Tag Archives: playwriting

Picture Exercises…

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From time to time, I have taken acting classes. While studying at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, I learned a technique called the “Picture Exercise” where the actor finds a picture of a person/character and recreates the picture by recreating the exact pose and costume.  This exercise helps the actor find specific character traits to incorporate into life-like behavior for the character.  Once the actor is dressed and posed like the picture, the actor must answer one question, “What does the person in the picture say at that moment in time?”  In order to answer that question, the actor must get a sense of the inner and outer voice of the character/person in the picture.  The actor has to create backstory and has to create the moment before.  The actor has to know what frame of mind the person in the picture is in, where they are physically, how they move, if they move, and why they move.  Then what do they sound like when they talk, do they have an accent, a lisp, are they loud or quiet…

I did my exercise from a picture of Sethe from Toni Morrison’s Beloved who is patterned after Margaret Garner, the slave who killed her young daughter rather than let her return to slavery. I used a photograph by Ken Regan (found in the book Journey to Beloved by Oprah Winfrey) on page 48.  The actress who played young Sethe, Lisa Gay Hamilton has a video of that scene “get in the shed”  and while I did not recreate her scene, I did recreate her look and the look of the babies for my exercise.  The picture I used was of Sethe holding her two infant daughters in her arms – in complete controlled hysterics.  I made my costume, bought two dolls – a small brown one and a larger white one, as there are seldom brown dolls to be found in stores.  I bought paint and mixed it to get the perfect hue and painted the white one brown, after the paint dried, I glued hair onto the head in little braids all over. I made dresses for the babies.  Grabbed a knife – one that could slice skin and created and reenacted what I considered fitting backstory that would make a mother slit her baby’s throat.

What did she say?  “Dey be dead or dey be free.”

I always liked the picture exercise but hadn’t thought of using it for a writing exercise until I participated in a playwright’s workshop at Native Voices the Autry with Bernardo Solano.  The seminar was right around the time that I lost my niece and I needed to do something to get my mind off my grief.  I needed to write and I was craving the company of other writers…  It was hard to focus; however, when we were asked to select a picture and write whatever it inspired us to write, I found the selection process somewhat soothing.  I selected a picture of a man and an infant lying dead on stone steps.  The picture began to speak almost immediately – “the bombs came in the night…”  The resulting piece is a 10-minute play titled MILK DUST.

I don’t usually do writing exercises because I believe to get better at writing, you have to write…  Writing is like doing pushups, the only way to get better at pushups is to do more pushups.  I do like this exercise though; I like the way it can be used from the acting and the writing perspective. It’s close to what I do in my head when I visualize the characters that I am writing about, when I am listening to what they say.  This exercise is a perfect way to find an unexpected way into an unexpected play…

Enough

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There were two theatre events tonight here in DC: a discussion of the state of the new play at GWU and a public thrashing of Mike Daisey at Woolly Mammoth. I wanted to attend both and ended up attending neither. And doing my best not to beat myself up.

It’s tough to hold down a day job (or raise small children or take care of a sick parent or…you fill in the blank) and be a writer. And even your role as playwright gets divied between the writing, the pitching, the preparation for the readings, attending friends and other fabulous plays, and the schmoozing. The two theatre events tonight that I skipped fall into the latter category. But frankly, I don’t have the energy. Tough week at work. (okay, I’ll brag: my tough week includes hanging out at the Supreme Court for the health care arguments. But it’s a pain in the butt with dodging protestors, the flood of media, the delay in getting audio from the court, and all the rest, I’m pooped. And I look like it.)

There’s only so many hours in the day. And I know the more rested I am, the more creative I am. Tired often equals depression, wasted hours at the keyboard, and too much chocolate.

So I’ve decided to forgive myself for not schmoozing on a Tuesday night. Instead, it’s fuzzy slippers, a bad movie, and some sewing.

How about you?

AFTER THE READING: NOW WHAT DO i DO?

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In yesterday’s posting, I made my list of “what I’m listening for” at a staged reading. Now, the question now is what to do with that information.

TAKE A BREATH

I like to let the reading sit for a day or two. It helps to get some distance between myself and the script. If there’s a talkback or a critique, I like to give it more time before I start tearing the script apart. That thinking time helps to organize my thoughts.

SIFTING WHEAT FROM CHAFF

Not all your notes – or someone else’s feedback – are useful. I re-read my notes a couple of times. Some things clearly need fixing. Others I want to think some more about. And then there’s the notes you absolutely think are wrong. I don’t burn the paper. Instead, I put those “wrong” ideas someplace – just in case I want to revisit them six months down the line. There’s always the possibility that they were right after all.

ONE STEP AT A TIME

I try to pick one thing that is a) not too disruptive to the rest of the script if I changed it; or b) not too emotionally vexing to change. Just changing one thing gives me courage to do further surgery.

Next, tackle the notes that make the most sense, even if it DOES mean tearing the script apart. You did save the original copy, didn’t you? You can always go back to it.

MAKE THE CHANGES YOU NEED TO MAKE, THEN…

Step back. Let the script breathe. Perhaps schedule another reading, perhaps share with your writing group. Perhaps get it off in the mail to that playwriting contest. Or stick it in a drawer for a little while. Just remember where you put it.

Staged Readings

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There’s nothing like hearing your words read before an audience.

I’ve had the good fortune to have two readings in two months of my newest play THE LUCKIEST GIRL. (It’s the play that not one, but two artistic directors told me no one will ever produce for political correctness reasons. So, I’m grateful that it’s even getting a reading!)

As much as we playwrights disparage the whole development hell process, it’s so important to have a safe place to help a play grow. And one part of that growth is exposing it to an audience.

Thought I’d share a few notes about what I’m listening for during a reading of one of my plays.

What I’m listening for:

LAUGHS

It’s the ultimate immediate audience feedback. Did they get my jokes? Even my dramas have little laughs sprinkled in. I admit if my chicken jokes in the Bosnian war crimes drama don’t get laughs, I feel like a failure. So the first thing I listen for is laughs from the audience – what jokes are popular? Which ones fall flat? Is there some unintentional laughter about something that seemed perfectly reasonable to me when I wrote it? Could it get a bigger laugh with different phrasing or a different punch line?

REPEATING YOURSELF

My bad playwriting motto is “if it’s good once, write it again elsewhere in the script. Several times.”

The reading is where I FINALLY hear the repetition that somehow doesn’t jump off the page. And it’s an opportunity to look for the places that plot points or character clues NEED to be repeated.

LISTEN TO THE AUDIENCE

My new standard for bad plays is when the audience starts texting. I’ve seen it happen at exactly the point in the script (not mine, of course…) where the action lags, the piece feels like it’s not going anywhere, the audience is bored. The worst example of this was a mediocre production of Jon Jory’s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” last year in Florida. Not one, not two, but THREE people in the audience all pulled out cellphones at exactly the same moment – late in the script just as Mr. Darcy was about to propose! Jane Austen was turning over in her grave! Dramatically, that should be the HIGH point of the script. It was not.

No one texted during my readings, but sitting in the back row, I did notice several folks fidgeting. I made note of where they came in the script and will now look to see why interest is lagging at that point.

LOGIC

Do the events of the play follow in a logical order? I discovered that I had inserted a short scene in a place that made no sense whatsoever.

TYPING MISTAKES

There’s nothing like an actor trying to make sense of a line missing a word to catch your attention. A cast is like a room full of proof readers.

STUFF THAT STILL DOESN’T WORK

I have a series of short “interview” scenes where my two young actors do a man on the street interview of actors who play a revolving cast of characters. It was clunky in rehearsal. It was still clunky the first reading. And it never improved in the second reading. I could say “three strikes and you’re out,” but I think I have an idea of how to fix it.

STUFF THAT DOES WORK (or “get your finger off the delete button)

There’s a line that just felt wrong to me. And I’d made a note to myself to change it. And then the audience laughed loudly at the original line. Will I keep it? See rule one.

LISTEN TO YOUR DIRECTOR

Directors are amazing people. They see things in your script you had no idea were there.

My both my DC and LA directors found things in my script I had not fully thought out. Which has helped me flesh out characters and motivations and a style quirk that needs ironing out. I think I took more notes than my actors.

LISTEN TO YOUR ACTORS

Actors bring heart and soul to your words. They generously spill their insides for the sake of your current draft. Pay attention to their instincts. They may see more in your characters than you do. Be aware of the lines that get stuck in their mouth. Usually it means the sentence construction needs a tweak.

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.

Playwrights blind date

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Last weekend, I was invited to participate in what was billed as a playwrights blind date. Twenty of us gathered at the Jewish Community Center library, sitting in chairs around the room. Facing us was a dramaturg, producer, or director. And in four minutes, we had the opportunity to get to know each other, to see if we “clicked.” The rules were: don’t pitch your plays, just get to know each other.

I now remember why I hated dating. That need to present our best selves, smarter, prettier, more facile than anyone else in the room. Yuck.

My husband chided me for not preparing an elevator speech – a fifteen second pitch of my stuff. I should have listened. Everyone kept asking what my “theatrical aesthetic” was. Hell if I know. I couldn’t even describe my plays. They’re not similar at all – a melodrama, a musical about baseball, a courtroom drama about war crimes, a ten minute comedy set in a ladies room. I’m not sure there’s even a theme that runs through my work. Perhaps for the dramas it’s the Rodney King question: “can’t we all just get along?” But how do you explain the romantic comedies?

Have you been able to nail down your “theatrical aesthetic”? Willing to share it here?

Why we write

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I read (in my latest edition of the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal) Roosevelt’s review of an obscure book called “John Gilley, Maine Farmer and Fisherman” by Charles William Eliot. TR said he was “immensely pleased” with the “little book.” He says, “it seems to me pre-eminently worthwhile to have such a biography of a typical American. How I wish President Elliot could write in the same shape biographies of a brakeman or railroad locomotive engineer, of an ordinary western farmer, of a carpenter or blacksmith in one of our small towns, of a storekeeper in one of our big cities, of a miner – of half a dozen typical representations of the forgotten millions who really make up American life.”

Roosevelt goes on to muse about immortality. “It makes small odds to any of us after we are dead whether the next generation forgets us, or whether a number of generations pass before our memory, steadily growing more and more dim, at last fades into nothing. On this point it seems to me that the only important thing is to be able to feel, when our time comes to go out into the blackness, that those survivors who care for us and to whom it will be a pleasure to think well of us when we are gone, shall have that pleasure. Save in a few wholly exceptional cases, cases of men such as are not alive at this particular time, it is only possible in any event that a comparatively few people can have this feeling for any length of time.”

And therein lies our gift as playwrights: to create living, breathing characters of what some might call ordinary people, the un-famous. And we are able to give them immortality, living long after we are gone, long after the people who inspired those characters in the first place are gone. It makes us gods of sorts, creating human beings and turning them loose on the world.

Who says playwrights have no power?

Dig that out of the trash can

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I can’t recall who said it originally or who it was that repeated it to me, but some wise writer once said you’re not allowed to throw out bad writing until you’ve shared it with someone else.
We’re our own worst critics, snarky and nit picky, embarrassed by our work, hiding it until we think it’s properly “cooked” and ready to serve to an audience. Even if that audience is your own writing group.
I’ve finally found a wonderful group of writers here in DC and our “assignment” was to bring in the final scene of the play we’re working on. Even if you haven’t written a word for any other scene in the play. I’ve been struggling with my LA riots play for ten years now. It haunts me. And since this spring marks the 20th anniversary, I know I’ve got to finish it. So I gave a stab to the assignment, trying to write that scene that I’ve been avoiding forever.
It was awful. Hide your face in a paper bag awful. Repeated sentences, facts out of order, wierd entrances, and worst of all, no resolution. I knew it was awful and spent weeks trying to “fix” it. Finally, I decided to stop looking at it and just not bring anything in to my group. Chicken!
But Sunday morning, I asked myself what I had to lose? This was a new group of people. If they thought ill of me and my work, did it really matter? Would they tell the whole town what a lousy writer I was?
I printed out the pages, handed them out, and confessed I hadn’t really completed the assignment. The scene was a problem. So there.
Listening to it read out loud, I could see where my fellow writers were interested, confused, amused. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. And those generous writers put their clever heads together and offered me a way out of my conundrum. It wasn’t one last scene, it was a series of scenes trying to squeeze into that last scene. Let it breathe.
But most of all, their enthusiasm for this badly written piece of work, wanting to know the characters, the rest of the story, helped me regain my confidence about the work. It wasn’t awful. Just a work in progress.
So my advice for the day: courage fellow writers. Be brave enough to share the rotten work with people you trust. There may be seeds there that can grow into something even more wonderful than you imagined it in the first place.

Writing Adrift

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A year and a half ago I was sitting on my parents’ couch, awash with grief and abject helplessness as the news showed footage of the BP oil spill ad nauseum, interrupted only by depressing unemployment figures, tragic economic shoulder shrugs, and tales of unrest abroad.  I was unemployed, newly returned to my home-town (per a very sympathetic welcome from my parents) with less than $50 in my bank account, and no idea what I was going to do with myself now landed.

I spent a lot of time that summer sobbing at the horror of it all, and stuffing my face with my parents’ hard-earned cupboard snacks.

I felt so adrift in all the news, I couldn’t find anyplace to drop anchor – and I felt powerless to do anything about any of it.

Then a cricket kept me up one night, tossing and turning and seeing red with insomnia, and I got up in the morning, sat down to the keys, and wrote a play about it all – even the cricket.

I felt better.  I had found a place where I could be heard – even if the play was still just on the page, it was my words, my world… it was mine and I no longer felt like I was bubbling with inarticulate horror… I was doing something about it.

That play got a reading, was a finalist for the O’Neills and is now in rewrites… whether it will see the stage, I can’t predict, but it makes me feel good to know it’s here – ready to be realized – and no longer eating away at my stomach.

I find myself going through a similar news-induced-panic now.

Every time I turn on the news or visit my home-page, there’s some new development here or there or in my back-yard, that has me nearly paralyzed with unease…  Where are we headed?  The deep polarity dividing the nation seems to be getting worse day by day, and news of our internal strife is riddled with continually depressing unemployment numbers and even more upset abroad.

Is it time for another play?

I read somewhere that Artistic Directors are lamenting the lack of “current” plays – Well, a lot of the artists most affected by current events are the ones they haven’t met yet.  A lot of the artists who are feeling the pinch are trying to decide between peanut butter or jelly because buying both is too expensive.  A lot of the creative minds who have been crock-potting the state of things are just now starting to send that work out into the world to be received/or/rejected and it’s going to take a bit of a hunt on those hungry Artistic Director’s fronts to find them amidst the piles.

Because although I love and adore many of our contemporary playwrights, many of those who are currently getting produced are watching the National Implosion from more comfortable seats than those of the not-yet-discovered.

Oh, of course all of us artists are in danger – popular thought on the national relevancy of  arts is too hot-button of an issue for any of us to be able to relax – but there’s a big experiential difference between those of us who are able to turn off the television and write about it at our stable desks, and those of us who are cramming our creative moments in front of the computer between job searches and coupon raids.

Which is why I’m looking forward to hearing from some of my fellows writing adrift… I’m looking forward to seeing their work on the national stage.

I’m looking forward to the day when more of us can finally drop anchor.

~Tiffany Antone

 

24 hour switch

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I have a confession… I haven’t written anything much lately.  I could (accurately) claim the busy-bee-nature of my calendar

has left me less than energized, but there’s a bit more to it than that; I just haven’t felt particularly inspired to actually make the writerly effort.

And I don’t mean “inspired” in the sense that I’m waiting for some hot-commodity-idea either.

(From my blog on Little Black Dress INK a week or two ago)

Writer’s Block… They should call it “Emotionally Disadvantaged Creative’s Block”.

There are countless essays and processes devoted to understanding and conquering the writer’s enemy, mostly involving baby steps of free-writing, calendering oneself, forcing it out like a stubborn turd, etc.  But I always thought these things were a crock – the reason we stop writing is because we’re harboring some deep fear or resentment – not because we’ve run out of ideas – and no amount of straining ourselves over the proverbial toilet is going to make them come out if the tunnel is plugged by baggage!

(I know, that’s a disgusting analogy)

But then, I haven’t written anything new in months (besides blog posts) so I had to ask myself, might I be stricken with a fog of literary stasis?  I mean, I’ve been really busy; I’ve been teaching and producing and directing and dating…

I have been doing any number of things besides writing…

(this is when my inner guru/muse/whatever it is within that is plugged more keenly into the source of things, lets me know that I am indeed hiding in the fog…)

Sigh

(and then I have to ask myself why….)

Double Sigh

But I think the answer is this:  I’m not writing because I’m afraid that whatever I’m working on still won’t be good enough to produce, and quite frankly I’m a little more than tired of all the back-patting and head-nodding and open readings leading to naught…

My demon it seems (the first in my history with the pen) is fear, chased by an ugly little thing called anger.

And it’s time I process it all, chew it up, and spit it out, and stop giving myself excuses.  I’ve collected seeds of anxiety and doubt and now they’ve spouted into a full blown emotional forest that needs cutting down.

Perhaps I can turn all that lumber into paper?

Then this past weekend I was invited to participate in a 24-hour play fest.  I’d never done one before, so I jumped in with a lot of willful trepidation and more than a little attitude (pointless as it is, attitude always makes us feel a little safer in the un-trod, doesn’t it?)

I was terrified – How was this going to work?  Was I going to be able to write a whole play (minimal page length be damned- would it have a beginning, middle and end?  Would it make sense?) in one evening?  Would my brain and The Muse be able to stand each other after so long apart and under the pressure of such short turnaround?

Turns out, the answer – just like my answer to the challenge – was “Yes!”

We gathered at 9 p.m., started writing at 11, and I had a 9 pager ready to hand over at 3:30 a.m.  I was exhausted, and I was seeing a little double, but by God, I crafted a funny enough piece to forgive it it’s whimsy, and the actors and directors who memorized and staged it in the morning/afternoon/evening did a great job and seemed to find it quirky and enjoyable enough that I could feel I had indeed done well.

And now I can’t get my little Muse to stop poking me, pushing me, demanding me to get back at the keys.

It seems that the “cure” was to just stop worrying about my attitude and the sheer overwhelming nature of my theatrical hopes, and just write already!

Now – if I can just get my calendar to listen, I’d be a much happier, even-busier-(but writing, damnit)-bee!

~Tiffany