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’m an artist residency whore. My friends know this and I am not ashamed. I hope to continue my whoring ways until the day I die, that’s how fond of the residency experience I am.
Residencies come in all shapes and sizes. Some limit whom they accept (Hedgebrook is for women writers, for example) but most welcome all artists, at all stages of their careers, and several are open to academics and scientists as well. Some are more like vacation spots and require that you pay to attend, others politely suggest you make a nominal contribution, many are a free ride and some may offer grant you a travel or hardship stipend. Some residencies are designed so that you’re roughing it in the great outdoors and some pamper you to no end. Most are somewhere in between. At some places you have to cook and shop for yourself, at others you have a master chef making every meal for you and staff serving it to you. And again, some places are somewhere in between.
I have a dream that we will one day live in a nation where our choice of play will not be based on the color of the skin of the actors on stage but by the stories told and the questions grappled with by the playwright.
Saw Katori Hall's Mountaintop yesterday. It's a wildly ambitious play. And I'm really glad I went. Even though I'm not black.
“It’s a strange, compulsive business, the urge to make plays. To act in them, or write ‘em, or produce ‘em. It’s no use appealing to reason.” That’s Henry James counseling a friend in Author, Author, a novel (2004) by British writer and retired literature professor David Lodge. I just read this well-told tale about the failed playwright and posthumously esteemed novelist Henry James (1843-1916).
James, frustrated at midcareer with his fiction’s lack of popularity, tried to find success and improve his income by turning to the stage. Oh, what fools these mortals be!
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. Another plaintive whine from an artist who feels he’s unappreciated. THIS is gonna be fun to read!”
Fear not. I’ve always felt that 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 knew more or less (well, actually less – but that’s another story) what I was in for. I don’t want to talk not about myself here. I want to talk about Francis Ford Coppola.
John Hurt, the superb British actor, gave an entertaining and enlightening interview this week on the “Charlie Rose Show.” Hurt is currently appearing in Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For a taste of his performance see this 90-second New York Times video. The Times review was a rave.
This production comes from Britain’s Gate Theater and is directed by Michael Colgan. Hard to believe but this is Hurt’s debut on a New York stage. He also stars in a movie just coming out, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
I recently completed a three-day workshop of my latest play. And it got me thinking about the usual developmental path new work takes in this country. Outside the sphere of developmental gatherings such as Seven Devils, Bay Area Playwrights, O’Neill and PlayPenn (to name just 4), most plays simply get a series of public or semi-public readings by professional actors until there’s an actual production and rehearsals begin. Once rehearsals begin with a first performance end date in place, there really isn’t the time for the sort of work we spent the last three days doing.
Continue reading "Up on our feet: the value of workshop vs. reading a new play" »
Saw The Cherry Orchard at Classic Stage Co. the other night. The production is a lot of fun. Most of the performances are stellar. Especially outstanding (no big surprise) is Alvin Epstein in his third turn as Firs, the loyal elder servant who ends the play by falling asleep in the abandoned house he has called home for most of his life. There aren't too many seats in this Off-Broadway house. It's a great venue. The three-quarter thrust makes for intimate theatre. I was seated in the back row of the center section which is Row F. That should tell you all you need to know about just how intimate this space is. Sam Waterston was seated directly in front of me -- his daughters are in the cast. The cast features a lot of star power and it got me thinking.
If producers pack casts with famous names to sell tickets, perhaps there ought to be an agreed-upon star to seating capacity ratio. For example, if, say, Dianne Wiest can by herself fill a 500-seat house to capacity, maybe the rest of the cast should be peopled with the un-famous. Otherwise what we have is a waste of a valuable asset: star box office power. Let's do the math.
Continue reading "What would be a reasonable star to seating capacity ratio for theatre?" »
The fantasy of countless writers was realized earlier this month when Alexis Jenni, a 48-year-old high school biology teacher, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize, for his novel L’art francais de la guerre (The French Art of War).
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 had a fascinating chat with the Artistic Director of a struggling regional theatre yesterday and among many interesting tidbits that were exchanged, he said something that kind of blew my mind. He said the problem ailing most American regional theatres today is that they all share a similar aesthetic. In other words you can't really distinguish between the seasons of The Guthrie, Long Wharf and South Coast Rep, for example. I had never heard it put quite this way. At first I balked but then I thought he actually had an interesting point. I filtered his comment through my own playwright-focused lens to mean: they’re all basically pulling shows from the same pool of writers. I imagine if you sat down and made a list of all the writers who’ve been produced at the major regionals over the past 15 years. I doubt it would exceed 200. Do you? Now that may seem like a high number but it’s not really when you consider that doollee.com boasts more than 20,0000 playwrights in its online database. Even if you allow that 80% of them may be “talent-free,” (an expression coined by my pal Jerry Kaplan), that would mean that there are at least 4,000 who regularly churn out scripts worthy of production. And yet we all know the number of well-funded productions in well-established regionals in this country doesn’t even approach that number. Well, there's really not the audience for that much theatre but that's a subject for another post altogether... But I digress. What struck me about this gentleman’s comment (and I’m not naming him because I expect he was talking off the cuff and off the record) was that this was not true 25 years ago when the likes of Robert Brustein, Ellen Stewart and Garland Wright (to name just three off the top of my head) were leading theatre companies.
David. Great post. You reminded me of this amazing letter that Robert Ross Parker, former Editor of The Dramatist magazine found in the Dramatists Guild archives. Click on the image to enlarge and read. It's priceless.
I ran into an aspiring filmmaker recently at a party. We worked together on a big budget feature a few years ago. He was working one of those jobs many aspiring filmmakers work to get by. An assistant kind of gig. The kind of job where you can learn a hell of a lot, actually take home some decent pay, maybe put away enough for a downpayment, but definitely not the sort of job that gives you any downtime in which to nurture your own pet projects.
At the time, he'd shown me a script he was working on for a short. I thought it was pretty fantastic. A kind of sci fi thriller thing. The kind of thing that I wish I could do but know I just don't have in my DNA so it makes me admire it in others all the more.
I asked him about the project. I even remembered his main character's name.
He said he'd been too busy working on a bunch of big budget features, working his way up the production ladder. That he hoped to find some time maybe next summer to take a couple months off and shoot. That is, if, he could manage to raise the money.
Continue reading "Filmmakers with a dream: just start. It's the hardest part. You'll see." »
Cross-posted on the Blue Coyote Commission Project Blog
It’s a little scary. At the very least it’s disorienting. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t know where you are.
It passes quickly, of course. The last time it happened to me, I found myself on NJ Transit. I was somewhere between Secaucus and Newark. It was around 5:30. I was on my way home.
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