Category Archives: playwriting

Jenische (Gypsies)…

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They were camped less than a mile outside Cooke Barracks in the empty field on the way to town for months.  The young children would wave at me as I passed by.  I would walk because, 1. I was in tip top physical shape and, 2. I did not have a license to drive in Germany.  Everyone on Base noticed them – the gypsies – camped like something out of a movie. Dark haired, dark complexioned – a beautiful and intriguing people… One weekend, the children waved as usual but the teen-aged girls called me over to have me show them how to put on makeup.  I showed them how to apply eyeliner, mascara, blush, lipstick… losing my stash of course to their giddy “May I haves.”  I asked them if they were gypsies, “No, we are German” they answered.  Adamantly, Wir sind Deutsch.  We are German.”  The next time I walked to town, they were gone…

I think about them sometimes – German, not Armenian, not gypsies – and the freedom I felt standing there in their camp.  I think about their claim to a land, a heritage not expected by outsiders or even by insiders with standardized tests.  They did not look the part but the field settled softly beneath their trailers disguised as carts disguised as trailers.  And the trees hung over them shielding their skin from the penetrating sun as if ordained as covering since the beginning of time.  And when they were gone, the trees sagged and could be heard moaning for the children.

Gypsies; part of the world but not confined by the world, always ready and willing to move anywhere to find home – never losing the authenticity of self.  Owning their space and place in time, they drew you into their story…made you look…made you want to know…

Sometimes, I feel like a gypsy (submitting work authentic to me and clearly not on the same-dar as what is being selected).  Sometimes I consider “what if I changed”…but never do because it’s the me way down on the inside that’s got so much to say and there is somebody somewhere who needs exactly what I write, how I write it, because the feeling of freedom when I write is worth the waiting period needed for that gypsy spark to ignite.  It must be the softness of the ground beneath my feet begging for seed during the planting season promising fruit during the harvest that keeps me pushing on head first into the wind and rain…into the fray…because I belong…because I am a storyteller…

When contemplating words and worlds, sometimes I go to the movies to see what other stories are being told.  It inspires/fuels/rouses me to create another day…  On my last such outing, I went to see THE GREY by Joe Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers (based on the short story by Jeffers titled GHOST WALKER).  It is a wonderful movie, wonderfully told.  There is a poem in it that made me think of my life as a writer… in this time just before…

Once more into the fray

Into the last fight I’ll ever know

Live and die on this day

Live and die on this day.

— from THE GREY

And all the artists said, “Amen.”

A New Play From The Other Side

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Out of nowhere I got a directing job.

The last couple of years I focused on my outreach and writing, with a few small self-produced  projects along the way. I purposely wanted a break from the rehearsal room and it was a good one. The last year I’ve written more than the five beforehand, and in that time fell in love with the whole idea of the new play.

Howlround and the formerly-Arena Stage-now-Emerson-College newplay initiative did a lot for me. So did the myriad of new work I saw during the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Part of my own odyssey involves ongoing class with the LA Writers Center, an inspirational incubator for new works. Not to mention being part of creating genre-defining projects last year while at The Indy Convergence. And of course, finding a community among this group, the Los Angeles Female Playwright’s Initiative.

So out of the blue is this opportunity, and it happens to be a play I really dig. I thought long and hard about what it would take for me to want to direct again, and I’d say 90% of my personal requirements are met.

In between meeting the wonderful playwright and making my decision, I saw friend Brian Polak’s reading as part of EST-LA’s Winterfest. I walked into the large black box with hidden rooms that create magic. I walked across stage and took my seat, turning off my phone. As I got comfortable, saying hellos and catching up with colleagues, I breathed it all into myself. I missed the potential inherent with only a space, actors, music stands, words and people to listen to them.

So here I am, flexing my directing muscles again, bringing a new play to life.

This afternoon I hear a new draft out loud for the first time. It’s more exciting a prospect than I thought, even after I’d made the decision.

Raise a glass to new works, folks. Keep the juices flowing.

The Play I Hate

playwriting

 

It started with the title. It was a great title. It was one of those titles that I thought, yes that’s what it’s all about. It was provocative yet mysterious. It was sexy yet full of ideas. It would even look good on a poster.

I started writing the characters. They were all right. They took their time revealing themselves, but I’m not a pushy writer. I gave them their space. There were five of them. They were all humans. They were characters that actors would love to play.

I liked the stage I saw. There was versatility to it, yet it was just realistic enough for an audience to say, ahah, I know that place. It was a good space.

I wrote a draft beginning to end. It was exploratory. I just wanted to see the characters run. It was two acts.

I put it aside for a year. Or maybe three years. Time is not specific in Los Angeles.

Recently, I picked it up again.

And

I hated it.

I hated everything about it. The set was claustrophobic. The characters were awful. The ideas in it were stupid and muddled. Even the title annoyed me.

I didn’t hate myself for writing the play. I just hated the play. What was I thinking?

I have written other plays that I’ve put aside for years. When I picked them up again, I could see my thinking and build on it. But this play was a junkyard of yuckiness. I even started to relish in my hatred of the play, and I knew not to give into hate.

So I put the play back in its virtual little yellow folder.

Then, last week, I started thinking about the play I hate. The title wasn’t so bad. I started making notes to change it. Oh no.

Then I realized that if I push all the things I hate about it further, I might start to like it.

Or not.

Meanwhile, I continue to work on a completely different play that I like.

For now.

And on that bombshell, I end my blogging week here. As always, it was a delight. Jen

On Jealousy

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Recently, I was talking with a writer friend whom I’ve known a lot of years. We go all the way back to writing craft class.

My writer friend works in a writing related field and makes good money. He also writes scripts occasionally.

We see each other from time to time and usually have a nice writing related discussion. Recently, over coffee, we were talking about the stuff we were working on. I was going through my list of writing to be done (it never will end, ever).

I’m Jealous. You’re so prolific. My writer friend said to me.

I didn’t know how to respond to that. I didn’t want to say, oh you can be prolific too, you just have to write more because that would be just not true.

I was also shocked that someone would be jealous of me. Me???? I have terrible vertigo, and that’s just the beginning.

My writer friend has a lot going for him. His job is good. He lives well. He should not be jealous of me. I do not have the power job. Compared to him, I. . . .

Ahhh-hah. I see.

Maybe we should strive to not compare ourselves to others. In the long run, it all evens out, and if it doesn’t, so what.

 I have seen friends from school go on to be super successful in writing, and weirdly I don’t feel jealous of them. Besides, we were all goofballs in school, and I still think of them as goofballs.

 Besides, I don’t have time to be jealous. I’ve got writing to do.

The Kobayashi Maru Scenario

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 Or my Kirkian response to the Who Gives A Sh*t Question

I do read this blog when it’s not my week. Recently, Tiffany Antone raised the all important Who Gives A Sh*t Question. I could also call it, do people really want to see another play about characters sitting in chairs and talking about their issues?

Or I can ask, should I write stuff other people want to see? Should I play to the mob? Or should I challenge audience expectation and possibly never get produced? How do I keep the audience interested? How do I keep myself interested? I’m not interested. I suck. I can’t go on, I shall go on.

The no win cycle of writing new stuff-will the audience dig it-but needing to write it- but no one will get it (I’m paraphrasing) kept repeating in my head.

This led to the inevitable playwriting funk which sent me crawling back to prose-writing while watching movie star interviews on youtube.  

Then I was rescued by basic cable. One night, as I surfing channels, I came upon Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn. Ahah! The Kobayashi Maru Scenario.

In Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn, a Starfleet cadet has to take a simulation test. She is the captain of a starship and receives a distress call from a civilian freighter (called The Kobayashi Maru) in the neutral zone. If the captain goes into the neutral zone, it would mean war with the Klingons. The purpose of simulation is to test the cadet in a no win scenario.

Captain Kirk’s solution to the no win scenario was to reprogram the simulation, so there was a solution. He cheated. But he won.

Maybe the solution to the Who Gives A Sh*t question is not in the answer but in the question itself. Change the question or make the question irrelevant. At the same time, there’s an audience out there in the dark. Show them something.

At the end of Wrath of Kahn, Kirk faced a no win scenario, but Spock saved the day and sacrificed himself (although he came back in Star Trek 3). So another question about the no win scenario, is what will you give up to win? Sometimes, the cost is too high.

Then again, that’s just a movie. And all we’re doing is writing plays. Or are we?

Maybe it’s time to become more Kirkian in the playwriting. Live long and prosper.

The Paper Toss

playwriting

 

I love paper.

That’s a good love because I write on a lot of it. Even in this age where I can work on my cell phone, I prefer the pen (black or blue) and paper. I love the immediacy of putting pen to paper. I look at a blank sheet of paper (preferably with lines but I can work on blank stuff too), and I see possibility.

Through the years, I’ve written in notebooks and journals, on legal pads and post-it notes, around envelopes and folders. I don’t write on skin or fabric.

I now also write while typing into a keyboard. However, most of the time, I’m typing in something written down.

I also love doing rewrites on paper. I love crossing out and drawing arrows and making inserts and spreading several sheets on the table as I change around a section.

I have accumulated a lot of paper through the years. Even though my papers are organized in boxes, I felt like I was drowning in it, so this past holiday season, I did a huge paper toss.

Over the course of two nights, I hauled out the boxes and dove into two decades (I’m old) of paper. I swam through pages. Sometimes it was a script, sometimes a story, sometimes a love letter.

Sometimes, the pages were stiff from age and moisture. Sometimes, they were fragile from too much writing on them. Page by page, I kept or tossed, and my toss pile got larger and my recycling bin got fuller. 

It was time to let go. Let go, let go, let go.

It was time for the paper to go, get recycled, and become something else.

I kept the love letters though.

2012 Affirmations, from a Chocoholic Playwright to YOU

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There is a real pain in the ass tradition of recollection and re-dedication to things left lingering at the end of each year… I think you can tell by the start of this sentence that I don’t hold too much to that tradition.  Perhaps it’s because no matter how many things I manage to check off my (very long) “To Do” list, the list never seems to get any shorter – so why would I want to haul that out at the end of/beginning of each/every blessed year and beat myself up about it?

That “To Do” list pretty much lives on the perimeter of my almost daily thoughts anyway.

But here I am with the “New Years Eve” blog spot, and I feel like I have to comment on the occasion… I have to come up with something worth reading… don’t I?

So I was thinking about it from the writerly perspective- reevaluating this past year despite myself and I realized that although I won’t be making any resolutions (evil self-destructive little things, aren’t they?) I did learn some things this year that might be worth sharing here… Then I got to thinking that rather than sound off like a bombastic fool, I’d try to fashion these little thoughts into as straight forward and relevant language as possible…  I’ll leave it up to you whether or not I succeeded.

The Writer’s Annual (or hourly, depending on how often you need to remind yourself of them) list of 2012 Affirmations.

  1. I will not beat myself up uneccessarily for: not writing enough/not getting the production/not schmoozing the right people at my agent’s son’s bar mitzvah/etc-reasons-to-artiscally-mangle-myself!  Or (at least) if I must abuse a gross personal misstep, I will try to make sure my fists are gloved before I self-flagellate, and I will treat myself to a stiff-stiff-delicious-something-alcoholic/or chocolate (or both) afterwards.
  2. I will not waste my time writing plays that do not pass the “Who Gives a Shit” test.  I will be honest and constructive in my answering of this test when administered to an idea of mine.  If I’m not sure, I’ll gather some opinions, stew on it for at least a day, and then probably write it anyway/have to reread Affirmation #1 until the gloves can come off and I can hold a martini.
  3. I will never underestimate life’s ability to pull me in new directions, and I will try like hell to be open to those new directions when life insists on dragging pulling me towards them.
  4. I will let myself try new things (really this is just a restatement of #3) because if you only swim in familiar waters, you’ll never know how long you can hold your breath or what other amazing aquatic acrobatics you can accomplish… no matter how uninterested you may think you are in finding out.
  5. I will reward myself when I deserve it (preferably with chocolate or new shoes… or maybe just chocolate because it’s cheaper)
  6. I will work hard, play hard, take care of myself as best I can, try not to let the state of the world drag me down into an artistic abyss of depression, and I will always remember to scoop the cat litter, pick my socks up off the floor when there’s no longer floor to be seen, and otherwise try to resemble a happy functioning human being, even though I’ve chosen this impossible/wonderful/colorful/delightful/terrifying career… And when in doubt of any of these, I will reference #1 – #5 until the doubt has been run out of town.

May you each experience your own delightful New Year celebration (or lack thereof) and be merry, healthy, and bright in the new year(s) to come!

With Cheer,

Tiffany

The “Who Gives a S***” Test

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So, I mention my “Who Gives a S***” Test and then I just leave you hanging for four days… what kind of lazy, no good blogger am I?

The kind that is on HOLIDAY!!!  I’ve been trying to sleep in (too much fun stuff to do) watching lots of movies (Yes, yes, yes) reading lots of plays (finally, my “To Read” stack is going down) and eating as much as I can before I head back (ugh) to work.

However, I promised you an explanation, and so an explanation you are going to GET.

Now, it may not be all that mysterious, but I think some context around the “Who Gives a S***” test would be helpful, so let’s dive right in.

Jessica Kubzansky is a genius director and dramaturg (I hope all of you have had/will have the pleasure of working with her!) who also happens to teach a dramaturgy class to the MFA playwrights at UCLA, and I think she’s the first one I heard telling us to really ask ourselves who’s going to get excited enough about our play to actually produce it?   That it wasn’t enough to just sit down and make out with our ideas, but we had to ask ourselves whether or not that idea was going to get anyone else’s rocks off as well as ours – because honey, being a new or “emerging” playwright is tough business, so why make it harder on yourselves by writing a play no one wants to see?

Fast forward a few years and I’m sitting on a panel at The Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage Festival (oh yes, I felt fancy!) when someone in the audience asks “How do you decide what to write, and how much do you take audience into consideration when you’re developing a story idea for a play?”

There were other (very awesome) people on the panel, and several of them had thoughts on a theatre’s responsibility to audience (not all of us were playwrights- so there were a lot of other awesome perspectives being put forth) but I remember one of the playwrights stammering about how she kept getting commissioned to write plays that never got produced, so she had a hard time thinking about an audience because she didn’t get to see her work in front of one.

Whoa!

Hold your horses, playwright!

You HAVE to think about the audience – unknown or guaranteed – Otherwise you may never see anything of yours in front of one.

Which is the crux of the “Who Gives a S***” issue – if no one but yourself is going to care about your play, then go write a poem or tell the story to your journal – get it out of your system or stick it in your mental crock pot to get bandied about by the muse… It may develop into something better, it may fade into the gray nothing from whence it came, but at least it won’t steal months of your writing-life away from an idea that does have the potential to ignite an audience with all sorts of “I love this play/playwright!” passion!

Because one of our jobs as writers for the stage is to anticipate the theatrical market – and I mean in a “What is going to get butts in the seats?!” kind of way… because that’s what theatres want!  They want to sell tickets, so they can all continue to get up in the morning and get paid to put more butts in the seats!

And it can be tricky – this self-reflective, self-administered standard of story “pruning”… We won’t always be able to get it right, of course, and sometimes a story we don’t think anyone will care about is just too loud to ignore and we have to write it anyway – and sometimes those stories become the ones they can’t get enough of… because it was told with too much passion to ignore… But if we force ourselves to ask these questions up front, we can save ourselves some time, some rewrites, and some self-loathing-“Why-doesn’t-anyone-else-like-this-play”-agony.

Spalding Gray

playwriting

 

I first saw Spalding Gray perform in person at Lincoln Center in 1996 when he did his monologue It’s a Slippery Slope about learning to ski and changes in his relationships. He sat behind a table with a notebook in front of him. He spoke with a Rhode Island twang. I liked his voice.

He was performing in tandem with Julie Taymor’s The Green Bird and Taymor’s lush green forest hung above stage like a forest of the mind.

I later learned he never wrote out his monologues. He performed from an outline, so he wasn’t reading. He was engaging the audience. He was telling his story, and this made one feel very intimate with his story. However, this intimacy only went one way. He didn’t know his audience members personally and only told what he wanted to tell. He had control over his material.

Even though he was sitting the whole time, he had physical presence. He leaned forward and leaned back. He gestured with his arms. He could become very animated without leaving his seat.

The second time I saw Spalding Gray perform was at PS 122. I don’t remember the year. It was probably the late 90s. He was workshopping a new piece called Morning, Noon, and Night. He went for an hour and a half, got to late afternoon, and stopped there. He was trying tangents out and still trying to find the structure of it. We witnessed the hours of his day pass in minutes, and it was so rich and lovely that we could’ve sat and listened for another hour.

The last time I saw Spalding Gray on stage was a panel at ColumbiaUniversityon the theatrical avant garde. It was late autumn 2001. 9/11 had just happened, and we were still sorting through the rubble. Other panelists included Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, and three or four others.

Spalding Gray walked with cane and several times had to get up and walk off the stage, but he always came back. I didn’t know at the time that he had been in a bad car accident that past July. At one point on the panel, he talked about stories and how he use to think they had power but he doesn’t feel that way anymore. Still, he structured his thoughts as a story.

I recently read The Journals of Spalding Gray published by Knopf. Even though I knew how the book would end, I was still very sad when I got there. However, the journal journey to that end has writing and insights from some good time spent on this earth.

He wasn’t just an autobiographical storyteller. He sculpted his story to something beyond even himself.  He created a theatrical event with desk, a chair, a notebook, and himself. Adios, Spalding Gray. Thanks for the words.

At the end of my blog week on Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative, I’m gonna give Spalding Gray the last words. This is from a journal entry dated June 9, 1995:

 . . .eating my old tuna, jalapeno and “hot” hummus sandwich I had a peaceful sense of NOTHINGNESS and that was what I was going to come to. DEATH is NOTHING. It’s not death that’s sad, it’s life. There is nothing sad about nothing. I had a very strong feeling that I am nothing visiting something. Yes, I am nothing visiting something and returning to nothing.

Theatre Dot Orgy

playwriting

Earlier this month on facebook, Tiffany Antone posted a really funny Freudian slip her Dad made about her website (http://www.theatricstheatre.org/). He called it theatre dot orgy.

This made me laugh not only because I love puns, but also because Tiffany’s Dad stumbled onto a fundamental truth about theatre. Way to go Tiffany Dad! Woohoo!

On dictionary dot com, Orgy is defined in a variety of ways. First, it is a wild drunken or licentious festivity or revelry. Second, it is any actions or proceeding marked by unbridled indulgence of passions (an orgy of killing). Third, in Ancient Greece, an orgy is an esoteric religious ritual in worship of Dionysius with wild dancing, singing, drinking. Finally, informally, an orgy is a boisterous rowdy party.

I worry sometimes that theatre writing is too much in the head, that plays ignore the body in favor of people sitting and talking about feelings, psychology, philosophy, ideas. Bodies on stage can move, dance, sit down, stand up. Plays are not just about the spoken. They are about the physical.

Orgy in theatre is not just sex orgy. Orgy in theatre is the revelry of the play. It is brutality and joy. It is passion and destruction together in their most extreme form. And there’s something holy in it—not in some organized religion kind of way, but in the communal understanding of the mystery of the unspoken.

And this unspoken does not need to be talked about. It does not even need to be whispered about, but when it happens, everyone in the audience knows it.