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.

Staged Readings

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There’s nothing like hearing your words read before an audience.

I’ve had the good fortune to have two readings in two months of my newest play THE LUCKIEST GIRL. (It’s the play that not one, but two artistic directors told me no one will ever produce for political correctness reasons. So, I’m grateful that it’s even getting a reading!)

As much as we playwrights disparage the whole development hell process, it’s so important to have a safe place to help a play grow. And one part of that growth is exposing it to an audience.

Thought I’d share a few notes about what I’m listening for during a reading of one of my plays.

What I’m listening for:

LAUGHS

It’s the ultimate immediate audience feedback. Did they get my jokes? Even my dramas have little laughs sprinkled in. I admit if my chicken jokes in the Bosnian war crimes drama don’t get laughs, I feel like a failure. So the first thing I listen for is laughs from the audience – what jokes are popular? Which ones fall flat? Is there some unintentional laughter about something that seemed perfectly reasonable to me when I wrote it? Could it get a bigger laugh with different phrasing or a different punch line?

REPEATING YOURSELF

My bad playwriting motto is “if it’s good once, write it again elsewhere in the script. Several times.”

The reading is where I FINALLY hear the repetition that somehow doesn’t jump off the page. And it’s an opportunity to look for the places that plot points or character clues NEED to be repeated.

LISTEN TO THE AUDIENCE

My new standard for bad plays is when the audience starts texting. I’ve seen it happen at exactly the point in the script (not mine, of course…) where the action lags, the piece feels like it’s not going anywhere, the audience is bored. The worst example of this was a mediocre production of Jon Jory’s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” last year in Florida. Not one, not two, but THREE people in the audience all pulled out cellphones at exactly the same moment – late in the script just as Mr. Darcy was about to propose! Jane Austen was turning over in her grave! Dramatically, that should be the HIGH point of the script. It was not.

No one texted during my readings, but sitting in the back row, I did notice several folks fidgeting. I made note of where they came in the script and will now look to see why interest is lagging at that point.

LOGIC

Do the events of the play follow in a logical order? I discovered that I had inserted a short scene in a place that made no sense whatsoever.

TYPING MISTAKES

There’s nothing like an actor trying to make sense of a line missing a word to catch your attention. A cast is like a room full of proof readers.

STUFF THAT STILL DOESN’T WORK

I have a series of short “interview” scenes where my two young actors do a man on the street interview of actors who play a revolving cast of characters. It was clunky in rehearsal. It was still clunky the first reading. And it never improved in the second reading. I could say “three strikes and you’re out,” but I think I have an idea of how to fix it.

STUFF THAT DOES WORK (or “get your finger off the delete button)

There’s a line that just felt wrong to me. And I’d made a note to myself to change it. And then the audience laughed loudly at the original line. Will I keep it? See rule one.

LISTEN TO YOUR DIRECTOR

Directors are amazing people. They see things in your script you had no idea were there.

My both my DC and LA directors found things in my script I had not fully thought out. Which has helped me flesh out characters and motivations and a style quirk that needs ironing out. I think I took more notes than my actors.

LISTEN TO YOUR ACTORS

Actors bring heart and soul to your words. They generously spill their insides for the sake of your current draft. Pay attention to their instincts. They may see more in your characters than you do. Be aware of the lines that get stuck in their mouth. Usually it means the sentence construction needs a tweak.

Playwrights blind date

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Last weekend, I was invited to participate in what was billed as a playwrights blind date. Twenty of us gathered at the Jewish Community Center library, sitting in chairs around the room. Facing us was a dramaturg, producer, or director. And in four minutes, we had the opportunity to get to know each other, to see if we “clicked.” The rules were: don’t pitch your plays, just get to know each other.

I now remember why I hated dating. That need to present our best selves, smarter, prettier, more facile than anyone else in the room. Yuck.

My husband chided me for not preparing an elevator speech – a fifteen second pitch of my stuff. I should have listened. Everyone kept asking what my “theatrical aesthetic” was. Hell if I know. I couldn’t even describe my plays. They’re not similar at all – a melodrama, a musical about baseball, a courtroom drama about war crimes, a ten minute comedy set in a ladies room. I’m not sure there’s even a theme that runs through my work. Perhaps for the dramas it’s the Rodney King question: “can’t we all just get along?” But how do you explain the romantic comedies?

Have you been able to nail down your “theatrical aesthetic”? Willing to share it here?

A playwright’s bill of rights

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I’m going to share a conversation DC playwright Gwydion Suilebhan just posted on Facebook. He heard from a UK playwright that writers in Britain came up with a playwright’s bill of rights. Gwydion took suggestions from folks here in Washington and came up with his own list. I offer it here…and ask what do you think? Needed? Or just gripes? Or do you have ideas of your own to add? Are there items the LAFPI constituency thinks are missing?

Submissions: Nuts and Bolts
1. No playwright should ever receive a rejection letter that begins with anything that resembles “Dear [INSERT NAME OF PLAYWRIGHT HERE]” or that’s addressed to the wrong person.
2. No playwright should ever receive a rejection letter that includes a significant misspelling, either of the playwright’s name or the title of the play.
3. Theaters, development programs, and contests should standardize on what constitutes a play sample: 10 pages, 15 pages, 20 pages. Playwrights prefer a longer sample, but standardization is of paramount importance.
4. Theaters, development programs, and contests should abandon any other esoteric submission requirements: demands that several different files be combined into a single PDF, or that an extra title page be created, or that bios be limited to a random number of words. Again, a standard set of requirements should be adopted.
5. No playwright should be asked for a letter of reference in support of an application or submission.
6. Theaters, development programs, and contests everywhere should immediately stop asking for paper submissions; all submissions can and should be handled electronically.
7. No theater, development program, or contest should ask for submission fees of any kind.

Submissions: Selection Criteria
1. All submissions for development programs and contests should be blind submissions; plays should be judged on their own merits, not on any other criteria.
2. All submissions for theaters should also be blind during the first round of review and selection.
3. No theater, development program, or contest should inquire as to the educational status of a playwright, nor should that status ever be used as a criterion for submissions.
4. Theaters should replace the “never before produced scripts only” criteria with a less restrictive “no more than two prior productions” criteria.
5. Playwrights should be allowed to re-submit scripts when substantial revisions have been completed.

Submissions: Transparency
1. All submissions for theaters, development programs, and contests should be as transparent as possible.
2. Theaters, development programs, and contests should publish the names and bios of judges, reviewers, and script readers prior to opening submissions.
3. Playwrights should have access to any reader’s reports.
4. To whatever extent possible, theaters, development programs, and contests should indicate why a given play has or has not been selected after it has received extensive consideration.

Submissions: Best Practices
1. Theaters, development programs, and contests should respond to every submission. It is not acceptable to let silence stand in for a courteous rejection.
2. Theaters, development programs, and contests should publish a maximum turnaround time for review of submissions and be held accountable to the dates they publish.

Nomenclature
1. No more infantile language should be used to describe play development: no cradles, no incubators, no hatcheries.
2. The term “emerging” (as in “she’s an emerging playwright”) should be eliminated immediately.

General
1. More playwrights should be considered for artistic director positions.
2. A higher percentage of plays produced in any given geographic area should be written by playwrights who live in that geographic area than is currently the case.
3. More theaters nationwide should have playwrights on staff, or at least in long-tenured resident dramatist positions.
4. More theaters nationwide should add playwrights to their artistic advisory boards.

Of course, he adds, that Dramatists Guild members have their own bill of rights…

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Why we write

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I read (in my latest edition of the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal) Roosevelt’s review of an obscure book called “John Gilley, Maine Farmer and Fisherman” by Charles William Eliot. TR said he was “immensely pleased” with the “little book.” He says, “it seems to me pre-eminently worthwhile to have such a biography of a typical American. How I wish President Elliot could write in the same shape biographies of a brakeman or railroad locomotive engineer, of an ordinary western farmer, of a carpenter or blacksmith in one of our small towns, of a storekeeper in one of our big cities, of a miner – of half a dozen typical representations of the forgotten millions who really make up American life.”

Roosevelt goes on to muse about immortality. “It makes small odds to any of us after we are dead whether the next generation forgets us, or whether a number of generations pass before our memory, steadily growing more and more dim, at last fades into nothing. On this point it seems to me that the only important thing is to be able to feel, when our time comes to go out into the blackness, that those survivors who care for us and to whom it will be a pleasure to think well of us when we are gone, shall have that pleasure. Save in a few wholly exceptional cases, cases of men such as are not alive at this particular time, it is only possible in any event that a comparatively few people can have this feeling for any length of time.”

And therein lies our gift as playwrights: to create living, breathing characters of what some might call ordinary people, the un-famous. And we are able to give them immortality, living long after we are gone, long after the people who inspired those characters in the first place are gone. It makes us gods of sorts, creating human beings and turning them loose on the world.

Who says playwrights have no power?

Dig that out of the trash can

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I can’t recall who said it originally or who it was that repeated it to me, but some wise writer once said you’re not allowed to throw out bad writing until you’ve shared it with someone else.
We’re our own worst critics, snarky and nit picky, embarrassed by our work, hiding it until we think it’s properly “cooked” and ready to serve to an audience. Even if that audience is your own writing group.
I’ve finally found a wonderful group of writers here in DC and our “assignment” was to bring in the final scene of the play we’re working on. Even if you haven’t written a word for any other scene in the play. I’ve been struggling with my LA riots play for ten years now. It haunts me. And since this spring marks the 20th anniversary, I know I’ve got to finish it. So I gave a stab to the assignment, trying to write that scene that I’ve been avoiding forever.
It was awful. Hide your face in a paper bag awful. Repeated sentences, facts out of order, wierd entrances, and worst of all, no resolution. I knew it was awful and spent weeks trying to “fix” it. Finally, I decided to stop looking at it and just not bring anything in to my group. Chicken!
But Sunday morning, I asked myself what I had to lose? This was a new group of people. If they thought ill of me and my work, did it really matter? Would they tell the whole town what a lousy writer I was?
I printed out the pages, handed them out, and confessed I hadn’t really completed the assignment. The scene was a problem. So there.
Listening to it read out loud, I could see where my fellow writers were interested, confused, amused. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. And those generous writers put their clever heads together and offered me a way out of my conundrum. It wasn’t one last scene, it was a series of scenes trying to squeeze into that last scene. Let it breathe.
But most of all, their enthusiasm for this badly written piece of work, wanting to know the characters, the rest of the story, helped me regain my confidence about the work. It wasn’t awful. Just a work in progress.
So my advice for the day: courage fellow writers. Be brave enough to share the rotten work with people you trust. There may be seeds there that can grow into something even more wonderful than you imagined it in the first place.

Writing here, writing there – by Kitty Felde

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It was nice to have two complete weeks in Maine, sitting by a lake, listening to the loons, dodging a hurricane, picking tomatoes and beans from the garden, drinking wine, swimming every morning, and writing. And writing.

What a blessing to not have to ‘feed the beast’ as we say in news, always on the lookout for a story, trying to catch up with a story you should have reported yesterday, making calls for tomorrow’s story. And squeezing in maybe 90 minutes of writing time on exactly what YOU want to write.

I’m in LA this week for a grammar school reunion (!) and a check in with the home office, but haven’t typed a word. But I will. I have five characters bugging me to tell the rest of their story. They get so impatient! They don’t understand that it’s important for the writer to visit her favorite farmers market where “industry” folks talk shop as they wait for their breakfast burrito, where she’ll run into an old friend having a tough year, and where finally, she’ll come home with heirloom tomatoes and peaches and basil for a family party on Labor Day. Those characters don’t understand why the writer needs a nap or needs to get her nails done for that grammar school reunion. They keep saying, “what about OUR reunion?”

Okay, guys. One quick nap and I’ll be back at the keyboards. Promise.

Stitching a play together – by Kitty Felde

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I am finding a relationship between my twin passions: playwriting and sewing. One involves visual puzzle pieces that are stitched together. The other involves character puzzles and pattern pieces of plot.

I came to Maine earlier this month to puzzle out act two of my LA riots/Kenya play, not to sew. But that sewing side of my brain started calling me. It might just be the need to do something creative using my hands, not a keyboard

So I started reading sewing blogs. And fell in love with this one: a British gal who does amazing things with thrift store finds.
http://charityshopchic.wordpress.com/
She gives herself permission to take things apart, discard what’s soiled or not needed, and create something fun and new. It’s that giving yourself permission that’s so important.

And by the way, it also sent me out to the local Goodwill where I spent $20 on five garments that I’ve totally taking apart! (at night, of course, AFTER my writing day…)

Writing lessons from young adult literature – by Kitty Felde

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There’s a wonderful quote in Lisa Scottoline’s review of the new novel “Plugged” by Eoin Colfer. She says, “like any great fictional character, he is what he does.” Boy, is that true for drama!

I’m as guilty as most, my characters do more talking than doing. Not to say they need to scale mountains and fight wizards onstage. But they need to constantly be doing something emotionally. What do they want and what are they doing to get it?

I know Eoin Colfer’s work from his young adult novels. We read ”Artemis Fowl” in my Book Club of the Air for Young Adults, a show that ran on LA Cable 36 where a trio of middle schoolers discuss YA literature. (http://la36.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=26&clip_id=1000Great fun.) In “Artemis,” Colfer’s characters were always DOING something. But he also created an entire universe, with its own rules and villains and quests.

I really like YA literature. David Almond’s “Skellig” is one of my favorites. He creates a character in a ramshackle garage that may be a cranky old man. Or an owl. Or a bird. Or something else. The young hero of the story keeps the creature alive with beer and take-out Chinese food. He decides he HAS to as his way of keeping his prematurely born little sister alive. Such invention! A real page-turner! And full of rich, emotional depth.

Which makes me think about expanding my universe of writing inspirations. I read and see as many plays as I can every month. But rarely am I truly blown away, transported to a really imaginative place where I cry and laugh and am haunted by words and images for days. That happens often when I’m reading YA literature. Why is this? Is it because YA books are short, to the point, aimed at an audience that demands to be wowed, an audience whose raging hormones make emotional outbursts a daily fact of life? That’s what I want to capture and put onstage.
Which is why I’m heading over to the YA section of the library to see what’s new.

Hurricanes and other natural disasters by Kitty Felde

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I’m a southern California girl. I know earthquakes and brush fires. I don’t know hurricanes.

But I was up in Maine for two blissful weeks of vacation – nothing but reading, eating, swimming in a lake, sitting, and writing. I’m working on rewriting act two of a play that’s been haunting me for ten years. More on that later in the week. But we were supposed to drive back south to DC on Saturday. That didn’t happen, thanks to Irene.

Friday was an absolutely perfect day! Warm temperatures, blue skies, you could smell the pine trees. The sun glistened on the lake. Hard to imagine the storm coming. By Saturday, you had this feeling you should be DOING something. Preparing somehow. So I drove into town to buy a battery for the flashlight and a power converter to run my laptop from the car’s cigarette lighter. (A true writer: can’t live without her laptop!) I made soup and chocolate pudding – to nourish the soul. We put away the plastic lawn furniture and took down the hanging plants and wind chimes. And we waited. And waited.

Finally, Irene arrived Sunday morning, first with rain, then with wind, then with wind and rain, and finally, just a bit more wind. Inland Maine got hit hard. We spent the day with friends, eating pasta and playing Crazy Eights.
It’s a nice metaphor for playwriting: that big idea that grows and grows, both scaring you to death and exciting something deep inside you. It takes its dear, sweet time developing, moving slowly towards you. You spend your time preparing – research, note cards, writing in longhand, making notes to yourself on the Iphone, freewriting – doing SOMETHING until it arrives. And then it does – you’re in the midst of the writing, full of excitement and terror. That new play makes you feel ALIVE! And then, all too soon, it’s over. It gets produced or a reading and your emotional brain is already preparing for the next creative storm.

Perhaps the National Hurricane Center can help me with titles when I sit down to write my next “hurricane.”

Day Three: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation – part four?

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What will it take to have gender parity in America?  Julia Jordan says lots of local, grassroots groups are springing up – like LAFPI.  Collectively, they hold a lot of power.  But not as much as artistic directors.  They have the power to break the cycle.  Look at the Blackburn Award winners and runners up who’ve never had a production.  AD’s can aggressively go out there and decide to produce work by women and they won’t be hurt artistically or economically.

Sheri Wilner says AD’s are choosing playwrights not plays.  We need to raise their conscience – take it to the streets and ticketbuyers.

Laura Shamas says she spent a year going to nothing but plays by women.  If someone asks her to resubscribe to a theatre season, she says “no” unless they’ll do more shows by women.  Economic information.

What can I do if I live in a tiny town?  Jordan says it’s almost a PR war.  You’d be hard pressed to find an artistic director who doesn’t know the “right” answer when it comes to the question of playwrights of color.  Not so with gender.  Add to the conversation with those artistic directors, this is something people have thought about and there IS a right answer.  The numbers are so glaring, it cannot be ignored.  Write letters, don’t give them your money.  And it’s not just playwriting.  It’s about all the arts, beyond the arts. 

Sheri says there should be a wider net.  A study looked at children’s books: 33% have a lead female character; 100% have lead male characters.  We need to start early.

Laura says we were so inspired in LA by the east coast work, they did their own study, there’s a listing of plays by women on the website, and a blog as well.  Start a festival!  Address it creatively.  There are LAFPI “agents” who reach out to theatres to ask, “how can we get you to consider more plays by female playwrights.  Mixers.  You can do this in your hometown.  You’d be surprised what you can do with some cocktails. 

Marsha Norman says every woman has to help another woman.  There’s an infinite amount of “antelope” out there – we can be in the business of generosity.  Why do the stories of women need to be told?  Not just because they’re stories of women.  We need to hear the stories of all the people here on earth if we’re to live here with any semblance of compassion and understanding.  Every story that’s there to be told has to find its way to the stage.  People in power have to stop telling the same damn story again and again on the American stage.  We also have to get our own body of work done.  And make it possible for people to come after us.

When Primary Stages did a season of plays by women, it was their lowest grossing season…it was also the season after the market crash.  But did women get blamed for bad sales?  Playwrights Horizons did really well with female playwrights.  Last year, nearly 40% of the plays in NYC were by women, and many were hits.

How about cross-discipline boycotts?  Dancers boycotting theatres that don’t do plays by women.  Is there a Dramatists Guild policy on gender parity?  Marsha said if that’s what’s needed, we’ll do it.

Marsha says the “afraid” part is a huge part of it.  Be not afraid.  Because what?  It’s gonna get worse?  Her two Broadway producers kept asking whether she’d seen any Tony nominated shows.  She said no.  “In a season where’s no work by women, I’m not going.”  Our mouths have to open.  Create an organization, be the artists telling stories who go to the White House. 

Parity: Julie says she met with funding organization who told her what they did for writers of color.  No quotas.  Instead said, “we just want to see the numbers…how many did you produce…just for our own information.”  Suddenly more works by writers of color were getting done.  Something similar could be down the line for women.  It starts with data, which is being compiled now and being available for anyone who wants them.