Tag Archives: playwriting

Stitching a play together – by Kitty Felde

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I am finding a relationship between my twin passions: playwriting and sewing. One involves visual puzzle pieces that are stitched together. The other involves character puzzles and pattern pieces of plot.

I came to Maine earlier this month to puzzle out act two of my LA riots/Kenya play, not to sew. But that sewing side of my brain started calling me. It might just be the need to do something creative using my hands, not a keyboard

So I started reading sewing blogs. And fell in love with this one: a British gal who does amazing things with thrift store finds.
http://charityshopchic.wordpress.com/
She gives herself permission to take things apart, discard what’s soiled or not needed, and create something fun and new. It’s that giving yourself permission that’s so important.

And by the way, it also sent me out to the local Goodwill where I spent $20 on five garments that I’ve totally taking apart! (at night, of course, AFTER my writing day…)

Writing lessons from young adult literature – by Kitty Felde

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There’s a wonderful quote in Lisa Scottoline’s review of the new novel “Plugged” by Eoin Colfer. She says, “like any great fictional character, he is what he does.” Boy, is that true for drama!

I’m as guilty as most, my characters do more talking than doing. Not to say they need to scale mountains and fight wizards onstage. But they need to constantly be doing something emotionally. What do they want and what are they doing to get it?

I know Eoin Colfer’s work from his young adult novels. We read ”Artemis Fowl” in my Book Club of the Air for Young Adults, a show that ran on LA Cable 36 where a trio of middle schoolers discuss YA literature. (http://la36.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=26&clip_id=1000Great fun.) In “Artemis,” Colfer’s characters were always DOING something. But he also created an entire universe, with its own rules and villains and quests.

I really like YA literature. David Almond’s “Skellig” is one of my favorites. He creates a character in a ramshackle garage that may be a cranky old man. Or an owl. Or a bird. Or something else. The young hero of the story keeps the creature alive with beer and take-out Chinese food. He decides he HAS to as his way of keeping his prematurely born little sister alive. Such invention! A real page-turner! And full of rich, emotional depth.

Which makes me think about expanding my universe of writing inspirations. I read and see as many plays as I can every month. But rarely am I truly blown away, transported to a really imaginative place where I cry and laugh and am haunted by words and images for days. That happens often when I’m reading YA literature. Why is this? Is it because YA books are short, to the point, aimed at an audience that demands to be wowed, an audience whose raging hormones make emotional outbursts a daily fact of life? That’s what I want to capture and put onstage.
Which is why I’m heading over to the YA section of the library to see what’s new.

Hurricanes and other natural disasters by Kitty Felde

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I’m a southern California girl. I know earthquakes and brush fires. I don’t know hurricanes.

But I was up in Maine for two blissful weeks of vacation – nothing but reading, eating, swimming in a lake, sitting, and writing. I’m working on rewriting act two of a play that’s been haunting me for ten years. More on that later in the week. But we were supposed to drive back south to DC on Saturday. That didn’t happen, thanks to Irene.

Friday was an absolutely perfect day! Warm temperatures, blue skies, you could smell the pine trees. The sun glistened on the lake. Hard to imagine the storm coming. By Saturday, you had this feeling you should be DOING something. Preparing somehow. So I drove into town to buy a battery for the flashlight and a power converter to run my laptop from the car’s cigarette lighter. (A true writer: can’t live without her laptop!) I made soup and chocolate pudding – to nourish the soul. We put away the plastic lawn furniture and took down the hanging plants and wind chimes. And we waited. And waited.

Finally, Irene arrived Sunday morning, first with rain, then with wind, then with wind and rain, and finally, just a bit more wind. Inland Maine got hit hard. We spent the day with friends, eating pasta and playing Crazy Eights.
It’s a nice metaphor for playwriting: that big idea that grows and grows, both scaring you to death and exciting something deep inside you. It takes its dear, sweet time developing, moving slowly towards you. You spend your time preparing – research, note cards, writing in longhand, making notes to yourself on the Iphone, freewriting – doing SOMETHING until it arrives. And then it does – you’re in the midst of the writing, full of excitement and terror. That new play makes you feel ALIVE! And then, all too soon, it’s over. It gets produced or a reading and your emotional brain is already preparing for the next creative storm.

Perhaps the National Hurricane Center can help me with titles when I sit down to write my next “hurricane.”

Go-Go-Gadget Brain

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I drove home from rehearsal last night, my brain firing off lists like nobody’s business – Program, DVD, Certificates, Monk’s, Forks, Fruit, Sound, Tech (!), Blog, Blog, Blog…

So I got home and stuffed my mouth with a ChocoTaco and set down to tidy up a few things on that list before my lids revolted and permanently shut down for the night, in the hopes that I could get a handle on it all somehow…

What is it that drives me to continually engineer means to be busy?  I look around at my “Civilian” friends who have their evenings free to eat at the table, watch t.v. and help the kids with their homework and I think “Am I just crazy?”

Or is it part of the artist’s path that s/he may not be satisfied until her/his work is out there… in the world… making some kind of imprint…

I woke up this morning after dreams about tornados and long, treacherous hallways (thank you subconscious) with that list-making brain already back in full gear, and noticed -forming at the bottom of that list – were fresh thoughts about the next big “What if…” project.

Umm, I might be obsessed.

Which may be why I’m so tired.

See, I started LittleBlackDressINK out of my frustration with waiting… it felt like, as a playwright, I was always waiting for a reading, or a production – and (to be honest) although readings are fun, I’ve had about all of them I can cheer about and now just experience them as the observational meet and greets they mostly are – for very rarely does it seem the reading is being held to weigh in on possible production.  (If you haven’t read Outrageous Fortune yet, they talk extensively about the realities of what many of us call “Development Hell” and it’s seriously fascinating to hear from both other playwrights AND theatre companies on this subject)

Which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy readings – I do, I do.  I just attend them with my writing ears on and little expectation beyond some new business cards in my pocket and rewrites on my mind.

Meanwhile, I’m hungry for stage time.

So it seemed the obvious step to carve some out for myself.

Yet… the hat-juggling of working a “real” job, plus producing/directing a show, plus the numerous other projects I have running simultaneously (I’m in the midst of managing some theatrical marketing for an upcoming event and I edit two other blogs) does make me wonder when I’ll tire of this circus life and…

…Settle down?

(shiver)

Doesn’t it manifest a “Throw in the Towel” type vibe when you read that?

But will I ever be able to truly support myself on my writing alone?

Will I ever be able to truly be satisfied with a teaching gig and some writing time in the summer?

Will things change when I finally tie my wagon to another’s and start popping out tots of my own?

Or am I too hard wired for motion?  Too geared for hurdle-jumping, to ever truly slow down to a snails pace, and get back to just “Waiting”?

It’s probabaly all a little too much to be thinking about at the moment- I’ve got a mountain of things to check off that list today and scant time for little else – but still, it lingers…

It lingers along with loud dreams of the next “What if?”

~Tiffany Antone

Words, words; rolling…

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Someone once said to me – well, alright, actually it’s been said to me many a time but I remember quite clearly at least the first time I heard it – that I write “with a lot of rhythm.”  At the time I think I nodded dumbly, and tried to feel good about what seemed to be a compliment but was something I hadn’t really thought all that much about as I wrote… it seemed strange to receive a compliment on something that I had no awareness of.

They were right of course… as I listened to the actors digging into and discovering the play, there was an amazing sense of rhythm and musicality to the language of the piece, and now I realize that the rhythm of a word or a combination of words has a lot to do with whether or not I’ll use it/them (or opt for silence) in my work.

Word selection, it would seem, has become as as serious for me as selecting the right wine, your child’s name, or which freeway to take during rush hour…

In other words, I take it pretty damn serious, but I also try to maintain a healthy sense of humor.

Because I have yet to meet an actor who hasn’t had to (on occasion) rearrange some portion of my text to suit his/her mouth.

Now, I used to act, and so I understand that sometimes getting your brain to remember a line that has been composed in such a way as to feel as comfortable in your mouth as a cheese grater, can be damn near impossible.  I understand that sometimes an actor winds up spitting out the subtext of a line or some mutant hybrid instead of the original…

And as a playwright who understands actors but who is still a pretty persnickety wordsmith, I’ve learned to pick my battles on which lines are truly crucial to the rhythm of the thing and which can survive a few… abuses.

But I still wonder if, although they are treating the play with much reverence and care, an actor realizes the value of the words themselves (and their order) to the playwright… or if it is only I that see them as a magical, swelling, and lyrical recipe that must be said in the correct order and pairings, lest they loose their power and cast (instead) only a murkish sort-of spell…

And now I’m in the unique position of directing my own play for the Dirty Laundry fest, and I’m battling with myself on the merit of nit-picking vs. focusing on the cohesive whole…

That said, when I find myself bristling and silently screaming inside at some liberty taken with my text, I take a breath and gently task the actor with getting it right, even if we have to work the beat several times or break down the text line by line to get their brains to accept it as written rather than letting them put it in their own words.  It’s avery interesting internal battle indeed to juggle egos (theirs and mine) with productivity and specificity.

And it’s taught me a lot about balancing expectations with function as well.

However, just because it might be fun to compare notes, here are my top three pet peeves in the line department:

  • Don’t start every line with “Look” or “But” or “Well”… This is an actor trick that I DESPISE…  Either they get stuck and need a second to recall the line,  or they don’t quite understand the transition that brought them there so they add a beat of their own wordage to “help” themselves with, and if left unchecked it turns the whole thing into a play about humming and hawing.
  • Don’t reduce poetry to “comfortable” language…  Sometimes an actor will come across a more complex line than they themselves would use and instead of mastering it, they alter it to suit their tongues.  “I left to fetch flowers” becomes “I went to get flowers” and I sit there and bemoan the lost mood of the line and silently curse the actor for their clumsy murder of my alliterative text, even though the same basic point has been made.  To me, the care I take in selecting my words mean the difference between craftsmanship and an “anyone can write a play” vibe.  There is very little in my characters mouths that I didn’t put there carefully and with specific intent.
  • Don’t blast through beats.  I use a lot of beats in my plays.  I hate when actors (or directors) try to fly through them – even if a director decides a “Beat” need not be illustrated on stage with time, they risk missing important shifts in power, emotion, intent, thought, etc. if they don’t take the time to ask “Why is the playwright adding a beat here between these lines?  What happens for the characters in this moment?”

~Tiffany

Crazy Schemes Produced

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So, I’m a pretty active person, playwright, and dreamer… I like to keep busy and I like to feel productive.  I think it’s one of the reasons I was SO excited about the LAFPI starting up… I mean, a group of kick-ass playwrights all working towards gender parity in theater?  AND we get to have fun mixers and support each other and address important issues in theater?

Count me IN!

And over the past year (+) I’ve been super happy to see all the strides we’ve made – the very important LAFPI study helmed by the amazing Miss Ella Martin, the Women on the Fringe work that honored theatres who produce female playwrights, and the all encouraging and inspiring support that this site has offered for countless other female playwrights who want to get involved and join the revolution.

It’s been amazing.

But I’ve been watching a lot of it from AZ – where I’m now stationed – and I’ve been ants-in-my-pants-to-the-extreme for more ground-work than I can actually do from afar…

Until I realized that my new stomping grounds include an amazing community theatre and quite a few talented and accomplished female playwrights of its own…

And then I realized that I could support female playwrights by actually producing them.

So I started up Little Black Dress INK (www.LittleBlackDressINK.org), sent out invitations to some awesomely talented women, had a thrilling meeting with the head of the theatre here who said “YES!” to my crazy scheme, and got the ball rolling…

Now, a few months later, I find myself in the home stretch of a most passionate project:  Dirty Laundry, a ten minute play fest benefitting the Prescott Area Women’s Shelter and including plays from 9 awesome female playwrights!  There are also 7 female directors helming each of the plays, and a WAY talented team of actors bringing these plays to life.

So that ants in the pants feeling I was complaining about?  It’s settled down a little bit, appeased that I’m making something happen instead of waiting for it to come to me…

And isn’t that what the LAFPI is all about?

Becoming an “Instigator” is a call to arms!  All it takes is some daring, some passion, some wild-eyed-scheming, and a shared vision.

I might be one tired puppy at the end of this week, but I will be sleeping happy 🙂

~Tiffany

Day Two: Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation – part two

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Todd London of New Dramatists gave the keynote address on Friday, on “After Outrageous Fortune.”
Here’s some excerpts: “We are perhaps a roomful of anachronisms, relying on outdated views of time and space.”

New Dramatists is in a Lutheran church in Manhattan. It used to house a soup kitchen and thrift store in the early 1900’s. It’s now a soup kitchen for playwrights. The altar is a writing area. The thrift store is a theatre space. The soup kitchen is a library. That library contains a stage manager’s copy of an August Wilson play called “Millhand’s Cast Bucket” – now known as “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”

“What a difference a play makes” is a song title suggested by Marsha Norman for an event celebrating the career of Horton Foote. They didn’t use the song, but the phrase stuck in London’s brain. Do plays really make a difference? To whom? Do they still? London says he’s a rabbi in a church for playwrights, constantly questioning his faith.

Horton Foote tried to stop time by remembering. Had so much been written about such a small space of real estate? Nothing can be lost as long as there are artists to write it down. But is it possible plays themselves are disappearing?

Robert Anderson had a note taped to his typewriter: nobody asked you to be a playwright. You write the plays no one asked you to write, that no one may ever produce, cultivate a garden that no one may ever wander with you. The world has no intention of meeting you where you live. Even the American Theatre doesn’t want to meet playwrights where they live. No sustainable structure that will last over time to provide a dignified life for playwrights. Theatres are concerned with pleasing an older, more conservative audience – or perhaps just the theatre’s “assets” – large donors. And audiences for straight plays are dropping every year.

Think about O’Neill. When it came to style, he tried everything. Think about how that would have played today. How could he have wrestled with scale, the years of internal struggle that separated early work and later? Where would Clifford Odets or Edward Albee or Horton Foote be without their theatres?

But London says there’s a “weird seismic shift.” The Guild will permanently fund the “Lily” awards. Arena Stage is providing its five resident playwrights with salaries, offices, and health insurance. Two separate black play festivals launched in a single year because of the “convenings” gathering at Arena this year. Money is appearing for second productions. TCG is holding national conversations on the individual artist. “The ground on which you stand is shifting.”

London says think of asking August Wilson what he was working on – a ten page cycle, performed in every theatre in the country. Will statistics keep it down? “Attention must be paid.” Think of the sweep and magnitude of his Century Cycle. “The highest possibility of human life.”

Where do we look for inspiration? London says he looks to playwrights. When you stare at a thing, it grows larger – a face, a flower, a play. We stare at plays and the machine of culture grows quiet. And the play speaks. The institutional theatre isn’t evil. It’s misguided.

“Your example is in you alone and you together: a community of writers.” Don’t be plagued by bitterness. It has killed more poets. Don’t be bitter. Or envious, which fuels that bitterness.

You have each other. You have power. Just use it.

Stones in the Garden…

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I’ve always wanted a garden even though I don’t know much about growing things.  I have destroyed a rubber plant twice and they’re supposed to be hard to kill.  I keep thinking that if I have a designated place for plants, they will grow well with water, air and soil and maybe a few stones here and there.  Certain plants need more or less sun than others.  I don’t know the exact planting season for each plant – hope it is on the package of seeds.  What I do know, is the smell and feel of good soil, played in enough of it as a child while digging up ant hills and worms.  I could always find at least one worm under a dug up stone.  The worms were always found in the best part of the soil.  Why did I spend so much time in dirt?  Feeding the pet ants of course!  Yeah, yeah, they didn’t know they were our pets but me and my big brother visited them all summer long with crumbs and water and ice cream so they were “pets.”  And, if we were careful, we could see the tunnels virtually intact once we started the excavation.

The observation and excavation skills I learned those summers work well when I’m writing or collecting moments for my writing.  I have to see the inner workings of things mainly because I believe there is a reason for everything and what’s on the inside affects your outside world more than you know.  So, when I say “does not cry” it is because I am hinting at a backstory to that character not trying to direct the actor.  I am lifting stones to get to the worm-filled soil.  My mother used to tell me that the worms made the soil good; at first sight a worm can appear to be an icky thing but ultimately the icky-ness is what enriches the soil or story…  The simple smell of it is as wonderful as spring rain on pavement and the feel of it in the hands always takes me back to the beginning of things…the place of possibility…

Think local, write local

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I continue my discovery of theatres around the Washington DC area and always compare them to our companies in LA. Last night, I saw a new show “Resurrectionist King” by a local DC writer Stephen Spotswood, at a theatre near the University of Maryland called Active Cultures Theatre.

Was it a perfect play? No. Was it a darned good attempt? You betcha. And creatively directed and pretty well acted.

But here’s the thing that impressed me: the play was commissioned by the theatre company Active Cultures.  It was based on a true story that someone had read in the local free weekly paper, about a local “celebrity” – a guy who dug up bodies for medical students to examine. The Resurrectionist King he called himself. And he did a one night show at a theatre near Ford’s Theatre (where Lincoln was shot) showing the audience the art of his craft.

Active Cultures worked for about a year with the playwright, developing the piece.  And then, instead of just a reading, they actually produced it!  What a concept.

The audience LOVED the fact that it was a story about their own community. They could identify with the places and some of the characters.

How many great stories are untold in LA? And why isn’t there a company commissioning local writers to write them?

Time management

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There really are only 24 hours in a day.  And on a night like this, where I’m just getting home at 8:30 in the evening, the last thing that I want to do after dealing with words and sound bites all day is stare some more at my computer and deal with words and dialogue.  If I were a better person, I’d go to bed earlier and get up at the crack of dawn and write.  But I’m not that better person.

I’m giving myself a pass this week.  I knew it would be a stressful week at work, what with threats of a government shutdown.  Plus, my Skype partner had another commitment and couldn’t make our once a week playwriting lab.   So no new pages for me. 

But just giving myself a week off gave me the space to actually send out some query letters and submit a couple of plays here and there.  And my brain has been working on rewriting the LA Riots play.  So I haven’t completely given up my identity as playwright. 

I’ve had a hard time finding a regular schedule for my writing – partly because of the unpredicability of the day job, partly because both my husband and I work out of an 800 square foot coop.  And he’s a writer, too.  There’s something about that other person sucking all the creative energy out of a place. 

When I was working on the many, many rewrites of “Gogol Project,” I found that if I could set aside 90 minutes a day, I could write a play.  That resolution has fallen away. I did manage to finish the first draft of a new play in spits and spots.  But after more than two decades of writing plays, I wish I knew a more efficient way to do it.

I’m curious about your writing habits.  Do you have a sacred place and time?  How long do you typically sit down to write at a time?  Is caffeine a requirement?