EXTRA CRITICUM

Hear 5 New Monologues on the Eve of Election Day 2020

The quest for something closer to the live theatre experience continues with our November 2nd Some1Speaking lineup. Five writers will share a new monologue and then we'll chat for ten or fifteen minutes about what we've just witnessed. Because we encourage our audiences to UNMUTE, the experience at Some1Speaking is a bit more reminiscent of sitting in an actual theatre and becoming part of an audience. 

It really is true. A random collection of strangers gathers together. And by witnessing the same thing -- be it a concert, film or play -- we become one. When all is said and done, we are transformed into an audience. A unit. With a specific shared experience that binds us. That's powerful. 

Here's the November 2nd lineup. Hope to see you there!

Reading Other People's Work Productively

Here's a confession. For years, with the exeption of a handful of favorite writers, when I would pick up a new script to read, nine times out of ten, I'd hate it. And it took me years of reading and hating to finally figure out that it actually wasn't true that nine out of ten scripts I read were awful. The problem was me. 

What I figured out (about a decade ago or so) was that if I open every script I read with a load of unconscious expectations that are based on my own personal style and approach, chances are my disappointment will come quick and forcefully. The silly thing is, I'm convinced many writers I know suffer from this same skewed view. 

Once I recognized that my frustration with many scripts had more to do with individual stylistic choices at odds with my own than with actual bad writing, I was able to relax and find much to admire in many of the scripts I read. 

What are these biases? It took me awhile to recognize them and there may in fact be more than the few I've been able to identify but I will list them here.

Get away from me! Where are you going?! Don't go. Go!

Possibly with the exception of freshmen orientation, those first days at college when I actually believed I might go four years without making a single friend, I have never been as lonely as I am these days. I suppose it's understandable. I've been dividing my time between my apartment in the city and the house I grew up in in Connecticut. 

I generally feel better, happier in my one-bedroom apartment than I do in the creaky quiet of a house that for years so easily absorbed the fits and starts wit and ambition of four pretty big egos. My sister and I each in our own way with a style of our own did manage to fill our share of rooms even if compared to Mom and Dad we might have seemed mere knock-offs. These days to me, the house speaks almost entirely of absence. This is where the quiet engine of my mother's carefully tamed ambition once seethed as she wrote and cut and scribbled out more and cut and stapled and wrote again. Shhh!!

My Larry Kramer Goggles

Couple nights ago the skies above Manhattan opened up to release a veritable deluge. As an unrepressed (or irrepressible) pluviophile I immediately dropped what I was doing, ran to put on my sneakers (in the country flip flops do well in a storm; not so much on the streets of NYC where the water sweeps up fecal matter from birds, dogs, humans... blech!), rip off my glasses (no one wants to try and navigate with streaks of water obscuring one's vision), don a cloth mask and fly down five flights of stairs, past the bewildered doormen and out into the joyful noise of water pouring down hard and fast and everywhere.

I had a marvelous 20min. deluge stroll. The streets emptied (as they generally do when it rains in NYC; even a drizzle can inspire even the toughest New Yorker to cancel dinner plans) and with Sixth Avenue all to myself I pulled my cloth mask down below my chin, tilted my face upward and breathed in the clarity.

It was fabulous.

Until I rounded a corner and came upon the outdoor tent of a Brazilian restaurant where I saw about 50 people dining out under the tents in tables crammed together so tightly that there was barely a foot between each table. I saw not one free spot. And the entire tent was abuzz with laughter, shouting, drinking. And I could not help but view these 20-35 year-olds as one big boisterous pre-funeral party.