All posts by Robin Byrd

Permission to Say…

Playwright, playwriting,

“You have to give yourself permission to say…” Theresa Rebeck

As a writer, “you have to give yourself permission to say” whatever needs to be said to tell the story – striving always not to sensor the authentic truth of the story.  Don’t sensor yourself.  It’s hard enough to release the flow of words from their birthing chamber without changing them as soon as they reach the light of day for fear of how they might be received.  Fearlessness is needed, as well as being honest in the writing and having confidence in your voice as a writer…

This is what I got from the conversation with Theresa Rebeck  at the Dramatists Guild Symposium on Saturday.  She was quite fascinating…

Things from the Writing Box…

Playwright, playwriting, Poetry, , ,

In the early nineties, I began my quest to look at my heritage and find more pieces of what makes me who I am.  I imagined that any journey toward that knowledge would be good for my little box of things to write.  One day while home from my day job, a man stepped out from between two cars in front of me.  I had to swerve to miss him.  Later that night in my apartment, I had a visitation from the man in the street. Not his physical self but his spirit or so it seemed.  I write about things of the spirit a lot in my work…it just shows up – like he did.  I have been trying to put the vision I had that night in a play but am not sure when, where or how to enter as I really do not want a literal interpretation of that experience.  I want to capture how I felt in those moments…  Over the years, I’ve tried different things but can never quite get that, “this is it” feeling.  Two years ago, I wrote this poem:

the Medicine Man

he stepped out from between the cars

with his staff

magnificent, authentic, ancient, familiar

he was tall like my uncle huron

with chiseled facial features

in headdress/ high moccasins/ native attire/ regal/ warrior-like

the feathers hanging from the staff caught my eye first

they were real

and i wondered if they were eagle

then i noticed that he was looking directly at me as i approached

our eyes locked for an instant/ for an eternity

my car seemed to be driving through a time warp

as i slowly passed him there in the street

looking through me to some place

we must have met before

in the rearview mirror

he turned his entire body to watch me drive away

i could not watch the road for watching him

he was a shaman/a medicine man, i knew

but why was he looking at me

did he know me/ daughter to native ancestors

i should have stopped/asked

later that night as i lay on the floor in prayer

i could hear and feel footsteps vibrating on the floor

moving toward me

a hologram in moccasins was all that i could see

his…

he placed one foot on the back of my head and pushed me into a vision

of the past

afraid/ unable to resist/ unable to move from the floor from the smoke

what is that?

i could hear the rattlers and sounds of war

the screaming women and children

i could smell the smoke and see its fog

then it lifted just enough for me to see

i was there dressed in buckskin

lying face down in the rubble

watching the boy as he searched through it for

his family

i was there

he knew me, daughter to native ancestors…

he knew me…

As a writer, do you ever wonder just how long a story can germinate before you can write it?  Have you ever come up against any story that just doesn’t seem to have an “in”? What do you do?  One of the greatest things about theatre is that the playwright doesn’t have to limit their approach to conventional ways in order to write their story.  Stuff just needs to be pulled out of the box, lived with for a while and looked at it from several angles…

 

 

A Place of Strength…

Playwright, , , ,

“Don’t lose your footing. Find your place of strength. Take time to identify those things that anchor your soul.”  —   Dr. Cindy Trimm

Often life goes full speed ahead – with or without you.  You can be so wrapped up in keeping up you don’t take the time to renew yourself.  Then, before you know it, out of the seemingly blue, you hit a wall and find yourself dazed and confused about how you got there.  You know you have gotten off track…  You know you aren’t yourself.  You know you’ve been missing you for a while.  You know that wall really didn’t just show up out of nowhere, you felt it coming but just didn’t stop yourself from walking into it.  You told yourself to “fake it till you make it;” which worked for a while – till the residue from the build-up of not taking a rest became so thick visibility was lost…

Now you’re at that wall, face in or butt down, and you’ve got to pull yourself back together again, got to find your place of strength…  You’re so far away from yourself, your normal avenues to renew and press just haven’t been working (to be honest, you haven’t been using them, hence the residue build-up).  What do you do?  How do you get your feet back on solid ground and get back to you?  How do you find a place of strength that will help you right here, right now?

I have a favorite passage of scripture, from Jeremiah that was ringing in my head as I found myself getting up off the ground recently:

16 Thus says the Lord: “Stand in the ways and see,
And ask for the old paths, where the good way is, And walk in it;
Then you will find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not listen.’

Jeremiah 6:16   New King James Version (NKJV)

This verse – taken completely out of the context of the story in Jeremiah but completely in context for me because I was not paying attention to how far away I was getting from my stress releasing regiments  – helped me get back to me.  I had been ignoring my own warning flags – my failsafe anchors that keep me from losing my footing.  I wasn’t taking time to read things that feed my soul, that recharge me and encourage me.  I wasn’t getting out in nature to simply enjoy the air and growing things or checking on/hooking up with family and friends…all the things that seem like nothing special but are…

A place of strength is where you go to find renewal, redemption, and hope…  It is a right now place…

The first thing I did to get back to there was pray.  Not my regular prayers I had been praying everyday for myself but the “can we talk” prayer where I pulled out by backstory, looked at the character traits, and examined the plot.  Repented.  Where did I veer from the natural flow of things?  Where did I lose my footing?  Examined myself with unabridged honesty.  Truth does set you free; it allows you to reset your pace and rewrite…  It allows you to get back to you no matter how far away you think you have gotten…

My place of strength is staying connected to me, to God, and to my backstory that informs the plot points in my life – plot points that can change if needed…

 

Time Spent…

Playwright, playwriting,

There are long nights of writing and longer nights of thinking about writing.  All seem to run together as I work out story bits, running plot lines in my head, listening to dialogue, visiting the people who live first in my mind then on the page.  A lot of time is spent working through a preliminary story, till it flows just right … If I could add up the hours spent before my computer, wonder how many times I could cross the earth with it.  It gets old – the constant push – but the time spent doing my craft is so much a part of me, too much time away from it makes me disoriented.  Funny, I can imagine myself day-job-less but I can never imagine myself not writing…

Time well spent is my daily goal; no matter the discomfort, it’s worth all the long nights needed to create that next perfect line…

Take the Small/99-Seat Theatre Survey

Uncategorized

Brenda Varda has asked LA FPI to participate in her Small/99-Seat Theatre Survey and to help get the word out about it.

Ms. Varda is doing a trial version of this survey to look at arts participation in the intimate theatre scene in Los Angeles.  She is writing some academic analysis on the cultural and personal functions of the Scene and getting more participants (women) would lend some more credibility to the exploration. If you are attached to any companies, tangentially or integrally, that would help the cause.  You can take the survey at one of the following links:

the Secrets of Poetry…

Poetry, , ,

One of the things I deal with in my writing are secrets; those kept by family, others, and those kept by me.  Poetry is a way I file them away for later days.  My brother used to read my diary and thus, knew my secrets so I started using codes, the best of which is the language of poetry.  Now, after all these years of writing, I no longer use it to always conceal but also to reveal.  Poetry:  snippets of moments or events captured in verse…

  

My Brother’s Eyes

my brother’s eyes pierce

shallow graves

to view the bones

set in awakenings and armor

dress right dress

till the cover is sure

secrets double time between memories

lay out half naked on the asphalt

soaking up the tar

hair black black now

skin black blue now

scrapped and pus-ing over

my brother’s eyes pierce but i cannot tell

the price i paid for his life…

 

the Blues of It…

LAFPI, Playwright, Poetry, , , , ,

it’s a rhythm

slow, low and bluesy

seeping like vapors into a waking day

me in the middle of it

always caught by surprise

always caught

off guard/off kilter

by the soothing riffs

slur/sliding down the notes

trilling backward in time

to then

when…

even after checking the archival catalogues

i can never find any foreshadowing

it’s always the same interrupt/

same perpetual stop-loss/

same…

decades passing

has not changed the cadence

henderson born, kentucky rooted syncopation

dating way back to the 1800s

way back to when

my shawnee mothers hid out

near robards station

waiting through

the trip to containment

waiting through

the loss

it’s the blues of it

that keeps the song going

pizzicato

shimmer/slur

pluck

me in the middle

me on edge

traveling back to then

in the middle of a waking day

stop-loss now/ me caught

in the blues of it

 

My grandmother used to tell me stories…before she began to forget.  I stored them somewhere in my subconscious.  I remember them at the oddest of times, in the middle of dreams, while writing other things.  When I was 26, I joined the army.  The days before I left, I would bury my head in her breasts – like I did when I was a baby – to soak her up.  I knew that was the last time I would see her alive and I needed to keep a piece…  She’s in a lot of my plays in some way and when I am really tired, I slip into her southern way of speaking.  Nora Lee Phillips Morris…could sing a whole church happy…right in the middle of the blues…

Being a storyteller means remembering and sharing even when you got the blues…

 

End Results…

Audience, LAFPI, playwriting, , , , ,

Sometimes, things fall through the cracks.  Sometimes the hard journey through the cracks is the best one that can be taken as an artist. Enduring the pull and stretch can be just what is needed to help create a fresh perspective or an authentic moment that can take art to the next level.

 …the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, neither is bread to the wise nor riches to men of intelligence and understanding nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all. [Ecclesiastes 9:11]

Time and chance happens to us all — an equalizer of sorts.   Knowing that, it is a little easier to decide that no matter what we go after, we have the right to expect the end result to take us some place intriguing – some place that will allow us to grow.   We must remember that how we view our world has a lot to do with how we manage in our world.  One can be so wrapped up in the circumstances that the result can be overshadowed.  But end results are like mistakes, everyone makes them; it is not if you will make a mistake but when you make a mistake, it’s how you recover that matters most.

So, the best results can come after the worst experiences as lack luster ones can come after the greatest fanfare.  However they come, one must be aware and celebrate them.  Or, you’ll miss the fact that after days on edge trying to cast your play for a reading, you have the best talkback of your life.  Does the struggle overshadow the win?  It shouldn’t.  Does the win overshadow the struggle?  It should.

I just had a  reading at a festival that was a challenge getting everything in place.  However, the last minute casting got me actors and non actors that really felt my play and discussed it up to an hour after the reading.  And they went deep — both actors and audience members.

I came away feeling that I had conquered the world…  The end result made it all worth it.  I think had there not been a challenge, in this instance, my end result would have been less spectacular…and less exactly what I needed to for my piece.

If We Believe…

LAFPI, Playwright, , , , , ,

As a storyteller, when I create the worlds for my stories, I must believe them to be real worlds.  If I believe it, the audience will believe it. If I believe it, my characters will know I believe it and they will talk; they will tell me their secrets and show me their hearts. We can sit a spell and work it out on the page.  We can see what the end will be…  We can find a way of telling the truth about things considered intangible/ethereal/surreal/too terrible to speak of/so hush-hush, the revealing can blow the mind. As a storyteller, I have to be open to conversations with the truth – whatever that truth is…  I have to be brave enough to share it… and let the chips fall where they may…

The singer, Brandy.  I watched an interview with Brandy “Behind the Music” where she mentioned one of her albums that didn’t do too well.  She said she was supposed to be “sexy” then she revealed, “I didn’t believe it. And, if I didn’t believe it why would you?”  I remember that album of which she spoke and I remember thinking, “What is she doing?  Why doesn’t she just be herself and sing?”  I did not buy that album – her voice was different – her sound was off.  And, I love me some Brandy; I think that her gift is phenomenal.  I love the deep colors in her voice – how one can feel the graininess of the “Shekinah Glory” in the tone, and hear the octaves rising and falling like a breeze on a warm day, telling stories in flats and sharps like nobody’s business. I’ve been missing that sound until recently when Brandy teamed with Monica on a song “It All Belongs To Me”.  Hearing the first notes, it’s easy to see, “She’s back!” You can best be sure she is not trying to be sexy, she just is and that voice…she is definitely telling a story that she believes and that makes me want to hear it…

As artists/storytellers/writers/painters/sculptors/singers/dancers, we must stay true to our authentic selves striving always to the perfecting of the gift as we translate it through our vessels.  We must strive to stay on course and learn to get back on course should we ever lose our way.  I am convinced that sometimes the best part of the story is how it is filtered through the artist.  If we don’t believe in ourselves and what we have to say and how we say it, is it fair to expect anyone else to believe in us?  We are different for a reason, unalike to serve a purpose, not-the-same because being the same was never the point.  It’s the collective sound of harmony in the many voices of a choir that makes it a choir, the collective sound of the woodwind, brass, string and percussion instruments that make up an orchestra and that collectiveness facilitates a symphony; and it’s the collective sound of a people that make its culture.  If we are listening, we know that all the parts are needed to give a true reflection of the sound of our times.  We must continue to believe and act accordingly.

Believing involves more than the worlds we are trying to create, it also involves the world we are in – the here and now – and the pieces that inevitably we leave behind.