EXTRA CRITICUM

ONE LIFE TO LIVE Dead At Last #oltl #abc

April 14th, 2011 will always be Black Thursday for soap fans who turned on their computers to discover that ABC had canceled their favorite shows, ALL MY CHILDREN and ONE LIFE TO LIVE. Despite organized protests and letter-writing campaigns, the network, unfazed, announced their replacement shows and went merrily on about their business.

It seemed as though no one associated with running the entertainment industry was remotely interested in providing this kind of entertainment anymore - even if they had to shoot the genre dead in order for it to die. Despite what felt like network dictated edicts to kill off characters and fill the shows up with actors that couldn't act and guns and violence (whatever happened to "Love in the Afternoon"?), the fans stayed. Mostly. But the numbers did tumble. When you decide to tell the exact opposite story that the fans want, why would you expect them to stay? But then, when you want to kill a show, why would you do what the fans want?

Inspiration - Sarah Ruhl

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.

Process: Editing a Bit of A Life's Work

In case you don't know, I'm making a documentary called A Life's Work. It's about people engaged in projects they may not complete in their lifetimes.

Before I get to the clip, some background. My first meeting with Bob Darden of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project was in Chicago, August 2009. During our sit down interviews it became clear very quickly that I would have to go to Baylor University (Waco, TX) to shoot audio engineer Tony Tadey in action. And so I did. The footage with Bob and Tony was shot April 2010, the interview footage is from that Chicago meeting.

Here’s the clip.

Choosing Ourselves Down to Zero?

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.

In response to Licata's post "On Rejection"

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.

On Rejection

Recently I posted on Facebook an email rejection I received for a work of nonfiction ---

Thank you for sending us "[title withheld by me]." The editors had a lengthy discussion about your work. Unfortunately, we are not able to publish it in our forthcoming issue; however, we certainly encourage you to submit other work to us in the future, as your piece had its fans.

This is called a "scrawl" and writers will tell you that as rejections go, this is about the best you could ask for. It is much more encouraging than a form email, such as ---