Category Archives: LAFPI

The Self Production Series with Anna Nicholas: #4 Paying for it (Part 2)…

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#4. Paying for it  (Part 2) – You’re on Your Own  (Read Part 1 Here)

by Guest Blogger Anna Nicholas

When I lost the theatre company as a potential financial partner, it fell to me to raise the money for my play. And as I faced that daunting prospect, I again turned to people who’d self-produced before me. Some had trust funds or wealthy spouses—I didn’t; some were ex TV writers with big bank accounts—ditto; an actuary friend financed his show by calculating life expectancies—who knew? Most, however, used some combination of their own money, loans and crowdfunding (Kickstarter, etc.).

Eight to ten months from opening, my plan was to sell my house and use some of the profit to pay for the show while also creating a kickass Kickstarter campaign in the hope that all my friends would give me $20-50 and I’d raise $15,000. After all, I reasoned, whenever I get hit up, I give at least that. But as things turned out, by the time I parted ways with the company, it was too late to put together (what I thought would be) a quality campaign, considering all the producing and rewriting I was doing.

For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts on crowdfunding: You can be successful but it’s no longer a new idea and may have even lost some of its appeal. If you’re going to do it, you need to develop your campaign so it attracts investors you don’t know as well as those you do. Running a crowdfunding campaign is like having another project instead of being an easy means to an end. It takes a lot of time. You need to have compelling pictures, text that “grabs the reader”, video and enticing giveaways for donors. Then you need to publicize the crap out of it, while continually adding updates. You need to get people excited about being part of your project enough to donate and ask them to forward the links so others can, all with the hope of going large with fundraising.

There are now hundreds of crowdfunding sites so start by sifting through them to see if there’s a perfect fit for your project. I won’t list all the possibilities; just Google “great crowdfunding sites” and you’ll get there. Regardless of how many options there are, however, most people end up on Kickstarter, Indie-Go-Go or Hatchfund. There are differences so read the fine print. For example, Hatchfund likes to say the artist keeps the entire donation but what they do is add a fee to the donor. To me this feels like a trick. It’s not cool if your friend intended his total give to be $20 and now he has to do some math in order to keep it there. Kickstarter and Hatchfund need you to make your entire stated amount before they release funds while Indie-Go-Go lets you keep what’s been donated even if you don’t make your nut (though they’ll take a larger fee for your right to do so). Depending on how much money you need, it might be better to go to a few individuals and say, “Hey, I’m trying to raise some money for my show. Would you possibly give me $100 and I’ll give you 4 tickets to opening night?”

In my case I just didn’t have any hours left to flog the crowdfunding endeavor, particularly since I was so late in starting. In retrospect I should not have counted on things working out with the theatre company and developed the campaign. But when that fell through about 9 weeks before opening, I had to scramble and there just wasn’t time. Had I found a volunteer to take over the task, I might have proceeded as well.

So in the end, it was the house sale that came through. Of course I would have preferred to use other peoples’ money. When something is not likely to make its money back, one should always risk somebody else’s money. But I didn’t have that privilege and I’d grown tired of waiting for my mystery benefactor or that angel artistic director to appear. And seriously, at my age (55) and a woman? The chances of that happening were about as likely as being offered the casting couch. There aren’t many “emerging” playwrights my age, unless you want to define “emerging” as people nobody knows finally popping their heads out of the sand. So, like the lioness Theresa Rebeck and many others before me, I needed to be my biggest fan and self-produce my own work. Put your money where your mouth is, right?

Next up: The Budget and Trying Not to Break it

Does Anyone Fly?

LAFPI, playwriting, Young Women

by Korama Danquah

I like kids’ movies a lot. Sue me. Please don’t actually sue me as that’s a dumb reason to sue someone and I’m too poor for legal fees. What was my point? Oh right, I like kids’ movies. I think that children’s films present a lot of simple truths in easy to swallow, not quite as grandiose ways. The Lego Movie teaches us that everything is better when you’re part of a team and that by believing you’re “the Special” you can become “the Special.” Side note: If you haven’t seen the Lego Movie you’re wrong. Just wrong. And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is wrong for not nominating them (I have a lot of Feelings about it).

The first movie I remember seeing in theaters was Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear asserts that he’s not flying, he’s “falling with style.”  That moment is great because you realize that Buzz knows he’s never going to fly and he’s ok with that because damn, can he fall with style.falling

Lately I’ve been wondering if that’s all success is – Falling with Style. I have trouble watching other people fly, not because I want them to fall but because I am ashamed of my own clumsy falling. But perhaps it’s just an issue of style. If anyone can show me how to keep falling, but how to do it with style and aplomb, please let me know in the comment section. Until then, I’m going to watch Tangled for the 1000th time. 

The Self Production Series with Anna Nicholas: #4 Paying for it (Part 1)…

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#4 Paying for it (Part 1) – The Company Connection

by Guest Blogger Anna Nicholas

Where does a self-producer get the money to put on a show? Do you bankrupt yourself like Michael Keaton’s character in Birdman? Maybe. (Spoiler alert: It worked out for him.)

Once my play was chosen, there came the question of paying for the production. Of course I had an idea of where I’d get the funds. However, once I’d made the commitment to go forward, reality struck when I had to start writing checks.

My first choice was to ally myself with a theatre company because doing so would help carry the load—from providing the physical space to assisting with lights, costumes, casting etc. Companies will do a co-production because they need shows to fill their theatres and plays in which their members (who usually pay dues and contribute a certain number of hours per week keeping the company going) can perform. But there’s usually a trade off: You may need to cast the company’s members (or a certain percentage) in your show, which may not be in your play’s best interest. You may have to pay for half the set.

If offered such a deal, explore it because doing all the production work yourself requires not only money, but time and lots of effort, some of which in retrospect, I’d like to have back. If you go this route, make sure before you get going that both you and the company are clear about what elements you and they will be responsible for. And write it down! This is a contract and best not left to a verbal understanding. If you either don’t have, or prefer not to work with, a company then you’ll need to come up with the money on your own–from finding an outside financial backer like a rich uncle or through donations and crowd funding.

In the early going with Villa Thrilla, I had a theatre company interested in a co-production. We spent months going down the road on the details: How many company members would I need to cast? Who will be responsible for what portions of the budget? Who would direct? Sadly, we couldn’t come to a meeting of the minds on much of anything and we parted company. I didn’t want to hand off a lot of (what I thought were important) decisions to someone else whose opinions, though valid, were so divergent from my own. Unfortunately, this decision came late in the going, leaving me with a rented theatre space and not a lot of time to put it all together. I recount my experience here to point up what to look out for, not to scare you. Plenty of other playwrights have nothing but good things to say about the arrangements they made with companies. But the rift had me scared and questioning whether I’d made the right decision. I almost bailed on the project out of fear I couldn’t pull it off on my own. Ultimately, I decided to forge ahead, somewhat blindly.

Next up: Crowd funding and where I got the money for Villa Thrilla.

Tornados…

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by Robin Byrd

There was a tornado in California mid December – a strange occurrence this side of the Rockies.  Out of the ordinary; it made me think of home and growing up in the midwest in tornado country; it made me think of the sirens going off and the treks to the basement to wait them out.  I was suddenly in remembrance of “the house that built me.”  All the experiences my midwestern background has bestowed upon me that inform my world.  We are who we are because of our experiences.

I may have southern nuances that pepper my work but I am a midwestern writer with a midwestern sound – a sound I inherited from the region that grew my sentiments.  I understand the tornado and its winds and thunder and lightening.  I know there is safety in the eye of the storm.  I know that the quiet in the midst of a storm builds hope and expectation…  I know the sun comes out after and we behold brighter days.

I enjoy traveling home to rejuvenate myself and though, nothing remains the same, it is good to remember where one comes from in order to stay the course of where one wants to go and to continue on regardless of the tornados…

 

Harmony…

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by Robin Byrd

Having gone through an entire year striving for harmony, I find myself in these last few days 1) very excited about the coming year and what it will bring, and 2) nearly undone by the journey thus far – nearly but not completely… It has been hard getting out of my old skin and becoming…more…but it has also been enlightening.

Harmony is a coming together, a joining together, unification, agreement, accord, synchronization…

Harmony enhances the melody. All I need to do is keep my strings tuned and know when to play second fiddle even though I can play first.

2014 has been a year of going deep, of following the rabbit down that rabbit hole and experiencing the entirety of wonderland. Forcing myself to go with the flow has taken me to new levels in my writing. I have finally shed the last of my inhibitions; usually less inhibited when writing poetry, I have seen my recent pieces come to the page in more exacting ways since I have decided to “write it like poetry”. Scary and exciting and liberating…

2015 hints at being a very good year…

May your 2015 bring you harmony and growth and prosperity…

The Self Production Series with Anna Nicholas: #3 Selecting the Work…

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#3 The Play’s the Thing – Selecting the Work

by Guest Blogger Anna Nicholas

In the wild, lions rule and don’t care if others like the way they take down big game. But in the small, equity-waiver theatre world most of us frequent, once you decide to self-produce, you need other people. It’s one of the best things about doing it—the collaboration. But putting on a play is expensive so at the onset the artist part of you needs to have a conversation with the practical side (yes, you have one). The play really is “the thing.” If you are not in a theatre company that has a built in support network, you need to choose a show that will attract a good director, actors, co-producers, and designers, which will also ideally find an enthusiastic audience. I’m not in the school of artists who say the work is enough. We write/act/create to connect with others and if we can’t get people to see our art, then we’ve failed in that little piece of why we make it. The main reason we make art—because we are compelled to—in this, we’ll never fail.

Whether you’re an actor, director or playwright with a couple of scripts to choose from—you need to select the play that is most likely to achieve your desired end. Is it to get an agent? Is it to get good reviews or to develop a Google presence? Actress/Producer/Director Deidra Edwards was smart when she decided to self-produce, casting herself in Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig. She was right for the role and she selected a play/playwright with a big following.

My goal was to restart my career after early success, which I’d abandoned to raise my son. I also wanted to have fun. In retrospect, these goals were not enough and were motivated too much by emotion rather than any sort of business sense.

Of the two plays I thought were ready, one was a four-character dramedy about an Apollo astronaut with Alzheimer’s and the other, a ten-character murder mystery farce called Villa Thrilla—very different shows that would speak to very different audiences. To help me decide, I consulted friends, fellow playwrights and others in the industry and it was generally agreed that without a known actor starring as the astronaut, the astronaut play would be the harder sell. It would be difficult to put an uplifting positive spin on the story so that people would come see an unknown, in a play by an unknown. So I went with the farce, which was beset with its own set of hurdles: a cast of ten and more expensive set, which would require a larger theatre. Looking back, with the issues we faced, I might as well have tossed a coin. And speaking of coin, the next post will be about getting the money together.

The Self Production Series with Anna Nicholas: #2 Be a Lion…

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#2. How I Decided to be a Lion.

by Guest Blogger Anna Nicholas

“Be a Lion, Be a Fucking Wolf, Take No Shit, Set Goals, Smash Them. Eat People’s Faces Off. Be a Better Person. Stay the Mother Fucking Course. Show People Who the Fuck You Are. Never Apologize for Being Awesome.” All right, one shouldn’t eat peoples’ faces off nor use the F word so freely. But if I hadn’t yet decided to produce my own play, reading this quote would have nailed it for me.

See for too long I thought there was a formula for success and once I found it, I’d become the successful artist-person I wanted to be. So in my search I read Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson and Eckhart Tolle. I absorbed the “7 Habits of Highly Successful People” and found no success. I bought into “Start With the End in Mind,” yet, mindful of that hoped-for end, nothing happened. I absorbed The Forum and watched The Secret. I even entertained the idea of Scientology until the negative aspects of that cult made it impossible to consider seriously.

I embraced the idea that there was actually something I could do or avoid doing that would ensure I would become a successful writer. I made a poster in power colors on which I pasted pictures of beautiful ranches and vacation spots I wanted to travel to and award daises where one day I’d accept a prestigious prize; all with the goal, promoted by the self-help gurus, that if I envisioned my—future, success, goal—what I dreamed of would happen. So I envisioned. I worked on my craft, kept writing and envisioned some more and believed and trusted and went out in the world and tried and tried and tried. And nothing.

All that envisioning started back in the early 80s and I’m over 50 now. You do the math. That’s a lot of years hoping for something to happen and not much of what was on my power poster has appeared. Some might say I didn’t envision hard enough or I was envisioning incorrectly but I figured out that for me–all that hoping was in fact handing off the responsibility for my success to somebody or some thing other than myself. It also ultimately made me feel “less than,” which is the opposite of what the positive thinking bandwagon makes a good deal of money promoting.

I really thought there was something I could do, someone I could become, some sort of mantle I could don that could make the people in control of who gets picked artistically pick me. This was true whether I was auditioning for a part I really wanted or, once I began writing, submitting a play that would capture the hearts and minds of the pickers who were in control of choosing what plays got put on. I just needed to figure out what that was and my name would be at the top of their list. Obviously all of this, over time, has proved to be completely fallacious reasoning. That’s not to say keeping hope alive isn’t important; I just wish I’d figured out earlier that I needed to be the lion because I wouldn’t have wasted so much time hoping somebody would step up and roar for me. Well fuck waiting for something to happen; time to make some noise.

Coming up next: Selecting the play.

The Self Production Series with Anna Nicholas: #1 The Decision…

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#1. The Decision to Self-Produce or I’m Self-Producing my Play… Agh!

by Guest Blogger Anna Nicholas

After more than 30 years of loving theatre, writing plays, studying the craft of playwriting and having my plays selected for readings and workshops; after years of submitting those plays to theatres large and small around the country (and England) and receiving many a glowing (albeit boilerplate) rejection; and after fellowships, labs and a couple of prizes along the way, I decided, however foolhardy, to produce my own play.

“What—why—how—?” People asked. And not just people—friends; trusted allies in the slog through life. All good questions, but ones that ultimately only served to strengthen my resolve. As to why I felt compelled to do this, the reason that comes quickest to mind was: If I chickened out, then it wasn’t clear—despite all the aforementioned time and effort and minor success that I’d had with my plays—that anyone else was going to. Oh, yeah, it could happen; and I live in hope and engage in many forms of positive thinking that it would. But in practical terms, it was looking more and more unlikely. And it became very clear that if I wanted to see a play of mine onstage before I needed a walker, I was going to have to produce it myself.

As I said, I’ve been writing plays for over 30 years and had some lucky, early success when my first play was produced and directed by Dorothy Lyman. Then life intervened. I had a child, we moved, the child had ambitions, which kept me busy and not pursuing my own goals. But now, with my son grown and off to college, I found myself starting over. In starting over, however, where exactly does one start? It’s not that I’d ever stopped writing, but I’d dropped out of the game and most of the principal participants had changed in the interim. Dorothy closed her theatre twenty years ago and moved back to New York. I didn’t have any friends with theatre companies and though I hung around a few before I jumped into this madness, no one was buyin’ what I was sellin’. So there was another reason I needed to do it myself.

Over the next few months, I’ll be writing about the journey of how I came to be brave (or silly) enough to self-produce, along with recounting the minefields, pitfalls, fears and yes joys! that have occurred along the road to getting my play on its feet in front of a (mostly) paying audience. I’ll give you the what, why, how and where, as well as all the angsty decisions about money, selecting a director, finding a co-producer (you didn’t think I was stupid or brave enough to do everything myself did you?), choosing a theatre, actors, the union, designers, publicity or lack of it, and bad reviews. My goal is not to scare anybody but to give other playwrights the confidence to produce their own work, to arm them with some information about how they might do that and the resilience to see it all through.

 

Throw out the kitchen sink dramas!

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by Kitty Felde

This past weekend was DC’s annual “Page to Stage” Festival. It’s a tremendous gift from the Kennedy Center to local playwrights. Every Labor Day weekend, the Kennedy Center opens up rehearsal rooms, the Millennium Stages, donor event rooms, every nook and cranny on every floor, to staged readings of plays by local writers. Imagine the Music Center turning us loose for an entire weekend!

This year also included a special seminar for writers given by Michael Bigelow Dixon, formerly the literary manager and associate artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Dixon wants us to stop thinking about conventional reality and play.

Reading hundreds of plays for the Humana Festival, he says none of the current batch included anything other than realistic plays – kitchen sink dramas, domestic conflicts, even those that got away from home and hearth and tackled international issues were still written in conventional, realistic fashion.

He wants us to dream and has written a book to spark our imaginations about making theatre THEATRICAL.

Why? Not just to get our plays noticed, but to attract a modern audience.

But how do you do this? Do we throw out everything we know about writing plays and reinvent the wheel? Not necessarily. Dixon has a few suggestions:

  • – Interruption: the “reality” of the stage play is interrupted by “real” life. How many audiences paid big bucks to see “Spiderman” for the play itself? More were there to see if a real-life event like an accident might happen. Is there a way to bring reality into our artificial worlds?
  • – Give the audience a choice: call it a gimmick, but from “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” to Alan Ayckbourn’s “Intimate Exchanges,” plays that let the audience choose its own ending are very popular. Is there a way to invite the audience to participate in the creation of your play?
  • – Anthropomorphize a character: put a talking animal on stage. Or a lot of them. Hint: there were WAY too many dog characters in our workshop.
  • – Interdisciplinary approach: try rewriting your play as a radio play – what do you have to eliminate? What do you have to add to make the audience understand what’s going on? Then rewrite it as a graphic novel. Then go back to the original script to add SOME of the elements.
  • – Ekphrastic drama – or what I call “dancing about architecture” – include other art forms in your work
  • – Distort time and space – ala Jose Rivera’s “Cloud Tectonics”
  • – Recontextualization – tell your story from someone else’s point of view. Think “Amadeus” and Salieri’s version of Mozart

Just a few thoughts to shake up your “realistic” world.
The book: “Breaking from Realism: A Map/Quest for the Next Generation” by Michael Bigelow Dixon and Jon Jory

Facing the ghosts: Eugene O’Neill and Tao House

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This wonderful article:

Facing the ghosts: Eugene O’Neill and Tao House

by Laura Shamas can be read on the HOLLYWOOD JOURNAL website under the “Industry Impressions” section.  I found Laura’s article to be well written, informative and to be honest comforting.  We, artists, have our ways of being that make us who we are and who we are is what sets the pitch and frequency of our voices and the stories we tell…  Please go here to read it.

 

http://hollywoodjournal.com/industry-impressions/facing-the-ghosts-eugene-oneill-and-tao-house/20140728/