One of the writers in my writer’s group goes to the Sundance Film Festival every year, and comes back to share stories of what she’s seen. It sounds like a Harry Potter experience, to be able to see these wildly original films, ready for marketing (or not), and to be part of a small group of industry insiders who get to see those efforts.

What I loved hearing from her this year is that all of the films that she saw (and she only saw a sampling of what was offered there), the films that she saw –  were written from a very personal point of view.  The films were “intimate” and “story-focused” and “emotional”.  Now granted, these are films, not plays. But I think that there is an influence from theatre to cinema, just as there is an influence of cinema to theatre.

I was thinking about that influence of cinema on theatre when I saw this clip on Anna Deavere’s Smith’s new play.  Look at the visual effects for this one woman show – it looks like a scene out of a big budget motion picture. And yet, there’s an intimacy in her writing, and obviously, in the people she’s portraying. 

The Clip from the News Hour on One Person Shows

I remember when I did a one woman show on Emily Dickinson, all I had was a desk and a fainting couch for a set, and some pretty low budget lighting.   (“And lights up.”  “And lights down.”) Would the show have been better served with a scrim projecting images of Amherst, and Emily’s handwriting, and beautiful photographs of the natural world, the beauty, the despair, that she wrote about?  Perhaps, and especially in the media/photo saturated world we lived in now – but I like to think that theatre is also about asking the audience to imagine a cowboy holding a beer at a bar, or an enraged patient at a doctor’s office.

I still think about using scrims with projected images for background images onstage.  But I just haven’t made the leap. Yet.

I hope you get a chance to read this essay by Wallace Shawn; he explores the world of acting and writes about the freedom inherent in moving between roles and society.

Wallace Shawn post

I remembered this post a lot this weekend as I finished up a writing project that I’ve been working on for the past year.  I resembled an insane person as I talked out the various voices: gesturing to the air, scaring the cats with imaginary arguments, figuring out how an arthritic recluse would clutch a tea cup, yelling at dust bunnies on the floor.  But somehow I was in that zone of letting it come out of me, all the noises, all the steps ahead, to let the story uncoil and have its own path. It was a 15 hour writing marathon, and on the other side of it I’m amazed. I’m amazed I drank so much coffee and survived.  And the cats…well, they’re glad that this weekend is over.

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.”

– Isaac Asimov

When I was a child I was a scavenger: pebbles, sticks, feathers, dead bugs, seed pods were the coin of my realm.  The natural world was my buffet plate and I scrounged through all kinds of treasures.  I once found a completely intact dried snake skin, (and cried when it crumbled in my over anxious hands).

After struggling through a season (or some) of despair, I’m finding my way to enjoying writing again.  Maybe its more accurate to say that I’m finding ways to enjoy parts of my life again and that’s reflected in my writing.

Now I find that my kind of inspiration needs to have the same kind of guilt free piracy:  the  gifts to be found in the natural world that I can bring with me to my writing are still around me, and I’m trying to awaken the same kind of wonder and appreciation.

I’m reading more; seeing more art work, trying to see more friends and get out of the smallness of the past few months.  I especially appreciate reading the LA FPI blogs – to know that there are like minded spirits and writers here is very comforting.

Here is a website I go to for an occasional jolt of positive thinking:

Here’s to finding the feathers and sticks needed for new ideas.

I’m at a business conference this week where I’m listening to speeches given by business executives.

Its remarkable to witness, that no matter how wonderful or awful the script is, if the speaker can’t use their own breathing when they’re talking – the words don’t really matter.

I know about breath control from being an actor, (and from the training in iambic pentameter), so I know about how breath illuminates spoken text (or not). But I was surprised to see how much nerves and tension and competiveness prevented a lot of today’s speakers from effectively using their words. They had some great phrases to use – but a lot of them just dumped their words out on the table like pieces from a puzzle.

One of the speakers, the CEO of the company, took his time to deliver his messages. Yes, he did seem a bit…ponderous…maybe even older in his vocal quality. But his messages had more weight and meaning because you could frame their connection to your understanding of where he was going in his speech.

I had the chance to go see THE KINGS SPEECH this past weekend, and there were some glorious moments, not just in story telling, but in the power of what words are, and how they can be used – and overcome.

I think I’ll be writing with more of a consciousness of the breathing between and in the words I write. At least for a little while.

This past week, I watched a friend’s dream come true. It was decades in the making and I was surprised at the emotions it evoked in me.
This seems important to remember when we’re writing plays. Or growing herbs. Or helping loved ones with illnesses.

A friend of mine has had her first book published (and yes, she already has her second book written and ready for publication) and she’s now on a publicity trail.
In our salad days we were acting students together, and she was funny, irreverent and spunky. She still is. Back then, we were cast in a rather awful play about Catholic School Girls in Trouble, and we did some Shakespeare (she played Pandarus in Troilus & Cressida). She ran a theatre company, did a lot of producing and directing.
We’ve kept in touch over the years, did a couple of shows together, and then she spent some time in London researching a book she was writing.

This past week, she gave a reading at a book store in Pasadena for the first leg of publicity for her book. I sat up close and watched her as she was introduced, and then read sections from her book. She took questions from the audience, and talked about what it took for her to begin, and more importantly, to finish this book.

This was a great experience to share – I saw her young face, her face when we were young actors together, and her face now as she read her book.
Her voice took on the characters in her book, much like a play. You could see how much she loved this book, these characters, this creation.
I was so proud of her, thrilled to hear how much the crowd wanted to be in her story, wanted to know what she had been through, wanted to live through this moment of hers.

Yes – in the car on the way home that night I did find my own monsters of jealousy, inferiority, and whatever self esteems issues I could muster up. But I also had these images of her face as she faced her audience, and that’s what really stayed with me afterwards: the wonder, the appreciation, the self awareness, that yes, here it is, the dream you’ve been chasing.

I know we all experienced that writing can be lonely business. But I did see this few hours of getting to read your work to an audience, getting to be asked what did it take, where did it come from, all that is a blip on the radar, after years of writing and writing and then the dice game of getting published. I did get to see what it feels like to have a dream take shape, and happen and go forward.

So that was a gift in the beginning of this new year. And I’ll take it, and cherish it.

Click here to see Todd Barton's video link.

This week has been a surprise. I’ve written on a blog for the first time.

I’ve been able to write – bits and drabs – about mannequins and costumes.

I wasn’t able to write about character arcs or third act slumps or about the craft of playwriting.

But amidst my own mind babble (shut up with the complaining: no one’s making you write) or inspiration (connecting threads from the past), I let go of some of my dread.

I wanted to share this link from Todd Barton, a friend from my past; he’s a great feminist, composer and artist. Years ago, we collaborated on a great idea for a children’s interactive video game (build your own flying carpet/city with music you create in a keyboard game). It was a great idea…in its time.  But he’s created some inspirational music for theatre that can spark some great ideas and feelings. I asked his permission to post his link here.

Thank you to LA FPI for giving me the nudge to share on this blog. I begin again tomorrow with my writers group.

So here’s to tomorrow.

Halloween is coming. Yes, the chance to dress up in a scratchy plastic mask and run screaming through dark neighborhoods and get free candy.  At least that’s the way I remember it.  But times are different. There used to be hordes of young children, without parents or flashlights or fireproof costumes, roaming the sidewalks experiencing unsupervised tragedies on Halloween.

Halloween was the chance to live out your fantasy of your evil twin, your secret self, your nemesis.

But I had my issues. I had an identical twin sister, and other, cuter siblings, and the wild card – a magical mother who could make any costume come to life. She made costumes for us as skunks, and cows, and Rosie the Maid from the Jetsons, and Pirates, a geisha, and bunnies and a horse that ended up tragically torn in two, and Elvis and a Christmas tree (with presents as feet), and a Black Eyed Susan, (and as my twin sister Susan defiantly explained to everyone “I am not a sunflower”). My mother gave us this idea that we could become anyone – if only with a plastic mask and a bunch of fabric. “Let’s see how this looks,” she would say. This would look like a bunch of fabric bunched up to look like a giant toenail. But somehow, with her imagination and with paint or some trim, or a bunch of buttons, eventually it became a kimono, or a queen’s cape, or a Spanish shawl.

I think this ritual of experiencing other cultures, other costumes, and personas, is a great way to experience the building blocks of theatre. How do you walk in these shoes? What does that wig feel like? That innocence of wanting to become someone else – “What are going to be for Halloween?” What freedom there is in the permission to become someone for a night, a party, a photograph.

Do Zombie’s wear tiaras? I guess I’ll find out this year….

There’s something about mannequins that remind me about a writer’s first/second/final drafts. Maybe it’s the skeletal frame, or the glassy eyes, but I’ve always been attracted to the idea of an idea taking a form, a body, a costume and then resembling a whole idea.

When I was a child my mother was keen on bringing us to every small town museum she could find, The Lobster Museum in Kittery Point, Maine, the Birch Tree Forest Museum in the White Mountains, Vermont – and some of them were quite surreal in their use of mannequins and taxidermy. The museum with the most sinister theatrical memory was a rather musty one in Fremont, Nebraska: “The American Indian in the American West” . It had a grouping of “American Indians” (this was before the term “Native Americans” or the discovery that Indians had tribes or nations of their own), anyway, the Indians looked very much like suburban neighbors who were dressed up in bad fitting leather outfits and they were lumped around a glassy eyed buffalo that they had apparently just killed (it looked like a moth eaten buffalo sofa with bent arrows coming out of it).  There was the square jawed Indian Chief with the Eagle feather headress, and the sullen young Indian brother, and the Indian Mom with a fake looking papoose on her back who was cleaning up the buffalo blood on the floor.  The caption read something to the effect of: “…here the Indian family are dressing one of the last of the buffalo, which were soon to be extinct on the plains of Nebraska….”

This exhibit really confused me. The Indians really didn’t look like Indians, they looked like white people with smudged dirt make up on, and the buffalo didn’t look dead, except for the glassy eye part, and I didn’t realize that buffalo were already extinct. I thought we saw one at Six Flags Over Texas the summer before. I didn’t quite get the distinction that they would soon be, perhaps, extinct on the plains of Nebraska. And I didn’t understand why they would be dressing a dead buffalo – (if he was dead, why would he need clothes on him?) – but when you’re nine years old and you know everything, you don’t ask questions.

So anyway, this really does bring me back to mannequins. The idea that they represent an idea – especially in theatre – as characters take shape in the time/place/class that they inhabit. I went to see the new costume exhibit at LACMA at the newly opened Resnick Exhibit this past weekend. The daring of these clothes really sparked my imagination – the curious nature of the each generation’s idea of the ideal form. It was inspiring. Especially the feathers in the hair.

……Is Hard To Do

(Writers Block)

You know that feeling when the words are tumbling out of you and you’re typing so fast because you’re raining dialogue, you’re percolating scenes and stomping exits and slamming doors and people in your head are yelling at you to hurry up – they’re waiting to get on stage. (…Okay, this could be a fantasy…)

And that’s only happened to me when I’m at writing retreats and I’ve paid money to show up and have actors read my scripts. But I swear, it has happened. I’ve had dreams where characters are chasing me like some kind of Twilight Zone episode and they’re trying to catch up to me to get to me to have their last say in the script I’m writing. I don’t mind that kind of scenario. I’d rather have that, then the Siberian exile I’m living in now.

Yeah, that island I’m living in now is called Writers Block. I know a lot writers have lived there, or had to visit. There are lots of life issues at play here: a family member is battling with cancer, my husband and I are dancing with unemployment and financial dread, and my life seems smaller and less assured.   What else.  My beloved Abyssinian cat is very ill and I know I love him too much in a way that people who own Abyssinian cats do. It’s a cult thing.

I guess it started with an unhealthy attachment to my last script. I loved it. I still do. Maybe you’re not supposed to love an unproduced script. Hell, it’s still out there, circling the zip codes.

But after I sent the script out I stopped writing. Six months of not writing was called “a break”. A restful pause. Refueling. A blank page. But then a series of life earthquakes happened and the writer’s block stayed.

So I teased the white fog to other names: Block head. Gnawing doubt. A log jam of inability. Did I fall out of love with writing? Did I use up all I had to say?

When I was a young actor, I played Eve in a production of “The Apple Tree” in Boston and worked with a very talented opera singer. He would save himself during rehearsals, barely coasting through the score and script, but then, eventually, gave an incredible performance in front of the audience. I thought he cheated the rehearsal process; but he shared, what was for him, a important part of his technique. “Darling,” he said, “God only gives us so many high notes; and I’m going to spend them with the audience, and not in the rehearsal room.” I might have thought he was selfish and a little precious, but I have to say, that technique really worked for him. He sang the role of Adam like an angel.

I’ve often wondered if there isn’t a part of my writer’s brain that is a little bit like his Adam. That it needs to get what it needs to write, and then –  it just turns off. I’m done. I’m tired of your stressful, fussy life. I’m tired of you giving the cat shots twice a day. I’m tired of the invisible cancer in the house, and the checkbook and the migraines and the grinding teeth.  So my brain just says:  I’m not writing.  Just not.  Just make me.

So I’ve been doing some “inspirations” to try and lure my curious self back into writing mode: meditation class, venturing out to see a couple of plays through LAFPI, embarking on a mannequin project, infusing vermouth. Getting engaged in something with my mind and hands has helped. Starting my writers group again will be a bit of trial when I really do not feel like writing at all, which I suppose,  is the point. Writing on this Writer’s Blog is supposed to be part of breaking the iceberg.  I don’t know that I can do this.  I will try.

And we’ll keep giving the cat his shots twice a day. That’s just part of the deal.