All posts by TiffanyAntone

Enjoying the Howl

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Short plays… who loves short plays?  I’ve been working with them a lot lately.  I just wrapped up a female playwrights festival in Prescott (next year’s submission process will open up to LAFPI writers – so stay in touch with us on Facebook), I’m in the middle of developing another short play fest for December, and I’m writing a short play each month this summer for HowlRound.com’s Here and Now Project.

The funny thing is that I used to hate short plays – I didn’t feel like there was ever enough time in a 10 minute play to get the story told.  Maybe it’s because I was trying to say too much, or maybe it’s because I was still a new writer and I didn’t really understand the value of brevity.  Whatever the cause, my aversion to the form has melted away and I am now a major fan… because it’s seriously challenging to write a whole play in 10 minutes!  Much of the time I wind up thinking “What comes next” at the close of ten pages rather than satisfaction and catharsis.  However, I’m finding that when I do strike it right, the sense of accomplishment is delicious.

And when I watched this year’s female playwright’s fest in Prescott – From the Mouths of Babes – I felt such happiness as the completion of the whole… made up of each individual playwright’s part – that I could scarce believe I used to loathe the 10 minute play format.

But maybe what’s most rewarding for me is the producibility of 10 minute plays.  They’re easy to rehearse, easy to stage, and audiences get a kick out of seeing new writers in small doses… almost like a dinner party with lots of appetizers.  I now totally understand why theater companies put out so many calls for short plays – they get to know new writers without committing to an expensive full-length production – something that can be frustrating as a playwright, but makes sense from a company standpoint.

Also, I’ve grown really tired of wrestling with the eternal “WHEN is  SOMEONE going to PRODUCE my plays!?” ennui .  The thing about producing on my own is that I feel like I’m actually doing something other than waiting.  And hopefully it’s satisfying to the other playwrights getting produced as well.

In any case, it’s an interesting way to start the week… reflecting on the magic of short plays and the satisfaction of seeing them on their feet.  Hopefully the  Here and Now Project plays will see some stage life soon too – either way, it’s been great to work on so many 10-minute plays this summer… and it’s left me feeling really good about finishing up the full-length that’s been haunting me for the past several months – it’s a sense of accomplishment that I was sorely missing.

Because it’s really important to remind yourself that you don’t just have to sit around and wait…

Did you hear that?

Stop.  Waiting.  Now.

🙂

A Tingling Sojourn

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It’s the end of my blogging week, and I want to talk (finally) a bit about time…  How we spend so much of it waiting, making excuses, rushing around from unimportant (in the scheme of things) task to unimportant task – how we put so many wonderful moments on the backburner because it’s not vital to our day-to-day existences…

We’ve got to stop that nonsense.

Cason and I spent our final “Jane Doe in NY!” vacation day puttering around Park Slope – there was a wonderful street fair with plenty of good food and excellent knick-knack browsing to be had.  The weather was gorgeous.

And the art was everywhere.

I need to stop getting sucked into my “Oh-my-God-I’m-so-Broke!” panic and remember to make more art.

I need to write more plays.

When I moved back to AZ (almost 2 years ago now – yikes!) it was never with the intention to stay as long as I have.  I was unemployed, beat down, and depressed as all get out about my “Why can’t I just EMERGE ALREADY” Emerging-Playwright status.  So I took my Arizona Sojourn as an excuse to hide out, lick my wounds, and heal.

Well, the healing has happened – it’s time for me to get back on the hamster wheel.

And that’s not to say I’ve been lazy – just the opposite in fact – I’ve been insanely busy.  But it’s primarily been a producerly and survivalist sort of busy… I haven’t done a lot of writing or art-making of my own, and this weekend was just the right thing to help me refocus and get my sails back up again.

Because it’s incredibly validating when a theatre company reads your work and decides to produce it – there is so much involved in theatre making, it is a tremendous compliment to know that someone besides you and the non-producing back-clappers think your work is worthy of an audience.  It’s why we write plays, after all.

There is also something incredibly inspiring about visiting a city full of artists fighting to make their art seen/heard/count.

We saw Fuerza Bruta this week and the sheer spectacle of the thing had my imagination spinning with possibilities – my playwright brain was in visual ecstasy.

I walked into shops full of hand-crafted clever arts and wanted to run home and start building pieces of my own.

I have really missed the visual and theatrical feasting that the East and West Coasts provide… and I am inspired to bring my reclaimed whimsy and dedication back home with me with a vengeance, now that the “licking-my-wounds” sojourn is over and I’m feeling the Muse stretch her wings again.

Thank you CAKE Productions, and thank you New York!

~Tiffany

 

Piece of CAKE

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I have to admit, I was incredibly nervous to see my show Thursday night at the 4th St. Theatre at the New York Theatre Workshop.  I think it’s to do with the fact that it was a completely new experience for me and my little playwright brain couldn’t grasp the reality of it all- aside from the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway festival I had participated in 4 years ago, this was my first production in NY… and it was completely different and amazing for a whole-exciting-bunch of all new reasons.

But when I walked into the theatre, I was greeted by a voiceless director who was exhausted from the last minute tech-insanity, but who also seemed really happy with the work… so I settled in, took a breath, and let go.

And it was wonderful!

The play began with an entirely different interpretation of the first scene than I’d imagined (there was dancing and shadow play!) and it completely surprised me – but in a really great way.  You see, I’d written this play to be interpreted and designed – The text is the text is the text, but the staging and design of the play are not strongly indicated, so a director/design team can (and should) have fun manifesting the metaphorical nature of the events of the play… which of course runs the risk of someone getting a little too auteurish with the script, which in turn might make me cringe someday, but the fact is that I like writing for designers and directors and actors.  I like giving them a jumping off point – dialogue, plot, a lot of visual challenges, and room to stretch their creative wings.

And I really loved the design that CAKE Productions and their director, Paul Urcioli, created.

The set was all white, the back wall moved as we dove deeper and deeper into Jane’s nightmare, the many doors provided funny and poignant entrances and exits, and the lighting was really cool.

And the actors were amazing.

Having seen the show twice before in LA, I was prepared for the embraced wackiness of the play, but the actors and direction in this production actually grounded the play more than I’d seen before and it brought a wonderfully genuine gravity to the play.  The play leans to the absurd, but Jane’s crisis is a very real problem… the humor and pathos was really well-balanced in this production, and it drove the plays meaning all the way home – at least I thought so.

And I enjoyed the surprises – having worked on the play for so long, I’m very familiar with the text, but hearing it aloud again after the 4 years since the last production was a treat because I had done some rewrites.  There were a few places I had honestly forgotten that I’d rewritten, so I found myself leaning in a bit more and being surprised by my own work.  Then there were a few places where the director’s choices changed the way a scene or moment played and I thought “Wow – that was totally not how I’d imagined it/seen it done before!” but in a really interesting and purposeful way that served the play well.

I walked out of the theatre feeling like a proud and honored playwright, like I’d just been to the interior of my play – past my own expectations and further into the world of Jane Doe.

And I can’t wait to see it again tonight.

~Tiffany

 

Landed! And still Juggling…

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Well, I’m in NY… and it’s just as loud, as bustling, and as chaotic as it was the last time I was here… or maybe not.  Actually, the last time I was here, there was a freakin’ hurricane-a-coming, so things were pretty intense.

In any case, I’ve landed, taken a nap, and am safely resting in Brooklyn, trying to recover from the lack of sleep I got on the red-eye flight over.  I’m excited and nervous about tomorrow – there’s been a lot of anticipation and anxiety around this event for me for the past several months… mostly me fearing the unknown and also being afraid to trust in the awesomeness of the opportunity.  Now that I’m here, I’m like “Hey, whatever happens/doesn’t happen, I’m still a playwright who got to travel to NY to see her play performed!” and some of the anxiety it dissipating… some of it.

And I’m so thankful I have some good friends and loved ones attending the show tomorrow night with me.

Meanwhile, I’m also trying to get some emails written to the ladies contributing plays to my Female Playwright’s Fest, From the Mouths of Babes, this July.  It’s very exciting – 9 new plays written by female playwrights from AZ, CA, and MN will be performed in Prescott, AZ then read in LA (I’ll be sure to make sure the LAFPI posse gets VIP invitations!) and then also read/performed in Minneapolis.  As a playwright who yearns to have more control over her destiny than merely writing plays and sending them out into the ethers, it’s really satisfying to put on my producer hat and make things happen.

First thing I need to make happen though, are those dramaturgy emails to the playwrights 😛

So, even though I’m here in NY and on a lovely vacation of sorts, there’s still lots to be doing, to be juggling, and to keep me from chewing all my finger nails to the nub.

More to come…

~Tiffany

Control Freak

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Of all the readings and workshops that In the Company of Jane Doe  has had over the years, this – my first NY production – is the first one I haven’t been able to help rehearse.  On one hand, it’s kind of exciting because it will be a completely new experience for me to walk into a space and see the play done based solely on someone else’s interpretation of what’s on the page (and a few email clarifications between myself and the producer).  On the other hand, it’s kind of terrifying to think that I will walk into a space and see the play done based solely on someone else’s interpretation of what’s on the page (and only a few email clarifications between myself and the producer).

It’s been a healthy challenge in learning to “let go”…

It’s been a healthy challenge in learning to respond to notes and questions coming from people meeting the play for the first time as well.

I don’t even remember sending the play to CAKE productions two (or was it three now?) years ago.  Apparently they had posted a call for female-focus plays and I had sent them Jane Doe.  They received so many submissions from that call that they  simply read till they found something they liked, produced it, and then went back to the pile of unread scripts for year two.  When they called me to ask if they could do a reading of the play, I was surprised (as I confessed, I didn’t remember sending them the script) and I was also over the moon excited.  When, after the reading, they said they’d like to produce it, I was over the moon again.

But when they asked me if I would take some script notes, I crash-landed at my desk and began to sweat like a mother-f***er.

My neurotic Playwright Brain began to torture me with panic:  What if I don’t agree with their notes?  Will they not do it?  What if I can’t fix the hiccups they’ve identified?  Will they not do it?   What if I make all the changes and it makes the play worse?  Will they not do it?  And even worse-   Do I even know how to write plays???  What if all this panic leaches into my brain and erases everything I’ve learned and I just sit here at my desk like a cucumber, staring blankly at the screen and thinking horribly blank vegetable-like thoughts…

Every email they sent, I sweated over, so dreadfully afraid was I that they were going to change their mind at any second and this super-cool-awesome-can’t believe-I’m-going-up-in-NY reality would dissolve into “Too bad, so sad, and bye bye Tiff!”

But only a few of those emails had notes –  really good notes – notes that challenged me to look at this thing I’d written at the start of my playwriting career and tighten it up with tools from my “7 years later” tool box.

So I wrangled the notes – I didn’t turn into a cucumber – and CAKE took the play into rehearsal.

They sent me a few more “Can we cut this, Can you write a bit more of that” emails that I listened to and worried over – it was really hard not being in the room and hearing these beats skip in the way they said –  but all in all, I had to trust them and trust myself, and negotiate my own view of the play with what they were hammering out in rehearsals in regards to which changes needed to be made and which did not.

It was a crazy new experience… and one I hope I managed well.  I guess I’ll know when I see the play on Thursday!

But all in all, this new step of “playwriting from the opposite coast” brought with it a lot by way of learning to let go, and just trusting in the play – quite a feat for an self-admitted control freak.

~Tiffany

 

Gearing up for NY

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This week I’m traveling to NY to see my play open off-off Broadway and I’ll be sharing it with all of you – what great blogging synchronicity!

About 7 years ago I began a little play called In the Company of Jane Doe.  It was my first graduate school play and only my second full-length play ever.  I was in the throws of “How am I ever going to get everything done?”ness and I had a wacky dream about a mad scientist and a woman who clones herself, only the clone comes out looking like she would sans all the plastic surgery and etc. she’d had done to herself over the years.  I woke up enthralled – I’d found my play!

The writing of the thing was another matter – all too aware of my newbie status as a writer, I allowed my un-baked babe to prance around before my peers for dissection at quite the price:  they didn’t get it, and I began to think I didn’t know how to write.  I spent the summer after that first year of grad school convinced I’d made a horrible mistake, but I kept working at the play because even if it wasn’t there yet, and even if they didn’t yet get it, I knew where I wanted it to go and I really believed I could get it there if everyone would just stop asking me so many dang questions…  See, I’d started to realize that the people who’d been challenging me along the way weren’t to be blamed for all that I hadn’t yet gotten onto the pages – it was time for me to stop worrying about everyone else for a little bit and just write the damn thing!

So I did.  I took the notes I thought helpful, and I ignored the ones based on the play’s absence of “Finished-ness”.  I worked hard to take the play where I knew it needed it go and go there it did!

And, as a result, I learned that all that strife and stress I’d been fighting was the result of showing my work too early/allowing too many notes to land on my big-sensitive heart.  I learned that I shouldn’t ask for opinions until I have gotten a thing as far as I can on my own, lest I get feedback on something I already know is undercooked.  I learned that I don’t need to take every note/comment/or question.

I learned to trust my own inner muse.

That that summer the play was selected by the Playwrights Center for their New Plays on Campus project and was a finalist for the Princess Grace Awards.  Those little victories were just what I needed – I redoubled my efforts and the play has had several other cool awards and opportunities tacked on to it since.  It even got a production in LA in 2008.

This week In the Company of Jane Doe opens in New York.

It’s been a long journey and a lot has happened to me since I met Jane Doe and the wild clone-making Dr. SNAFU – I graduated, I’ve written a number of other plays that have had cool things happen to them, I’ve been unemployed, I’ve taught, I’ve created playwriting opportunities for other female playwrights, and I’ve gotten a little less precious and a whole lot tougher about all of it along the way.

Which is all to say, I’m excited about NY – so very much so.  And I’m also dreaming about what comes next…

~Tiffany

Write

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I wrote this last week for my own blog in response to a big personal upheaval in my life.  The details aren’t important – what matters is that in my moment of crisis, this is what I wrote.  And looking back over it, I felt like it might be worth sharing here, amongst my writing peers.  I hope you enjoy it and that it means something to you as well.  

Write so that it does not rule you, does not wrap itself around your spine and sink into you and become you.

Write so that you remember – so that after the “This is happening”  has happened, and those chemicals that Mother Nature gave us to survive such traumas have done their thing, that there is a record of The Thing That Happened, lest you need to remind yourself what it was that changed you.

Write so that you can heal.  That you can ask the questions no one has answers to, if only to get them out of the hollows of your frightened skull and onto paper – trapped in lead between lines that you own.

Write to take its teeth out – this thing swirling inside you with its black eyes and dark intentions.  Write to strike it powerless against you and your fragile heart.

Write because it’s all you can do.  Surrender to the tap of keys, the scratch of pen… let the knowledge that you know not enough keep you company as you try to make sense out of the senselessness.

Write so that you can sleep.   So that you can lie down at night without the pressure of things unsaid and unanswered pressing into your quaking chest.

Write so that you may quiet that quake and breathe.

Write because language has the power to transform.  Let it take over and wash through you and transform you from frightened observer into active participant in this unfortunate chain of events… even if it is only in how you steer the words on your screen, they are still your words – your truths – they are your sacred experience come to lines and curves and they are beautiful and tragic and transformative.

Write to find stillness.

Write to come to a quiet place where you are spent, finally, and it is still.

… it is quiet.

You are there.

And you are powerful.

 

Word Love

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I love words.  I stew over the best words to use in a post, an email, a text… I weigh the rhythm, the gravity, and the depth of words against my intentions and emotional/intellectual need in that particular moment of expression.   Sometimes I make up words when it suits the occasion/situation/or beat, basing my privilege to do so on the fact that I have a very expensive piece of paper in my drawer stamped with MFA PLAYWRITING on it.

Because for me, the written word is an awesome opportunity to recreate genuine human expression in an (hopefully) accessible format.

But sometimes I forget that not everyone shares my affinity for the perfectly selected pronoun or ideally placed hyphen.  I forget that not everyone is as equipped with the gift of verbal manipulation and application as I-who-have-devoted-myself-to-such-things.

I’m right now in a very complicated communique with someone who simply cannot match my verbal-obsessiveness and I find myself having to control my hunger for better words… I want poetry and depth and craft  – what is being given to me instead is genuine simplicity.  My love of/need for “better” words is leaving me frustrated and unable to just accept the letters and dots coming my way as expressive enough.

And I’m wondering if other writers experience this… this need for high articulation in their real-world communications.  Do you ever find yourself searching for excessive verbal depth in debates/conversations?  Do you find yourself mentally trying to script the other person’s dialogue?  Do you get at all hung up on the seeming insufficiency of someone else’s vocabulary in high-stakes moments?

It’s kind of related (probably) to my anxiety about communication (perhaps this anxiety is another reason I’m so drawn to playwriting and the ability to craft dramatic communication on stage).  I’m terrified of the conflict that can arise from miscommunication, and so I’m always striving to be as clear as I can, to offer as much of myself through my words as I can.  But I forget that there are all sorts of ways people communicate – they say things with their actions, with their touch, with their eyes…

I need to learn to trust those things as much as I trust my words.  It’s an interesting thing to think about… especially when I consider how much I incorporate those things in my plays – I mean, I never rely solely on a character’s dialogue to convey a moment… why would I then deny the power of action/physicality in real-world communication?

In any case, I guess you can tell I’ve been thinking a lot this week about my playwright self vs. my human-being self… sometimes I just feel like I spend so much time at my computer, tap-tap-tapping away, that I forget to negotiate a healthy balance with the outside world.

… and I think I feel maybe a real-world vacation might be just what I need to help.  Thank goodness Spring Break is just around the bend!

 

Fighting the Story Need

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we (as artists, as audience, and as humans) can sometimes self-program to hunt for dramatic elements – all those important “Gotta Hit This” Rising Action/Climax/New World Order/etc. points – in life.

And how screwed up that is.

Because life is not story.  Even when we think in chapters, even when we impose our own impractical markers – I should accomplish X by graduation, I should be married/have a house/own my car by now, I should travel the world before I’m 60, I should start the New Year (every New Year) weighing less and able to buy more – we are not in control of the overlying structure of our life experience in the same way that a book or film shapes its characters.

Yet, we still try to mark time in story beats… in progressions… in dramatic arcs.

And when those “life markers” don’t happen at the right time, or if they don’t happen in the right sequence, we seize the drama of it!  We grab tight to the conflict, and we try to anticipate where the climax will come and what results it will yield – If I take this path, fight that demon, drink this potion, and climb that wall… I might find that solution and get the girl/boy/new house/great job/pot of gold/etc. and my life will get easier… it will be rosy sunshine happiness and only minor hiccups from here on out!

But the truth is, life doesn’t follow the dramatic arc… it’s life.  It just keeps going until it stops and your job isn’t to try and anticipate the hurdles and pay offs and story-ness of it all, it’s to just live.

Which is why we find ourselves picking up books and siting in the audience along the way – We want to watch someone have a contained experience that we can understand!  We want to feel, for the moment at least, that we understand the human experience a little bit better.  We want to walk away from the story feeling a little more in control of our own world view and the things that color it.

And I think that’s what I love about writing – I love diving in, getting messy, and then closing up shop with some renewed feeling of accomplishment, even if in my own life I often find myself desperately looking up to the big Author in the sky and shaking my fist at her/him for not following the arc I wanted to follow…

Because there is no happily ever after – we keep going – we get married and lose our house, or we get the dream job only to find that it’s awful… We are constantly fighting a thousand little battles that either go our way or don’t, but no matter the result, we keep moving forward into new, challenging situations that merge and swirl and carry us on, ever on, in this world without structure.

As artists, we spend so much time crafting and plotting and embracing made up worlds… sometimes we need to remind ourselves to love this one just as much, despite it’s uncertainty –  to stop looking for meaning or the next dramatic “trick” around every corner, and just live.

 

Progress Shoes

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So I hopped on the blog yesterday to talk about my producerly empowerment, and what do I wind up doing?  Complaining about the fight to find space in LA.  Tsk, tsk, tsk!

But the tallying/writing about it brought the truth to the surface of my frustrated mind… I’m still waiting.  On theatres. For space.  I hate waiting.  It makes me feel stuck.

And I hate being stuck.

Which is when it hit me:  Who said readings have to happen inside theatres?

And that little epiphany put me right back on track and in control… because if we stop limiting ourselves to the confines of the current patriarchal/inbred theatrical hierarchy (and I mean that in the most respectful way possible), aren’t we in the drivers seat?

(And totally/terrifyingly responsible for the outcome… but that’s a different problem :-P)

It seems then, that the frustrated female playwright need only some peers, some ingenuity, and some proverbial balls to get things up and running for herself… then she needs some running shoes and some long jump practice so she can bound around and over the flaming hurdles in her way.

I don’t know if I’m in marathon shape yet, but I’ve certainly got the shoes.

Which is one of the things I actually enjoy about producing – the creative problem solving it requires.  And maybe that’s what I like about playwriting too – stirring things up that require Big Answers… not knowing at the onset how I will tell the tale, only that I must tell it.

So, I don’t quite have all the answers for how I’m going to get my Female Playwrights ONSTAGE project the national wings I know it will someday flourish with, but I’m confident that if I keep fighting for it and running with it, I’ll find the festival evolving and developing those wings as we go…

Which is all to say, I figured out where the festival will be read in LA… and it feels perfect and exciting and surprisingly multi-dimensional for where its at in its development.

And that, my dears, is what I call progress.