I have heard and have been involved in so many discussions about the place of the playwright in the rehearsal process. The question always asked is, “Should the playwright should be “allowed” at rehearsals?” I’ve been shocked at how many directors and producers say, “No!”

The playwright will be hostile, will try to usurp power, will refuse to change a word, will slow down the creative work.

I disagree. The creative work started in the playwright’s head but the final creation is the result of a collaboration of all the players – producers, directors, set designers, actors, etc. And the playwright. Each contributes to the growth and evolution of the material. There will always be rigid and argumentative writers who indeed won’t change a word but every playwright I’ve ever known is eager to be able to cut, to clarify, to deepen, to flesh out her work with the help of the director and actors. All are thrilled to see their words come to life.

I remember being part of a company that developed a new play by an author who didn’t attend rehearsals. The morning after opening night, he came into the theatre office and grabbed a thick telephone book. He said to the director, “This is what I think of your play and this is what I would like to do to you.” Then, he tore the telephone book in half and walked away. (He was a burly man who worked out.)

The director of The Wind in the Willows, Dorothy Dillingham Blue, shares my philosophy. At the first rehearsal, she told all present that a new play is a work in progress and quoted, “A play is never finished. It just opens.” She continued, saying, a play is a living thing, cited Memphis, which was developed over a period of six years, and encouraged everyone to think, “Would it be better if….?”

We’ve just started rehearsing but I’ve there from the beginning of auditions. I’ve been in on talks with the set designer and as a result have rewritten the first Toad scene. The horse is gone, alas. I’ve added words for the mean Weasel girls, removed a Guard, changed exits and entrances, commented on lyrics and tempos for the songs. (What a joy to hear your lyrics sung by beautiful, youthful voices.)

I’m also useful on occasion. One of the actors mimed putting something into Mole’s hand. “What are you giving her?” the director asked. “A raspberry,” she answered. I was then able to demonstrate the Bronx cheer or giving someone the raspberry.

The second blocking rehearsal starts tomorrow at nine and I can’t wait.

Several years ago when I worked at Actors Theatre of Louisville, I heard this story about a play from the previous year’s Humana Festival:

ATL was producing Lee Blessing’s Oldtimers Game, which revolved around America’s favorite pastime. In their promo materials, the publicity department said the theme of Blessing’s play was baseball. The literary manager telling me this story chuckled mightily and emphasized with oldtimer’s knowledge, “Baseball is NOT a theme.”

The publicity folks were not strong at dramaturgy but they did get butts in the seats, God bless them.

Back when I was in school, we used to say the theme is the “message” of the play… something like, “Crime doesn’t pay,” or “True love wins out,” or “There’s no place like home.”

A couple of years ago I found a book (just by trolling through playwriting books on Amazon dot com, for Pete’s sake) that gave me a new perspective, a new lease on my writing life, a way of taking theme to another level.

Buzz McLaughlin’s book The Playwright’s Process, the gem I stumbled upon, says that a good dramatic premise (a phrase he got from Lajos Egri) has an active verb that links two parts. The dramatic premise of Death of a Salesman could be, “Looking for fulfillment in worldly success leads to disillusionment.” For The Crucible it could be, “Honor and integrity conquer sin and evil,” Buzz says.

Other fabulous verb choices besides “leads to” and “conquer” include “destroys” “defies” and defeats.” Theme is a lovely idea but it’s, well, static. The cool thing about ACTION VERBS is you get something leading to something else and that gives the play forward movement. Hallelujah! We’re goin’ somewhere! And things will be different when we get there! We will not be listening to endless clever dialogue spinning its wheels!

As writers, we can use this tool to UNIFY our plays when they want to wander like happy puppies sniffing flowers down every pretty garden path.

May your plays have not just activity but action, not just plot but story, and a compelling dramatic premise to hold us in our seats until the very end – when we want to jump up and applaud you mightily.

And now back to work. Gotta see if I can get the next scenes in my new play Community to unify around the dramatic premise I’ve been using.

Went to a lively theatrical event a few weeks ago. Zany characters, fun songs, lots of running around on stage by the crazy folk, provocative costumes, funny bits of business and snappy lines. A cavalcade of fun and hijinks.

And yet… after awhile… I was bored. I sat there thinking back to a lesson my playwriting teacher in grad school had taught us. Action is a character going after something, a goal. Activity is physical bits of business. Without the former, the latter gets tedious after awhile.

For better or worse, I think we’re hard-wired as a species to pay attention to goals. Maybe it comes from the days of having to find food on a daily basis. We want and need that meal and by golly, we’re on full alert to get that to happen. Extrapolating then, in a story where a character wants something, we empathize and get on board, wanting their goal right along with them.

Action movies can be particularly annoying when it comes to jamming loads of activity into the story (car chases, gunfights, martial arts flying kicks) and losing sight of that goal thing. Certainly the emotional connection the audience should have to that goal gets lost in the pyrotechnics. Our eyes and ears are dazzled by all of the activity (as were mine at that theatrical event), but our hearts and brains are left on the sidelines pleading, “Um, excuse me… why are we all here? What does the main character want? And why should I care?”

Ever have a moment when a lightning bolt of advice about writing makes you stop in your tracks and say YES, so helpful, thank you, bless you, have a piece of chocolate.

Had one of those when I opened up my latest Written By, the Writers’ Guild magazine.  Even though it’s a publication geared towards TV and movie writing, the advice in it knows no bounds.

Here it is:  a little cartoon from a book entitled 101 Things I learned in Film School has two stick figures (stick figures!), one is the bad guy, the other is a cop.  The cop says, “Police!  Halt or I’ll shoot!”  The bad guy says, “You caught me!  But you’ll never take me alive!”  That panel is labeled PLOT.  Then in cartoon panel #2, the cop says, “Hmm… if I shoot him, maybe I’m the bad guy…” and the bad guy, who is climbing out the window says, “Why do I always run from my problems?”  This panel is labeled STORY.  “Whamo!” said my brain. 

This cartoon reminds me of a tidbit from Lajos Egri in his book The Art of Dramatic Writing, as he compared these two sentences, “The king died” and “The king died… and the queen died of grief.”  The latter pulls us in and takes us inside a character and her story.

Now leave this blog, grab your latest script (and some chocolate because everything goes better with chocolate), and see what you can do with this newfound clarity.

Ageism

One could argue that all the “isms” are ludicrous; racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc., but they are at least a bit understandable, right? OK, there’s a “default” biological, reptilian fear of people who are “different” that’s transcended by education, understanding and relating to other people who are, well, er, “OTHER.” But ageism? Come on people! Is it that much of a stretch to look down the road and see that the people that are discriminators today will end up being discriminated against themselves?

I happen to believe that theater is the “mother” of culture. What producers can’t afford to put on the big screen, they can afford to put up on stage, especially small stages. That’s why the theater must incubate women, and women who are over 25 too. I have had been lucky enough to play incredible roles in theater and to have some really great jobs in TV too but they were all in my 20s and 30s. We’ve got to write employment “into” the canon, starting with the theater, if we’re going to have the full human family included in our story-telling.

One of the reasons I wrote “Now That She’s Gone” is that I was too young to have written my story before now. You could say that I hadn’t sustained enough losses before my 50s to have a perspective and long-view. That’s not to say that people who are young aren’t capable of being good or great writers. They are. Personally, I didn’t happen to be.

Theater to me is like a religious experience that’s not available on screen. The smells, the immediacy, the breath of a living being on stage is lost somehow on screen. I don’t know why that is. It’s a bit like the experiential difference between a music recording and a live concert. Anyone who has been lucky enough to start off in theater knows exactly what I’m talking about. It may be a bit of the thrill of seeing if someone will make it through without messing up. There’s adrenalin involved with live performance of any type, not only for the performer but for the audience too. And then, when there is a glitch? There’s the, “Whew, I’m glad that wasn’t me” or the little inner rubber-necker who can’t help looking at the car accident.

In one of my other “lives,” I’m a columnist for the Pasadena Weekly. If you’d like to see today’s column, go to: http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/no_more_no_less/8908/

Anyway, theater is a way for all of us to be on “display” for the others. To systematically “remove” one segment of our society is just stupid if not utterly wrong. I want to see how other people handle getting older, how they look, their issues, what they do with mortality breathing down their neck. We see men’s lives in so many of their stages. We need to see women at all stages too.

OK, so that’s my rant for today.
Talk to you tomorrow.

See you at the Hollywood Fringe!

Going Solo

As a soloist in the theater, I imagine I arrived at the decision to create “Now That She’s Gone,” my solo show, in a similar fashion to other women. How fabulous to make a lot of our own artistic decisions! As a theater person, we all know that’s not typical for women, as artists in any of the arts.

I would love to see an LA FPI study on the number of women doing solo shows. I also think it’s fascinating that at least one regional theater I submitted to has a “no solo show” policy. Hmmm. I’m wondering if we’d discover that solo shows have become a “pink collar” neighborhood for artistic directors.

Has anyone else noticed that male theater soloists trend toward doing shows about famous men and female soloists trend toward doing shows about their own lives? Maybe that’s “duh” to a lot of you but it’s fascinating to me.

While there are certainly a lot of really famous women who are not famous (yah, dig that irony), our stories are so MIA in the canon that our lives provide rich veins to mine for theater gold.

Do you remember the thrill of Nora leaving Torvald in Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House?” At the time, it was called the door slam heard around the world. It’s no wonder that the Scandinavian countries have such good gender track records. Their major playwright in the late 1800s was talking about women’s liberation on stage. And also no accident, I got my first major support for my show from the Norwegian community in Manhattan. They are not afraid of women like some cultures are!

You are probably all familiar with the stats but just in case you don’t know this source, here goes: From www.wetweb.org (Women’s Expressive Theater)

The Problem: women in the U.S are under-represented and often misrepresented in the entertainment industry — an industry that creates and defines our culture and has global influence.

• Only 17% of theater productions in the US are written by women
• Only 16% of theater productions in the US are directed by women
• Only 15% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working in the US film industry are women
• Only 20% of studio executives working in the US film industry are women*

Equal opportunity still does not exist for women in the entertainment industry. Additionally, the representation of women and girls in the media is often degrading, based on stereotype, and sets up impossible expectations women and girls must live up to. If we continue to accept that this business, which defines our culture, does not represent women equally or accurately, then we are supporting a business that does not value women as equal citizens.

Sources: Martha Lauzen, PhD., San Diego State University (2006), New York State Council for the Arts (2001), Suzanne Bennett, co-author of the 2001 NYSCA study (2005)

I have had to contend with people assuming that their “men folk” would not want to see “Now That She’s Gone,” without even seeing it. Perception is highly vital when you are trying to market the arts.

My experience is that the men who see my show completely consider it universal. And yet, getting them through the door is an entirely different matter.

One man in his 70s who saw my show, held my hand afterwards, tears running down his cheeks and said, “Until today, I was not able to forgive my father. Thank you.” How can I not want to perform my show when it fulfills the dream I always had of transforming perception while making people laugh and think? It doesn’t get better than that.

Anyway, we’ve got to find a way to break through this “chick flick” mentality that also translates over into the theater. Perhaps it’s born in the theater. Chicken and egg, right?
More tomorrow.

Going solo doesn’t mean we don’t need anyone else. We need the community to provide the support that solo doesn’t mean “less” or “female.”

LA FPI is a dream come true. I would have given my eye teeth to have had an organization like this when I was coming up in the theater and literary world. I’m performing the show I’ve written at the Hollywood Fringe on Sunday, June 27, and I hope you can come. “Now That She’s Gone” is a romp through sex, drugs and lutefisk. It’ll make you laugh, cry and think.

Theater is in my blood. I’ve been in theater since I auditioned on a fluke to play the lead (and only) chorus member in a high school production of T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral.”

It didn’t take me long to realize that the “boys” had the best parts. Oh sure, they were happy to have me be a Greek style non-named, faceless (literally) chorus for their drama but beyond that, the drama department of my experimental high school wasn’t all that experimental when it came to providing better and more parts for the girls.

So, here I am over 40 years later still appalled at the terrible casting ratios for women on screen and on stage.

So many conundrums, so little time. How do you complain about inequities, pardon the expression, with Equity (and elsewhere), without coming off like sour grapes? No one likes whiners, including the whiners. You create organizations like LA FPI and unite, that’s what you do!!!

I go to movies or plays and I see so many parts for men, so few for women. It’s not only an aesthetic problem, it’s an unemployment situation where playwrights and screenwriters virtually write poverty into their scripts; poverty for women.

Movies and plays that are dominated by males are considered “universal;” if a script by some rare circumstance is centered upon women or has a theme that’s even female friendly, it’s often relegated to the artistic “ghetto” of “chick flick” or for women only. Really? It’s seems to me that if half of the population is female, we’re pretty universal.

My show, “Now That She’s Gone” is a solo piece; an aria to my late mother. The men who see it love it as much as the women have. Nonetheless, a woman I know brought her husband one night and as he walked into the lobby, made note of the number of women there. He said something like, “I could get estrogen poisoning from being here,” called a taxi and left. Wow.

Anyway, I’m not sure if it’s such a great idea to lead off my first blog for LA FPI with such a cranky post but there you are. I’m as silly as I am crabby. You’ve got to have one to fully explore the other. I am not ashamed of my cranky pants nature!

I so hope you can see my show at the Fringe. I’m really honored to be blogging here at LA FPI and so proud of the women who create their own work.

Indeed, we are universal!

I have a love hate thing with Musical Theatre. 

I have training in book and lyrics and can talk the craft with the best of them. I still find delight in the movie version of The Sound of Music or a random dance number utilizing jazz hands. 

When I was a little girl, I danced around the living room to the Broadway cast records of Annie  and Evita (they’re kind of the same show). I get choked up during sections of Les Miz (Oh Eponine, why must you die!) and when Bobby sings Being Alive in Company and during the Money song in Cabaret (long story). 

However, when Musical Theatre gets crappy, it gets really crappy. It becomes The Sound of Mucus. It becomes more agonizing than the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland. It makes me want to crack my knuckles, and I hate cracking my bones. I then have to walk away from Musical Theatre for awhile until something good lures me back. 

Yes, I have a dysfunctional relationship with Musical Theatre. I love it! I hate it! I love it! I hate it! Love! Hate! Love! Hate! 

Gentle reader, I apologize for any musical theatre whiplash that last paragraph might have caused. 

I recently got to work as Associate Producer on the spring musical at the Blank Theatre in Hollywood. The show was See What I Wanna See, Michael John LaChuisa’s chamber opera suggested by the stories of Rynosuke Akutgawa. I had really liked LaChuisa’s Wild Party on Broadway a few years ago, so I was excited about being involved with this production. 

Both acts of See What I Wanna See begin in Medieval Japan with two lovers scheming to kill each other. This is what it feels like to be God! They exclaim in their songs of desire and blood lust. The rest of Act 1 is set in 1951 film noir New York where we the audience hear contradictory accounts of a murder in central park from a thief, a janitor, a psychic, and a married couple. What is the truth? Do we need the truth in our modern world as we lie and scam and cheat to become Gods of our fates. Act 2 is also set in New York in 2002. A priest, questioning his own faith in God, decides to come up with a miracle in a specific time and place. However, lots of people start to believe the lie. This is what it feels like to be God. The priest says. 

This might all sound a bit heady with words like God and truth, but the piece is extremely watch-able and quite moving. 

The music is excellent (technical musical theatre term) and carries a lot of the dramatic weight of See What I Wanna See. LaChuisa is able to connect ideas through musical and lyrical motifs. As an audience, we are listening to a score, not just a collection of songs. Each song fits into the larger whole. 

The Blank production of See What I Wanna See was very cleanly directed. There was no frivolity. No dumbass musical theatre tricks. The set was minimal. Shifting locations were shown through lighting. The five actors knew what they were doing second by second. 

As I sat through See What I Wanna See, I went to my happy musical theatre place. Maybe musicals weren’t so bad after all. Then, during a final dress rehearsal, something more happened. I got the lump in the throat. Yep, I was moved. 

In the second act, the Priest meets an Actress who had heard about the fake miracle. I’ve met this Actress character before in other theatrical works. She’s the poor little pretty girl trying to find fulfillment. She usually sings a really pretty song in a spotlight. My reaction to such a character is usually reflexive gagging. 

However, this Actress has a lot more in her. She might start off as laughable, but as she sings about her life in the Hills, a devastating auto accident, and her desire for something that has worth, she becomes something very truthful. Her song isn’t pretty. It has pain. All she wants a little miracle. She doesn’t want a big one. Just a little one will do. 

So yes, I’m back in love with Musical Theatre, but I know, there’s something out there that will make it all bad for me. Could be. Who knows? It’s only just out of reach down the block on a beach under a tree.