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.

Day Three: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation – part two

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Self-Production Panel: War Stories

Larry Dean Harris, Kathleen Warnock, Roland Tec

You are the one who is the most passionate about your work.  Protect your own work.  If it’s not right, you have the right to pull out.  No production is better than a bad production.  Don’t work with people who’ve already screwed you over.  When someone shows you who they are, trust that.  Work with people who like what you do.  Don’t rush casting.

PR lessons: Do not count on reviews to fill your house.  Sometimes reviewers don’t even show up.  And even if they do, the review just doesn’t have the same impact it used to.  (Reviews are good for an actor and writer for career building.)  Build an audience your own way.  New media is the way to go.  Having a PR person is the first wing of your attack.  How about a YouTube trailer?  Postcards are being used less often (except in festivals) because of new media.  But business card sized handouts are becoming popular.

Don’t count on your publicist to fill your house.  But look for the thing that’s unique about your show – it gives your publicist something to sell.  Good pictures are helpful online.  Constant Contact is helpful.  Create an event on Facebook, cultivate an individual blogger.  You first contact your personal people, then media folks you know, then start emailing reporters you don’t know, and go to the festival bar and hand out postcards or fliers.

Go out and find your audience: whatever it is about your play that will drive people to the theatre.  For a Bible play, Larry went to churches, talked to pastors and got church groups to come.  For his play about alzheimers, he went after those groups.

Venue: putting your show in the appropriate venue can be key.  Send your director to the walk thru so they know what they’re facing.  And learn to live with it.  Choose the venue with the smallest number of seats…then you’ll have a sellout.  Get your feet wet the first time.  Learn on someone else’s time: volunteer to be on someone else’s show.  Learn from their mistakes.  Find a buddy: do their show, then yours…and learn.  Go see other folks’ shows; talk to people who’ve produced in that space.  They’ll tell you what to put in your contract.  And tell you about the things you don’t know: the rockband rehearsing next door, the parking lot that fills up from restaurant patrons down the street, the helicopters that fly overhead, the pipes that bang…  Be aware that if you’re sharing space with other productions, you may have laughter next door during your serious drama.  And their intermission becomes part of your show.

Think about non-traditional spaces – the front porch of a house, a tent.  The venue can be an ad for your play.

Day Three: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation

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Self -Production Primer; Brass Tacks – Roland Tec

Here’s a few thoughts about paying for your self-production:  hold a fundraiser party.  Roland Tec’s formula is that you invite a certain number of people (A) and ask for a set amount, say $50 (B), but only ten percent (.1) of those people show up.  A x B x .1 = projected revenue.  So if you invited 235 people and asked for 50 bucks, you’d make $1,175.  Throw a good party.  Do excerpts, but NOT the entire play.

Ticket sales: here’s the formula for estimating how much you’ll make from ticket sales.  A = number of seats in house; B = total number of scheduled performances; C = average ticket price

AxBxcX.4 (40% capacity) = ticket sales

Day Two: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation – part four

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Publishing seminar with Abbie Van Nostrand of Samuel French, Deborah Hartnett of MTI, Music Theatre International, and Ron Pullins of Focus Publishing

Selection:
Focus: He has a list in mind what he wants to do and is interested in the changing theatre scene – acting, directing. “We sell people, not books.”  Doesn’t publish plays…except the dead ones. 

MTI: Publishes plays from Broadway, off-Broadway, sometimes a show in the Midwest.  Junior program, deliver “musical in a box.”  High school and middle school kids can keep the scripts.  Like to have a range of things for customers: large and small musicals.  They have almost 400 shows in the catalogue. 

French: publish and license straight and musical plays.  45K titles either archived or in print.  The last 4-5 years, seeking keeping authors happy, but looking for emerging and early career playwright.  Stats: Look at what theatres are doing, playing it safe.  Theatres are closing, cutting back on seasons, those that are doing the best are playing it safe.  They’re pushing their authors, finding the right theatre for the right show.  They’re pulling back on acquisitions.  They’re still actively seeing everything in NY, going to Humana, they get agent author submission, and website queries.  Check the website for updates.  But the reality is that the parameters are shrinking.

Day Two: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation – part three

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Theatre for Young Audiences – Michael Bobbitt – Adventure Theatre and Kim Peter Kovac – Kennedy Center

TYA includes adults performing for kids, kids performing for kids, and teen theatre. Theatre for Young Audiences is the operative word these days. Denmark has 60 children’s theatres. The best theatre professionals in the country work for it.

Trends: theatre for the very young – 2-5 year olds, baby theatre, which is all about discovery and sound, where seeing yourself in the mirror is a theatrical event. (Just like actors!) Baby theatre is becoming huge.

Over the past ten years, there’s been more money and resources available for TYA. Regional theatres are doing more. Perhaps because Disney went to Broadway. And made money. Also, there’s grant money. Similar to black theatre in the 1990’s, funding organizations are looking at whether a theatre is doing educational and youth theatre. There’s also a trend where performing arts centers are booking shows…but the person who does it is also the “community engagement” person.

New work? People are looking at more popular titles. Michael Bobbit says he has the same administrative needs as a big theatre, but only charges 15 bucks for tickets. So famous titles brings in an audience. There’s a huge amount of work for adaptations.

Length: 45-hour length for under ten. One study showed the ideal length for 4-8 year olds – idela length is 47 minutes. For an older audience, 50-70 is ideal.

Getting the rights: sometimes a playwright has the rights. The Kenendy Center gets rights from the publisher, pays them, and then commissions the playwright. Make sure everyone knows there’s no money. 3-12% of gross box office is given to the picture book writer, 1.5% to the playwright or $1500 (Adventure Theatre). Kennedy pays 3% to the book writer; playwrights get 6-8% of the box office.

Who owns the play? At Adventure, they own it. Kennedy never owns the play.

Look for works in the public domain to adapt. Don’t discount movies, songs, TV shows, poems, lots of possibilities for adaptation. Only about a third of plays produced are new scripts not adaptations.

Cast size: 2-6 is great. Two is the best. Think about how a cast can be doubled – or shrunk.

Other advice: know your audience. Knowing how to tie your shoe is a big thing to a kid. Know what’s on a kid’s curriculum and reading list to see what they’re working on in school. Fairy tales are out of fashion right now. Teen theatre is issue related. But above all, it has to be a good play, not a lesson.

Popular TYA plays:
For very young (2-3 or 5) audiences: “Go Dog Go,” “Good Night Moon,” “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,” “Knufflebunny,” “Tick Tac Moo,” “Miss Nelson is Missing (Joan Cushing),” “Flat Stanley,” Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Day,” “Ferdinand.”

Ages 8-12 – “Holes,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Anne Frank and Me,” “A Wrinkle in Time,” Laura Ingels Wilder, “Skellig” by David Almond.

Cold submissions: Adventure: no capacity; only doing popular titles. Kennedy – only commissions.

Last thoughts: parents and teachers are the gatekeepers, deciding what shows kids come see. Diversity is good business.

Day Two: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation – part two

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Todd London of New Dramatists gave the keynote address on Friday, on “After Outrageous Fortune.”
Here’s some excerpts: “We are perhaps a roomful of anachronisms, relying on outdated views of time and space.”

New Dramatists is in a Lutheran church in Manhattan. It used to house a soup kitchen and thrift store in the early 1900’s. It’s now a soup kitchen for playwrights. The altar is a writing area. The thrift store is a theatre space. The soup kitchen is a library. That library contains a stage manager’s copy of an August Wilson play called “Millhand’s Cast Bucket” – now known as “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”

“What a difference a play makes” is a song title suggested by Marsha Norman for an event celebrating the career of Horton Foote. They didn’t use the song, but the phrase stuck in London’s brain. Do plays really make a difference? To whom? Do they still? London says he’s a rabbi in a church for playwrights, constantly questioning his faith.

Horton Foote tried to stop time by remembering. Had so much been written about such a small space of real estate? Nothing can be lost as long as there are artists to write it down. But is it possible plays themselves are disappearing?

Robert Anderson had a note taped to his typewriter: nobody asked you to be a playwright. You write the plays no one asked you to write, that no one may ever produce, cultivate a garden that no one may ever wander with you. The world has no intention of meeting you where you live. Even the American Theatre doesn’t want to meet playwrights where they live. No sustainable structure that will last over time to provide a dignified life for playwrights. Theatres are concerned with pleasing an older, more conservative audience – or perhaps just the theatre’s “assets” – large donors. And audiences for straight plays are dropping every year.

Think about O’Neill. When it came to style, he tried everything. Think about how that would have played today. How could he have wrestled with scale, the years of internal struggle that separated early work and later? Where would Clifford Odets or Edward Albee or Horton Foote be without their theatres?

But London says there’s a “weird seismic shift.” The Guild will permanently fund the “Lily” awards. Arena Stage is providing its five resident playwrights with salaries, offices, and health insurance. Two separate black play festivals launched in a single year because of the “convenings” gathering at Arena this year. Money is appearing for second productions. TCG is holding national conversations on the individual artist. “The ground on which you stand is shifting.”

London says think of asking August Wilson what he was working on – a ten page cycle, performed in every theatre in the country. Will statistics keep it down? “Attention must be paid.” Think of the sweep and magnitude of his Century Cycle. “The highest possibility of human life.”

Where do we look for inspiration? London says he looks to playwrights. When you stare at a thing, it grows larger – a face, a flower, a play. We stare at plays and the machine of culture grows quiet. And the play speaks. The institutional theatre isn’t evil. It’s misguided.

“Your example is in you alone and you together: a community of writers.” Don’t be plagued by bitterness. It has killed more poets. Don’t be bitter. Or envious, which fuels that bitterness.

You have each other. You have power. Just use it.

Day Two: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation

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The most helpful note from the “Dramatists on the Web” session: decide WHY you are blogging. One person said it was to create community. Another said it was to attract people to their work. The best blogs? Those that provide content you can use. For example, the site that just interviews playwrights. Adam Szymkowicz has a great blog that just interviews playwrights. You can google “I interview playwrights” and find it quickly

Day One: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation – Part Three

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Christopher Durang – no surprise – was very funny.  He spun great stories about his career and offered a few words of advice.

He says he was influenced by sitcoms of the 1950’s and ‘60’s because of their quick pace.  He didn’t want to write the overly realistic style of plays of the era.  He wrote his first play at age 8: his own version of the episode about Lucy having a baby.   At age 12 or 13, he decided to write the book and lyrics for a musical called “Banned in Boston” with the hit song “I Love Money.”  But he was too shy to tell anyone at the school.  His mother told the head of the drama club at Delbarton High School about the musical.  and they put it on when he was in eighth grade.  He went to an all-boys school.  So he got to audition girls from the nearby Catholic school.

His high school college guidance counselor didn’t recommend a single Catholic school, but did suggest lots of high brow places.  Told him schools wanted individuals.  “You’ve written plays,” he said, ” that’s unusual.”   His mother’s divorce lawyer suggested he also apply to Harvard.  He was so surprised to be accepted, he went there.  He wrote a musical and Al Franken was in it.  It was called the “Greatest Musical Ever Sung.”  It told the story of the gospels in musical comedy terms.  Songs included “Everything’s Coming Up Moses.”  “The Dove that Done Me Wrong” – sung by the Blessed Mother.  They couldn’t get 12 apostles, so they went with 9 and included some women.  Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore both saw the show.  It ran two weekends and got a good review.  But there started to be letters saying “this show is offensive to Catholics.”  An English professor wrote back saying, “haven’t you heard of satire?”  One critic said Durang was “Pigs trampling in the sanctuary.”  He used the critique in his application to Yale.

Durang has a few bits of advice: the best drama comes from writing about your stuff,  what you know, not what pleases anybody.  It’s important not to just hold onto one play.  Be prolific.  His rules for avoiding writers block: write at least 5 days a week; at least 2-3 hours; and you’re not allowed to quit if you don’t like what you’ve written.  If you’ve written act one and stuck, get a reading.  You start thinking about actors and casting and you have a deadline to finish act two for the upcoming reading.

Day One: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation – Part Two

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Snuck out of Jeffrey Sweet’s seminar and dropped in on Juanita Rockwell’s: “Elsewhere: The Fulbright and Other Journeys.”  She participated in what’s called the Fulbright “Specialist Program.”  Lots of tips in no particular order:

Instead of a one year or three month program, Rockwell was given the option of going overseas for a shorter period of time: two to six weeks.  Her posting was in San Jose, Costa Rica.  She knew a little Spanish, but worked on it before going.  While in country, she had theatre rehearsals in the morning, and two afternoons a week, she went up to the university in the mountains and taught class and met with students.  “A fantastic experience!”

For the Specialist Program, you have to be invited.  You’re put on the roster for five years – meaning you may get a call sometime in that five years to go somewhere to do something.  Or not.  It’s better to create your own opportunity.  If you know someone who teaches in a university in another country, ask if there are exchange possibilities.  She had colleagues in Costa Rica who taught there, and through their institution, invited her to come.  Fulbright is talking about perhaps allowing a theatre (rather than a university) make the invitation.  Frame the invitation from the institution so that it can only be you. 

Qualifications: It used to be required that you have a PhD or terminal degree (MBA), but now it’s expanding to include “professional equivalency.”  Get fancy people to make recommendations. 

US Studies is an area to look at: ie, contemporary American theatre.  Any area of American culture would fit under this category.  There are also humanities categories, or propose using contemporary American culture (ie: theatre) to teach English.  What is it in your background that you can frame towards what they’re asking for.

The Fulbright officers are very helpful. 

On language: in Western Europe: if you can’t speak the language, it ain’t gonna happen.  No one’s sending you to Paris if you don’t speak French.  But many countries have languages few folks speak and often they want English speakers to work with their students.  Sometimes the posting will say “language helpful but not required.”  Do take the language course before you go. 

Here’s a resource: Theatre without Borders – a website where you can make connections to feed into other programs to get you abroad.

How to get started: go to the website.  Search for areas of interest.  Look at how many Fulbrights are being offered in that country.  Check out the “new” section for countries that have added a slew of new postings.  Or look for the countries you’re dying to go to.  Look at what’s available and see if you fit the qualifications.  Look for those that look for “all disciplines.”  Or “arts.”  Sometimes they say “drama” or “playwriting” or “theatre.”  Sometimes.

Day One: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation

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The temperature in my car reads 103 as I park outside the Mason Inn. Inside to pick up the nametag and schedule and Dramatists Guild lanyard and then we were herded onto a shuttle bus for a short ride up the hill to the theatre. There’s a couple of workshops to choose from. I started off in Jeffrey Sweet’s “Improvising Your Play.”

Sweet says it’s much more effective if you don’t use the “word.” The audience can figure out that it’s a play about divorce and “him” is dad. It’s called pattern completion. If you don’t say the most important word, the audience figures out and believes it more deeply.

He says we go to the theatre to watch actors making choices – in the present. Even if talking about something that happened in the past, use historical present. Or use one line in the past and shift into the present. Then the character is re-experiencing the past in the present. Thornton Wilder calls it “the ever renewable present.”

No adjectives and adverbs: they make an audience passive. Let them make that evaluation. Put the premise on the stage; let the audience reach the conclusion.

Take out that line that spells out the “theme” of the play. 

A lot of very good plays are not very good reading experiences.  Scripts are meant to be performed.  If you have any chance of putting up a staged reading, and invite appropriate people, you’ll have a better shot at getting produced.  But make sure the play is ready.  Don’t invite them to your exploratory work.

The event of a play is not literary.  The point of a script is gives actors an opportunity to create compelling behavior.  And sometimes the language isn’t even first rate.  The passion, the behavior, the emotion behind the language is what works.  The words float on top of the behavior.  The novelist gives you everything you need.  The playwright doesn’t.

Look at those first ten pages.  All exposition?  Think of it as scaffolding for your play.  Take it down.

Here’s a tip from Jeffrey: if you’re visiting a theatre town, find out where the storefront theatres are, which ones are doing new work, write a letter, tell them you’re coming to see the show and want to buy them a drink.  It gives them a face to put with your script.

The dreaded synopsis

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I do not claim to be a very good synopsis writer. But I had to boil down my lengthy synopsis twice for the upcoming Capital Fringe Festival. And I think it’s actually a good exercise for anyone else out there struggling with putting together a good, concise pitch.

So here’s the long-form version of my synopsis for my play ALICE:

It’s June of 1971. And Tricia Nixon is getting married. Every reporter in town is determined to interview the last bride to be married in the White House, 80-something Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

Long before there was a Lady Gaga or a Jenna Bush, there was Alice. She was the daughter of one of America’s favorite Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt. She married a future Speaker of the House in a White House ceremony that was the event of an era. Before she was married, Alice made headlines in an era when tabloid journalism was exploding. She was tall, gorgeous, and loved to shock the American public with her antics. She endures, perhaps because every other sentence she uttered was a sound bite with teeth that still nip.

In tonight’s play, Alice is being interviewed by an unseen reporter. She offers her opinions on the Nixon presidency and several other presidencies in her long lifetime. But she is also trying to justify her own gadfly existence to herself and to her father. The ghost of TR appears in the play to question Alice’s version of events and force her to confront the truths in her own life: her unhappy relationship with her daughter, the infidelity of her husband, her own marital indiscretion, and her selfishness in general.

Welcome to an evening with the ultimate political celebrity: Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

The Fringe Festival asked for a much shorter synopsis: no more than 40 words. Here’s what I finally came up with:

“If you haven’t got anything good to say about anyone, come and sit by me.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth was the ultimate political celebrity: daughter of a President, married to the Speaker of the House. Spend time with “Washington’s other monument.”

That was frustrating, because I couldn’t get in the fact that she was Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter. But I figured the quote was famous enough and conveyed exactly who she is and that was more important to attracting an audience for the show.

But the Fringe wasn’t done with me. They wanted a TEN WORD version! Here’s what I ended up with:

Meet the ultimate political celebrity: Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

Very unsatisfying. But again, I was thinking of my audience: a Washington DC crowd that LOVES political celebrities. And the names Roosevelt and Longworth are famous enough to entice even those who’ve never heard of Alice.

Or at least that was my thinking. (I welcome better rewrites!)

But it’s a useful exercise: start with your synopsis. Then write a 40 word version. And then a ten word version. You may never use them, but just think how pithy that ten word version would look as an opening sentence in a pitch letter!