be YOUR play that sets the trends for theatres across the country.

 

link: http://www.nnpn.org/about

WHEN NEWS COLLIDES

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by Kitty Felde

I have an orphan play that keeps getting readings, but no production. I’m sure you have one, too. Mine is a play for young audiences with a controversial topic – a character in blackface – and revolves around a holiday festival most Americans know nothing about. (And I wonder why nobody’s produced it yet!)

I’ve discovered the reality of the marketplace in children’s theatres these days: lots of new plays are being produced, but nearly all of them are based on favorite children’s books or Disney movies. Like Hollywood, these theatres are surviving by offering audiences the familiar and the famous.

So I decided to adapt my play to a chapter book. I even found an agent who is shopping it around to children’s book publishers.

But now, news about the topic of my play is breaking out worldwide. I just wish I knew how to capitalize on it.

And so I appeal to you, the great brain trust of LAFPI.

The Netherlands celebrates Christmas as a religious holiday on December 25th – though I found the churches sadly empty of anyone under the age of 100 when I lived there. Instead, Holland celebrates December 6th, the feast of St. Nicholas – or, as he is known in Holland, Sinterklaas.

Most Americans know Sinterklaas from one thing: the scene in “Miracle on 34th Street” where Edmund Gwenn as Santa speaks to the little Dutch war orphan and sings the Sinterklaas song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNpijhg3KN4

What most Americans don’t know is that when Sinterklaas arrives in Holland by boat from Spain (don’t ask), he’s accompanied by his buddy Zwarte Piet. That’s literally translated as Black Pete. And yes, it’s a Dutch person in blackface, complete with a bad Afro, overly large red lips, hoop earrings, and a clown-like costume.

The first time I saw Piet, I was appalled. My Dutch friends brushed off my reaction, insisting Pete was a Moor, or perhaps that dark from sliding down chimneys. They said he was a friend to Sinterklaas, not a slave. And that his crazy antics were amusing, not meant to ridicule people of color. Yeah, right.

I found it particularly interesting that there were now many people of color living in The Netherlands – from Suriname and Turkey and Africa – but none of them were called upon to play Pete.

In The Hague, where I was covering war crimes trials, I talked to the only American judge at the Tribunal, Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, an African-American former federal judge who became the Tribunal president. I asked her about Pete. She said every year, there was a debate in her group of African-American ex-pats about whether to make a big stink about Zwarte Piet or ignore him.

Judge McDonald became the inspiration for the adult character in my play THE LUCKIEST GIRL, the story of a ten year old African-American girl who moves to Holland with her grandmother, a lawyer at the Tribunal. Tahira is homesick. The last straw is when she discovers that Santa doesn’t come to Holland; instead, it’s Sinterklaas, and his politically incorrect buddy Zwarte Piet. Much to the horror of her grandmother, Tahira likes Piet.

This fall, UNESCO considered taking The Netherlands to task over Pete. And the Dutch reacted with a Facebook page devoted to Zwarte Piet that got a million likes in a DAY!

https://www.facebook.com/pietitie

Everybody and their brother has been writing about the controversy: New Yorker, Huffington Post, the Economist, and tons of newspapers in Great Britain.

https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/11/is-a-dutch-holiday-tradition-racist.html&ct=ga&cd=MTA3NDcxMTQ1MTc5OTg4MDk3ODY&cad=CAEYAA&usg=AFQjCNGgyKlg3dkXVljaoVqSTblGZqWuqg

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/zwarte-piet

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21588960-debate-holiday-tradition-exposes-racial-attitudes-zwarte-piet-racism

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/tensions-mount-in-the-netherlands-as-un-questions-black-pete-christmas-tradition-8909531.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2474693/Zwarte-Piet-abolished-Outrage-Netherlands-Black-Pete-Christmas-tradition.html

A bonanza, yes? Maybe.

So here’s my question for you playwrights smarter than me: what would you do to capitalize on this kind of publicity? Does it help or hurt the chances of a theatre doing the play? Should I be sending it to British children’s theatres? What should I be doing???

Meanwhile, I’m excited that THE LUCKIEST GIRL is getting another workshop reading at 11 AM, Sunday December 1st at Ensemble Studio Theatre Los Angeles as part of their fESTivity/LA 2013 series. (3269 Casitas Avenue, LA 90039)

It’s directed by Susie Tanner, who loves the script, and starring the two actors who should be playing Tahira and her Dutch friend Jan: Tamika Katon-Donegal and Whit Spurgeon.

http://ensemblestudiotheatrela.org/about/programs/festivityla-2013/

Please, please, please post ideas about marketing. And come on down for the reading at EST. Zwarte Piet might even have pepernoten and suikergoed (gingerbread cookies and sweets) to toss to the audience.

 

IT’S ALL ABOUT STORY

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by Kitty Felde

Like many writers, plot is not my strong suit.

It’s been interesting of late, seeing a lot of new or newish plays that have major problems with plot. As in: nothing happens until the end of the first act, or the second act does not satisfy the desires of the audience set up in the first act, or the entire evening is just a series of short scenes with a twist at the end of each one. I may not be able to solve my own plot problems, but I can sure spot them in others.

I’ve put aside the new play I’ve been working on because of hitting the wall on plot.

Instead, I’ve been spending every early morning working on my second chapter book. These are the books designed to wean kids off picture books – designed for age 7-11 or so. I got frustrated that most theatres producing theatre for young audiences are adapting kids books rather than choosing original scripts. So, I thought I’d fight back by adapting my play THE LUCKIEST GIRL* into a BOOK. I even found an agent who’s shopping it around.

I rejoined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and attended a local conference last month.

And there I was, listening to book writers talking about … plot.  Guess what? It’s all the same damn thing.

  • Conflict: You ask yourself what does my main character want? And what will she do to get it? Who or what’s standing in her way? Her desire conflicts with that of her antagonist. And you ask yourself why the antagonist doesn’t want her to achieve her great desire?
  • You start with the present world, then something happens to upset the apple cart.
  • Creating scenes: What character flaw or bad habit creates complications? Complications intensify, more obstacles, things get worse. Is there a single, driving force through all scenes? Are the heroine’s wants in the entire story?
  • Climax: the darkest hour that allows the heroine’s truest self to emerge. She takes charge of dealing with the story problem
  • The end: have we satisfied the expectations we have given our audience for what we promised at the beginning?

It’s the same damn Aristotelian story structure we all learned in Drama 101.

And so, now I find myself starting a new book**, knowing full well I’m going to have to wrestle with story structure again.

Just maybe not tonight.

*THE LUCKIEST GIRL: A ten year old African American girl who moves to Holland with her grandmother, who’s there to prosecute accused war criminals. Tahira is homesick. The last straw is when she discovers that Santa doesn’t come to Holland; instead, it’s Sinterklaas, and his politically incorrect buddy Zwarte Piet. Much to the horror of her grandmother, Tahira likes Piet.

**UNTITLED CAPITOL HILL CAPER: The young daughter of a Congressman walks dogs on Capitol Hill and solves the mystery of the Demon Cat of the Capitol Crypt.

 

FEMALE PLAYWRIGHTS GET THEIR MOMENT IN THE DC SPOTLIGHT

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by Kitty Felde

So here’s some really big news that’s not yet public:

ALL the DC/VA/MD theatres are banding together and vowing to produce world premieres of plays by female playwrights.

It’s not official yet, but two different artistic directors have confirmed it.

This is a MAJOR step for female playwrights.

Unfortunately for DC writers, I don’t think it’s limited to us. Fortunately for you in Los Angeles, it looks like it will include you as well. So dig out that unproduced masterpiece and submit!

But more important than that, the challenge is on the table for theatres in OTHER cities – like LA – to follow suit. The pressure will be on THEM to produce ONE new play by a female playwright.

As soon as the DC theatre community makes it official, I’ll post the article and I’m asking each of YOU to send it to one or more theatres in LA.

One more word about being a playwright in DC. A recent study by our Dramatists Guild rep Gwydion Suilebhan showed that nearly one in three plays produced in Washington this coming season (2013-2014) are considered “new” – that means first, second or third productions.  Unfortunately for local DC writers, fewer than 1 in ten plays is by a local writer, about half the number of locally written plays produced in DC during the previous season. Writers here ARE getting produced – just not in DC.

So LAFPI activists, start putting the pressure on LA theatres so I can get something produced out there!

 

Gotta Have a Gimmick, Part Two

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by Kitty Felde

Just want to followup on a comment from playwright Mallery Avidon:

Welcome to LAFPI! It’s a wonderful group of women writers battling it out in Los Angeles to draw attention to the work and increase the number of produced plays by women writers.

I think I need to more fully explain my inclusion of your play in my description of what I call “gimmick” plays.

As I noted, I don’t use the term as a derogatory genre. Shakespeare himself used cross dressing lovers to great effect in “Twelfth Night.” It’s a trend I’ve noticed as a genre showing up on legitimate stages all over the country. They can add an element of fun and excitement to a play. It’s what Hollywood might call a “hook” – something that will turn a curious audience member into one who will buy a ticket.

And as playwrights, it’s something we should take a look at as another reason a theatre might want to produce our plays.

Here, let me express my own personal opinion, not that of LAFPI:

I am not a fan of “Clybourne Park” for reasons other than the writing. I think Norris got it wrong. I grew up in Compton, lived through the white flight and thereafter. I just think his history is wrong in Act One. (I’m not the only one: Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director at Centerstage – like me – wrote a play IN RESPONSE to “Clybourne Park.”)

“Oh Guru Guru Guru, or why I don’t want to go to yoga class with you” has a terrific first act – funny, heartfelt, a story that felt specific and real. The fact that the writer used the “gimmick” of a lecture was icing on the cake. In my own opinion, the use of several other gimmicks in the next two acts – demonstrating the life in an ashram, audience participation, the surprise of “it’s only a movie!”, the conversation with Julia Roberts – detracted from the strong beginning. And from the play, which tackles a unique experience: growing up in an ashram and how that affects a person’s life.

Would I buy a ticket to a gimmick play? Of course! Would I write one? You bet.

Gimmick Plays

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By Kitty Felde

I mentioned in an earlier posting that I’ve seen a lot of new “gimmick” plays lately. Our fellow LAFPI member Marissa was “wondering what you mean by ‘gimmick plays’ being the new hot trend these days” and asks what kinds of gimmicks are showing up onstage.

Great question.

First of all, I don’t mean to disparage the genre. It’s a concept as old as playwriting and the mantra of Hollywood. Another way of describing it would be a “hook.” In my own personal theatre dictionary, I’d describe a Gimmick Play as one that offers something else besides character, dialogue and plot to draw in an audience.

Here’s a few examples: Bruce Norris’ “Clybourne Park” is a two gimmick play. It’s a riff on Lorraine Hansberry’s “Raisin in the Sun” AND it offers the added bonus of having the cast from Act 1 play completely different characters in Act 2.

At the Humana Festival, there was another play with FOUR gimmicks: “Oh Guru Guru Guru, or why I don’t want to go to yoga class with you” (I suppose you could count the title as a sort of gimmick, too…) by Mallery Avidon. Gimmick one: a lecture. The first act is a lecture, complete with slide show, of the “author” explaining the premise. Very funny. Gimmick two: we go to the ashram in act two where audience members are invited to come onstage and sit on embroidered pillows to be enlightened. And then there’s gimmick three where we discover the ashram is just a film set for “Eat, Pray, Love” and act three is a conversation with Julia Roberts about how tough it is to be Julia Roberts.

“Clybourne Park” would have stood on its own feet without any gimmicks; “Guru” would not.

There was one FABULOUS gimmick play at Humana – tucked in with two real turkeys. Apparently the acting school in Louisville is learning how to fly ala Peter Pan or Spiderman or that Angel in Tony Kushner’s work. And there really aren’t a lot of other plays out there with flying actors. So Humana commissioned a trio of writers to come up with them. The real genius gimmick piece was by Lucas Hnath called “nightnight.” He used the gimmick of flying to show weightlessness in space, telling the story of a trio of astronauts on a mission. It was brilliant. You marveled at the cleverness of the gimmick itself: an astronaut sleeps in zero gravity, lying sort of sideways, suspended above our eyes, the launch itself had the actors straddle a wall twelve feet high, upside down. It was marvelous to watch. The director also created with perfect accuracy the mumblety dialogue of the NASA engineers in Mission Control, chattering about who knew what constantly. But the play itself was about the conflict between characters, their ambitions, their foibles, their actions.
It’s not a new concept. Shakespeare certainly wrote gimmick plays. “Twelfth Night” could be described as a cross dressing play; “Hamlet” as a ghost story. Again, though, it’s the writing that carries the play, not the gimmick.

And I suppose here’s my beef: a lot of theatres are choosing work for the gimmick, not the writing. It will certainly sell tickets. But will those theatre-goers return for more once the gimmick has been revealed?

PLOT

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By Kitty Felde

I’ve always hated Aristotle.

He said there were only two parts to a good drama – the rising action leading to the climax, and the denouement, or the unraveling that follows. It sounds so simple. But my brain doesn’t work that way.

I remember when I first started out as a reporter. It was so hard for me to write with the denouement in the lede. Why the heck would you put your best stuff at the top? I wanted to tell a story the way you tell a story – give your audience a setting, introduce them to the characters, make things worse for them, and worse again, and solve the problem. But news rarely conforms to that clean format.

And I find that when I write plays, those stories rarely conform either.

I wonder if it’s because I don’t like torturing my characters. I like them too much to give them grief, let alone trouble after trouble. I enjoy spending time with them. I don’t want to kill them off.

Which leads me to my Act Two problem.

I’m still stuck in Act Two of my romantic comedy. Perhaps I should look at my favorite films to see how those writers solved this part of the story. You know, the part where both parties admit to themselves that they are in fact attracted to each other. I know logically that there needs to be some sort of complication, an obstacle that gets in their way. Now, make it worse.

I know, I know, Mr. Aristotle. I need some of that rising action leading to a climax. I just wish I knew what it was.

So I appeal to you, my fellow writers. What secrets do you have to share about digging yourself out of Act Two?

I await your wisdom.

New Play Festivals: GO!

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by Kitty Felde

I’ve done the ballpark tour: planning vacations to cities with interesting baseball stadiums, trying to visit every one of them. Unfortunately, new stadiums were being built at a rapid rate and many of the old ones I’d visited were being torn down, so that goal of seeing them all went out the window.

But I’ve started a new vacation tour: new play festivals. And fellow “emerging” playwrights, I highly recommend it for several reasons:

– The Work: It’s like Fashion Week. You get the opportunity to see who’s hot (or for cynics like me: which MFA playwriting program is currently churning out kids with promise), spot trends (gimmick plays, in case you wondered), and see plays that aren’t perfect – always a wonderful opportunity to practice your writerly skills and imagine how YOU’D fix the play.

– Ego Boost: Seeing new work can also be a real confidence builder. You realize that the quality of your writing isn’t lacking; you know you can turn out work equal to or much better than anything you’ve seen. It sends you home to your laptop with real determination.

– Relationships: In a business built as much on who you know as the quality of writing, these weekends are grand opportunities. This spring, fellow DC playwright DW Gregory persuaded me to join her in Louisville, Kentucky for Humana. They have two “industry” weekends, which I discovered means that artistic directors, dramaturgs, university theatre professors, and literary managers from all over the country show up. Very few playwrights. The schmoozefest began at the airport where – because there just aren’t that many flights to Louisville – half a dozen DC theatre folk were on the same flight. At Humana, there were pie meet and greets, seminars, and lots of drinking. Because there were so few playwrights, the opportunity to have actual conversations instead of 15 second elevator speeches was priceless.

– New Play Festival 101 – I also attended CATF – the Contemporary American Theatre Festival at Shepherdstown, West Virginia – this summer, again with local writer DW Gregory. This time, we brought our husbands, lured with the promise of bike rides along the C&O Canal. We saw two very good and one just awful play. How could that happen? We attended a Q&A session one evening after a show in a local restaurant (again, the alcohol flowed freely…) and got to ask how they pick their plays. The artistic director is the main guru, making final selections after others at CATF have sifted through the submissions from agents. (Alas, having no agent myself, that counts me out for a while.) But the one klunker we saw: it was an actress they had worked with previously. Her husband directed this particular show (by one of those hot young playwrights) in New York and they brought it down to CATF intact. Aha! That’s the way the theatre world works. Which takes us back to relationships and ego boost…

– Californians: I live in DC now, but I miss California – the beaches, the produce, the weather. But I also realize I miss Californians. At every new play festival I’ve attended, for some reason I find myself gravitating towards Californians. We think differently, perhaps we’re more open. And because we have SO much theatre, there’s a lot of us at these festivals.

– The Unexpected: the highlight of Humana for me was meeting Paula Vogel in a drink line at a loud, local bar. And SHE was excited to meet ME! Alas, not because of my playwriting, but because of my day job on public radio. But that led to a lovely conversation and subsequent following of each other on Twitter.

You lucky folks in LA have several new play festivals within driving distance: South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival, the Ojai Playwrights Festival, Playfest up in Santa Barbara. They’re on my list. Look for me in the audience next year.