EXTRA CRITICUM

Navigating the Season of Submissions

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Every year around this time, as we start to notice the days growing shorter signaling an end to Summer, my teaching schedule fills up with writers eager to meet the moment. What moment is that?

It's that time of year when lots of submissions are due for development opportunities, grants and competitions. 

Recently, a favorite student of mine, someone I'll call Hal had booked time with me to prepare a major submission. This involves us reviewing writing samples together as well as the dreaded Artistic Statement. (I'll be the first to admit, by the way, that I suck at writing artistic statements; and yet people seek out my help so frequently that it almost proves the old adage: Those who can't do, teach.)

Seriously though, there's no magic secret to all this. It's simply a matter of reading someone else's material with care and then reflecting back to them what it is you see. We all have the capacity to do this. It's just that most of us lack the patience and curiosity to do it well.

The other day Hal reached out to cancel their appointment with me. It was a surprise to me because I know Hal to be a supremely hard-working and detail oriented writer. 

It was Hal's reason for canceling that inspired me to write this post. Because it contains within it what I consider to be one of the biggest challenges most artists struggle with.

Message from the Universe Received: Slow Down.

The Summer of 2022 has been full and fraught. I'm not sure why I imagined it would be smooth sailing to produce and perform my own solo show  while producing the third Hear Me Out Monologue Competition. 

There were signs of cracks in the foundation as early as May when I started to receive evidence of logistical details getting lost in emails between me and various others who make this thing happen. Entire emails went missing.

Sometimes those I'd written.

Sometimes those I was supposed to have read.

I've been told (Hello, Gary!) that I have too many email addresses. 

I know this is true. Yet seem unable (or unwilling?) to address it.

I'm hearing anecdotally of other breakdowns in communication on so many fronts that I'm beginning to suspect we're all just suffering under a collective case of Pandemic Fatigue. 

I was thrilled when A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored got a very positive review from our first critic. Others were lining up to see for themselves.

And so we added performances and decided to extend through September 7th.

And then I got sick.

And have barely been able do much more than sleep, eat a bowl of cereal and sleep some more. (Rinse & repeat)

Performances of my show were canceled. And some of you know how much this one has meant to me, possibly cause it's the first thing I've managed since March of 2020... But... If the actor can't keep his eyes open...

Having lost about two weeks in our production schedule on the monologue competition, I've finally heard the universe which seems to be playing the same tune all summer long this year. And the tune is:

Slow down. Take a breath. What's the hurry?

So, this is all to announce two important scheduling changes.

A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored will not perform August 24th but will resume for two nights only on Wednesdays August 31 and September 7.

And the Hear Me Out Monologue Festival & Awards Ceremony will postpone from Labor Day this year to a date in November, TBA. 

 

And I hope to be able to announce a new structure to hold all the RT workshops, Wednesday Gathering, the Hear Me Out Some1Speaking series and the annual competition and all the rest in a more coherent unified structure that will allow me to support the work without doing everything on an absolutely voluntary basis. More details to follow...

Please update your RT Inner Circle status to be sure not to miss any of this.

American Loneliness & Brené Brown's Continuing Quest to Understand Human Connection

Our Uniquely American Inability to Truly Connect

Any American who's had the chance to live overseas will tell you that when compared to the friendships typical of most other cultures, American bonds are wanting. When it comes to forging meaningful nourishing relationships we are quite possibly the worst. James Baldwin wrote about this a little bit when living in Paris he came to understand that much of the emptiness and mistrust of others he had always assumed to be uniquely characteristic of the Black experience was in fact a fundamental truth sewn into the whole cloth of American life.  

Morgan Jenness, the literary agent who most defied all the usual stereotypes of the business, tells a moving story from her early days when she was working in the literary department at the Public Theatre. During a particularly stressful and disheartening period she heard that Mother Teresa was scheduled to make a visit to New York and suddenly felt compelled to speak with the her in hopes of resolving what was feeling more and more like a moral crisis of faith around her chosen career path.

On a whim she found herself traveling uptown sixty blocks to wait on the sidewalk in front of the Indian Consulate hoping that the odds were good that the spiritual leader's itinerary would bring her there at least once. And, as would prove true for Jenness again and again and again over the years, on that day, her intuition served her well as she looked up and came face to face with the tiny woman she knew she needed to consult.

In a flurry, she heard herself describing a lack of meaning she'd been struggling with that gnawed at her because she deeply wanted to make a life of meaningful work and was starting to doubt whether theatre could possibly compete with selling everything and traveling to India to be of service however she could. Just feeding one human being at a time, no matter what the sacrifice.

Mother Teresa (herself a brilliant creative thinker) had an unexpected response.

I WROTE A SHOW TO CAPTURE THIS MOMENT (Too bad "this moment" just happens to be one that the entire world seems desperate to escape)

https://rolandtec.medium.com/i-wrote-a-show-to-capture-this-moment-53cdd0d955fa
originally posted to Medium.

Click here to read it.

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