Tag Archives: Tiffany Antone

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.

 

Write

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I wrote this last week for my own blog in response to a big personal upheaval in my life.  The details aren’t important – what matters is that in my moment of crisis, this is what I wrote.  And looking back over it, I felt like it might be worth sharing here, amongst my writing peers.  I hope you enjoy it and that it means something to you as well.  

Write so that it does not rule you, does not wrap itself around your spine and sink into you and become you.

Write so that you remember – so that after the “This is happening”  has happened, and those chemicals that Mother Nature gave us to survive such traumas have done their thing, that there is a record of The Thing That Happened, lest you need to remind yourself what it was that changed you.

Write so that you can heal.  That you can ask the questions no one has answers to, if only to get them out of the hollows of your frightened skull and onto paper – trapped in lead between lines that you own.

Write to take its teeth out – this thing swirling inside you with its black eyes and dark intentions.  Write to strike it powerless against you and your fragile heart.

Write because it’s all you can do.  Surrender to the tap of keys, the scratch of pen… let the knowledge that you know not enough keep you company as you try to make sense out of the senselessness.

Write so that you can sleep.   So that you can lie down at night without the pressure of things unsaid and unanswered pressing into your quaking chest.

Write so that you may quiet that quake and breathe.

Write because language has the power to transform.  Let it take over and wash through you and transform you from frightened observer into active participant in this unfortunate chain of events… even if it is only in how you steer the words on your screen, they are still your words – your truths – they are your sacred experience come to lines and curves and they are beautiful and tragic and transformative.

Write to find stillness.

Write to come to a quiet place where you are spent, finally, and it is still.

… it is quiet.

You are there.

And you are powerful.

 

Word Love

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I love words.  I stew over the best words to use in a post, an email, a text… I weigh the rhythm, the gravity, and the depth of words against my intentions and emotional/intellectual need in that particular moment of expression.   Sometimes I make up words when it suits the occasion/situation/or beat, basing my privilege to do so on the fact that I have a very expensive piece of paper in my drawer stamped with MFA PLAYWRITING on it.

Because for me, the written word is an awesome opportunity to recreate genuine human expression in an (hopefully) accessible format.

But sometimes I forget that not everyone shares my affinity for the perfectly selected pronoun or ideally placed hyphen.  I forget that not everyone is as equipped with the gift of verbal manipulation and application as I-who-have-devoted-myself-to-such-things.

I’m right now in a very complicated communique with someone who simply cannot match my verbal-obsessiveness and I find myself having to control my hunger for better words… I want poetry and depth and craft  – what is being given to me instead is genuine simplicity.  My love of/need for “better” words is leaving me frustrated and unable to just accept the letters and dots coming my way as expressive enough.

And I’m wondering if other writers experience this… this need for high articulation in their real-world communications.  Do you ever find yourself searching for excessive verbal depth in debates/conversations?  Do you find yourself mentally trying to script the other person’s dialogue?  Do you get at all hung up on the seeming insufficiency of someone else’s vocabulary in high-stakes moments?

It’s kind of related (probably) to my anxiety about communication (perhaps this anxiety is another reason I’m so drawn to playwriting and the ability to craft dramatic communication on stage).  I’m terrified of the conflict that can arise from miscommunication, and so I’m always striving to be as clear as I can, to offer as much of myself through my words as I can.  But I forget that there are all sorts of ways people communicate – they say things with their actions, with their touch, with their eyes…

I need to learn to trust those things as much as I trust my words.  It’s an interesting thing to think about… especially when I consider how much I incorporate those things in my plays – I mean, I never rely solely on a character’s dialogue to convey a moment… why would I then deny the power of action/physicality in real-world communication?

In any case, I guess you can tell I’ve been thinking a lot this week about my playwright self vs. my human-being self… sometimes I just feel like I spend so much time at my computer, tap-tap-tapping away, that I forget to negotiate a healthy balance with the outside world.

… and I think I feel maybe a real-world vacation might be just what I need to help.  Thank goodness Spring Break is just around the bend!

 

Fighting the Story Need

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we (as artists, as audience, and as humans) can sometimes self-program to hunt for dramatic elements – all those important “Gotta Hit This” Rising Action/Climax/New World Order/etc. points – in life.

And how screwed up that is.

Because life is not story.  Even when we think in chapters, even when we impose our own impractical markers – I should accomplish X by graduation, I should be married/have a house/own my car by now, I should travel the world before I’m 60, I should start the New Year (every New Year) weighing less and able to buy more – we are not in control of the overlying structure of our life experience in the same way that a book or film shapes its characters.

Yet, we still try to mark time in story beats… in progressions… in dramatic arcs.

And when those “life markers” don’t happen at the right time, or if they don’t happen in the right sequence, we seize the drama of it!  We grab tight to the conflict, and we try to anticipate where the climax will come and what results it will yield – If I take this path, fight that demon, drink this potion, and climb that wall… I might find that solution and get the girl/boy/new house/great job/pot of gold/etc. and my life will get easier… it will be rosy sunshine happiness and only minor hiccups from here on out!

But the truth is, life doesn’t follow the dramatic arc… it’s life.  It just keeps going until it stops and your job isn’t to try and anticipate the hurdles and pay offs and story-ness of it all, it’s to just live.

Which is why we find ourselves picking up books and siting in the audience along the way – We want to watch someone have a contained experience that we can understand!  We want to feel, for the moment at least, that we understand the human experience a little bit better.  We want to walk away from the story feeling a little more in control of our own world view and the things that color it.

And I think that’s what I love about writing – I love diving in, getting messy, and then closing up shop with some renewed feeling of accomplishment, even if in my own life I often find myself desperately looking up to the big Author in the sky and shaking my fist at her/him for not following the arc I wanted to follow…

Because there is no happily ever after – we keep going – we get married and lose our house, or we get the dream job only to find that it’s awful… We are constantly fighting a thousand little battles that either go our way or don’t, but no matter the result, we keep moving forward into new, challenging situations that merge and swirl and carry us on, ever on, in this world without structure.

As artists, we spend so much time crafting and plotting and embracing made up worlds… sometimes we need to remind ourselves to love this one just as much, despite it’s uncertainty –  to stop looking for meaning or the next dramatic “trick” around every corner, and just live.

 

Progress Shoes

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So I hopped on the blog yesterday to talk about my producerly empowerment, and what do I wind up doing?  Complaining about the fight to find space in LA.  Tsk, tsk, tsk!

But the tallying/writing about it brought the truth to the surface of my frustrated mind… I’m still waiting.  On theatres. For space.  I hate waiting.  It makes me feel stuck.

And I hate being stuck.

Which is when it hit me:  Who said readings have to happen inside theatres?

And that little epiphany put me right back on track and in control… because if we stop limiting ourselves to the confines of the current patriarchal/inbred theatrical hierarchy (and I mean that in the most respectful way possible), aren’t we in the drivers seat?

(And totally/terrifyingly responsible for the outcome… but that’s a different problem :-P)

It seems then, that the frustrated female playwright need only some peers, some ingenuity, and some proverbial balls to get things up and running for herself… then she needs some running shoes and some long jump practice so she can bound around and over the flaming hurdles in her way.

I don’t know if I’m in marathon shape yet, but I’ve certainly got the shoes.

Which is one of the things I actually enjoy about producing – the creative problem solving it requires.  And maybe that’s what I like about playwriting too – stirring things up that require Big Answers… not knowing at the onset how I will tell the tale, only that I must tell it.

So, I don’t quite have all the answers for how I’m going to get my Female Playwrights ONSTAGE project the national wings I know it will someday flourish with, but I’m confident that if I keep fighting for it and running with it, I’ll find the festival evolving and developing those wings as we go…

Which is all to say, I figured out where the festival will be read in LA… and it feels perfect and exciting and surprisingly multi-dimensional for where its at in its development.

And that, my dears, is what I call progress.

 

The Battleground

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I have a secret – I’ve become a producer over here in Arizona – I’ve actually produced more shows/events this past year than I’ve written and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop… because it’s hard out here for a Playwright.

It’s damn hard.

So I created Little Black Dress INK, an organization dedicated to promoting/creating production opportunities for female playwrights.  I invited some talented ladies to put pen to paper (or fingertips to keys) and draft up some plays for a festival last summer and it was a great success!   We didn’t know it would be a great success, we just went for it and crossed our fingers – because it’s better to do that than waste time hemming and hawing over a thing for so long that you forget what it is you’re even considering.

Which is why, when I decided to do it again, I decided to go reach even further… to get the fest to travel.  One hell of a lofty undertaking, to be sure… but so worth the work… isn’t it?

I ask, because I’m finding that while I may be tired of sitting around waiting for someone to produce my work, not everyone else has my same verve for  making-it-happen-ness.

(which may actually be more of a testament to their common sense than my tenacity)

In any regard – I am trying to get the plays some sort of reading in LA… it’s just a reading… no big expense, no set, no props… just a reading… And it’s been a hell of a lot more work than getting the thing fully produced here in AZ.

Which draws images to mind of the Los Angeles battleground I abandoned two years ago – so many theatres, so many artists, so many denizens of the “Industry” running their scrawny-underpaid butts off to get produced, be on stage, be seen, and knock some socks off…

I don’t miss the rat race of LA, but I am definitely feeling out of her frenetic loop.

But what else can I do than keep on keeping on?  I’m a playwright who’s fallen into producing as a means of feeling less impotent against the theatrical unknowables… no one ever said any of it would be easy, did they?  Nope.  Not even for a second.

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.

2012 Affirmations, from a Chocoholic Playwright to YOU

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There is a real pain in the ass tradition of recollection and re-dedication to things left lingering at the end of each year… I think you can tell by the start of this sentence that I don’t hold too much to that tradition.  Perhaps it’s because no matter how many things I manage to check off my (very long) “To Do” list, the list never seems to get any shorter – so why would I want to haul that out at the end of/beginning of each/every blessed year and beat myself up about it?

That “To Do” list pretty much lives on the perimeter of my almost daily thoughts anyway.

But here I am with the “New Years Eve” blog spot, and I feel like I have to comment on the occasion… I have to come up with something worth reading… don’t I?

So I was thinking about it from the writerly perspective- reevaluating this past year despite myself and I realized that although I won’t be making any resolutions (evil self-destructive little things, aren’t they?) I did learn some things this year that might be worth sharing here… Then I got to thinking that rather than sound off like a bombastic fool, I’d try to fashion these little thoughts into as straight forward and relevant language as possible…  I’ll leave it up to you whether or not I succeeded.

The Writer’s Annual (or hourly, depending on how often you need to remind yourself of them) list of 2012 Affirmations.

  1. I will not beat myself up uneccessarily for: not writing enough/not getting the production/not schmoozing the right people at my agent’s son’s bar mitzvah/etc-reasons-to-artiscally-mangle-myself!  Or (at least) if I must abuse a gross personal misstep, I will try to make sure my fists are gloved before I self-flagellate, and I will treat myself to a stiff-stiff-delicious-something-alcoholic/or chocolate (or both) afterwards.
  2. I will not waste my time writing plays that do not pass the “Who Gives a Shit” test.  I will be honest and constructive in my answering of this test when administered to an idea of mine.  If I’m not sure, I’ll gather some opinions, stew on it for at least a day, and then probably write it anyway/have to reread Affirmation #1 until the gloves can come off and I can hold a martini.
  3. I will never underestimate life’s ability to pull me in new directions, and I will try like hell to be open to those new directions when life insists on dragging pulling me towards them.
  4. I will let myself try new things (really this is just a restatement of #3) because if you only swim in familiar waters, you’ll never know how long you can hold your breath or what other amazing aquatic acrobatics you can accomplish… no matter how uninterested you may think you are in finding out.
  5. I will reward myself when I deserve it (preferably with chocolate or new shoes… or maybe just chocolate because it’s cheaper)
  6. I will work hard, play hard, take care of myself as best I can, try not to let the state of the world drag me down into an artistic abyss of depression, and I will always remember to scoop the cat litter, pick my socks up off the floor when there’s no longer floor to be seen, and otherwise try to resemble a happy functioning human being, even though I’ve chosen this impossible/wonderful/colorful/delightful/terrifying career… And when in doubt of any of these, I will reference #1 – #5 until the doubt has been run out of town.

May you each experience your own delightful New Year celebration (or lack thereof) and be merry, healthy, and bright in the new year(s) to come!

With Cheer,

Tiffany

The “Who Gives a S***” Test

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So, I mention my “Who Gives a S***” Test and then I just leave you hanging for four days… what kind of lazy, no good blogger am I?

The kind that is on HOLIDAY!!!  I’ve been trying to sleep in (too much fun stuff to do) watching lots of movies (Yes, yes, yes) reading lots of plays (finally, my “To Read” stack is going down) and eating as much as I can before I head back (ugh) to work.

However, I promised you an explanation, and so an explanation you are going to GET.

Now, it may not be all that mysterious, but I think some context around the “Who Gives a S***” test would be helpful, so let’s dive right in.

Jessica Kubzansky is a genius director and dramaturg (I hope all of you have had/will have the pleasure of working with her!) who also happens to teach a dramaturgy class to the MFA playwrights at UCLA, and I think she’s the first one I heard telling us to really ask ourselves who’s going to get excited enough about our play to actually produce it?   That it wasn’t enough to just sit down and make out with our ideas, but we had to ask ourselves whether or not that idea was going to get anyone else’s rocks off as well as ours – because honey, being a new or “emerging” playwright is tough business, so why make it harder on yourselves by writing a play no one wants to see?

Fast forward a few years and I’m sitting on a panel at The Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage Festival (oh yes, I felt fancy!) when someone in the audience asks “How do you decide what to write, and how much do you take audience into consideration when you’re developing a story idea for a play?”

There were other (very awesome) people on the panel, and several of them had thoughts on a theatre’s responsibility to audience (not all of us were playwrights- so there were a lot of other awesome perspectives being put forth) but I remember one of the playwrights stammering about how she kept getting commissioned to write plays that never got produced, so she had a hard time thinking about an audience because she didn’t get to see her work in front of one.

Whoa!

Hold your horses, playwright!

You HAVE to think about the audience – unknown or guaranteed – Otherwise you may never see anything of yours in front of one.

Which is the crux of the “Who Gives a S***” issue – if no one but yourself is going to care about your play, then go write a poem or tell the story to your journal – get it out of your system or stick it in your mental crock pot to get bandied about by the muse… It may develop into something better, it may fade into the gray nothing from whence it came, but at least it won’t steal months of your writing-life away from an idea that does have the potential to ignite an audience with all sorts of “I love this play/playwright!” passion!

Because one of our jobs as writers for the stage is to anticipate the theatrical market – and I mean in a “What is going to get butts in the seats?!” kind of way… because that’s what theatres want!  They want to sell tickets, so they can all continue to get up in the morning and get paid to put more butts in the seats!

And it can be tricky – this self-reflective, self-administered standard of story “pruning”… We won’t always be able to get it right, of course, and sometimes a story we don’t think anyone will care about is just too loud to ignore and we have to write it anyway – and sometimes those stories become the ones they can’t get enough of… because it was told with too much passion to ignore… But if we force ourselves to ask these questions up front, we can save ourselves some time, some rewrites, and some self-loathing-“Why-doesn’t-anyone-else-like-this-play”-agony.