Good Advice From The Guy Who Just Dumped You

I wanted to drop in a block quote from my recent reading - Christian Parker's article, "The Art of the Breakup" at howlround.com. The article, it seems to me, is a call for clearer communication between playwrights and the literary managers at institutional theaters. I recommend a full read, but these lines caught my attention:

"I am so tired of having lunches, drinks, and meetings with playwrights who cannot decipher the messages they are getting from theaters, and show me copies of endlessly nit-picky and detailed letters offering critical dramaturgical feedback from people they don’t know, and who, in most cases presumably don’t like their work enough to advance it. Playwrights need to solicit and accept feedback only from those people that they respect, trust, and rely on.

I know I've been a party to similar exchanges from the literary manager's side, although that isn't my title. I will confess that there were times when I declined to work on a play because we didn't have the resources to produce it, and I will allow that there were other instances when a lack of resources was a convenient excuse for declining a play I didn't really believe in.  To console myself for causing a disappointment, I may have offered some suggestions.  The cloud of confusion that Parker describes is generally the result.


Parker wishes these professional disappointments could be like the best possible romantic disappointments: "Rejections," he writes, "as in 'real life,' should be gracious, clean, and quick. Of course, I don't remember any disappointments like that from my real life.  What a delightful idea, though!


Commission playwrights: do you have any stories to share about the mixed messages and unwanted advice you've received when shopping your plays?

- Kyle Ancowitz

Magic/Bird and the Myth of the "New Theater Audience"

I had the opportunity to see Magic/Bird on Broadway last week and I'm still shaking my head a little.

I'm not even shaking my head at the show so much - which I like just a tiny bit more than I thought I would or knew I should (though I will be the first to admit that I am a sucker for much of what was enjoyable about the show, even as I recognize that "liking" something means very little to any project's artistic aspirations, had artistic aspirations rated highly enough to have even been given a schwag bag at this particular party).

I'm not against popular entertainments. I'm a sports fan, for god's sake. And I'm not entirely against empty popular entertainments. I'm a Cleveland sports fan, for god's sake. But there does seem to be some back-patting on the part of the show's producers about how they are attracting "non-traditional" fans to the theater.

Now, I will admit that the crowd at the show I saw was hands-down the most diverse crowd I've ever seen at a play. But, those people who will go see Magic/Bird will very likely not rush out to see Venus In Fur the following weekend because - you know, that theater thing's got something interesting going on.

These "new theater goers" then are little more than dollar signs invented by the producers. They have figured out a way to get people to the theater who wouldn't normally go - but they are not people who will likely go back - and the people who would normally go don't really see the point in this project so they won't go ... and it's a whole cycle that they hope can be sustained just long enough to justify itself.

So, bravo to the producers of Magic/Bird for figuring out a way to (possibly) make money. Good work. But let's call it that. Let's not call it theater.

Theater as we know, is about figuring out a way to (probably) lose money.

- Robert Attenweiler

Draft 1 Done!

Ok, so after weeks of procrastinating… after a week of sleeping in four hour stretches, where I woke up at 4am with ideas of scenes, woke up two hours later realizing said ideas for scenes were garbage…writing and writing then cutting cutting cutting...

Last night I finally heard the first draft of my Blue Coyote commissioned play! Currently a full-length one act, still called HUNTERS AND THIEVES, the play was read by fellow writers at a weekly playwrights group I have been going to for well over a decade now (the Playwrights Unit at Ensemble Studio Theatre). We don’t use “real” actors, so the feel is very different than what it will be when BCTG finally has a reading of it, but incredibly useful. I both loved a lot of it… and heard and felt how much work there is ahead for this piece. It’s definitely a first draft. But I got totally jazzed hearing it. Good sign.

And thus today I sent Draft 1 to Gary, my liaison with the BCTG team. Nervous/excited to hear BCTG’s feedback and dig into a rewrite/reimagining.

In other news, last night I finally got a good night sleep.

- David Zelnik

A Riff on the Play I'm Writing

My Coyote Commission play is a spring play. I know it's a spring play because spring is here and I can't stop thinking about it. Spring is a minefield - the smell of mud, the feel of air chilled by the water and warmed by the sun, the giddiness of forsythias - everything pulls me down the rabbit hole.

My thoughts get jumbled and pile up. Things are difficult to sift through, they just accumulate in drifts. I don't want to let anything go and really all I want to do is to skip out before the bell rings, sneak to my car and drive off to the river with some bean burritos.

But this isn't high school, I don't have a car anymore and taco bell makes me sick.

My play is also a memory play. But I don't want anyone to know that. So don't tell anyone.

At the moment my play is a pile of fits and starts. It's laying there under the mulch - sprouting some early blooms, but those don't last long. I'm waiting for the annuals. Waiting for the leaves that can last a season, sniffing out the roots to ground it all.

Till then. I'm gathering all I can.

TAKING THE SHOW ON THE ROAD

I’m back.

I’m back in rehearsal.

I’m never back in rehearsal.

I’m always just in rehearsal (except when I’m not) for the next project that I’m going to speed along to the stage – the producer-version of the father at a shotgun wedding – carefully keeping the script between my two barrels…

But, as of late last week, I’m back in rehearsal for my play “Our Greatest Year” (with S. Henkle) about one couple’s relationship and the 2007 Cleveland professional sports year.

I’m back because in late-March we’re taking the show, fittingly, to Cleveland for a limited run hosted by John Carroll University at the fantastic Dobama Theatre.

Woo-hoo, right? (not to be confused with Wahoo which is a troubling Cleveland thing in its own right…)

I wrote this play in 3 weeks. We rehearsed it for 2 and put it up for 4 performances last June.

Now, I’ve been living with it for nearly a year. We’ll have more rehearsal time than we did originally, as well as a comparable run.

We’re back.

My director, Anna Brenner, started the actors – and, consequently, me – by asking how their thoughts on the play, the characters, etc. had changed since our first foray.

As a writer – and I’ll just speak for myself – you always think you can tear down the whole script – or not.

So, I’m aware that the play’s got its flaws (…yeah, like if supreme awesomeness is a flaw…) but the nature of the play – it’s a blend of live stage action and projected motion comics – makes it a difficult revision (as the words can be changed and changed or not infinitely easier than the images).

With the writing, we can nip and tuck and tweak and recontextualize, but we pretty much need to go to war with the ammo we got. Returning to the show is, then, more complicated for me as the producer. In four weeks I’m taking two writers, two actors and a director to a city where I haven’t lived in fifteen years, know relatively few people and have (relatively) no clue who the theater-going community is or how to reach them (relatively).

So, I’m back in rehearsal thinking about audience. Not in the way that a writer thinks about an audience as the theoretical people who will be receiving this work, but the practical audience – the people who will be in the practical seats – my least favorite thing to think about when producing a show in NYC. I’m thinking about audience. Audience, audience, audience.

And it’s actually kinda fun…

In NY, I often have the feeling that I know every one of the 200-or-so people I have a fighting chance of getting to see my show. In fact, the fact that I know them is the primary reason I have a fighting chance to get them. That’s how independent stuff works here.

Cleveland – and this may be the single most shocking statement I will ever write – has certain advantages over NY. It has family, friends and family friends, many of whom have never had the chance to see the work we’ve been doing out here. There are the 200-or-so JCU students who will be encouraged/required to attend. But, beyond that, the audience question is wide-open.

There is no one yet who has refused to attend. There is no marketing strategy (yet) that has blown up in my face. There have yet to be modestly attended shows or lukewarm receptions (clearly the fault of them and not us) or thousands and thousands of dollars thrown with gusto from the nearest open window… Not. Just. Yet.

So, I’m back in rehearsal feeling, I guess, what one hopes one feels when one is back: I’m excited and hopeful … however suspiciously. I love the show and the cast and think we have a fighter’s chance of performing this for actual people. Hopefully many of them. Now, if only Bernie Kosar would return my emails requesting his attendance…

Hey – ho – way to go – Ohio.

You can learn more about this production at www.OurGreatestYear.com.

- Robert Attenweiler

Failure

“Failure” is such a dirty word.

People in the arts talk a lot about bravery, about having the courage to follow your impulse no matter where it leads. What this means, in practical terms, is that you have to give yourself the right to fail. You have to accept failure, make friends with it.

Still, people don’t really talk much about failure. It’s considered rude, unsupportive.

I failed recently. I failed as a part of the project for which I am writing now. I failed in my first attempt at my Blue Coyote commission.

In December I brought 50 pages of a new play to be read for an invited group at the Dramatists Guild. We spent a very pleasant hour there hearing what I had written. There were good parts and bad, some laughs, some moving moments. When it was all over I heard many nice things, and soon after received many supportive emails and calls.

But it was a failure. Make no mistake about it. I failed.

No one said that to me, of course. I don’t think they were just being polite. I think they didn't say anything because the only person who could really know that I failed was me. Everyone who came to the reading saw the same mixed bag up there that I did, but only I knew the dispiriting truth – I had reached a dead end.

Others could easily have seen this likable mishmash as a promising start. I knew that it was over.

I kinda knew before the reading. I had been running out of gas for a while. I was hoping that something would happen in the reading to prove me wrong, or would appear that would show me the way I needed to go.

It didn’t.

What is one to do in the face of failure? My first response was “Abandon ship!” I would call the Coyotes and tell them that I appreciated their support but my experiment was a failure and it was time to move on. I thought about that a lot in the first few weeks after the reading. The thought gave me great comfort.

I never did make that call, though. I wonder why. Was it stubbornness? Gratitude to the Coyotes? A sneaking suspicion that there actually was a play in all that mishegoss if I could just see my way clear to finding it?

Silently, without ever acknowledging it, I accepted that I would try again. Once decided, I had an impulse to jump right in. Pop open the hood and get to work. Fix everything! Save what I liked and toss the rest!

I didn’t do that. Some other impulse, a deeper impulse, told me that anything I tried to do right away would be Band Aids on a hemorrhage. So I suppressed that impulse. Instead I did…nothing.

Actually, that’s not true. I did do something. I thought. I daydreamed.

The first thing to appear was a monologue. Then a new opening scene. Then an idea for a closing scene. Then a new twist on one of the original characters that would make her much more interesting. And before I knew it, my brain was firing again.

Since then, the ideas have flowed freely. I have ideas for new scenes involving libertarians, ventriloquists, and sodomy (have I stumbled on a new title?). I don’t know if any of them will work, but we’re about to find out.

I cannot promise success. I haven’t the faintest idea if any of it will work. But what I have now is the one thing I absolutely cannot write without.

I’m a little excited.

- John Yearley

Severe Clarity!

 “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?”  - Stephen Speights

The topic of constructive criticism is an excellent one.  I love Stephen’s post and the question he poses in it.  I’m also completely blown away by the phrase ‘severe clarity’ as a way to describe the aim of an artist.  I’ve never heard that before, but am now adding it to my bag of references as a reminder of what I’m after when things seem lost.

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

The first play is in pretty good shape - it is a total and complete play.  A director and I are working on it together and the informal reading marked the real beginning of our collaborative process.  Going in, there was a section that didn’t feel quite right to me during the play’s production in 2011, and I knew I wanted to look at it during this reading.  The director had his questions too as this was the first time he was hearing it out loud.  We were lucky to have wonderful actors, some rehearsal and a great audience.  All in all, questions were answered and the director came away with some notes, four to be precise.  They took me forever to understand, but in the end were insightful and spot on.  I can… now hold on to your hats people… I can be very defensive when receiving notes.  It’s definitely much better than it was, but I tend to have a terrible “oh no” feeling right before, like perhaps it’s going to be a big battle or I’m really going to disagree or be upset.  I’ve had to learn how to really listen through my nerves and consistently seek to understand what’s being said to me.  In this particular case, I can see in hindsight (after reading Stephen’s post) that what the director was aiming 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.

The second piece for the CCP is not a play yet.  The reading I had for it had no audience – just the actors and myself.  It was the first time it was going to be heard at all, which I find to be a very tender time.  At the earliest stages, such readings are for my 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 to anyone else, but to me?  After getting over that hurdle, I can ask the great, smart actors who graciously read for me questions about this or that, if they got certain elements, do they want to know what happens, etc.  It offers me incredible clarity on what’s next, what works and doesn’t, a general sense of the gathering storm of a complete play. 

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

So, if it’s still brewing, if I still don’t know quite what it is, there is no criticism that will be constructive.  It just ends up offending me, which is ridiculous.  Therefore I’ve found it best not to open up that part of the process.  There are a few trusted people who look at pages early on, but that’s it.  For me, criticism is only actually constructive once what is intended is firmly set.  Then it’s vital.

- Christine Whitley