EXTRA CRITICUM

These five artists I love.

There have been more than a few happy byproducts of the year+ spent at home during Pandemic Pause. One of the most meaningful in my life has been the weekly hour I now spend online with 5 former members of New Opera Theatre Ensemble, the improvisational opera company I founded and directed in Boston toward the end of the 20th Century.

Sylvie lives in New Hampshire. Vicky lives in Keene, New Hampshire, which frankly doesn't really feel like the rest of New Hampshire. Merle lives in Boston. Mary Ann lives in Northampton. And Jon lives in San Francisco. There was a time when we all lived and worked in Boston. And as former musical collaborators, gathering for one hour on Zoom each week has reconnected each of us with a part of our artistic selves we may not have accessed in quite the same way in recent years.

How best to explain this?

When you open your mouth to sing but you've no idea what pitch, rhythm or words (if even there are words) might come out it takes a special kind of letting go and trusting and allowing for what might be considered "ugly noise" to come out if it will. In my opinion it's an act that taps into one of the deepest levels of trust we can access. It implies:

I'm going to sing now and it might be ugly or boring or trite. But I know I'm in the company of love. And so anything is possible and nothing will be fatal.

The five people who join me each week for one hour of exploration and conversation are among the most remarkable and wonderful artists I know. And I wanted to just share a few bits about each one of them in the hopes that how they live their artistic lives might offer you all some inspiration.

To the woman who answered "Unsure," I'm here for you.

My online workshops are always interactive. So whenever someone registers to attend one, the order form includes one or two simple questions designed to help me get acquainted with the collection of artists that will gather in the "room."

Recently, I asked the following of my registrants:

What do you think is your greatest gift as a writer?

I think it's an important question. And I'd go further than that. It's important for writers to answer this question and to ask it of themselves frequently. Chances are, the answer will change as we change. 

People's answers vary from the super specific (I write terrific death scenes.) to the general (Talent, babe. Isn't that what it's all about?) But nothing could have prepared me for one woman's answer. 

I cried when I recently came upon her one-word answer.

This is why I would never have made it in the ad game: Before and After on my latest online ad for RTOWW

I had acquired some credit on my Dramatist Magazine advertising budget so decided to run a small online ad for the upcoming RT Online Writers Workshop which is now accepting applicants. In case you hadn't noticed, the RolandTec.com empire is pretty bare bones so I figured I'd design the ad myself. I mean,. how hard could it be? Having worked a number of years in the Conde Nast Traveler Production Dept. I know my way around the Adobe suite. 

I was sort of surprised that I hadn't heard anything since the ad is suppose to run September through October and imagine my surprise when I found that some very caring and generous staff members at the Guild saw my ad and felt it was not quite up to snuff. And so they remade it and in so doing taught me a thing or two about ad design. (Although, truthfully, the greatest takeaway from this is that hiring a graphic designer must be moved out of my "optional" column and into my "necessities" column, tout suite.

Take a look.

Before:

And

LinkedIn: Congratulations on Your Work Anniversary! Hear Me Out Turned One Last Week.

LinkedIn is the Cinderella to the evil stepsisters of social media, Twitter and Facebook. We're not really sure it's going to make it to the ball to meet her match but we sure hope she does. LinkedIn is overt about its purpose. It promotes itself as a professional networking platform. And for this reason, it's a lot kinder and gentler than the evil stepsisters.

Naturally, too, for this reason it's less successful. And it has some quirky sort of obviously missing-the-mark elements that are almost quaint in their cluelessness.

One of these is the message that periodically pops up to suggest we congratulate one of our contacts on their work anniversary.

I, for one, do not track my work anniversaries. Do you?

So whenever I get these odd messages I kind of giggle inside. They're trying to promote connection which I of course applaud. Compared to facebook and twitter it's downright altruistic. But what's inevitably the result? If you think about it, most of the congratulations we're going to receive on our work anniversary are going to be from people we've linked with but have never met. So, in a way, by definition, the "congratulations on your work anniversary" starts to read like a giant name tag that reads: YOU DON'T KNOW ME. BUT I DO CARE.

But last week, I actually found myself marking and celebrating a work anniversary. Labor Day 2021 was the 1st birthday of the Hear Me Out Monologues experiment. Take a look. And thank you to all the earnest, talented and generous writers, actors, musicians, technicians and audience supporters who helped us create the feeling of becoming an audience together via Zoom.

Look at what we've done together!

Roland Tec's Advanced Monologue Weekend (Oct 1-3) Course description and registration at: rolandtec.com

Our love affair with Facebook must finally come to an end.

FACEBOOK IS KILLING US BUT WE CAN'T STOP EATING IT?

Let's face it. SOCIAL MEDIA ISN'T SOCIAL.
(It's pathological)

This latest revelation that Facebook's upper echelon has for quite some time been aware of Instagram's destructive impact on young women's mental health should be astonishing but it's not. It's just the latest in a seemingly endless tsunami of human suffering we can directly tie to the social media giant.

What’s it going to take? Donald Trump’s presidency wasn’t enough? Actual murder of actual people in Myanmar barely made a dent. Now this? Really the flood of toxic corrosive programs, algorithms, byproducts and even sometimes direct messaging from the executive office suites shows no signs of reaching an end or even slowing.

If our social fabric were a house, the basement would be filling up with toxic waste while we (billions of facebook users) continue going about our business upstairs telling ourselves that the foul smell we detect wafting up from below must really just be a figure of our imagination. After all, nobody else seems all that concerned?

So what will humankind do? We are living with an enemy of our better angels--call it humanity, compassion, mutual cooperation. And yet we all simply accept that we’re too far gone:

"We could never manage to decouple from Facebook et al.," we tell ourselves, forgetting the very real cost of staying tethered to this albatross.

Think about that statement. Never? Really? And why not? Mankind has managed far greater hat tricks. Sure it will take time and I may not live to see it through to completion but we owe it to ourselves to try. The very fact that we can on the one hand acknowledge that this enormously powerful force in daily life is itself designed to push us away from everything that makes life worth living reveals just how far down the rabbit hole we've fallen.

"I know this will kill me but I can't stop eating it."

#unfriendfacebook

Begin today. #socialmediaisantisocial

Ed. note: I have been sounding the alarm re: facebook ever since the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Most who know me now simply accept that I'm an oddity, an outlier with my pie-in-the-sky fantasies of a global decoupling from Facebook. So, please, engage me here on this question. Please, if you will, use the comments section below to make the argument(s) in favor of remaining tethered to the platform. I'd really like to try and understand your thinking. 

Attention Playwrights! That monologue does not belong to you.

So, if you read this blog much you know that since the dawn of this pandemic I've been on a kind of OCD Mission Impossible to encourage playwrights and screenwriters--really anyone who writes scripts, who tells stories this way--to give monologue a closer look because, well... as the pandemic shutdown demonstrated so well, when the expensive and time-consuming elements associated with productions disappear and the community at large finds itself communicating via Zoom, the unique work of the playwright becomes more essential than ever. 

No lights. No sets. No costumes. No stage. Yet still feels like theatre. How come?

If people are waiting for something akin to theatre (as we once knew it) to find them and move them through the Zoom box, then who is more equipped to provide this than the playwright?

After all it's the playwright who engineers our catharsis. If I am pummeled to my core at the final curtain that's because the playwright wanted it. It's the playwright who understands, perhaps more keenly and more viscerally than any of us, the bond between life as we live it and life as we wish it to be. Our refusal to acknowledge that there might be a difference between these two things has been selling theatre tickets since man discovered fire and gathered everyone around to talk about it.

 

The Festival of Playwrights Making Lemonade from Lemons

This Labor Day marked the one-year anniversary of Hear Me Out Monologues, which produces the Hear Me Out New American Monologue Competition & Labor Day Fest. 400 entries from around the world were read and evaluated by a

My How These Limits Can Set You Free. Join me for Advanced Monologue Weekend Oct 1-3.

You write for the theatre. That pretty much guarantees that you are like me in at least one respect. You stand or sit in a darkened theatre as the curtain goes up on your latest play and every fibre of your being is tense as you wait for the verdict to come in. Did you manage another bullseye aimed squarely at the universal truths of human nature or did you miss slightly, just enough that the people sitting all around you in the dark, your audience, are not buying the characters you're selling.

Sounds stark but you know it's generally that simple. With each passing moment of the play you've written, you (perhaps with more certainty than any other member of the creative team) you know whether you've hit or you've missed your mark. It's the playwright who cannot help but grimace and sweat at the first false note, at the first sign of a play shaped more in the head than in the heart, or to put it even more plainly, the difference between the words on the page and the lives on the stage.

So when the pandemic hit, it hit you right where you live because in an instant you found yourself cut off from your oxygen supply. Without the barometer that is a living breathing audience, the script writer is left to make her best guesstimates based on experience with characters and circumstances similar to the current one but not identical.