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on learning

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Sara Israel, May 5, 2010

Yesterday afternoon and this morning I have dedicated myself to learning about the history, culture, and characteristics of storytelling in the region currently known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It’s for the play I’m working on, and per usual when it comes to research for my writing, I’ve had to resist plunging deep into the wormhole.  It’s a challenge to balance letting myself learn freely, and seeing where that takes me, with a vigilance to monitor myself, to make sure it all keeps applying to this play rather than purely becoming a crutch for procrastination.

But wormholes be damned, I’ve learned that it’s impossible to be a good writer without being a good learner.  I’ve also come to learn– and appreciate– that learning is a skill.  It has to be taught, and then encouraged to flourish.

I’ve been very, very lucky throughout my life to be surrounded by people who have both taught and encouraged me, starting with my parents and my Grandma Helen, continuing with my elementary school librarian, with my music instructors, with public school teachers, college professors, and the wonderful friends I’ve collected along those paths and beyond.

  • I’ve had English teachers who have taught me to be more analytical and less judgmental.
  • I’ve had math teachers who have taught me to be more creative and expansive in my thinking.
  • I’ve had art teachers who have taught me the value of precision and repetition.

You never know what you’re going to learn, and from whom you will learn it.  You just have to be open to learning, and fortunate enough to have people in your lives who will take you there.

dusting off my playwright’s cap

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Sara Israel, May 3, 2010

Moss Hart is one of my role models– a director who terrific playwrights relied upon, but also a terrific playwright in his own right.

I wish I could reach across the decades between us, hunt him down, convince him I’m not a crazy person and I really had just traveled through time– so I could pick his brain for a few minutes.  Over a cup of coffee, say.

I’d ask him, How do you balance your responsibility to your own plays with your responsibility to the work of others?

He’d probably have a pretty pithy answer for me.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve almost exclusively been wearing my director’s cap.  I love wearing it.  It’s really fashionable and sexy and it looks good in public.  But now, after a weekend that included directing both a fantastic reading Friday at 6PM and a wonderful opening of another play later that very same night, it’s time to swap out that director’s cap for the slightly dowdier playwright’s variety.

My directing work no doubt informs my writing.  That starts with the other writer and his or her play, of course.  But what I find really sinks into my own playwright’s bones is what I learn from the actors.  The truthful and unexpected places they take not only words, but also silences, and how those words and silences create an architecture for character and story and, well. . . a whole wide world parallel to our “real” one.  The work they do– and, as a director, having the privilege of seeing it from the inside out– reminds the writer-me not to limit myself, reminds me that the world is my oyster, because their skill and talent is my permission and my safety net.

The seven actors I had the pleasure of directing, culminating in my crazy Friday, performed in plays I did not write, but working with them will absolutely serve to propel my writing forward.  You should work with them too, soon and often:  Keith Allan, David Bickford, Michelle Gardner, Sharon Madden, Eric Nenninger, Karen Jean Olds, and Rick Steadman.

It’s apropos for me to be waxing rhapsodic about actors right now, because the play I am working on this week is inspired by the wonderful actor Drew Powell.  “Inspired,” as in, I wouldn’t have a freakin’ clue how to approach the lead character of my play– and therefore the entire play– if I didn’t have a vision of what I know Drew is capable of achieving.

A few years ago, I knew there was this story I wanted to tell, but I was completely lost when it came to telling it.  And I didn’t know why.  Then I saw Drew perform, not the first time I’d seen him on the stage (he was a friend of a friend) but his work that night– heartbreaking yet gregarious yet incredibly restrained– made me realize that I wasn’t cracking this play I wanted to write because I was afraid.  I was writing with a fear that the character I wanted to create couldn’t really exist in my story.  Drew’s performance screamed at me to stop being a chicken, stop underestimating myself and others, and just go for it.

This play is still frightening and unwieldy for me at times, by far the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to get out onto the page.  But Drew remains my touchstone.  It’s the first time I’ve ever written anything with an actor in mind, and who knows. . . by the time it’s done, the character that he’s inspired might manifest in the form of an 85 year-old woman.  (And if Drew’s reading this, he was probably a bit freaked out by this point anyway; now add to that he might have to age himself by 50 years, shave significantly, and buy himself some quality hosiery.)

And now, my playwright’s cap dusted (and maybe sexier than I give it credit for)– onward to my “real” writing for the day.  If anyone knows what Moss Hart would have said to me over that cup of coffee, please let me know.

This American Life

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Saturday I was listening to This American Life on KCRW, my favorite radio show since way back.  It was a re-broadcast of a live show that featured a variety of guests telling stories and being entertaining.  One of them was Joss Whedon, the uber-talented writer-director-mad genius behind such TV shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Dollhouse.  The reason for his radio appearance:  Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, his Web sensation – which may have caused computer servers to melt (or whatever they do when overtaxed) because 200,000 people an hour were trying to download it.  Joss-on-the-radio sang a very amusing song about doing commentary for a video release of this musical.

I knew Joss way back.  He was a young whipper snapper writer on a little TV show called Roseanne.  You may have heard of it.  I worked on Roseanne, too.  I was a writers’ assistant.  It was Joss’s first TV production job.  It was my first TV production job.  He went right out of there to a gig writing on Parenthood (the first TV version; why did they resurrect it recently?  Were there no original ideas this season NBC thought worthy of broadcasting?  Hmm, apparently not…) and then to the movie and TV versions of Buffy… and fame and fortune.  I did not.

I almost turned my radio off Saturday so I wouldn’t have to listen to the clever song – not because I wasn’t amused by the song and not because I don’t like Joss (he was a smart, kind, and funny guy when I knew him and still is, as far as I can tell).  It was because of the jealousy thing.  Joss’s professional life took off like a rocket and every time I see him or his work, I am reminded my professional life is more at a steady hum.  It’s a nice hum but it’s not a rocket and is not accompanied by the cascades of cash that one can have in Hollywood.  I sometimes just turn things like this off and get back to work.

But by keeping the radio on, I got to hear the next piece – a story by Dan Savage about his mom dying and his grappling with being a lapsed Catholic.  It was hilarious and sad and I sat glued to the radio, laughing and milliseconds later crying.  Stories like that remind me why I like to write – to connect to people, to move them. 

So THEN I turned the radio off… and got back to work.  Feeling inspired instead of jealous.  A much better place from whence to write. 

I’ve finished the first outline of my new full-length play this weekend.

Drive, She Said

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When I’m not writing regularly, I get a little cranky.  If I’ve just finished a large project and I’m tired and the well is empty, then, yeah, I’ll take a few weeks or a couple months off.  But after that time, I go stir crazy if I’m not working on something.

Why is that?  On the one hand, I do feel I was placed on Earth to create (write, photograph, and on the rare occasion, perform my words), so, there’s that Destiny thing.  But that’s only part of the puzzle.

After hearing a report on NPR’s Morning Edition this week about a new book entitled Dorothea Lange:  A Life Beyond Limits, I started contemplating the driven life.  Here’s the section of Steve Inskeep’s interview with author Linda Gordon about Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange that caught my ear:

STEVE INSKEEP:  Was she obsessed with her art?

LINDA GORDON: Absolutely. She had a hard life in many ways. She was a disabled woman. She’d polio at age seven and she ended with a withered, lower right leg and a kind of twisted and crabbed foot. She could not put her heel down as she walked, but she was an incredibly strong woman physically. She could hike for days. She climbed on top of her car to photograph. She was really a very ambitious and driven woman about photography at a time when women were really not supposed to be that way.

INSKEEP: What were the affects of that on her family?

GORDON: Well, when she took this job for the Farm Security Administration, she had to leave her children for long periods of time, even for a couple of months, and Paul Taylor was her partner, as well as her husband. And whenever possible, he was on the road with her.

She knew she sensed as soon as she got this job offer that it was the chance of a lifetime. And she was correct because if it hadn’t been for that federal government job, we would have never have heard of Dorothea Lange.

INSKEEP: Who did take care of her kids when she was gone?

GORDON: She placed them in what we would call foster care, something that was very haunting to her all her life, because her children were very young when she began to do this. But I think we have to understand it in terms of the context of the times, when it was not quite so shocking to use foster care.

INSKEEP:  You know, as you describe her personality, I’m reminded of another figure we’re discussing in this American Lives series: Theodore Roosevelt, who was considered a weakling as a child and was driven to great exertion and he was so incredibly ambitious that he left his family behind to go to war even though his wife was ill and he wrote later that he would have left her deathbed. I mean it seems like that same kind of ambition drove Dorothea Lange toward photography.

I’m driven and driven to write.  I’ll cop to it.  The second and equally powerful piece of my drive – OTHER than the Destiny thing – is that I write to prove my worth.  I discovered the depth of that drive when I realized that my last two full-length plays had main characters who were trying to prove their worth through their work – with nearly disastrous consequences.  I  started to use that theme again on the current full-length I’m outlining but stopped myself when I saw I was doing it again.  I’ve consciously chosen a different theme this time ’round. 

But can I stop myself from using my writing as a vehicle of self-worth?  It’s been my identity since I was in grade school.  If I’m not writing, who am I?

I don’t know if my drive is on the scale of Dorothea Lange’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s.  I don’t have a club foot and I wasn’t a weakling as a kid.  But I have my vulnerabilities, my childhood internal injuries.  So I keep writing.  The next play, the next piece, is gonna get me that validation I want.  Except that it won’t or it’ll go away or I’ll find fault with the script.  So I’m back to square one.  Except that I’m not because I keep having realizations about who I am and what my motivations are.  Just like my characters.

Simple Gifts

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I’m learning to play the Shaker song “Simple Gifts” on the guitar.  It’s a humbling experience as I have no innate musical talent and there are a lot of pesky eighth notes scattered hither and yon throughout.  But I love the song and keep at it.

This winter I sent a full-length play of mine off to three high-falutin’ workshops scattered hither and yon about the country where you-the-playwright get to work with actors and a director on your play for two solid weeks.  Joy, joy, happy, happy as they used to say on Ren and Stimpy.

When I started to write this blog entry, I’d been turned down by two of them (one received 500 scripts for five slots… so the odds were a lit-tle long).  Today in the mail I found out I’d been turned down by the third one (they did feel my script was of particular merit; dang, it was the workshop in Idaho with the glorious mountain scenery).

But this winter I also got to work with two wonderful actors – Hannah Crum and Mandy Dunlap – in my living room.  That’s about as bare-bones as you can get when it comes to theatre.  And I had a blast.  We spent a few hours blocking and rehearsing an excerpt of my short play The Happy Wanderer (a.k.a. Chicago) that they were about to perform at Shorts & Briefs (see my previous blog).  The actors found moments, brought it to life, we made moments better, I trimmed and rewrote a little, we had a lot of laughs, and I had a lump in my throat a few times. 

One of the things I hated about working in TV was the lack of connection between the writers and the actors.  Writers would hole up for hours and hours, churn out a draft… have it read ONCE by the actors around a table, and then go back into the seclusion of  the writers’ room and work until the wee hours once again to churn out another draft.  Coming from the theatre, I thought this seemed insane.  How can you figure out if anything works unless you have the actors right in front of you as co-conspirators in the energy?

So I won’t be flying hither and yon across America.  But the evening in my living room with Hannah and Mandy reminded me why I do theatre, why I love it, why I love working with actors.  A simple evening, a simple gift, but a wonderful one.

p.s.  Oh, yes, and yesterday I had a voicemail letting me know that The Happy Wanderer – the full one-act version – has been chosen to be part of the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights’ and West Hollywood’s collaboration to celebrate Gay Pride month in June with play readings at the Celebration Theatre (June 1st, 7:30 p.m.).  Joy, joy, happy, happy!

Go On Anyway

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At my friend Eve’s birthday party a few weeks ago, I found myself in conversation with our mutual pal Kelly, who was asking how “Shorts & Briefs” had gone – an afternoon of 10 minute plays and excerpts of plays that I’d been a part of in March.  I said “Most excellent,” and then launched into why the heck Jan O’Connor, Mary Casey and I had cooked up the event:  the sorry state of affairs for women getting their plays done.

Kelly asked (innocently) why things were that way.  I explained that getting ANY play produced is tough – especially if you’re unknown or semi-unknown without a track record – but that the choosing of plays by literary departments leans towards picking male authors.  It’s not unlike the film or TV business, I said.  Writing staffs on TV shows to this day will have more men than women.  Movie scripts by men still far outnumber those by women.  (All hail Kathryn Bigelow, but don’t get me started on the number of working female directors.)  Why is that, Kelly asked.

It’s been this way for years, I said.  It mirrors the non-show biz business world (even though we’ve made progress on many fronts).  Why is that, she asked again.

This is how our conversation went.  Kelly kept asking why and I kept talking until finally I had a light bulb moment and said, you know what, Kelly?  I think this is the journey of our planet. 

I think we are a planet of polarity.  North and South poles.  East and West cultures.  Night and Day.  Black and White.  Male and Female.  And I think our journey is to reconcile, to integrate what we perceive to be our opposite, to see that we are not opposites, that we are many, many shades, many colors, many gradations all on the same spectrum. 

But what keeps us from doing that?  Fear.  And I think that’s the other great journey of our planet.  We hold on to our little acre of land.  Our rung on the ladder.  Our spot in the pecking order.  Our religion.  Our opinion.  We think that spot, that belief is our tangible proof of… of what?  We’re loved?   We’re okay?  We’re good enough? 

And so we make fear-based choices.  It takes courage to say, “Yeah, I’m gonna take a chance on this playwright who is not of my gender, my tribe, I’m gonna risk my reputation on her.”  But  you can’t stand around waiting for literary managers and producers to get over their fears and integrate “oppositeness” into their world.  We must do it ourselves, in whatever way we can.  Thank you Jan and Mary as well as Laura, Jennie and the other women of the L.A.F.P.I. for taking steps so we’re not standing around waiting.

I will close this first blog with a quote from Robert Henri that I have taped to my bathroom mirror:  “ Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be, stop you.  Go on anyway.  Everything depends on those who go on anyway.”