Coyote Commission Project Blog

Severe Clarity!

2012-02-28T14:56:00.000-05:00

“If criticism is meant to speak to thesuccessful clarity of what was INTENDED, as Mr. Adamo suggests, what is thehelpful way to speak of a work in process that is still brewing, still decidingwhat it is supposed to be?” - Stephen Speights

Thetopic of constructive criticism is an excellent one. I love Stephen’s post and the questionhe poses in it. I’m also completelyblown away by the phrase ‘severe clarity’ as a way to describe the aim of anartist. I’ve never heard that before,but am now adding it to my bag of references as a reminder of what I’m afterwhen things seem lost.

Readingsare an invaluable part of the writing process for me, as they probablyare for every playwright. I had two inJanuary for plays that are in two very different places. One is finished and has had a productionalready, the other is the piece I’m working on for Blue Coyote, which is in theearly, fifty-pages stage. The two projects feed into eachother plotwise, so it’s good fortune tohave to work on them at the same time.

Thefirst play is in pretty good shape - it is a total and complete play. A director and I are working on it togetherand the informal reading marked the real beginning of our collaborativeprocess. Going in, there was a section thatdidn’t feel quite right to me during the play’s production in 2011, and I knewI wanted to look at it during this reading. The director had his questions too as this was the first time he washearing it out loud. We were lucky tohave wonderful actors, some rehearsal and a great audience. All in all, questions were answered and thedirector came away with some notes, four to be precise. They took me forever to understand, but inthe end were insightful and spot on. Ican… now hold on to your hats people… I can be very defensive when receivingnotes. It’s definitely much better thanit was, but I tend to have a terrible “oh no” feeling right before, likeperhaps it’s going to be a big battle or I’m really going to disagree or beupset. I’ve had to learn how to reallylisten through my nerves and consistently seek to understand what’s being saidto me. In this particular case, I cansee in hindsight (after reading Stephen’s post) that what the director wasaiming for in his notes, and why I appreciated them so much, was to aid towards that ‘severe clarity’ of what’s intended. His notes were constructive.

Thesecond piece for the CCP is not a play yet. The reading I had for it had no audience – just the actors andmyself. It was the first time it wasgoing to be heard at all, which I find to be a very tender time. At the earliest stages, such readings are formy ears only and not open to criticism. It’s just a baby, after all. Plus, my main question going in to these first-read-of-pages things is -does this suck or not? Not suck toanyone else, but to me? After getting overthat hurdle, I can ask the great, smart actors who graciously read for mequestions about this or that, if they got certain elements, do they want toknow what happens, etc. It offers meincredible clarity on what’s next, what works and doesn’t, a general sense ofthe gathering storm of a complete play.

WhenI began writing the finished play mentioned earlier, I would attend a weeklyactors group that invited writers to bring pages in they wanted heard. I had done this for the first play I’dwritten and found it helpful, so it made sense to do the same with thisone. But the voice, the intention forthat first play was very loud and strong right off the bat, so even though itwas difficult to hear comments (I was just learning!), I could take them orleave them. But the second play wasdifferent. It didn’t start as sure asthe first and it had an unconventional structure. As a result, the un-moderated comments, hardto take to begin with, were not at all constructive. They tended to be in the vein of what shouldbe instead of what was, an ‘it’s not going to work if you do it this way’ typeof thing. And I remember reacting very,very badly. Everyone involved meantwell, but it became clear that if I was going to listen to my own voice inwriting the play, there could be no outside voices for a time. Not until it had a real shape, a real, solidintention. So I stopped going to theclass and asked actors to read for me when the need to hear it came. And that play has ended up doing well foritself - I’m proud of it.

So, ifit’s still brewing, if I still don’t know quite what it is, there is nocriticism that will be constructive. It justends up offending me, which is ridiculous. Therefore I’ve found it best not to open up that part of theprocess. There are a few trusted peoplewho look at pages early on, but that’s it. For me, criticism is only actually constructive once what is intended isfirmly set. Then it’s vital.

- Christine Whitley

ENDINGS

2012-02-21T15:56:00.000-05:00

Beginnings are hard. Middles are hard. But endings are hard.

When something is good, a book, a play, anything, my usual thought, my subconscious drumbeat, is “please stay good, please stay good." There are just so many ways to start well, and – in my estimation – only one way good to finish: The ending should feel both unexpected and inevitable.

That is, I want to feel a gasp or surprise and pleasure...but when I look back over the play I should, for a moment, believe it couldn’t have ended any other way. It should fulfill some promise that has been made to me, but in a way I wouldn’t have thought of myself.All of which is to say, I don’t know how to end my play.

Cause again, they can feel like verdicts: so this is what actually happened. This is the author’s point of view on the characters, the ideas. If an ending is too pat, the play wafts away. But if it feels too opaque, it leaves me grumbly and cranky and unsatisfied.

There are some canonical plays that I would offer disappoint deeply at the end and everyone knows it (I’ll offer my nominations over drinks if you like). And there are plays that muddle along until the last 10 minutes, and only then become thrilling and thus become hits (again, ask me over booze).

But back to me and HUNTERS AND THIEVES. Like all plays in progress, I suppose I’ll just have to write and write and write different versions of the ending. Read one by reading the whole draft, then read the whole draft with a different version. Curl up in ball and throw all the pages out. Wait for a deadline and write another version. Do it badly. Rewrite. Hope that one day I have a shock of understanding and do it right.

- David Zellnik

Learning to Fall in Love (with yourself) Again...

2012-02-13T12:44:00.000-05:00

I'm in the process of preparing a four-year old script for publication.

The New York Theater Experience's IndieTheaterNow is publishing highlights of the FRIGID New York Festival's 5-year run to celebrate that anniversary and my 2007 play The Butterfield Tones is among those lights.

But how am I supposed to feel about this thing that I wrote five years ago and haven't touched since?

Should I find it precious? Antiquated? Dated? Beneath my current mastery of the dramatic arts? Should I be jealous of it? Should I hate it?

We've probably all felt some version of these things about old things that we've written and, probably, the conventional wisdom holds that I should feel something between the love and the hate ends of the spectrum. It's wrong to really like something that far behind me, isn't it?

But I really like this play.

It's not perfect, by any stretch. It's short. And it's, ultimately, an experiment. But it does some fun theatrical things that I haven't done since and reminds me of a time when, in many respects, I took myself less seriously. It's play is, perhaps, what I still like so much about it.

But what does this say about my going forward as a writer?

Well, the short answer is "everything is fine." It would really suck to look back on previous projects and think them amateurish and terrible, to not see what made me excited to be working on them when that's what I was working on.

And, I guess, that's the point. If I can still get the sniffles from the bug whose infestation led to Project X then I'm still in that same arena ... it's just now a more crowded arena filled now with more varied projects, more kinds of writing - but all things that are authentic to me.

Every word I put down is not precious - it is not gold (despite, very much, those exact claims in this blog) - but maintaining the general writing head-space from project-that-excites-me to project-that-excites-me is, I think, what, at the end of the day, will be the measure of that work to me.

Oh, and it's okay to like the work you've done, no matter how far removed. Go ahead and think that poem you wrote in the 4th grade contains some truly unique imagery. Secretly think that the short story you wrote in college has some of the better sentences written in the last-half of the 20th Century. Laugh at your own jokes.

Better that option than the other...

- Robert Attenweiler

Constructive Criticism

2012-02-10T16:02:00.001-05:00

I was in the audience at two different work-in-progress presentations these past weeks. I’ll start with the second experience, as it helped me to pinpoint my feelings on the first.

THE ART OF THE ARIA was a master class led by the composer/librettist Mark Adamo. Working with a small group of hand-picked writers and musicians (friend and collaborator David Johnston among them), Mr. Adamo invited us to sit in as he, along with his students, critiqued the arias created for the class.

Mr. Adamo started with rules-of-the-road regarding their evaluating comments. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but what struck me most went something like this:

Avoid using the phrase “I LIKED THIS”. Avoid “THAT DIDN’T WORK.” Something is SUCCESSFUL when something INTENDED OCCURS, and occurs with clarity.
In your critique, speak descriptively about what you SAW and HEARD, then let that lead to comments of what you experienced. Let your opinion about the work/scene/moment follow from how successfully the work expressed what was INTENDED.
The goal of the artist is SEVERE CLARITY. And the work should limit, rather than expand, the possibilities of its presentation. As the artist you guide us to what you want it to be.

These guidelines were revelatory to me, and made me wish I could have bent space and time to switch Mr. Adamo’s class with the invited staged reading I had attended a couple of weeks prior: John Yearley’s first fifty pages or so of CLEAR HISTORY, the script he is working on as part of the Coyote Commission Project.

John mentioned in introducing the event that what we were to hear/see was still unformed in its structure (there were a couple of scenes, in fact, that he simply had the actors read at the end, still not knowing where they should go, or if he’d even keep them), and indeterminate of tone (did he want this to be a romantic comedy, something more serious, or a combo of both? John didn’t yet know…). His introduction made clear that the script was not yet at a stage to be judged or critiqued.

Nonetheless, as one of the producers of the CCP, I took John up on his request for feedback, hoping that my impressions and comments would help him clarify where he wanted to go with CLEAR HISTORY. I saw it as my-end-of-the-deal to let him know what I thought.

So I wrote him an email, insisting that he discard, out-of-hand and immediately, any of my comments that seemed to miss the mark or that he disagreed with. Then I told him what I thought worked and what didn’t. I pointed to where the story surprised me, where I thought it would go, where I thought it SHOULD go.
He emailed a response the next day — prompt and appreciative — addressing my comments and offering his own about what the reading had revealed. He thanked me for my thoughts and assured me that they had helped to clarify for him several aspects of CLEAR HISTORY.

But…for all the warmth and respect of our exchange, it felt, in my gut, somehow inappropriate for me to have evaluated his still-forming work. It occurs to me that he may feel, and rightly so, the same way I feel when someone comments on my work when it is cooking — outwardly appreciative of someone’s well-intended comments, and inwardly peeved.

Of course I fail the artist when I reflect back to him or her information that is unhelpful—my personal taste. My job, instead, is to honestly reflect back to them whether or not what I have seen is what they want me to see—not to suggest a different direction in the plot, say, or a different setting, or different characteristics in the characters I’ve witnessed. In this, I now understand, I misapprehended my role in my notes to John.

If criticism is meant to speak to the successful clarity of what was INTENDED, as Mr. Adamo suggests, what is the helpful way to speak of a work in process that is still brewing, still deciding what it is supposed to be?

Given that public readings for works-in-progress seem destined to remain a part of the playwright’s process these days, I would love for the CCP participants, and any other playwrights out there, to comment on the lessons I took away from these two experiences as audience member / feedback giver. What kinds of observations are helpful to you, and what kinds of observations serve only to derail you and infuriate?

- Stephen Speights

The Soul Hungers for Beauty

2012-02-06T13:39:00.001-05:00

I have a friend. It doesn’t matter what her name is. Let’s call her “Erma Duricko.”
Erma likes quotes. Lots and lots of quotes. She has quotes tagging the end of her emails. She posts them every day on Facebook. These quotes are usually of an inspirational nature. They are usually on the subject of how beauty and art and love conquer all.

I roll my eyes a lot around Erma. She encourages it. Truth be told, she loves it. We were at a conference together once when a student came up to tell me how Erma had encouraged her to look into her past lives to help her write her new play. I was about to explode in total exasperation when I looked up to see Erma hiding behind a potted plant, laughing her head off. She had set me up.

I was in a place. It doesn’t matter what place it was. Let’s call it “Montgomery, Alabama.”

I have it on good authority from a friend that there are lovely nooks and crannies to Montgomery. She spoke of eccentric farmer’s markets and creative yoga studios. I have no doubt that she told the truth. It was not, however, a truth that did much for a man charged with entertaining a 3 year old.

My experience of the town of Montgomery was different than my friend’s. I found the place to be horrendous, an endless flat expanse of concrete and chain stores and malls. Arid and soulless on a good day, it had been ravaged by the recession. Driving past the endless run of closed down strip malls, it was all I could do not to stick a gun in my mouth.

One night, with my son was asleep in the next room, I watched a movie. It was Steve McQueen’s Hunger, a 2008 film about the Irish hunger strikers. Netflix had sent it to me a while ago. I’d heard wonderful things about it, but the subject matter put me off. How many evenings do you do you say to yourself, “I’d like to watch someone starve themselves to death tonight”?

That night, I watched it. It was as bad as I feared. Worse. You see the deterioration of the body in horrifying detail: the festering sores, the incontinence, the mind slowly slipping off the rails. What happens to a body when it is denied food is that it essentially eats itself. It is an awful thing to witness.

The genius of Hunger, however, is that it is also beautiful. McQueen was a well-known visual artist before turning to film, and his mastery shows in every frame. However bleak the scene, he always frames and shoots it so that you can’t look away. Images from the film – a pair of bruised, bloody hands being washed in a basin, a shaken man smoking a cigarette alone in a snowstorm, the red sores of shoulder blades beginning to stick through skin in an otherwise pristine white room – are lodged in my mind. They may well be there for as long as I have a mind.

One image in particular stuck out. There is a visual theme in the film linking the first hunger striker, Bobby Sands, with some birds nestled in a tree. When Sands finally dies, the birds fly away all at once. They are black against a deep purple sky. They squawk and rustle and fly away into silence. The moment was so staggeringly beautiful I audibly gasped.

After I did, a thought appeared in my mind – “The soul hungers for beauty.” I say that because I think I gasped not just from the force of the image. I gasped because I was starving. After two weeks in Montgomery, I was desperate for beauty. I felt so grateful for it.

Now, I’m not the kind of person who says things like, “The soul hungers for beauty.” Reflecting on it now, it sounds stupid. A romantic, childlike fantasy. Christ, it sounds like something Erma would say.

But here’s the thing about me and Erma - we’re collaborators, and damn good ones. I’m a playwright. She’s a director. She’s as good as anyone I’ve ever worked with (and I’ve worked with some good ones).

Perhaps our sensibilities aren’t so different after all. Maybe we’re not as far apart as the roles we play to the world would indicate. Perhaps inside herself Erma’s rolls her eyes all the time. Maybe inside I long for love and beauty and hope. We are a fine yin-and-yang, as all collaborators should be.

So in her honor, with no eye roll, I say it:

The soul hungers for beauty.

- John Yearley

Deadlines

2012-01-31T13:42:00.001-05:00

As I write this I am staring at a list that represents deadlines for five writing projects, six teaching projects, two reading projects, and the very forgettable exercise project that is not getting off the ground this month.

January is ending and very few of these projects have been completed. Instead they grow, evolve, multiply, go into another draft, ask for more, need more, want more, demand more.

Several years ago I decided I would approach my work in projects instead of jobs. So, in my teaching artist work I began to take on projects instead of classes and with writing I allowed each play to be its own project with its own workshop of sound, notebook, images and timeline.

I like this approach. I am more organized. My natural bent towards eclecticism and desire for letting things evolve organically is given the container of a project. I can schedule work so that even when there's not a lot of time for one thing, I can check in on it. Visit it.

I can imagine my desk is like my dad's workbench, tools and hardware at hand, shelves of power tools and raw materials. Imagine that hung up along the wall are images, in the little drawers lie characters dreaming away, in one area are a bunch of teaching ideas, and the power tools are actions, are big questions, are those books I carry with me through every move.

But.

Now my workshop is looking like some shed from one of the families down the other street, where things accumulate but nothing is ever finished. It's looking like the yard with cars up on blocks and a fridge on the porch. A dog running back and forth till there's a patch of dirt that nothing will grow on ever again. There's half a pool dug, some kind of tree house that no kid would even want to play in and a flag pole leaning against the chimney. There are too many kittens and they are sleeping in a cracked aquarium.

So. It's time to clean up. Time to clear out. Time to call some things done and other things well - maybe the neighbors want them.

- Kristen Palmer

WHEN TO SAY WHEN...

2012-01-25T13:32:00.000-05:00

First, let me make one thing clear. What I’m about to say in no way applies to me. Everything I’ve ever written (this post included) is gold. Pure gold. I’ve never wasted a single word and, because of that, am actually dictating this post to my assistant while lounging in my penthouse’s hot tub half-crocked on Veuve…

But (and this is for everyone else, mind you … not me), I’ve been wondering at what point writers know to let a project go. We all (…I mean, you all) have the drawer or the binder or … um, the seldom-emptied waste basket filled with the papers covered with the words we used to love, only no longer do. We all (…okay, only for the sake of ease here, when I say “we” from now on, it’ll seem like I mean “we,” but actually I mean “you” - “we” means “you,” go it?) have the play that we couldn’t figure out – the one that has had several readings, but just never made it over the hump and really grabbed the right people’s attention – the one that we’ve revised and re-written and reconceived and regurgitated but we never got it to “Wow.”

“Wow,” of course, is what gets people who aren’t you behind a particular piece of writing. We all know “Wow.” It’s what we feel. It’s why we bother. But, for something to have a life beyond ourselves, someone else (usually several people and usually the right several people) need to get “Wow” too. And some of us grind and grind away on the same script (because it did take a good deal of time, thought and concern … and we’re not exactly dripping with leisure time, are we? Since [what we often view as] the bulk of the work is done … this draft is done … this second, third or seventeenth revision of this draft is done … we might as well stick with it, right?). And some of us drop it and immediately pick up Shiny New Idea and get to work on that.

But what is that thought when the switch flips from “project in-process” to “yeah, not gonna be working on that again”? Is it a realization of some fundamental flaw in the piece (i.e. is it a learning moment?)? Is it a feeling of resignation that the piece has made it’s rounds without anything significant happening to it (i.e. the recognition that people don’t want to keep seeing your same piece over and over again)? Is it boredom (i.e. “I can’t think about these characters anymore!”)?

Of course, it’s these things – and many other things. There is no good conqueror who doesn’t leave a trail of dead bodies in his/her wake (… okay, no good conqueror that I know of).

I guess, for me (which means “me”), I keep projects going so long as there is interest – or some spark that still keeps the process fresh and alive for me. I have no interest in riding the same script through the development process for years and years. There is a point (again, for me) where the script feels dead – where I’ve killed it with my work on it. And, maybe it will live again one fine day. But, for that time, the best thing to do is cut the cord.

- Robert Attenweiler

We Are All Udmurts!

2012-01-20T17:12:00.000-05:00

Lately I’ve been trying to imagine the life of a woman I’ve made up, from a place didn’t make up (…though sounds like I did).

The woman’s name is Mrs Huff, and she rents a room out in Queens. She is old, frightened, but has powers her new lodger - whom she is immediately convinced is a thief - isn’t quick to realize...

The place she’s from is Udmurtia – a semi-autonomous ethnic republic on the edge of European Russia. The Udmurts are a Finno-Ugric people related to other small groups of Finno-Ugric people near them …and also to a some larger populations to the West - the Finns, of course, the Estonians, and also the Hungarians – who maybe 1100 years ago were the Udmurts’ next door neighbors, until they took their horses and rode west.

I first learned about Udmurtia in a funny, excellent travelogue by self described anti-tourist Daniel Kalder called “Lost Cosmonaut” and I was immediately hooked.

Who were these crazy people?? I don’t know why they fascinated me so much, or what exactly I’m chasing writing about one now.

…Perhaps it’s something about the comic melancholy of coming from a people who almost none of us in America have ever heard of, or hear from. A people Russia has done an excellent job of nearly (culturally) destroying. What it might feel like to come from such a proud culture that is not only disappearing…. but whose name itself sounds ludicrous to our ears? who speak a language no one could study in college even if they wanted to?

Maybe it’s the only recently discarded pagan heritage (their closely-related neighbors, the Mari El, never converted to Christianity, and so are considered Europe’s last fully pagan culture). Maybe it’s that Tchaikovsky is from Udmurtia (though ethnically Ukrainian) or that Kalashnikov – born in 1919! still alive! inventor of world most popular gun! – lives there now and there is a museum in the capital celebrating him.

Or maybe it’s: we who write in English have a notion that we have the potential to write for a huge audience, if we are lucky, millions. (100s of millions if we write a hit movie... or "The Phantom of the Opera".) We think “if my play is published, in a hundred years, in 500 years, people may still read it!”

What would it be to write a play in Udmurt? What courage. What humility. For what you write will most probably evaporate.

And yet we, the children of victorious linguistic groups, will evaporate too. Most all our work will fade away.

And someday, maybe in 500 or 1000 years, even our language may change past recognition.

So perhaps: We are all Udmurts. Or will be.

- David Zellnik

A Boy Who Really, Really Liked His Horse

2012-01-18T17:35:00.000-05:00

So…War Horse.

It’s a juggernaut. It won six Oliviers. It won five Tonys. It won Best Play on both sides of the pond. It has been made into a giganto new movie by Steven Spielberg that was nominated for two Golden Globes. It didn’t win any, but hey, you can’t have everything.

“Jooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!”

Those who have seen War Horse know the origin of that plaintive cry, which is tattooed on my brain for what I can only presume to be the rest of my life. It is the most oft-repeated line in War Horse, and more or less describes the entire action of the play.

In little more detail, the story is as follows:

Joey is a horse. He is thought to be wild, damaged, unfit for work or the company of humans. Albert is a boy. Albert tames Joey through boundless attention and selfless love. All seems happy and well until Albert’s drunken father loses Joey in a bet, and Joey gets sent off to help the troops in World War I. Albert enlists so he can go rescue his beloved horse on the Western front. I’ll let you guess whether or not he succeeds.

Here’s what War Horse is – visually dazzling, continually inventive, a magnificent succession of images.

Here’s what War Horse isn’t – a good play.

There’s no question that War Horse is extraordinary to look at. It is filled with the kind of moments that evoke a childlike sense of awe and wonder. But is there no one else who walked out after three endless hours of a boy wailing about his horse and thought the whole thing was kind of, maybe, just a little bit…stupid?

I will be accused of being callous, but as anyone who knows me will attest to, I’m a sap. I cry all the time, and it doesn’t have to be great art that calls forth those tears (cell phone commercials will often do it). And I was with War Horse for a while. The beauty of the images made me happy, almost tingly.

As the evening stretched on (and ON), however, my interest began to seriously flag.* I started to have questions of the mental well-being of our young Albert, whose single minded determination began to seem less like boundless, childlike love than an autistic fixation. More to the point, as an audience member I started to feel manipulated. Jerked around.

I turned on War Horse for good after a scene when Albert and his friend have been cut off from their unit. They are walking through that World War I patch of hell known as No Man’s Land when Albert’s friend basically gets his head blown off. Albert is discomfited by this for a moment, then brushes himself off and returns to looking for his horse.

(?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?)

I confess I have an issue with people placing what I consider an inappropriate amount of emotion onto animals, so perhaps I’m more sensitive to this than most. But wasn’t anyone else disquieted by the Albert’s casual shrugging off his friend’s violent death? Was there no one who thought that maybe the friend’s death would be an event of an equal (or even – GOD FORBID – greater) import than the fate of that horse?

This thought brought others in its wake. I started to wonder at the propriety of using the historical event of World War I to tell this story. The Great War, as it was called then, was one of the great cataclysms of world history. Millions upon millions of people died in a conflict whose origins were murky and results almost non-existent. It was epic slaughter for absolutely no reason. I find it a little off-putting that against the backdrop of this ocean of blood, where an entire generation of men died, the thing I’m supposed to be concerned about is the fate of a single horse. What’s next? A heartwarming tale of a girl’s love for her cat against the backdrop of the Holocaust?

I have no bone to pick with anyone who liked War Horse (a group that includes just about everyone I know). I get it. It’s beautiful. It’s an experience. But I cannot join the hosannas. For all its grandeur, for all its success, War Horse traffics in a kind of smug, ahistorical sentimentalism that makes me a little nauseous.

- John Yearley

*My wife says that everything she loves about me is encapsulated by the moment in Act III when I turned to her and muttered, “Boy, that kid REALLY likes that horse.”

Happy New Year and Good News!

2012-01-13T13:51:00.002-05:00

Hello Internet!

We hope you all had happy holidays -- however many you enjoyed -- and have already embarked on a Happy New Year! (If you got left behind, we wish you the best of luck.)

We're all back to work on upcoming projects, but we wanted to take a minute to crow about the Dramatist's Guild grant we recently received in support of our "efforts to promote the work and wellbeing of writers for the theater." Chief among those are our Coyote Commission Project and the upcoming production of David Johnston's Coney.

We just got the news -- what a great way to start 2012! That's all! Now back to your regularly scheduled blog...

All the best,
Bob, Kyle, Gary, and Stephen

My First Time

2011-12-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

A blog. Never before have I written a blog or on a blog or for a blog or whatever you say when you are talking about blogging….I have never blogged? Does that work? Okay, I have never blogged. This is my first blog. Today is the day I blog for the first time. I feel different, I must admit. I think I am radiating blogger vibes and it feels sexy…and sad. Sound familiar? Yeah, not to me either but I am sure someone out there has had an experience where those emotions co-exist (j.k., sexy/sad is my home address).

When I think of writing I immediately conjure up images of Hemingway at a typewriter in Key West with an open window, a ceiling fan rippling his already beaten up slips of paper. Or of Woolf, sequestered in her study, having trays of food brought to her door because she could not bear to break with words. A tea set is present, as is a wild bird in a cage hanging from the ceiling. And of course I think of Williams typing furiously, half-drunk in golden light with a lover sleeping in the bed next to his desk. Writers toiling, struggling privately; cocooned inside of their own imaginations for months and years until the completed (?) draft was ready to share. It took time. It took tears. It took drinks. It was where they lived. In short: I romanticize the act of writing like a motherfucker.

I don’t fashion my life to look like the inside of a precious snow globe, but I do like a bit of silk to be thrown over the lampshade: I don’t take the content of my writing or myself too seriously but there is something too quick, too easy, about a blog. It makes me uncomfortable.

But maybe it doesn’t. I’m sort of having a blast writing this (from my desk that is in a basement of a Tribeca bar. No wild bird. No ceiling fan. No lover. But I do have Diet Dr. Pepper, Swedish Fish, and Pandora is playing a solid playlist from my En Vogue station). Yeah, this is nice. When I think of people reading this and all of the inevitable grammatical errors, I’m sure I will get hot all over and my butt cheeks will clinch together really tightly. But that pretty much happens any time I share my work; whether it is a close friend reading a script for the first time, a fully rehearsed production in front of an audience on closing night, or during my rendition of Fancy by Reba McIntyre during Karaoke. So, it is no different, really. Sharing is sharing.

Okay, thanks everybody. I like blogging. I think I will do it again. Romanticizing things might work for a minute, but ultimately it is just another way to keep yourself right where you are. And baby: it’s time to move.

- Boo Killebrew

Man At Work

2011-12-26T22:50:00.001-05:00

Take this with a grain of salt, if you'd like, because I am officially writing this post on my phone while working a busy pre-holiday shift at my East Village bar. So, raise a glass to multi-tasking and put a holly's worth of hope on my spell-checker and let's rattle off a few, quick holiday writing observations...

1.) People still go to the theater. Shocking, I know. But I just talked to a law student tonight who had seen BY FAR more theater than me in the last year. He saw everything I should have seen (but, in many ways, couldn't because I WORK NIGHTS). And he was raving about "Jerusalem." I want to be raving about "Jerusalem," but here we are...

2.) December is my official LEAST favorite time to get writing done. With gift buying, travel and a busier service industry (that behooves me to work as much as possible) I've relegated month 12 to a time to get things done that can be done in 45 minute increments (because that's all I seem to have...).

(Oh, I'm sorry. I just had to address the "Are all men assholes?" question while her oblivious friends - none, I think, the assholes in question - sang the "Gummy Bears" cartoon theme - loudly and with great relish. These are the days of our dreams, my people!)

3.) But it is a good time to keep conversations going. While it's been difficult to get substantive work done, I have had a good time the last six weeks talking to a potential writing partner about a potential project. We've been talking in fits and starts- which is exactly what my schedule allows now. So, keep the lines open...

4.) I get to talk to tourists. For better or worse, I get the pulse of the theater-going nation. They generally like what you'd expect them to like.

5.) The depressing reality of fundraising this time of year. Everyone's got their end-of-year pitches. Do any of them work?

6.) Don't write every day. It's great if you can, but follow your life.

- Robert Attenweiler

Young Loves

2011-12-22T21:22:00.001-05:00

I've been looking back at early influences. Things I encountered in those years when the synapses are on overload, when sleep is un-necessary, when a trip to the Fas-Mart is an adventure (that might be another post)

Anyways. This has led me to re-read Orpheus Descending and re-view Twin Peaks. These are two works of art that I love. and still love, but what I didn't know is how much I steal from them. In so many permutations. An image here, a name here, a moment of tension there, a turn of phrase - and how there are things from these works that I turn over and over in my unconscious, maybe these things were turning over before I saw them, and then, like an unstable molecule they attached and grew and grew until they became structures and works on their own.

Do you have these early loves? What are they? How do they sneak into your work? What are the things you cannot forget?

- Kristen Palmer

In Praise of Francis Ford Coppola

2011-12-19T15:43:00.000-05:00

The ways in which this country is fucked up are too manifold to go in to in this humble little blog. But I would like to take up, for a moment, the issue of this country’s relationship to art and artists.

“Uh oh,” you’re thinking. “Another plaintive whine from an artist who feels he’s unappreciated. THIS is gonna be fun to read!”Fear not. Though a life in the arts is difficult, it is also a choice. No one put a gun to my head to make me a playwright. When I decided to do this, I more or less (well, actually less – but that’s another story) knew what I was in for. I don’t want to talk not about myself here. I want to talk about Francis Ford Coppola.

My level of accomplishment is open to debate. Francis Ford Coppola’s is not. The Godfather is, to my mind, the greatest American film. It is one of those select few works of art that has permeated our entire culture. Our understanding of ourselves as Americans, of our history, is profoundly influenced by that film. The Godfather also performs that rarest of feats – great art that is also greatly popular. For several years, in fact, The Godfather was not just our greatest film. It was also our most popular. This is a staggering accomplishment.

If Coppola did nothing else in his entire career, he would worthy of the highest possible praise. Instead, he was just getting started. In the six years following The Godfather, Coppola wrote and directed The Godfather Part II (thought by many to be even better than the original), The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. All 4 of those films were on the American Film Institute top 100 films. And he did it in a single decade, the 1970s.

(A fun parlor game – name an artist in any art, at any time, who had a greater decade than Coppola in the 1970s. Dickens in the 1850s? Picasso in the 1920s? Shakespeare in 1600-1610?)

Recently I heard Coppola interviewed. In this interview he was asked the same embarrassing questions he always is - about how he lost his money, how his studio went bankrupt, how many less-than-great films he’s made. People seem to put this air of unfulfilled promise on him, like he’s some sort of enfant terrible who never quite panned out.

If Coppola is a failure, God help the rest of us.

Why do people continue to harp on every unseemly detail of Coppola’s career? He is a giant. The world is full of people who lost their money, or who have made bad films. Only one person has made Apocalypse Now. Which of these facts is more salient, more relevant, more interesting?

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced. He could make shitty movies for the rest of his life and it would not change that fact. He could foolishly squander his money a thousand times and it would not affect change that fact. A culture that believed in art, that was grateful for all the beauty that great art can bring into our lives, would understand that.

Some cultures revere artists. There was a national day of mourning when Victor Hugo died. Tolstoy was considered the second most powerful person in Russia after the Czar.

There should be statues of Coppola in public squares. There never will be.

It is our loss.

- John Yearley

Regarding the Impossible or It's All in the Specifics

2011-12-16T21:41:00.000-05:00

My first play, The Goatwoman of Corvis County, was produced in 2008. I was a complete basketcase weirdo during the whole thing. It was excruciating for me, and probably pretty challenging for everybody else. As we neared opening, I was no longer sleeping, reduced to choking down food, and above all, I had lost all perspective. Here was this thing that had only existed for me, that was now up and walking around, with lots of other people involved. Amazing people! And they were all working really hard. On the very first play I had ever written.

Don’t get me wrong. It was also thrilling. But I couldn’t quite tell where my voice as a playwright fit in the rehearsal process. This was a large source of anxiety for me. The director and I had worked out the basic boundaries but, what things did I let go of and what things did I fight for? So I began to learn, albeit very ungracefully, how to get a grip amidst all the other voices present during production, and fight for how the story gets told on the stage.

There are many ingredients for great theater, how it all comes together, the stars aligning, etc. But I think the most important aspect of making great theater is the specificity of the storytelling. Bad theater is vague theater. I’m not referring to purposeful ambiguities or questions posed by a play that go left unanswered. I mean muddy intention and action – a lack of specificity on how the story moves from point A to point B. Since my job in rehearsal is the script, it’s the specifics I fight to draw out, which are laid into the play very carefully. If there ends up being a hole in the writing, which there always is (you know, but only very tiny holes...), I fix it.

So, in regards to the question posed by Kyle on fighting for the impossible… If a theater doesn't think my play is a good fit for their season, there’s nothing I can do about that. No fight there. But if I’m fortunate enough to have a theater produce my play as a world premiere or as a "still new" play, I fight for the specifics.

***A note about the word “fight”. This makes everything sound very antagonistic! Like it's come to blows or something! While there have certainly been tense moments, my production experiences as a playwright have been amazing and collaborative. Most of the time, the fight is only between my ears.

- Christine Whitley

John Yearley's CLEAR HISTORY -- First Read

2011-12-12T09:04:00.000-05:00

On the evening of Sunday, December 4th, The Dramatists Guild graciously hosted John Yearley and Blue Coyote Theater Group for an early reading of his Coyote Commission Project play, CLEAR HISTORY.

Frank Anderson, P.J. Sosko, Sarah Kate Jackson,
Carter Jackson, Liz Pepe, and Mark Boyett

We read more than fifty pages of polished scenes and intriguing experiments. John is exploring a delicate space between genial social comedy (verging on farce, as he explained) and stark visions of loneliness and despair.

John Yearley, the playwright
(in the pose of a playwright)

The reading was a giant success and all in attendance were well pleased. Also, there were snacks.

Veggie Bootie, Kettle Corn, and Tostitos Hint of Lime

Progress! Sincerest gratitude to our readers: Frank Anderson, P.J. Sosko, Sarah Kate Jackson, Carter Jackson, Liz Pepe, and Mark Boyett. Stay tuned!

- Kyle Ancowitz

"We Have Suggestions..."

2011-12-09T00:38:00.005-05:00

Been a few weeks since I posted – shameful – as my life for the past 2 months went into a YANK!-related vortex. (YANK! is a musical I wrote with my brother that has, after its 2010 off-Broadway run, gone on a pre-Broadway Development Odyssey. Exhausting but really, there’s no downside.)

So… hi!

First off, for them’s who care, the workshop went great. Now as machinations happen far from my sphere of influence, I go back to the computer, to the legal pad, to write new work, to write this work for Blue Coyote.

Onto the question asked:

Won’t you please tell us about a time when your "challenging" and "unconventional" experiment never made it to the stage because some director or producer shut you down?

Most theatre people worship at the altar of free expression and innovation, so ripping down an offensive mural with a jackhammer (see: “Cradle Will Rock”) is not, in my experience, how it rolls.

That is, things don’t usually get as far as where you’re in a situation where you get shut down. You just… don’t get picked. You get a long absence of “yes” and apologetic emails saying “get back to you soon!”. And it’s understandable, but almost definitionally crazy making: you don’t know whether people are genuinely busy, whether what is wrong is your writing, or your talent has evaporated, or someone reading it was having a bad day.

…Or if the structure or tone or content is simply outside the blinders that many well-meaning people wear.

You go down a wormhole of wondering.

Sometimes (you think) these good, overworked people who run theatres and theatre companies don’t realize their biases. So you press. In my own case, I am confident some scenes that have read as “too dirty” when between men would have been seen as “refreshingly intimate” had they been between a man or a woman. I am confident that politics about American poverty or racism or homophobia (marketed by theatres a “dangerous” but really, who in the audience disagrees on these issues?) are given a pass whereas politics about, say, Israel freak people the fuck out.

Who’s right? Who’s to say. No one knows anything for sure (see: crazy making). I will say that good theatre can push buttons, even if the work is not intended to anger, merely be truthful as the writer sees it. I have had individuals walk out of my musical during a gay kiss (never gay sex; gay romance is the problem).

But my role is to be on the side of truth as I see it. How much honesty can I get into a play? How much scary fun delicious writing? There will always be a creative tension between the two sides - theatres which are businesses and creators who are not. But when in doubt, I would encourage theatres to push more, push harder. That said, running a theatre in this culture, in this economy, is hard. Artistic Directors aren’t the enemy.

Lastly, on a related note:

No one sets out to write a boring play. And no good writer accepts terrible notes. The great challenge as I see it is smart people listening to too many good notes. If you make dozens of minor shavings, all the weird nubbliness of the original work is gone. But this way lies Mitt Romney, no? In theatre I have yet to se the perfect play. Hamlet? Midsummer? Streetcar? Death of Salesman? Masterpieces. But the producing world would “have suggestions”.

I treasure development. But there is a sweet spot of time and feedback that we should aim for, which varies play to play, musical to musical.

- David Zellnik

YOU CAN('T) ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT

2011-12-02T15:58:00.001-05:00

As writers we are trained (or convinced or cajoled – and with reason) to be creative (ummm… obviously). We’re pushed by nearly everyone with any say in the formation of our craft to think of things that have never been seen (or heard – or read – or read aloud – or, maybe, thought) before. The need to be innovative can be that voice inside our heads when we sit down with our projects: What makes this story different? What am I giving the audience that they haven’t seen before? How will I be amazing today?

And that’s great. That’s what, often, we look to art and artists to give us: a vision of the world that is in some way new or unfamiliar to us. That’s what we want.

Except when it’s not.

I met with Kyle Ancowitz a couple weeks ago to discuss the draft of my commission play, “I Heart Rock N Roll.” Kyle was great to talk to (cue Kyle blush…) as I was definitely at a point where, while I could rattle off a list of 10 or 20 things I knew I still needed to get back in and work on, what I really needed was to get some of these ideas out of my own head and into someone else's for a while. Kyle and I were pretty much in agreement about many of the things I felt were primary concerns when approaching revision including the main one: the boy-meets-girl relationship that is, if not the center of the play then, at least, a very large cog in it just wasn’t working. It wasn’t only not working it was pretty blatantly not working. As we talked through it, an idea was raised: there was plenty about the play that was unexpected and playful and ambitious (you’ll forgive me the superlatives … they are less necessarily true than they will help illustrate a point), maybe the relationship between Jerry Lane and Heather “Hell’s” Belles (I’ll refer you back to the play’s title now…) needed to be more conventional, more what we expect, if it’s going to ultimately be more effective.

Now, writers of screenplays and television know this (and, if pressed, playwrights will nod along as well): audience expectation is one of a writer’s greatest assets. We like to use it in terms of surprising an audience – of playing off their expectation. But it’s equally important to play to what an audience wants and expects at certain points of a story – it can be just as powerful to do what is expected as to do what has never been thought of before and it’s the balance between these two things that makes for really powerful writing. Sometimes the answer may be to do what everyone thinks is coming. Maybe…

Maybe that’s not the solution to Jerry and Hell’s (again, remember the title of the play…). Maybe everyone will call their part of the story “expected” or “lacking imagination.” But maybe not. Maybe their part is conventional, as every romantic comedy is, essentially, conventional and that what joy their relationship brings to an audience (“See, there, he promised us joy!”) is by allowing to happen what we all know will happen and let other parts of the story do the surprising (did I mention that another of the play’s storylines follows Charon, ferryman of the River Styx, and a character based on Bret Michaels of Poison and VH1’s “Rock of Love”?).

It’s possible.

- Robert Attenweiler

Geeking out on Play Development -- 17th Century France

2011-11-28T21:33:00.002-05:00

Some paraphrasing from a text by Samuel Chappuzeau, writing around 1673 about 'Reading and Casting a New Play.'

Some of his advice for an unknown playwright:

Find an actor who you think is smart to read it and let them decide whether to put it forward to a company. Since actors know best whether a play will work or not, "...better than all the authors and critics together."
If the actor says it's no good - give up.
If the actor says its good then name a time and a place to assemble and then, "the playwright, without introductory remarks (which the players do not like), reads their play with all the emphasis they are capable of giving."
During act breaks the actors listening will discuss where it's boring, too long, lacking zest, crude, too broad - whatever.
After the whole play has been read by the playwright, then the actors discuss if the plot has been developed well, and particularly if the denouement works. (Chappuzeau points out that this is the part where most playwrights falter - same in 1673 as it is today.)
Then if they decide to do it, they cast it. The play should be cast well - since, "A play well cast succeeds better, and it is in the common interest of the playwright and the company, and even of the spectator, that each player act the part which fits him best."

So, back in 17th century France, when the actors ran the theaters (and the court provided the patronage), this is how it would be decided if your play made it to the stage or not.

Pretty straightforward. All the development lies in the hands of the actors who will ultimately be the ones casting, rehearsing, performing and profiting (or not) from the play.

It's interesting to think about how financial and artistic interests are linked here - and how financial and artistic concerns are linked in new play development today.

How are the institutions and individuals who drive new play development directly impacted? Should they be? Or is the remove better for the playwright? Is it better for the play? Is it better for the American Theatre?

- Kristen Palmer

Three Kinds Of Impossible

2011-11-26T10:10:00.001-05:00

When Gary andI were flying back from Janis and Dustin's wedding in Texas, I was readingthrough my copy of Outrageous Fortune for blog inspiration. This book, which investigates the prevailing "dysfunctional"relationship between theaters and playwrights, has lately been a topic ofdiscussion behind the scenes at the blog. That’s how John Yearley beat me to a post about it last week.

Gary and Iwere stuck in the plane aisle when a woman leaned over her seat and poked atthe book in my hand. "I hope you’re not an artistic director,"she said. "That's not gonna cheer you up." Of course she was right – she turned out to be an artisticdirector herself. No one has much of anything nice to say about thestatus quo in the world of new plays, and almost everyone interviewed takes theopportunity to gripe about it in this detailed study. But since no one likes listening to mecomplain, I ultimately chose this passage describing the problem from a writer’spoint of view:

"Thestate of playwriting is healthy, most writers agree, but there's a failure ofthe imagination on the part of theatres, an inability to make sense of emergingvoices and new work. Theatres, this common critique goes, lack the visionto realize those voices in production, and woefully underestimate theiraudiences' ability to appreciate challenging material. At the same time,they fail to educate these audiences about unconventional dramatic forms. Through the eyes of the playwright, the obstacle of unconventionality issymptomatic of a widespread failure of imagination."

As a producer,I'll admit that I often read plays with a wary eye towards impossible ideas. By impossible, I mean ideas that are either simplyunstageable with our budget or that contribute needlessly to downtown theater’sreputation for being pretentious and/or incomprehensible. Come to think of it,let’s say there are three categories of impossible:

BORING AND IMPOSSIBLE:Car chases. Climactic gunfights. Enormouscountry-style breakfasts.
INTRIGUING BUT IMPOSSIBLE: Thermonuclearexplosions. Singing alien plants. Journeys to the Heaviside Layer.
TOTALLY BANANAS AND IMPOSSIBLE: Characters vomitingmythological creatures. Giant thumbs that bleed abstraction. Talking Jewish lobsters.

Does myresistance to unconventional ideas such as these represent a failure ofimagination? Or am I just doing my job? I want to explore this idea with ourcommission playwrights: Won’tyou please tell us about a time when your "challenging" and"unconventional" experiment never made it to the stage because somedirector or producer shut you down? What happened next? And who wasright?

- KyleAncowitz

Never Tell Me the Odds

2011-11-22T15:35:00.001-05:00

“Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is 3,720 to 1!”

“Never tell me the odds.” – C3PO and Han Solo, Star Wars

I’ve never read Todd London’s Outrageous Fortune. This is not because I think it is without value. In fact, I have it on good authority that it’s excellent. I’ve also met Mr. London several times and found him to be a lovely person. He speaks with great passion about playwriting. He has devoted his professional life to helping and nurturing people like me.

And I will never read his book.

I’m usually a big “The truth will set you free” kinda guy. I’ve always felt I can handle anything if I just know what it is. In a tough situation my mind has usually conjures up something far worse than the truth, so even bad news usually comes with a measure of relief.

Except here.

I don’t want to know the exact figures on how bad the state of the American theatre is. I know it anecdotally. I know it experientially. I know a friend of mine who was paid only $5000 to have his play produced at one of the country’s top regionals. I know several people in their 20s who have never even seen a play. I know how bad it is.

I don’t even want to know the glimmers of hope, whatever bright lights London sees on the horizon. Such news will only make me feel worse, like a girl who tells you how great you are just before she dumps you.

I don’t want to know these things because I need to preserve the safety of my little desk in the basement. At my little desk in the basement, I conjure. I invent people and scenes through my imagination and through words. It is arduous but incredibly rewarding work.

I work to please myself, and I am rarely satisfied. To get the pages to be anywhere near as good as it sounds in my head is hard enough. If I had to imagine my work’s fate out there in an increasingly disinterested world, I would simply cease to function.

I don’t recommend the way I handle this to anyone. I recommend all playwrights, indeed all people who are passionate about the future of the American theatre, to read Outrageous Fortune.

I never will.
- John Yearley

When the Well Runs Dry

2011-11-21T21:52:00.000-05:00

Lordhave mercy. I’ve got no idea whatto write about for this blog post. I've been racking my brain for a few days now, trying to pick something,anything to write about. I want itto be good. Lots and lots ofideas, all of which have gone nowhere. Oh, the pain.

WhenI get like this with a play I’m writing, I put it down. Sometimes for months. Go into research mode orsomething. Because if I chase ittoo hard, there’s nothing.

So the solution here I think is to not try to hard to come up with something. Even if it means I come up with nothingat all.

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody.

- Christine Whitley

Develop-Mental

2011-11-17T15:37:00.000-05:00

Currently, I have my two most recently completed (drafts of) plays in some form of developmental system. My play, “Our Time Has Come,” is being worked as part of The Actor’s Studio Playwright/Director Workshop and “I Heart Rock N Roll” (both titles, of course, subject to change at some point on their winding path…) is part of the CCP. This is, we’ll say, a bit of a strange feeling. Not unpleasant. Just strange. For me. Personally.

In school, I was told two closely related things: 1.) I would not be ready (not me personally, just the me who, like the others in my class, was about to get an MFA in playwriting) would not be ready to be produced professionally for a looooooong time (I was, after all, a student … a learner, not a doer … a, they should have been reminded, forker over of large sums of money for the privilege) and that 2.) readings were the way to go. Everyone loves readings. And readings will, no doubt, lead to productions once I am, if ever, ready. Become a gear in the developmental machine, they inferred, sit back and wait to feel the teeth…

(I’m actually a bit amused to see how bitter I still come off when I write about this.)

It became too much to be living and working in New York, blindly sending my plays around (which, for the record, were not the finest things ever put to playscript format. But that’s not the point … I’ll explain how that’s not the point … Maybe…) and getting invitations for readings of my friends’ thesis plays, now with their fourth different theater company, I thought (both rightly and wrongly, it turns out) that it was best to go it alone.

And so I didn’t worry about waiting until a script was ready (or even, sometimes, ready-ish) and getting feedback and rewriting and getting feedback and rewriting. I’d just put them up. I would rent the theater before I had begun writing the play. I would cast actors before I’d even written their parts. I would start rehearsal with a half-finished script (again: rightly and wrongly) and it would be the process of figuring out how to get the play to a place where we would be proud (or, at least, proud-ish) to get an audience to come see it was, for me, more instructive on how to write a play than any talkback after a reading had ever been. It was more instructive because I had to make the piece work for – and be exciting to – the artists who were creating the experience and, generally, if you can do that, you’ve got something that you can show people – and it’s a something that has the freshness that comes with not being overworked by the urge to please every opinion in the room.

Was everything brilliant? Probably just brilliant-ish. Or not. But that’s not the point. The point is not to be brilliant. The point is to do your work. To get in your reps. And to figure out how to do it all better.

So, why was my thought – that play development programs, in fact, do the exact opposite – both right and wrong?

It’s right because, yes, production, if one can be critical and honest with one’s self, is arguably (but nearly not so) the most useful process a playwright can take part in. It just is. And, yes, there is not enough money available to produce all the plays that get written- not even enough for all the plays that warrant production on some level, no matter how small. And, yes, readings and development too often seem like a lackluster way to fill up space on the calendar page.

But my thought is also wrong. It’s wrong mainly, out of the fact that I do not, it turns out, know all there is to know about all things. It turns out, that what benefits me is not always to everyone else’s benefit. It turns out, it turns out, that it is not all about me at all. Plus, barring the money to produce everything they want, theater companies still want to foster relationships with writers telling stories that excite them. And, mainly, it turns out that all I was doing by circling the wagons, so to speak, was finding the community who could most help my work to *ahem* develop to the point where I could tell stories that excited these people and that I might even be able to seek out, identify, or be identified by other communities who are, again, so to speak, in my wheelhouse.

To repeat: strange, not unpleasant, just strange, for me, personally. Not about me. And repeat...

- Robert Attenweiler

Inspiration

2011-11-10T08:05:00.003-05:00

I hate reading plays.

There’s no excuse for it. I’m a playwright. I have to read plays. But I hate it. A friend of mine, Paul Meshejian, is the artistic director of PlayPenn. He is taking the 100 semi-finalists for the 2012 conference with him on his winter sojourn to Puerto Rico. He’s going to read them all down there. I told him it sounds like torture.

There are good reasons for a difficulty in reading plays. Most plays are bad (though that’s also true of most fiction, non-fiction, etc.). More importantly, plays aren’t meant to be read. They’re meant to be performed and seen. These are the good reasons for not liking to read plays. They are not, however, my reasons. I get confused. I can’t remember who’s who. God forbid there are more than twoo people talking at any one time. Then I’m totally lost.

Still, sometimes I read plays. Sometimes I even buy plays, as I did recently when I bought a collection by Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House and Other Plays. I bought this collection for two reasons:

I saw Ruhl’s play Eurydice a few years ago and really liked it.
I never get to see anything because of commitments to job and small child. She is the most acclaimed playwright of the day, so I wanted to see what she’s been up to.

When people gush about art that they love in print, my eyes tend to glaze over. It is usually an avalanche of laudatory adjectives (“brilliant”, “searing”) that lose all meaning being by bunched up and lumped together. So I will just say about The Clean House that there is in it some combination of gentleness and tragedy, a mix of effortless comedy and life-or-death stakes, that absolutely blew me open.

There is a moment near the end of the play that was particularly resonant to me. One of the characters is dying of cancer. Her lover, a doctor, flies off to the Alaskan forest because he believes the sap from one of the trees there can save her life. While he’s gone, the woman suffering from cancer says, “He wants to be a hero, but what I need is a nurse.” Later, her lover the doctor misses the moment of her death trying to get the tree he has brought back from Alaska through her front door.

I’m not sure how much of the impact that moment had on me has to do with my own personal psychology. I feel like many times in my life I have performed a grand, futile gesture rather than attend to the simple, practical task at hand. I suspect that I am not alone in this, that it is an impulse common to men, which can be baffling and frustrating to women. But that may just be my projection.

Whatever the reason, the comedy and tragedy of watching that man trying to get that tree through the door as his wife dies felt like the distilled essence of the play. It is also something else. It is incredibly theatrical. Part of the power of reading that moment was in how easy it was to visualize - the huge tree, the little door, the desperate man struggling. It must be a special moment onstage. I look forward to seeing it someday.

Why, you may ask, have I spent my whole Blue Coyote Commission blog post talking about somebody else’s play rather than my own? I think one of the points of this project is for the writer’s to open up about what inspires us. Sarah Ruhl, and The Clean House, inspires the hell out of me. And not just to be a writer, either. To be a writer of plays.

In my hectic little life, I spend every spare moment I can find reading books. Given that, and my aforementioned distaste for reading plays, I occasionally wonder why I have turned my talents (such as they are) to playwriting. The Clean House reminded me why.

- John Yearley

OK THEATER

2011-11-07T13:38:00.000-05:00

The other week, I got to see Radiohead play NYC’s Roseland Ballroom. It was my third time seeing the band with Rebecca Benhayon (who was on Radiohead concert no. 6) and, regardless of your feelings on how this band may or may not suck relative to how much some other musical jewel in your eye “rules,” I think it’s fair to say that it’s always a cool thing to see one of the bigger rock bands of the last decade-plus play a comparatively small venue.

So, standing room it was and I was shoulder to shoulder with the throng about 40 feet back from the stage and, generally, the 5 inches I have on Rebecca make for a pretty clear view of the stage. Until, that is, the band actually goes on. Then, my view – and I have to assume most everyone else’s – gets blocked as people find every available free space to hold up their phones to take pictures and videos of the show.

I get it, okay? It’s important to note that I get it. This was a hot ticket, a much anticipated show. People wanted to document and maybe get a personal bootleg video of a song … or seven. Hell, I would have even probably tried to snap a shot if I wasn’t busy already working myself up about everyone’s screen blocking my view (and enjoying the show … also important to note … still enjoyed the show mucho). But, the crowd was arguably more subdued (or maybe just more subdued than I would have liked … let’s keep in mind, this is a guy who’s been in a Pantera pit or two in his day) because … well … they had to hold still to get a good video.

While I don’t want to sound too much like a crag and talk about the destruction of the live moment, I would say that the whole “digital documenting and sharing” compulsion bummed me out a little bit. It bummed me out because, I suspect, our culture is moving further away from valuing what cannot be captured. Why else watch Radiohead perform their set through the crappy screen on your phone rather than the much higher res (depending on your eyeglass prescription, I suppose) version in front of you? Is it better to be able to watch them play the version of “Karma Police” from the show you saw over and over again – or to pay attention to the experience as it’s happening? If an experience can’t be captured, it reasons, it cannot be shared. If it cannot be shared, it is of limited social use.

This is particularly troubling when thinking about theater, of course, because the main thing that was always said about live theater is that it offers an experience that can only be viewed once. But what if that argument is holding less and less water – or that the water is less and less a thirst quencher? All this while theater makers (myself included) are trying to find the way(s) that our now-everyday technology and networking can work to increase awareness and excitement about all the amazing stuff we do. The Radiohead show reminded me of when Neil LaBute’s “reasons to be pretty” was on Broadway recently and encouraged people to text during the show. Totally see what would make them want to try that out. Totally see how terrible it would be to be in a Broadway show (or, for that matter, a Broadway audience) where people are being encouraged to not completely engage with the show. But “reasons” will not be the last show to think this is a good idea.

I’ve never been particularly interested in “Is Theater Dead?” conversations – and I’m not bringing this up with the intention of having one now. I don’t think, however, that it’s an incredible stretch to say that people’s relationship with the live moment is an ever-evolving thing in our culture and that, as peddlers of live moments, it’s something to be aware of.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some YouTube bootlegs of Radiohead’s Roseland show to watch…

- Robert Attenweiler

The First Room

2011-11-03T22:00:00.000-04:00

[for the full experience, listen to this while you read...]

I used to write out everything long-hand. When I started. Everything was just piles of words in a notebook with no rhyme or reason. I'd fill up a notebook and then put it in a drawer. Then, sometime when the mood would strike me I would go searching in the notebooks for something. If that 'something' struck me, I would fold the corner of the page.

Then put the notebook away.

Then, much later, I was around a bunch of people who wrote things and read them aloud together and I wanted to play too. I wanted to join in. Then I remembered. I have these notebooks. These notebooks are full of words, and some of them are on dog-eared pages. I will type up those dog-eared pages.

So, I typed them up. But not just typed because there were people in mind. There were people I would read this to, so I fiddled this word, arranged this thought, made this image stand out, threw in this memory or that, something I would want them to know. These became poems and stories and random prose - eventually I found a notebook that was all dog-eared that seemed like it had voices in it, that became a play. My first play. The one I don't talk about or show, but I love it. Because the three voices became three characters and the three characters demanded a stage, a stage with microphones and over-sized furniture and papers falling from the sky. And they had all these words and stories that they wanted to say in front of people and they had all these things they wanted to do in front of people and I put it down into a script and we did it. Me and those people who were reading things together, just put it up in front of people.

And I'm so grateful for those people in a room reading things they wrote to one another.

And I'm so grateful that in my life there has continued to be so many rooms where people read things they wrote to each other.

But the first one. That's the one that was necessary.

- Kristen Palmer

Cruel to be Kind and a Bald Soprano

2011-10-31T18:43:00.003-04:00

“It’s all been done. It’s what you put in your particular stew.” – Nick Lowe

“The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.” - Eugene Ionesco

I love these quotes. Not sure what point to make about them, because it seems self-explanatory. Two quotes saying “there’s nothing new, it’s how you say it” in two totally different ways. And from two totally different artists, both pivotal and important in their respective genres. I’m not a geek about Nick Lowe or Ionesco, meaning, I’d be a bit out of my depth to go on about them. But the subjects of rock 'n' roll (or more specifically, rock 'n' roll theatre) and Absurdism are obsessive interests for me. Plus, they tie into what I'm working on for the Coyote Commission Project.

This is from Wikipedia:

In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean "logically impossible," but rather "humanly impossible." The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.

More Wikipedia (sorry), from the entry on Albert Camus’ philosophical essay on Absurdism, The Myth of Sisyphus:

“Thus, Camus arrives at three consequences from the full acknowledging of the absurd: revolt, freedom and passion.”

And this is a video from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (need to view the whole clip for full effect): WATCH THIS

Just ingredients... for a particular stew... Ha! How corny is THAT? Couldn't resist, though. But I do love that image, the act of culling ingredients/influences etc., and making something that's yours out of it.

I have a great deal of excitement and fear around writing this play. A director I worked with once said, and this was during a particularly tense part of the rehearsal process, that his motto was to breathe and remain flexible. Not my forté. And I feel particularly clamped down around this lately, stuck in the writing of it. So perhaps I need to adopt his motto, let go and trust the process.

Right? Right.

- Christine Whitley

“Nothing gold can stay”

2011-10-27T16:58:00.000-04:00

“Nothing gold can stay”

-Robert Frost

…or as my brother says: except gold, that is. Bury it for 5000 years, dump it in salt water… it stays gorgeous. No rust, no grime, no decay. Whatever else you can say about gold, that stuff lasts.

Ok so lately I’ve been distracted by some bright shiny things, and rather than get back to work, I‘ve been thinking about why the world over, most people seem distracted by bright shiny things.

Literally bright and shiny: like gold, like diamonds. Like iPhone screens. Like fire.

I’m wondering (as I avoid work) if it’s some misdirected evolutionary response – like we are born to be attracted to the glint of water, or the juice of a ripe fruit, or eyes or lips. So that it is really: Jewelry as Permanent Glint, as Permanent Ripe Glistening Fruit.

I’m thinking of this also because in my commissioned play, HUNTERS AND THIEVES, the golden fleece makes an entrance.

In the play, the fleece is a worn-out prop from the collection of an old actress who is an exile from her homeland in Central Russia. She once played Medea, who as legend famously has it, butchered her own brother and tossed the body parts into the water so that while Jason and the Argonauts could speed away with her and the fleece in tow, Medea’s father would be forced to pick up the pieces for a proper burial. (On a related note, whatever else we can say about what Medea did, we should at least be able to say: Jason should not have been surprised.)

The golden fleece still shimmers in my mind, all the more so for its weirdness – the skin of a flying golden ram? Kinda awesome, kinda ewwww. It’s hard even to actually picture it. And what would you do with it? Wear it? Sit on it? Have sex on it? Surely never melt it down. It seems perfectly useless; its power must simply be to captivate the mind.

So I sit here distracted and not working; but if I am to be distracted by a shiny bright thing, let it at least be something weird and beautiful, with a lineage.

- David Zellnik

Firsts

2011-10-24T12:54:00.000-04:00

Greetings and welcome to my introductory blog post! First and foremost, thank you to Blue Coyote Theater Group for the opportunity and honor to be one of the playwrights chosen for the inaugural Coyote Commission Project. I’m in excellent company. Also, I’d like to add that this is my very first blog post ever, of any kind, so there’s that too.

Now, a quote.

“I want to be ripped apart by music. I want it to be something that feeds and replenishes, or that totally sucks the life out of you. I want to be dashed against the rocks.” - Jeff Buckley

I was talking to my Mom about Jeff Buckley a couple of weeks ago. She is in her late sixties. And while she enjoys music, she's never really been crazy over it. She wasn't one to rush out and buy a new album when she was young or go to a lot of concerts (at least this is what I remember her telling me, maybe I have it all wrong...). She does like to sing though, and does so to all music - but only in a very high soprano.

I sent her a couple of favorite Jeff Buckley songs, or rather, YouTube videos, because I really like to subject my Mother to things she probably won't like and then bug her endlessly about it. But she called the next day to say that she had been incredibly moved by watching the video of Hallelujah, but in a way that had unnerved her, which was surprising to both of us. She was excited and emotional in telling me about it, trying to "figure out" the beauty of the thing - what exactly it was about the video, the song, the singer himself that moved her so. We talked for a while and concluded that maybe she just got dashed against the rocks a little by Jeff Buckley.

The quote above has stuck with me ever since reading it several years ago. It's something I agree with, strongly. And while it's said about music, it resonates with me as something for theatre as well. In discussions about playwriting, storytelling and the theatrical experience, I eventually truck out this quote to sum up exactly how I feel.

So there it is.

Looking forward to all the blogging...

- Christine Whitley

What I Have In Common With 6'7" New York Knicks Forward, Landry Fields

2011-10-20T20:15:00.000-04:00

I’m sorry, New York, but I’m really sick of watching baseball this year. I’m done. Tapped. If it were up to me, I’d just concede the Yankees the World Series title (even though, with Bartolo Colon pushing upwards of 548 pounds this year, I’ll hold out a glimmer that it will all come crashing down for the Yankees at some point … I do like to hold out that glimmer … always) just so I don’t have to watch any more baseball. Part of this is that my Cleveland Indians took a lot out of me this season, their strong start making me care when I still thought I had a couple more baseball seasons before I had to start paying close attention again. I’d banked on those couple more baseball seasons to get an awful lot of things done. Now those seasons are gone and I’ll never get them back.

But it’s more than that. Seeing baseball going into its post-season reminds me what would normally be absorbing all of my attention this time of year: basketball. Basketball, basketball, basketball. And as you may or may not know (or, quite possibly, may not care, as you’ve come here to read thoughts on theater and writing and … I’ll get to all of that … well, some of that … I promise I will say a good sentence or two on that matter) the National Basketball Association – or, more accurately, the owners of the teams that make up the National Basketball Association – have locked out their players until a new labor agreement between the owners and the players’ union is reached – and the prognosis is not good.

And who cares? Well, not as many people as care about baseball and that’s why I’m over baseball for the foreseeable future (which is to say: until I’m not).

We learned from the writer’s strike of 2007-08, that writers – and artists in general – have a spotty history thinking of ourselves as labor and that’s done little to collectively raise the general perception of what we do. The result for the writers in ’08 was them taking a deal that many consider worse for them than the one that was in place before the strike (the perception that the writers were easily replaceable parts in a machine was disproven, in as much as the parts already in the machine proved overly eager to ensure that there was not the opportunity for them to be replaced … lest it prove easily done). The results for the rest of us plays out more in terms of the arts general failure to quantify their value to, if not our immediate communities, then certainly our state and national one(s).

Professional basketball players are going to be fine (even if, as the owners hope, they will start to feel the financial pressures once games begin to get canceled and then take the money that’s there over the no money that isn’t) … well, most of them will be anyway. But there’s just something about the labor dispute of a sports league that does not have the cumulative public will that, say, professional football does, that makes me think a little more about what many of us working artists are up against when we actually think of ourselves as working … as labor. Cue the Woody Guthrie…

- Robert Attenweiler

Killing Characters

2011-10-17T18:22:00.000-04:00

I have this play, THE MELTING POINT. And when it started it had like 9 characters. Then I wrote and re-wrote and cut and revised and then there were 6. Two were dead. They were named Joanie and Mike. I liked them though, they were kindof sad late-20 somethings in dead-end jobs, dancing around getting together for a date, by the end they did. But, their short story didn't get kept as the play's story came into the fore.

Then there was Imogene. A 50 something friend of two other 50 something ladies. The school social worker, coincidentally. Lonely for her sons who moved away and never called. She was a master at making nice. As the structure of the play took over, she receded further out of the picture, she became extraneous. In the beginning she was the third witch, this chorus of mothers raging against their abandonment in the suburbs - but, really, the play's about one family's estrangement - not three, so she - well - she left in the last draft. Theater is a brutal form.

And now there are Five. And they all have to be there. Even the one who you could argue with me about cause he's not in the family and really, does he change? Nope. But he's not going anywhere. Cause he's part of scaffolding that got permanently attached to the building. The others? They got dismantled once the play was built.

So.

Now I'm writing this play, part of the Commissioning project. Thank you so much Blue Coyote, the kick in the ass is helpful, always.

And I did a draft...and there're some characters who I don't know what to do with...I don't know if they belong. In fact one of them gets shot in the middle of the play. In a play that is not about shooting people. I'll tell more about what it's about as this blog goes on - but it is NOT about shooting people. So, maybe I had him get shot - suicide by cop actually - because I knew he had to go... or maybe in the next draft I'm going to need to find the way to get him to stay. I think I want him to stay. His name's Mike too, a much more screwed up guy than the first Mike, and he brings things out from my head... I know I won't get there without him, but I don't know if he'll be discarded scaffolding, or if he'll move in as a cross beam. It's early in the writing, the best time, I don't need to decide.

- Kristen Palmer

Getting Lost

2011-10-13T22:10:00.000-04:00

It’s a littlescary. At the very least it’s disorienting. You don’t know what time it is. Youdon’t know where you are.

It passesquickly, of course. The last time it happened to me, I found myself on NJTransit. I was somewhere between Secaucus and Newark. It was around 5:30. I wason my way home.

Though ithappens fairly frequently, it always catches me by surprise. That day, I hadjust settled into my seat on the train at the end of the day. I was pulling mybook from my bag when I saw a copy of the play I am working on for Blue Coyote.An idea for the scene I was currently writing had been

kickingaround in my head all day. Impulsively, I grabbed the script and set to work.

That’s thelast thing I remember.

What does it mean to “lose yourself”? Why isit considered desirable? It is the stated goal of every ecstatic experience,from revivalism to raves. But why do we want it?

My guess isit’s not a matter of losing your self so much as it is losing yourself-consciousness. Self-consciousness is like the booby prize of sentience. Withoutself-consciousness, you’re just an animal. With it, however, you are doggedforever by a self that hovers just outside of you; it is often a judging self, acritical self.

The onlytime I lose self-consciousness is when I write. There’s nothing ecstatic aboutit. My eyes don’t roll back in my head. I see no visions. I just becomecompletely and totally involved in the thing I’m doing, namely writing.

It doesn’tlast long. For me, it rarely goes longer than a half hour at any one time. Andit doesn’t feel like much. To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t feel like anything.When I write the part of me that is usually records experience for future memoriesis writing, too. So there is no trace. The process of writing is forgotten the

second ithappens.

Why thendoes this experience, which couldn’t be more ephemeral, lately feel like thesingle most important part of the life’s work that I’ve chosen?

Immersion is what’s about, I suppose. It is thattotality of immersion that makes you lose your self-consciousness. There aremany things to lose yourself in (just pick an addiction), but the pleasurestend to be short lived and have nasty side effects. The difficulty is infinding something worthy, or even capable, of such a deep immersion.

Most jobsdo not provide this. My job certainly doesn't. My job does not want my wholeself. It wants a self from me that accomplishes certain tasks while acting acertain way. It is an easy self for me to put on. I wear it like clothes. Myjob wants that part of me and that part of me only.

I don'tmind that my job wants only a fraction of me. I don’t need every moment of mylife to be spent in the pursuit of deep personal fulfillment. But I am able tonot care about this parceling out of myself because I have this other thing,this writing.

Sometimes Isee people in my office, good and smart people, and I feel like I can see themlooking for something. They have adesire to do something more, to pour their passion for life into something thatcan hold it. Their failure to find this thing for themselves can leave themlooking distracted. Sometimes, they look scared.

Most days, being awriter feels like a very poor career choice. Most days,it all feels impossible. It is impossible that the scene will come out the wayyou want it to, or that it will work into your idea for the play, or that theplay will come together, or that anyone will want to read your play if it evendoes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. In most writing careers, indeed in most careers in the arts, five disappointing things happen forevery encouragement. It can, and often does, feel like a ridiculous way tospend your life.

Yet latelyI'm feeling very lucky for my chosen profession.

Once ortwice a week, I get to get lost. Like falling asleep, I can never pinpoint themoment it happens. I only know it’s happened when I wake up, be it on NJTransit, my writing space in my basement, or at some coffee shop around town.When the fear dissipates, and I am grounded again in the here and

now, I feelanother emotion very strongly.

Gratitude.

- John Yearley

It Used to Be Easy...

2011-10-13T13:06:00.000-04:00

It used to be easy.

Well, that’s not true. It was never easy. But it was simple.
I used to write plays sequentially, in order. Start at the beginning, end at the end. Discover the play in the writing. Refine it in rewrites. End of story.

Then my son was born.

To be able to write a play in the way that I used to requires a lot of brain space. It’s not that I kept the whole play in my head (I could never do that), but I did keep the totality of the world I was creating and the characters I was inhabiting simmering all the time. I didn’t know it then, having never lived any other way, but writing like that requires a lot of free space in the brain.

Children eat that brain space. And then they come back for more.

I needed another way.

Like most opportunities, it first appeared as a problem.

I was writing my newest play, Another Girl. It’s a story of a woman, Aidan, coming back home after 20 years to see her sister, Hannah, and her dying mother. The problem was this – I had created the character of Aidan, and several other subsidiary characters, but I didn’t yet have Hannah. It was very clear that the first scene of the play had to be between Hannah and Aidan. But since I didn’t yet know who Hannah was, how could I write that scene?

And I had all this other stuff in the play I wanted to write! Scenes, monologues, stories. I was stuck. I couldn’t start.

So I cheated.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I actually felt that way at first. As if writing out of sequence was a sin. I wrote the bits that were popping out of my head (they had been trapped so long they BURST out). It was a blast. And I’ve been doing this long enough to know that if writing is fun, you’re probably doing something right.

Soon enough, with the space to let her grow organically, Hannah came to life. Scenes I wrote bled into other scenes. Soon enough there were whole sequences. There were some ugly stretches tying it all together- character, plot, theme. But there are always ugly stretches in writing. In the end, I had not only what is perhaps my best play, but a new way of writing.

I am using that new way of writing for the play I have been commissioned by Blue Coyote to write, currently titled Clear History. It’s a story of the way in which the decision to have children saves and ruins your life, and of the time and place – now, New York – in which that decision is being made. Allowing myself to write in this way has made writing this play a joy. I often sit down at the desk with an anticipation that borders on giddiness.

I could not be more grateful for Blue Coyote asking me to write this for them. I hope it lives up to every expectation they have for it.

- John Yearley

Introducing Me. Hi.

2011-10-10T20:22:00.000-04:00

Thanks for reading. And thank you Blue Coyote Theatre Company for picking to be one of your commissioned writers :)

Just to be clear: I am doing this for the money.

...But if I weren’t doing this for the money, I’d be doing it cause I’m a fan of BCTC, the work they do, what they stand for, the talent they have assembled on and off stage.

My association with Blue Coyote came about because 15 years ago (!) I met Stephen Speights while we were both marathon dancing in Anne Bogart’s MARATHON DANCING. We were… glorified stagehands? Extras? Except at the end we all danced, so we were performers too. We were fast friends. I possibly had a mini crush on Stephen, as one does, but I might be making this up. He was and is crushworthy so I think this reflects well on me either way.

Years have gone by and I’ve seen a lot of BCTC shows and have always been impressed by the integrity, the passion, the humor, the naughty language. Some of my favorite theatrical experiences of the past 10 years have been at the Access: the plays of David Foley, David Johnston; the work of Vince Gatton and Gary Shrader...

Stephen and Gary have always been supportive of my work, which has meant a great deal, and so let me introduce myself:

I tend to write plays about scared people who discover their strength, people awake to history but who try and navigate their own small lives within in, to find happy endings (heartbroken happy endings?) in a world that often has no use for them.

Also I hope to be funny. And joyous. That’s the goal at least, in works as disparate as the musical I wrote with my brother about 2 soldiers in love during WW2 (YANK!) and in the plays I write alone like my angry heartbroken meditation on 120 years of Zionism (ARIEL SHARON STANDS AT THE TEMPLE MOUNT AND DREAMS OF THEODOR HERZL).

Here is the play Blue Coyote commissioned:

HUNTERS AND THIEVES takes place in a ramshackle Queens apartment owned by Mrs. Huff. She is an old woman from a (real) small autonomous region in Russia called Udmurtia. She is mysterious, an actress, an exile. She rents the main room in her apartment to Nate, a scared 18 year old who goes to NYU and may or may not be a thief in order to earn money to live. When he and his friend Clem suspect she has a treasure in her apartment, they plan to rob her. But when she wakes and discovers the plot, they become prey to her wrath…

The play is barely begun. But I aim to fill it with as much integrity, passion, humor, and naughty language as an audience at Blue Coyote has the right to expect.

- David Zellnik

Welcome to the Coyote Commission Project Blog!

2011-10-06T21:10:00.001-04:00

Hello fans!

Blue Coyote's Commission Playwrights

Earlier this year, Blue Coyote Theater Group invited a group of our favorite playwrights to be a part of our first-ever playwrighting commission. In order to invite you, our audience and our community, to learn more about to the process, this week we're launching the Coyote Commission Project Blog.

We will post semi-weekly updates from our commission playwrights in order to share more about their progress with the project, the adventure of playwriting, and anything else they all think is interesting to write or read about. We hope you learn more lots about our playwrights, their work, and their commissions as they develop.

We want your attention and your feedback! Please have your say by leaving comments and asking questions!

With affection,
Kyle Ancowitz
Producing Director