Tag Archives: Tiffany Antone

Most Unsuccessful Playwright Ever

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Yep, right here. Most unsuccessful playwright ever. And I hate superlatives.

Hello Lafpiers,

It’s my blog week here on LAFPI. So I had a whole big comic riff planned for my Monday post. I had planned to talk about how I had absolutely nothing happening in my playwriting world and how I was now aiming for a lack of success instead of success and how once I realized that I became a happier person even though to desire a lack of success instead of success is very un-American.

Then last week I got an email from Tiffany Antone. Darn you, Tiffanyyyyyy!

Tiffany is producing an evening of plays about pets, and I had sent her some monologues which I had totally forgotten about. Anyway, she’s putting my monologues in her pet play evening and would I be interested in writing another monologue?

Of course I wrote another monologue. So now, I have something theatrical happening and I can no longer be the most unsuccessful playwright ever. I’m bummed. I’m seriously bummed.

Meanwhile, on the cover of the most recent LA Weekly was a drawing of William Shakespeare with a laptop and the headline: Why Be a Playwright in LA? Inside, Steven Leigh Morris wrote a very engaging profile of four Los Angeles based playwrights. The article can be found here.

Personally, I’ve never been very good at being a playwright. I can’t figure out the secret handshake, and my wardrobe is all wrong. I just like to write plays that are crazy, sexy, cool.

But I could relate to the LA part of the headline. I’ve been looking around LA and asking myself why am I here? Sure there’s a great acting pool, but great actors can be found all over the world. Sure seventy degree February days are nice, but so is rain. Why am I in LA? I don’t have a witty answer for that one. I just know it’s April 2013, and I’m still in LA.

But. . .But. . .But

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Last month, Tiffany Antone put her writing heart on her sleeve on this blog. She kept coming back to the phrase but I’m not writing full length plays as she talked about everything she was doing—and she does some great stuff.

I totally understood her pain. She was going through the Buts. Yes, I have the buts too. I might be writing away and kicking ass on a new play,  but. . .but. . .but. I might have sat through a really successful production of a short play I wrote, but. . .but. . .but.

The Buts have caused me to start smoking (which creates real butts, hahahaha), drink too much, and curl up into a little ball with my eyes tightly closed and my fists clenched.

How do you fight the Buts? I do not recommend smoking, drinking too much, or curling up into a little ball. I fight the Buts by doing yoga (skipping the little ball part), sailing, and just plain getting on with it.

Sometimes, you just gotta get on with it and say, okay, what next? Actually, that might be a good phrase to counter punch the Buts. What next? Also what can I do now?

And Tiffany, don’t worry about them full length plays. According to Wikipedia, Chekhov wrote less than ten full length plays. Less than ten. Okay, so he was a prolific short story writer. Okay, so five of those plays are considered classics. Okay, so he was also a doctor. Okay, so he died young. Still, he did the work. Remember it’s quality not quantity. Insert inspirational quote here.

It’s your time now. What are you going to do with it?

Hello Again Hello

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Happy Week one hundred and twenty three, LAFPI Blog!!! Woohoo! Has this blog really been up for over two years? I swear, it doesn’t look a day over six months.

When I first started blogging for LAFPI, I figured I would stop when I ran out of ideas. Well, this is my eleventh time blogging here, and I’m still going. I wonder how many times I have to blog in order to get an LAFPI baseball cap.

My playwriting coffee has been percolating nicely. Last month, I traveled to Prescott, Arizona for yet another theatrical extravaganza produced by Tiffany Antone (producer, playwright, fellow LAFPI blogger, and the more I know her, the more I am tempted to put the words, ‘the great’ in front of her name).

My short play, POP, a meditation on the financial crisis told with balloons, was part of an evening of short plays called From the Mouths of Babes. It was great fun returning toPrescott for a second time and seeing folks I hadn’t seen in a year.

POP was directed by Cason Murphy who directed my play last year. Once again, he made a production that was dynamic and exciting. I just sat back and delighted in it. It was a moment in time that happened and then popped like a balloon. Yes, it was good. I was a happy playwright.

Cason also wrote about directing my plays, and you can read his words here.

This week, I plan to put up new posts every day Monday through Friday this week, so check back for more playwriting fun. I promise there will be no posts about how difficult it is to write because it’s August and too darn hot for any of that.

Totally Worth It!

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I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut of for the past four months and I’ve felt the pinch in a number of areas – sleep(!), diet, patience, nerves, peace and balance – but the details of the “then” aren’t as important to the posting of the now… the great happy “Ahhhh” I’m reveling in tonight, as it all finally wrapped up.

I get to sleep in tomorrow and the only thing I HAVE to do after I drag myself from bed is add up receipts and get my oil changed.

Two things.

I only have to do two things tomorrow.

I can’t wait.

And I’m heading into this much-needed day of repose after a hugely successful final performance at the summer camp.  These kids knocked it out of the park!  Not only did they jump head first into Viewpoints, Suzuki, and the myriad other techniques and challenges we presented them with, but they also soaked up every moment with joy.  They trusted each other, listened to one another, and they created a completely original theatre piece as an ensemble that was terrifically moving.

My partner and I were ecstatic, watching from the light booth, as proud as we could be, absolutely bursting at the seams with pride.

I feel good.

I feel so good.

I’m so grateful to the kids for invigorating me, for reminding me why I do what I do, and for showing me the magic that can happen when actors listen, trust, and explore together.

It was inspiring.

So after I catch up on sleep, eating, and yoga, I’m going to get right back to writing… the muse is awake and happy.  Working with new artists has proven again just how much I love teaching, how important it is to share our passion with the future, and how wonderful we can be when we work together.

Enjoying the Howl

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Short plays… who loves short plays?  I’ve been working with them a lot lately.  I just wrapped up a female playwrights festival in Prescott (next year’s submission process will open up to LAFPI writers – so stay in touch with us on Facebook), I’m in the middle of developing another short play fest for December, and I’m writing a short play each month this summer for HowlRound.com’s Here and Now Project.

The funny thing is that I used to hate short plays – I didn’t feel like there was ever enough time in a 10 minute play to get the story told.  Maybe it’s because I was trying to say too much, or maybe it’s because I was still a new writer and I didn’t really understand the value of brevity.  Whatever the cause, my aversion to the form has melted away and I am now a major fan… because it’s seriously challenging to write a whole play in 10 minutes!  Much of the time I wind up thinking “What comes next” at the close of ten pages rather than satisfaction and catharsis.  However, I’m finding that when I do strike it right, the sense of accomplishment is delicious.

And when I watched this year’s female playwright’s fest in Prescott – From the Mouths of Babes – I felt such happiness as the completion of the whole… made up of each individual playwright’s part – that I could scarce believe I used to loathe the 10 minute play format.

But maybe what’s most rewarding for me is the producibility of 10 minute plays.  They’re easy to rehearse, easy to stage, and audiences get a kick out of seeing new writers in small doses… almost like a dinner party with lots of appetizers.  I now totally understand why theater companies put out so many calls for short plays – they get to know new writers without committing to an expensive full-length production – something that can be frustrating as a playwright, but makes sense from a company standpoint.

Also, I’ve grown really tired of wrestling with the eternal “WHEN is  SOMEONE going to PRODUCE my plays!?” ennui .  The thing about producing on my own is that I feel like I’m actually doing something other than waiting.  And hopefully it’s satisfying to the other playwrights getting produced as well.

In any case, it’s an interesting way to start the week… reflecting on the magic of short plays and the satisfaction of seeing them on their feet.  Hopefully the  Here and Now Project plays will see some stage life soon too – either way, it’s been great to work on so many 10-minute plays this summer… and it’s left me feeling really good about finishing up the full-length that’s been haunting me for the past several months – it’s a sense of accomplishment that I was sorely missing.

Because it’s really important to remind yourself that you don’t just have to sit around and wait…

Did you hear that?

Stop.  Waiting.  Now.

🙂

A Tingling Sojourn

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It’s the end of my blogging week, and I want to talk (finally) a bit about time…  How we spend so much of it waiting, making excuses, rushing around from unimportant (in the scheme of things) task to unimportant task – how we put so many wonderful moments on the backburner because it’s not vital to our day-to-day existences…

We’ve got to stop that nonsense.

Cason and I spent our final “Jane Doe in NY!” vacation day puttering around Park Slope – there was a wonderful street fair with plenty of good food and excellent knick-knack browsing to be had.  The weather was gorgeous.

And the art was everywhere.

I need to stop getting sucked into my “Oh-my-God-I’m-so-Broke!” panic and remember to make more art.

I need to write more plays.

When I moved back to AZ (almost 2 years ago now – yikes!) it was never with the intention to stay as long as I have.  I was unemployed, beat down, and depressed as all get out about my “Why can’t I just EMERGE ALREADY” Emerging-Playwright status.  So I took my Arizona Sojourn as an excuse to hide out, lick my wounds, and heal.

Well, the healing has happened – it’s time for me to get back on the hamster wheel.

And that’s not to say I’ve been lazy – just the opposite in fact – I’ve been insanely busy.  But it’s primarily been a producerly and survivalist sort of busy… I haven’t done a lot of writing or art-making of my own, and this weekend was just the right thing to help me refocus and get my sails back up again.

Because it’s incredibly validating when a theatre company reads your work and decides to produce it – there is so much involved in theatre making, it is a tremendous compliment to know that someone besides you and the non-producing back-clappers think your work is worthy of an audience.  It’s why we write plays, after all.

There is also something incredibly inspiring about visiting a city full of artists fighting to make their art seen/heard/count.

We saw Fuerza Bruta this week and the sheer spectacle of the thing had my imagination spinning with possibilities – my playwright brain was in visual ecstasy.

I walked into shops full of hand-crafted clever arts and wanted to run home and start building pieces of my own.

I have really missed the visual and theatrical feasting that the East and West Coasts provide… and I am inspired to bring my reclaimed whimsy and dedication back home with me with a vengeance, now that the “licking-my-wounds” sojourn is over and I’m feeling the Muse stretch her wings again.

Thank you CAKE Productions, and thank you New York!

~Tiffany

 

Landed! And still Juggling…

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Well, I’m in NY… and it’s just as loud, as bustling, and as chaotic as it was the last time I was here… or maybe not.  Actually, the last time I was here, there was a freakin’ hurricane-a-coming, so things were pretty intense.

In any case, I’ve landed, taken a nap, and am safely resting in Brooklyn, trying to recover from the lack of sleep I got on the red-eye flight over.  I’m excited and nervous about tomorrow – there’s been a lot of anticipation and anxiety around this event for me for the past several months… mostly me fearing the unknown and also being afraid to trust in the awesomeness of the opportunity.  Now that I’m here, I’m like “Hey, whatever happens/doesn’t happen, I’m still a playwright who got to travel to NY to see her play performed!” and some of the anxiety it dissipating… some of it.

And I’m so thankful I have some good friends and loved ones attending the show tomorrow night with me.

Meanwhile, I’m also trying to get some emails written to the ladies contributing plays to my Female Playwright’s Fest, From the Mouths of Babes, this July.  It’s very exciting – 9 new plays written by female playwrights from AZ, CA, and MN will be performed in Prescott, AZ then read in LA (I’ll be sure to make sure the LAFPI posse gets VIP invitations!) and then also read/performed in Minneapolis.  As a playwright who yearns to have more control over her destiny than merely writing plays and sending them out into the ethers, it’s really satisfying to put on my producer hat and make things happen.

First thing I need to make happen though, are those dramaturgy emails to the playwrights 😛

So, even though I’m here in NY and on a lovely vacation of sorts, there’s still lots to be doing, to be juggling, and to keep me from chewing all my finger nails to the nub.

More to come…

~Tiffany

Control Freak

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Of all the readings and workshops that In the Company of Jane Doe  has had over the years, this – my first NY production – is the first one I haven’t been able to help rehearse.  On one hand, it’s kind of exciting because it will be a completely new experience for me to walk into a space and see the play done based solely on someone else’s interpretation of what’s on the page (and a few email clarifications between myself and the producer).  On the other hand, it’s kind of terrifying to think that I will walk into a space and see the play done based solely on someone else’s interpretation of what’s on the page (and only a few email clarifications between myself and the producer).

It’s been a healthy challenge in learning to “let go”…

It’s been a healthy challenge in learning to respond to notes and questions coming from people meeting the play for the first time as well.

I don’t even remember sending the play to CAKE productions two (or was it three now?) years ago.  Apparently they had posted a call for female-focus plays and I had sent them Jane Doe.  They received so many submissions from that call that they  simply read till they found something they liked, produced it, and then went back to the pile of unread scripts for year two.  When they called me to ask if they could do a reading of the play, I was surprised (as I confessed, I didn’t remember sending them the script) and I was also over the moon excited.  When, after the reading, they said they’d like to produce it, I was over the moon again.

But when they asked me if I would take some script notes, I crash-landed at my desk and began to sweat like a mother-f***er.

My neurotic Playwright Brain began to torture me with panic:  What if I don’t agree with their notes?  Will they not do it?  What if I can’t fix the hiccups they’ve identified?  Will they not do it?   What if I make all the changes and it makes the play worse?  Will they not do it?  And even worse-   Do I even know how to write plays???  What if all this panic leaches into my brain and erases everything I’ve learned and I just sit here at my desk like a cucumber, staring blankly at the screen and thinking horribly blank vegetable-like thoughts…

Every email they sent, I sweated over, so dreadfully afraid was I that they were going to change their mind at any second and this super-cool-awesome-can’t believe-I’m-going-up-in-NY reality would dissolve into “Too bad, so sad, and bye bye Tiff!”

But only a few of those emails had notes –  really good notes – notes that challenged me to look at this thing I’d written at the start of my playwriting career and tighten it up with tools from my “7 years later” tool box.

So I wrangled the notes – I didn’t turn into a cucumber – and CAKE took the play into rehearsal.

They sent me a few more “Can we cut this, Can you write a bit more of that” emails that I listened to and worried over – it was really hard not being in the room and hearing these beats skip in the way they said –  but all in all, I had to trust them and trust myself, and negotiate my own view of the play with what they were hammering out in rehearsals in regards to which changes needed to be made and which did not.

It was a crazy new experience… and one I hope I managed well.  I guess I’ll know when I see the play on Thursday!

But all in all, this new step of “playwriting from the opposite coast” brought with it a lot by way of learning to let go, and just trusting in the play – quite a feat for an self-admitted control freak.

~Tiffany

 

Gearing up for NY

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This week I’m traveling to NY to see my play open off-off Broadway and I’ll be sharing it with all of you – what great blogging synchronicity!

About 7 years ago I began a little play called In the Company of Jane Doe.  It was my first graduate school play and only my second full-length play ever.  I was in the throws of “How am I ever going to get everything done?”ness and I had a wacky dream about a mad scientist and a woman who clones herself, only the clone comes out looking like she would sans all the plastic surgery and etc. she’d had done to herself over the years.  I woke up enthralled – I’d found my play!

The writing of the thing was another matter – all too aware of my newbie status as a writer, I allowed my un-baked babe to prance around before my peers for dissection at quite the price:  they didn’t get it, and I began to think I didn’t know how to write.  I spent the summer after that first year of grad school convinced I’d made a horrible mistake, but I kept working at the play because even if it wasn’t there yet, and even if they didn’t yet get it, I knew where I wanted it to go and I really believed I could get it there if everyone would just stop asking me so many dang questions…  See, I’d started to realize that the people who’d been challenging me along the way weren’t to be blamed for all that I hadn’t yet gotten onto the pages – it was time for me to stop worrying about everyone else for a little bit and just write the damn thing!

So I did.  I took the notes I thought helpful, and I ignored the ones based on the play’s absence of “Finished-ness”.  I worked hard to take the play where I knew it needed it go and go there it did!

And, as a result, I learned that all that strife and stress I’d been fighting was the result of showing my work too early/allowing too many notes to land on my big-sensitive heart.  I learned that I shouldn’t ask for opinions until I have gotten a thing as far as I can on my own, lest I get feedback on something I already know is undercooked.  I learned that I don’t need to take every note/comment/or question.

I learned to trust my own inner muse.

That that summer the play was selected by the Playwrights Center for their New Plays on Campus project and was a finalist for the Princess Grace Awards.  Those little victories were just what I needed – I redoubled my efforts and the play has had several other cool awards and opportunities tacked on to it since.  It even got a production in LA in 2008.

This week In the Company of Jane Doe opens in New York.

It’s been a long journey and a lot has happened to me since I met Jane Doe and the wild clone-making Dr. SNAFU – I graduated, I’ve written a number of other plays that have had cool things happen to them, I’ve been unemployed, I’ve taught, I’ve created playwriting opportunities for other female playwrights, and I’ve gotten a little less precious and a whole lot tougher about all of it along the way.

Which is all to say, I’m excited about NY – so very much so.  And I’m also dreaming about what comes next…

~Tiffany

Oh I Could Never Why The Heck Not

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Or the post where I try to be inspirational.

I am trying to eliminate the phrase, Oh I Could Never, from my mental vocabulary. It’s not in my writing process, but I’ve been trying to eliminate it from my life thought process as well.

Oh I Could Never. It’s such a simple thought. It can be used ethically. Oh I could never shoot someone. That’s a good thought to have. Please, my friends, never stop thinking that thought.

But Oh I Could Never could also be used in negative ways to eliminate possibility. Oh I could never go and try that new thing. Oh I could never go two days without a shower.

We all have standards that we hope to live our lives by. But what about the possibility of something new? What if I stepped off the curb of Oh I Could Never into the puddle of possibility?

So whenever I think Oh I Could Never, I add the phrase Why The Heck Not. I prefer heck to hell because in this context, heck reminds me that it’s so simple that I don’t have to swear.

Oh! I almost forgot. I have to plug stuff today.

If you are in Prescott, Arizona in April, my monologue “Cake” is being performed by fellow LAFPI blogger Tiffany Antone as part of an evening called Love Makes The World Go Round. Here’s the website.

I will not be in Arizona in April, but I’m sure it will be a fun night.

 Speaking of Tiffany (who is definitely in the WTHN zone), she’s producing another festival of women’s plays. I recently blogged over on her website.