Category Archives: playwriting

Fatima Quest

Playwright, playwriting, , ,

I’m writing a new piece now, some stories that have been swirling around my head for a while – the Virgin Mary and Fatima sightings and women’s bodies and family stories and growing up Catholic.

Many of these stories I have told before. Most over a beer or two getting to know a new friend. They are the stories told in the night that you can’t imagine putting in print for fear family members would sue. Honestly, they still might.

And it seems that the story to haunt me forever is the one that caused a great shift in my life: Fatima.

Here’s the gist: two young girls and one young boy (ages 7-9) see the Virgin Mary one day while out tending their family’s flock. She tells them of future visitations and offers three secrets which include:

  • Russia must proclaim their devotion to the Mother or She will fail.
  • (shady interpretation) Pope John Paul II’s Assassination attempt
  • The two youngest (Francisco and Jacinta) will die soon while Lucia will live on to spread the glory of the Virgin Mary’s word.

The two youngest did die from a pretty common flu, and Lucia, later Sister Lucia, or Looney Lucia, as I will refer to her, lived to be a ripe old advisor to the church and I believe was appointed for sainthood after she died at 92. The two youngest were the only canonized youth who were not martyrs.

The show is called Fatima Quest, and this is the blog I write before leaping into the next ten pages I promised to finish by Monday.

Wish me luck. I’ll tweet about it @cindymariej & also started a Pinterest Inspiration Board.

If you have any stories or experience with the Fatima story or the Virgin Mary, let me know!

Oh I Could Never Why The Heck Not

News, playwriting,

Or the post where I try to be inspirational.

I am trying to eliminate the phrase, Oh I Could Never, from my mental vocabulary. It’s not in my writing process, but I’ve been trying to eliminate it from my life thought process as well.

Oh I Could Never. It’s such a simple thought. It can be used ethically. Oh I could never shoot someone. That’s a good thought to have. Please, my friends, never stop thinking that thought.

But Oh I Could Never could also be used in negative ways to eliminate possibility. Oh I could never go and try that new thing. Oh I could never go two days without a shower.

We all have standards that we hope to live our lives by. But what about the possibility of something new? What if I stepped off the curb of Oh I Could Never into the puddle of possibility?

So whenever I think Oh I Could Never, I add the phrase Why The Heck Not. I prefer heck to hell because in this context, heck reminds me that it’s so simple that I don’t have to swear.

Oh! I almost forgot. I have to plug stuff today.

If you are in Prescott, Arizona in April, my monologue “Cake” is being performed by fellow LAFPI blogger Tiffany Antone as part of an evening called Love Makes The World Go Round. Here’s the website.

I will not be in Arizona in April, but I’m sure it will be a fun night.

 Speaking of Tiffany (who is definitely in the WTHN zone), she’s producing another festival of women’s plays. I recently blogged over on her website.

 

Comment Feedback

Audience, playwriting

We’ve all been there. We’ve all received feedback for a play and gone huh? We writers want to be diplomatic and open, but at the end of the day, some things we hear are just plain stupid.

When we receive those little gems of stupidity, we nod, smile, and say, yeah, I see. Then, we promptly forget it or put the comment on auto repeat as we drink ourselves into a stupor or walk away with our hands on our hips whispering what the f*ck while wondering why we even allowed that person to talk to us in the first place.

I won’t go into all stupid comments I have received over the years. I actually have forgotten many of them sometimes without the aid of the drunken stupor. However, there are a few that I just have to share.

Diplomatic Disclaimer: These are comments I have heard repeatedly over the course of almost twenty years, so if you think you may have said something similar to me, I have no memory of you saying it specifically. It’s not you, it’s me. All me.

You are crazy for writing that.  Wow Jen, you write crazy. Whoa, crazy stuff.

 Sometimes this comment is meant to be a compliment. Still, the implication is that I am out of mind when I work. This is not true. I am focused. I am working with an awareness of both the mental and sensual. I don’t write for therapy either.

 I don’t get it. I don’t feel it. I dig it. I love it! IIIIIIIII. . .

 The interesting thing about I-comments is that they are about the speaker saying them. They’re not about the work in question. That’s nice that you get it or don’t get it, but if you really want to engage a writer about her work, ask her a question. Questions lead to communication. That’s good. Communication is good.

It’s like Beckett. It’s Beckettesque. Very Beckett.

Beckett didn’t write my stuff. I wrote my stuff. Beckett wrote his own stuff. I respect Beckett. Usually when someone uses a term like Beckettesque (or Pinteresque or Chehovian), she (or he) can’t speak deeper about such a comparison which is not interesting to me anyway.

So what is a poor play viewer to do when she or he encounters me?

If you see me in person and want to tell me that you like my play, simply catch my eye and point to your nose with your right index finger. That’s all you have to do. I’ll know.

And if you want to compliment me, compliment my shoes because deep down, I am a girlie girl.

On Pseudonyms and Pen Names

playwriting

When the Bronte sisters were first published, they were Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

Pride and Prejudice was first written by the author of Sense and Sensibility, and Sense and Sensibility had A lady listed as author.

Nowadays, women can publish under their own names. My favorite author name for a woman is Lionel Shriver—her name is actually Lionel—she named herself because she liked it.

I have a lot of different pseudonyms. I write plays under Jen Huszcza, but I blog under different names. When I work in different forums, the voice comes from a different place and my mind works in a different way.

I’m not going to tell what my pseudonyms are. I’m not that easy.

Are pseudonyms career suicide? Shouldn’t I make ‘a name’ for myself? Shouldn’t I be a ‘brand’? Shouldn’t I let everyone know everything about me? Shouldn’t I be easily found on facebook and twitter and in the blogosphere?

I won’t insult your intelligence by answering my own rhetorical questions, gentle reader. I will say that in this age of instant access to too much information, it’s nice to be a bit elusive. I can slip in and out the backdoor without being noticed. I can steal kisses in the shadows and pick wallets out of pockets. Was I here? Was I there? Where was I?

On Woody Allen

playwriting

Back when I was a baby writing student of eighteen, there was a cute guy in my craft class who loved Woody Allen, so  I watched a bunch of Woody Allen films in rapid succession. Some of them I liked. Some of them I didn’t. There certainly were a lot of them.

Fast forward to now. Woody Allen has just had a hit with Midnight in Paris and was the subject of a PBS documentary. He’s in his seventies, and he just keeps churning out movies. Every year we get a new Woody Allen film. Some are good, and some are yawners. I loved Match Point, but I fell asleep ten minutes into Cassandra’s Dream.

I was thinking about Woody Allen when I got a rejection letter recently. No the letter was not from Woody Allen. It was from a literary manager who said the play wasn’t for her company, but if I had anything else, I should send it on. I thought, heck yeah I have something else, and I sent her another play.

As a playwright, my job is to the write the plays. Some of my plays are not bad. Some of my plays are probably not producible on this planet.  I just keep writing them and throwing them at the wall. One of them might stick.

I keep waiting to run out of ideas. Hasn’t happened yet. I’m gonna do this when I’m in my seventies. Oh no.

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

playwriting, , , , ,

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.

 

The Battleground

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I have a secret – I’ve become a producer over here in Arizona – I’ve actually produced more shows/events this past year than I’ve written and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop… because it’s hard out here for a Playwright.

It’s damn hard.

So I created Little Black Dress INK, an organization dedicated to promoting/creating production opportunities for female playwrights.  I invited some talented ladies to put pen to paper (or fingertips to keys) and draft up some plays for a festival last summer and it was a great success!   We didn’t know it would be a great success, we just went for it and crossed our fingers – because it’s better to do that than waste time hemming and hawing over a thing for so long that you forget what it is you’re even considering.

Which is why, when I decided to do it again, I decided to go reach even further… to get the fest to travel.  One hell of a lofty undertaking, to be sure… but so worth the work… isn’t it?

I ask, because I’m finding that while I may be tired of sitting around waiting for someone to produce my work, not everyone else has my same verve for  making-it-happen-ness.

(which may actually be more of a testament to their common sense than my tenacity)

In any regard – I am trying to get the plays some sort of reading in LA… it’s just a reading… no big expense, no set, no props… just a reading… And it’s been a hell of a lot more work than getting the thing fully produced here in AZ.

Which draws images to mind of the Los Angeles battleground I abandoned two years ago – so many theatres, so many artists, so many denizens of the “Industry” running their scrawny-underpaid butts off to get produced, be on stage, be seen, and knock some socks off…

I don’t miss the rat race of LA, but I am definitely feeling out of her frenetic loop.

But what else can I do than keep on keeping on?  I’m a playwright who’s fallen into producing as a means of feeling less impotent against the theatrical unknowables… no one ever said any of it would be easy, did they?  Nope.  Not even for a second.