Tag Archives: playwriting

When Did You Know…?

LAFPI, Playwright, playwriting, , ,

At what point did you know that you were a playwright?  When was the first time you said, “I’m a playwright” or “I write plays” and it sounded right.  Was there some other career you were headed toward; where did you detour?   Or, were you always on track?

Did you study playwriting or learn by trial and error?  When did you find out that you were good at writing plays?  Was it by osmosis or did you get an “A” on a writing assignment or some serious clapping at the end of one of your plays?  What was the play?

When did you determine your voice as a writer?  Did it catch you by surprise?  What were you writing?

When did you know that life without writing was not an option…?

For the Girls Who Tell Stories…

LAFPI, Playwright, playwriting, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , ,

 

My month – last month – started off well, full of good intentions with the exception of scrambling for references for a certain competition.  It’s always hard to ask – again.  It’s not hard to know who to ask just hard to ask someone to write that reference one more time and you hope you won’t have to ask next year because you’ll be successful and there will be no need to ask again – you hope.  Near the middle of the month – September, the heaviness that accompanies the submission period hit me like a brick…  This time of the year is also the most demanding period of my “day job” which causes the inevitable fight to replenish myself in order to just keep up with everything.  For some quick R & R, I found myself sneaking moments with Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” which I had never read and even though I have the beginnings of the perfect play to send…somewhere, I couldn’t stay away from the book.  It was like balm; reading it renewed me…like watching the sun set over the Pacific does.  That’s the thing about a good story, it pulls you into that world and out of yours for a moment.  I found Scout’s voice very comforting even though some of the subject matter was not.  I think it was the pure innocence of the child that grabbed me.  It seemed Atticus, Miss Maudie, and even Aunt Alexandra tried very hard to keep the children viewing the world through unskewed eyes.  As long as I could see the events through Scout’s eyes, I could see the patches of light in the middle of the gray. 

There are things about fiction that I try to bring to my playwriting like the full on description of the world to be materialized in some way in my plays and the lingering of sorts, the way a book lingers with you after you have come to know the characters or come face to face with the clear essence of the piece.  I had that experience this past weekend with Jennie Webb’s play, “Yard Sale Signs” about mothers and daughters (playing at the Rogue Machine Theatre).  It’s a comedy but it is so rich and full of stuff, I have to admit, there was a point early in the piece where I heard myself think, “Don’t you dare do that here and now”.  Who cries at a comedy?   So, I laughed instead, it was easy to laugh because it’s a really funny play.  I wasn’t sure I understood it all till the ride home when I couldn’t stop thinking about it, then I woke up the next morning thinking about it.  I’m still thinking about it.  I had never seen a play like that before, it caught me off guard so I promptly put my guard up.  Didn’t matter, it lingered.

The most important thing I came away with from Jennie’s play is that I need to work my  “Mother things” into the mix with approaching deadlines.  Live theater – it is truly a living breathing thing with a voice.  What really draws me to theater is the “right now-ness” of it – right now you are in the characters’ world and they are flesh and bone and if they stumble, you see it unfold, you feel it jumping out at you and you may even jump with them or in response.  You can’t push pause or sit the actors down till you are ready to get back into it; it’s an “off and running” thing and “ready or not”, it’s a “right now” moment.  But, if it’s a good moment, it lasts a lifetime…

I talk about going there as a writer but the flip side is going there as an audience member.  I should have cried like I wanted to.  Laughing and crying are tied together and sometimes the emotions that cause one to laugh are the same that cause one to cry.  I hope I can get back to see “Yard Sale Signs” again.  I’ll sit in the back and just let the jewels of truth have their way with me… 

It’s all the special moments that make theater so exciting, so spellbinding…like when I saw “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” by Ntozake Shange.  I had forgotten those moments until I saw the trailer for the movie “For Colored Girls” based on Shange’s play; the movie will open November 5th.  I tell you, I have to watch that trailer almost every day.  I had to re-read the play and that’s when I remembered…it was after seeing that play that I really began to search for my voice as a woman which has everything to do with my voice as a writer.  It was the first play I had ever seen at a real theater and there were brown girls just like me up on that stage but they were more than just brown girls, they were women talking about women’s things and feeling women’s feelings.  It is impossible to have a true world view without hearing from the women and the men…

So…

for the girls who tell stories…/ and climb trees alongside their brothers, reaching the upper branches to look out on the world/ who dance in spite of the offbeat rhythms running through their lives/ who sing in the wrong key till they learn the notes were never theirs to sing any way/ for the girls who find their own song and their own way to sing it/ who create from wombs, from words, or from living/ having more than a little “somethin’ somethin’” to give/ for the girls who dare to have a say…

i say… thank you…/ i’m listening…

Part 5 (or) Some and Summation

LAFPI, playwriting, , , , , , , , ,

I think, then, as I wrap this monster up, that the thing to remember is that we are all of us aspiring towards the extraordinary.

This is not an easy, or necessarily “friendly”, field.  Neither is the theater industry is a snake-pit either.  (Hello Hollywood!)  But the journey of the creative spirit continues to ask of us an incredible balance:  making art for art’s sake is one thing, commercializing it quite another.

If a theater company is interested in diverse theater, or if a theatre company generally produces plays about/by men, and if I am a white female playwright, do I keep writing the way I have, or do I write more characters of color/or/male?  How do we maintain our integrity in our strides to get ahead, be we author, producer, or artistic director, while we also strive to maintain cultural “fairness”?

Or is thinking about it too much a danger of another sort?

As a literary manager, I must remember to value balance – I would not want to see a whole season of plays written by “privileged white men” anymore than I would like to see a whole season of just about anything else.  The key is to create a balance within the designated aesthetic of any given theater company… And the theatre company itself has every right to decide what that aesthetic is.

My job as playwright then is to try to find theater companies who’s aesthetic matches my own… or even (perhaps) those theatre companies who look to be open for a feminine revolution.

The struggle then continues to be both global and internal; to engage in the community we so want to conquer, but to do so as best we, the individual theatre artist, can.  We will continue to juggle our own perspectives of what makes a play “good” and what makes it “necessary” and we will continue to fight for those that stir our convictions.

Meanwhile, there will continue to be conversations among those at the top and between those on the bottom, about how in the world to manage things better…

I guess, what I’m saying is, I can’t wait to be one of those people at the “top” – where the discussion is less about surviving as it is about setting the trends.

Part 4 (or) In Which we Juggle…

LAFPI, playwriting, , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve always been a big advocate of “Competition of Self” – what I mean by this is that as I navigate the playwright’s landscape, I may see many people winning accolades that I myself covet, but I truly believe that the only course of action from such observations is to learn from these talented writers as I myself strive to top my last work with the new.  I may feel a flash of jealousy or of heartache, but I never think to myself “They won!  They beat me!”  Instead, I think to myself “DAMNIT!  (sigh) Alright… well, what can I learn from this writer so that I can do better next time?”

It’s one of the things that keep me sane.

But, in exploring this week’s train of thought, I have to ask myself who my scripts are in competition with…  It’s certainly not the brain-child of Sarah Ruhl or Martin McDonough!  While I like to think I write on par with them (don’t we all) and while I have been influenced by both, no theater in their right mind is currently weighing my playscript and one of, oh, say David Lindsay-Abaire’s, in their hands wondering “Gee, I wonder which we should go with.”   Because I’m simply not a big enough fish yet to be part of that kind of decision.  Instead, my scripts are sitting in piles with other “emerging” playwrights – those that have a few awards under their belts, but no BIG productions… yet.  We are engaged in silent battle for desk space and shelf space… We go head-to-head for literary manager’s time and interest…

Every.

Single.

Day.

We playwrights just aren’t present to witness the literary carnage.

And so, we send out scripts to various competitions, hoping that we’ll win a reading or a ribbon, or, if we’re lucky, some kind of travel or monetary prize… OR, if we’re really lucky, an airline ticket stuffed with cash all wrapped in ribbons and trade magazine announcements exclaiming our brain-child a total GENIUS…

Yeah, that happens.

But the point is, we hope we will win accolades so that we can use the 5-seconds of fame to edge out the other scripts in that “emerging” pile to the left of the Lit Manager’s elbow.  (The pile that sits depressingly close to the lip of the desk and the gaping mouth of the trashcan…)

So what happens when a theatre company run by someone like that first artistic director endeavors to fill slots according to a cross-cultural quota?    Does such thinking narrow the question from “Who’s the best playwright?” to “Who’s the best Latino playwright?  Who’s the best Woman playwright?” or “Who’s the best transgender-African -American-who-walks-with-a-limp playwright?”

And is it helpful?

I don’t know the answer… I wear enough hats to recognize that it’s overly complicated.  There have been times when, in reading a winning script, I’ve scratched my head and thought to myself “Jesus, I wish I had thought of this!”  And there have been times when I’ve looked over lists of contest winners that read like a United Nations meeting, but included plays that I had actually turned away for (what I perceived to be) poor writing.  I’ve been on both sides of the selecting and entering… and I still don’t have an answer.

Because I want to believe that the best man or woman will reach the stage.  I want to believe that if I keep growing as an artist, if I keep writing and dreaming and running this race, that my work will be recognized, produced, and applauded regardless of my gender or (lack of) ethnicity.  I want to believe that I will get there on merit…

But as a woman playwright who is all-to-aware of the numbers before her, I will also take any advantage I can get.

I will enter contests designed to honor female playwrights, and I will challenge any contest or theatre company that seems to eschew balance in (perceived) favor to male playwrights over female.  I will also look at a list like that one from the “UN” and sigh with frustration – What were the parameters of their evaluation if not totally and irritatingly PC?

Because I want it both ways.

And it all speaks to the one achingly human truth – no matter the rules or the designations, we are all of us reaching and scraping for the finish line.  It’s a business, it’s a dream, it’s a damned difficult trail.  We try to find the best shoes to get us there… sometimes they’re ugly, but if they get us there…

Well, more often than not (and no matter their “how”) we will defend those shoe’s merits to the death.

Because that goal, that gold, that rising above the tides to be seen, heard, my GOD, produced?  Doesn’t it seem built on a lot of hard spilt blood and tears all the same?  Isn’t it the mountain we look down on, and not our feet, even as we focus our eyes on the next looming peak?

(Tomorrow: Part 5 (or) Some and Summation )

Part 3, or The Angry White Woman…

LAFPI, playwriting, , , , , ,

Fast forward 6 years to yet another literary job, wherein I’m actually the person in charge this time – Yes, I reported to an artistic director, but this time I was running the literary department, which consisted of… oh…  wait a minute, it was just me again.

Hmmm, maybe “being in charge” was really just a nice way of dressing up an otherwise low paying pile of responsibility 🙂

In any case, I was a woman on a mission!

This theatre company was also dedicated to Los Angeles writers, but specifically plays by, for, and about culturally diverse peoples.  This time it was written into the mission statement, I had a very clear understanding of what they wanted and I loved the energy and the people responsible for this theatre.

I read a ton of beautiful plays (and not-so beautiful, of course) in my time there; all written by playwrights with something to say and with dreams of being heard.  I learned a great deal about the art of the submission, I also learned a little bit more about those who submit…  Particularly in the case of my first nasty email; a vociferous letter written to me by a white female playwright who had read over our submission guidelines and found them lacking.

Among it’s many blistering accusations, the following stood out as the writer’s main beef with me and the theater: “How nice of you to support female playwrights of color… what a shame the rest of us are left out in the cold.”

I sat in shock for a good 10 minutes after I read the thing, wondering how in the world I would respond…   Wasn’t it the theatre company’s prerogative to decide what its mission would be? And had they really denied “white women” a slot in its mission anyway?  In their drive to represent diversity in LA, surely women as a whole were included as an under-represented people… or were we?

I wrote back to this woman in the kindest words possible “Thank you for your interest in our company, and for sharing your heartfelt opinions.  While I, a female playwright as well, hear your frustrations, I encourage you to seek out more opportunities for women playwrights on the web, as there are quite a few…”

What else could I say?  I certainly wasn’t going to ask her for her script- she had been ridiculously spiteful.  She had also signed her email anonymously as “an angry female playwright” or something like that, perhaps forgetting in the heat of the moment that her name would be clear as day in the “from” field of the email. (Note to all:  if you’re going to send an anonymous email, make sure it is, indeed, anonymous.)

In any case, it was an awkward exchange, but one I remembered well… And one that begged the question – Is polarity healthy?  Are the limited support resources that exist fractured and specific for greater purpose?  In creating our own sort of theatrical “Affirmative Action”, are we creating better theater?  And is this system breeding resentment among the very playwrights it is designed to help?

(Tomorrow – Part 4, or, In Which we Juggle…)

Part 2… (or)… Rewind!

LAFPI, playwriting, , , , , , , , , ,

When I was an undergrad, I worked as a literary intern for a Los Angeles theater company.  The company’s mission was to produce work by Los Angeles writers.  I was put in charge of selecting plays for a fall festival of new work.  “Oh goodie!” I thought, “I can’t wait to meet these writers!”  And I proceeded to select a handful of plays that I thought exhibited the most talent and promise.  They were on varied subjects, three were written by men, two by women, one of the women was Latina, one of the men Japanese; all the rest were white.

When I sent an email to the artistic director with the playwright’s names and play synopsis, I received back an email exclaiming that my selection wasn’t diverse enough – why were there so many white men in the line up? – Along with a list of “diverse” playwrights to contact about putting in the festival; playwrights who I had previously heard of, but none of whom had submitted work to me.

I wrote back questioningly, “It looks like you have a quota in mind – are you asking me to fill these slots according to ethnicity?” Which elicited another bristling response “Los Angeles is a diverse community.  It has always been our intent to reflect that on our stages.  We have only once done an all white-cast play, and one of those characters was handicapped”

Wow.

Needless to say, only one of the plays I had selected was for an all-white cast.

So I suggested that the artistic director’s intent be reflected in the company’s mission; maybe more diverse people would submit work and we would have a more colorful (and well written) pool of scripts to pull from in the future.

To say that the whole discussion was “awkward” would be an understatement.

Now… several things must be addressed if I am to be as objective as possible :

  • I am white. It is possible that as such, on a subconscious level, my predilection is for scripts by/for/about similarly pale-skinned persons.  I don’t think this is the case, as some of my favorite authors hail from different parts of the rainbow, but, nonetheless, it could very well be a factor for me in determining which plays I find exciting.
  • I am a woman. As such, my tastes may very well be different than a man’s, or, as recent studies have shown, I might be more critical of  women’s work than men’s… I certainly hope this isn’t the case, but it must be mentioned. Especially since, as I acknowledge in the following bullet point…
  • I am a playwright. What does this have to do with anything?  Perhaps nothing… or perhaps as a playwright, I have developed a certain style/taste and hold material to similar standards of my own work… perhaps I like best the work that I would like best to have written…   I couldn’t tell you.  Certainly I revel most in work that I look at with admiration – but is this admiration based on an internal, completely subjective scale?   Am I secretly lusting after white-centric plays because those seem to be what I write?

I bring these things to the forefront of my discussion because I think it is important  (if I am going to ask what I am about to ask) that I acknowledge what may be my own limitations as a script-reader.  It is important to acknowledge that while I am a heterosexual, white, female playwright, the artistic director was a homosexual, *non-white (I don’t want you all guessing who I’m talking about now), male director, who had a completely different perspective than I .

So who was I to argue for these “White man” plays?  Who was I to be reading for this company in the first place if our aesthetic was so off?  And, as a woman, should I have been pushing them on out the door with the same verve as my AD?

But, more importantly; who were wither one of us to host a new play festival of work we had to go out and ask for, when we had a mountain of engaging submissions from Los Angeles writers before us…  just because those submissions were from predominantly white playwrights.  And was I supposed to include (what I considered to be) weaker material, simply because it was written by someone more “representational” of LA?

Was it my job to go out and ask for new material from established writers of color simply to make our festival better reflect (in the artistic director’s eyes) the Los Angeles community?

Right, wrong, or in-between, what wound up happening is what usually happens when an artistic director makes a request – we shuffled and asked, and put together a line-up much more in line with his vision and much further from the material I’d been reading the past 6 months…  Meanwhile, I had to send “TBNT” letters to a handful of very qualified and talented writers, for no other reason than that they were too pale for us to produce.

Isn’t that a strange and odd turn of events?

~Tiffany

(Tomorrow:  Part 3, or, The Angry White Woman…)

Asking the Tough Questions…

LAFPI, playwriting, , , , , ,

I’m going to dedicate this week’s blog to a sensitive subject – and I do so in the interest of stirring a discussion.  I don’t propose to have developed a hard and callused opinion on the matter, but I do, as a writer and literary manager, find myself asking these questions on occasion.

I think we all must.

A few weeks ago a submission announcement went around the web, which included a call to female playwrights and my personal email address.

Woof!

While I worked to furiously track down the source of this submission call and staunch the flow of scripts steadily flooding my inbox, I also fielded submission after submission.  Most of my responses were a polite “Sorry for the confusion, but here’s our official submission language and the correct email address to submit to”, but a few I could tell right off the bat weren’t for us.  One in particular was written in Spanish, and I wrote a very polite letter telling the playwright that we didn’t do foreign language plays, but also included a list of theatre companies who might.  She responded with a terse “So much for your mission of working with LA female playwrights, then, huh?”

Whoa.  Hold your horses, lady!

What had just happened?

She went on to say that to claim our theatre company was interested in LA was a joke, that LA wasn’t just “White.”

Now, if she had done any research at all, she would know that our company is comprised of many different shades of people, and that yes, while we do have a large Caucasian population, we certainly don’t only do plays by/for/or about them.

But facts are rarely an issue to those who have been hit by a nerve… This woman was angry not just at me, but at all the other literary managers or contest readers, or agents, who had (for one reason or another) not responded favorably to her material.

She was frustrated that her work further marginalized her from “Female Playwright” to “Female Foreign Language Playwright”

It threw me back into a familiar and sensitive loop…

~Tiffany

(Tomorrow: Part 2, or, Rewind!)

Work, Work, and Surprise!

LAFPI, playwriting, , , , , ,

Well, what a crazy week this has been!  My first 40-hour workweek in… oh… I don’t even know.  I mean, sure, when I was in grad school juggling two part time jobs, class, and teaching, I pulled in some gnarly hours – but they were varied, they were all over the place – they were almost unquantifiable.

Heading into an office 5 days in a row is new; staying there for 8 hours at a time even stranger.

So imagine my glee at the weekends arrival!  “Ahhh, time to sleep in, time to read, time to (gasp) WRITE!”  because although I spent a fair bit of time this week responding to the insane comments my blog stirred up, I hadn’t really gotten any work done on the script I’m currently revising (and we all know submission season is banging on the door!)

But then I got asked to come in today as well; Orientation is Monday and there are still things to do, and I didn’t even hesitate to jump on board.

This is how I know that I really like my new job.

I guard my writing time like a tiger guards its cubs; I don’t want anyone messing with or infringing upon it.  I get grumpy when I don’t have enough of it, and I get angry at those who try to take it from me… I know, real pretty picture, huh?

Which is why my willingness to head in on my day off surprised the hell out of me…

Although I really aspire to (double gasp) make a living writing and teaching,  and although I hope, Hope, HOPE that this next year brings that dream to fruition in a big way… I am seriously enjoying working at this burgeoning college, running their learning center, and planning student activities.  It’s fun!  It makes me happy.

It’s kind of amazing.

That initial panic that I was wrestling with has kind of faded into an exhilarating kind of high… I won’t be rolling in money, but I will be doing something useful, helpful to students, and enjoyable to me and my little sparkling muse.

So while I don’t think I could pull 40 hour + work weeks every week (woof!) I don’t mind doing it for now… Very soon I’ll be down to the promised part-time schedule, with plenty of days off to devote to my computer; only now, perhaps, with a bit more bounce in my step, and a bit more fuel in my emotional tanks, for although I’m tired at the end of the day, I’ve noticed I’m attacking my tasks with a lot more enthusiasm than weary old, worn out, dejected and unemployed Tiffany was doing.

It seems that feeling useful goes a very long way in feeding the muse.

What a thing to figure out this far into the game 🙂

~Tiffany

Nurture vs. A Good Slap in the Face

playwriting, , , , , , ,

Sometimes I sit on my sofa watching X-Files reruns with a fist-full of chocolate just because I feel like it…  Lately, I’ve felt like it a lot more.

So much so in fact that I’m thinking I might just  need a good a slap in the face to get my day-dreaming butt back to the keys, because although that Fox Mulder makes me go “mmm,” indulging the inner kicker and screamer can only lead to wider hips and a few cavities.

(sigh)

I don’t know if it’s all the “working” that’s got me so lazy lately, or what, but I get home from my 9-5er and all I want to do is vegitate.  I don’t want to look at my computer, I don’t want to think, I just want to be whisked away by alien-chasing men in well tailored pants… or sit in the back yard with a glass of red wine and look for my own alien adventures in the sky above.

I think that this is why I treasured my unemployment, even as it was landing me on my parents couch; I knew the time was precious.  I knew it wouldn’t always be so easy to spend days, Weeks, MONTHS, writing…

I’ve spoken to several friends lately who find themselves at the mercy of jobless woes, but it’s the artists who seem the least fazed; as though having long ago made peace with the fact lthat they were dedicating themselves to a dance with uncertainty by pursuing their passions.  Eating bologna and corn flakes for a week stinks, but if you’ve done it before the economic crisis/disaster/total and complete meltdown, it’s not like you’re slamming your head against your law degree in abject and stunned anxiety, wondering “How in the world did this happen to me?!”

Oh no, the artist knows unemployment and financial uncertainty are always just outside her door.

I knew it was a risk the moment I signed on to work with a burgeoning Theater Company… and I knew I wasn’t doing myself the most favors by pursuing a string of part-time, temporary positions after that…

But I will always choose art over practicality.  (sigh) It’s just how this cricket jumps.

And it’s why she’s so damned tired now that she has a “real” job to tend to.

In any case, it’s interesting to see how this will inform my writing.  I just wrapped up a play about an unemeployed, heartsick woman ravaged by too much news and the oil spill, and I threw in a census worker (temporary time job # 129), so who knows what will come of this present experience…

If I can just manage to turn off that handsome David Duchovny…

Equality Now and the Monday Artist Blues

LAFPI, playwriting, , , , , ,

I was more than happy to be a fill-in blogger this week, my imagination already percolating with a crock-pot of thought… Then I went and started a new job… the capitalist inside of me (and lets face it, the survivalist as well) is veeeeery happy to be (finally!  Hallelujah) earning a paycheck at last.  The artist inside is a bit nervous about the next two weeks of “project necessary full-time-ness.”

Even though I know it’s only two weeks of this 40-hour business, my little muse is shaking in her boots at all the writing she may not get done… and it’s not necessarily that she was projecting a wordsmithing windfall, it’s just that now, if she does want to bury herself in verbage, she’s going to have to do so late into the night…

(sigh)

And so it goes… the starving artist taking what she can, cobbling together a patchwork type of life made of imagination, tender typing, and hard-earned bread.

In any case, I’m going to amuse you today with this little gem a dear friend forwarded to me (see below for link) – it’s an acceptance speech by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Serenity, Firefly) as he receives an award from Equality Now, an organization his mother founded to support women.  He is being honored for creating so many strong women characters, and I think the things he says about his choice in creating these wonderful roles are very moving and inspiring!  Just the type of fodder for a good Monday start.

~Tiffany

Joss Whedon’s Equality Now speech