Extra Criticum

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

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

Deadline at Noon. Let me repost what I said last year.

I have to admit I found it heartbreaking having to refuse what amounted to an avalanche of last-minute requests for special exceptions to our strict Noon deadline. 

First, I feel it important to explain our rationale for refusing to accept post-deadline submissions.

 

read the full post:

Submission Deadlines When Life is Lived Online

Sounds like listening: The Hear Me Out Monologues pursuit of Audience

It's been a year and a half since that day in March when suddenly we understood (or almost did) that audiences could not gather under one roof without putting our lives at risk. I remember getting some angry emails after I posted this piece [Social Distancing and the Power of Audience, March 11, 2020] on Medium suggesting that it was not a matter of if but when Broadway was going to have to shut down.

They announced a 30-day shuttering the next day.

At the time it seemed inconceivable to me that we might somehow find a way to re-create audience online.

And then that summer I mounted the first Hear Me Out New American Monologue Competition and on Labor Day we celebrated 12 finalists with live presentations of their monologues and an impromptu awards ceremony at which new work was celebrated. Although with an audience of 300 unmuting everyone would have been impossible, we did carve out a small audience "on stage" comprised of about 25 of us -- writers, actors and competition judges. And this little audience within an audience enjoyed the show unmuted with earbuds or headphones and cameras mostly on.

It was magic.

And so I got a little obsessed.

Purchase one of 30 "We Are Audience" (Seen & Heard) Tickets to Hear Me Out 2021

Borders: The 2021 Hear Me Out New American Monologue Competition Theme

Borders. 

In the early days of the pandemic, there were calls for barring flights to the U.S. from China. My sister was in Poland when Donald Trump suddenly announced an impending ban on incoming flights from Europe. She hastily scrambled to adjust her itinerary and was home in Massachusetts within a week. 

It didn't take long for us to understand that travel bans be damned, the horse that was CoViD19 had long since left the barn and locking the barn doors now was a pointless exercise in willful blindness. It soon dawned on much of humanity that regardless for our relative comfort or antagonism toward the idea, we were somehow finally going to be forced to accept the degree to which the human race is itself a single organism. We are all interconnected. Gangrene in any corner must not be ignored.

3 weeks til deadline! How to best use this time to submit a winning monologue to Hear Me Out 2021?

June is ending. And you haven't figured out what to submit to this year's Hear Me Out Monologue Competition?

Don't panic. Sure, you only have about three weeks til the July 22 deadline, but if you break it down, you have more than enough time to conceive of, write and submit a winning response to this year's festival theme: Borders.

Here's my two cents on how I'd go about this if I were hoping to submit.

1. Write something new specifically tailored to the guidelines of the competition. 

As you consider the calendar, it may be tempting to go digging into your files in search of an existing monologue from some older work that might fit the various judging criteria outlined in the Call for Entries. 

The impulse is understandable. I admit to having wrestled with similar notions myself when hoping to enter a potentially lucrative competition with thousands of dollars in prize money at stake. The submission of a tried and true piece, perhaps one even pulled from a successful full-length play may be a kind of comfort a de-stresser. And of course, it requires less of you. Less time. Less thought. Less work. 

Here's why I suggest you avoid this path.

What does theatre need most in this moment? Ken Levine says "comedy." But I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

My friend Robert Sullivan shared this morning's post on Ken Levine's popular blog. In it, he puts forth an idea I've heard before. When times are tough after an economic upheaval, what theatre need now more than ever is: comedy. Comedy, the argument goes, is our ticket to escape, to take our minds off what we've been through and what may lie ahead in a not-so-certain economic recovery post-pandemic.

We heard similar calls for comedy above all else in the period of uncertainty immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001. 

It's understandable why some might think this would be the trick. But I have a different idea.

In those moments when the house lights go down and the curtain goes up, everyone in the audience begins putting their own life worries (of the day and of the year) on a shelf and turning their attention, instead, to the lives of the characters on stage. This is what we have come to do. To set aside our own concerns and for the duration of the play, focus our attention—with head and heart—on the lives of others.

Zoom Theatre May Have Left Us Some Important Gifts. Don't Miss the Rare Opportunity That's Arriving.

We can hardly contain ourselves with the glee that stems from the idea that our current way of life may possibly be coming to an end... or at least a kind of optimistic pause 

In the meantime, those of us who make plays. films, musicals, operas, ballets, etc. etc. find ourselves stuck in the same boat: not 100% seaworthy, overcrowded, and possibly not even sailing in one discernable direction.

The Most Basic Questions:

Will Zoom Theatre continue even after we've all stopped needing to construct approximated lives via our laptops?

When will theatre lovers, for example, not hesitate for one moment when lining up to purchase tickets for shows that pack us into houses with the cool efficiency of one of our major commercial airlines?

Will the type of work that audiences clamor for have changed in any fundamental way as a direct result of a steady diet of talking heads in screens? 

And has more than a year of making theatre happen within the narrow confines of the Zoom Box somehow helped us all to see some of the ways in which the traditional rules of how theatre gets made and who gets to make it don't necessarily need to be renewed without question?

What Have We Learned? Surely a lot. No?

COVIUSbe sure there's nothing we'd like to carry with us into the future, a future that's anything but certain for the performing arts.

Kia Corthron, Gary Garrison, Tammy Ryan and Sophfronia Scott on How to Reach Us in a 140-char World

Over the past several months, I've had more than one student working on a full-length play or musical that starts out seeming to be one thing only to eventually reveal itself to be something entirely different. And in each, the moment when it becomes clear that we've been toyed with, that the real story is here not back there, the shift is thrilling.

I should say that my writers workshops never banish questions of ambition. I want participants to show up with their real-world dreams for their material out in the open for all to see, up for discussion.

And, when it comes to these types of pieces, I can't help but worry a little. And so I've been wondering.

How is a writer working on material that takes more than 10 pages to reveal its true nature going to have a chance of being picked up in a world of ever-shrinking attention spans, where gatekeepers may not stick around long enough to discover the hidden treasure beyond page 19?

I put this question to four clever writers who all happen to care deeply about teaching and paying it forward for the future of our shared culture.  Here's what each of them had to say:

Another Great Film Lost in our Broken System

Who We Are Now is one of the best indie films I've seen in years. And it's playing on one screen, the beloved Cinema Village. And if yesterday's sparse attendance is any indication, it won't be here next week. And that is a crying shame. If you're in the city and can manage it, run to the Cinema Village to see this important, moving, breathtaking and beautifully written and acted film while you can.

I can point to two things which might account for its lackluster box office performance. The first is a problem of film marketing. The trailer is a pumped up shiny object which tries to make the film seem like a conventional thriller when it's so much more. Like many trailers today, it underestimates the public's hunger for substance and plays the lowest common denominator. And by doing so, I'm afraid, possibly causes folks who'd really connect with the moral core of the story to skip it entirely.

Robert McKee is So Much More Than I Imagined Him to Be

All filmmakers know his name. It's virtually impossible to have written a screenplay in this country (or any other, for that matter) without having come across the name Robert McKee because it is McKee who towers over all of us, or the idea of McKee, an omniscient master analyst of any story told on screen. As we write our screenplays, it's almost impossible to ignore the nagging fear whispering from within. The fear that when the film is finally made and screened and (God willing!) released in movie theatres, McKee might see it and emerge from the darkened theatre shaking his head in disbelief at the multitude of glaring failures of storytelling on display.

As I was making ALL THE RAGE, which I adapted from my stage play A BETTER BOY, I wondered what McKee might make of my radical reworking of the story's structure, specifically, the last 15-20 min. of screen time, which departed radically from the play's resolution. I uprooted what had been the the last 25% of my protagonist's journey to construct an end that really landed 180-degrees from where the play had arrived. What's amazing to me, looking back on it, is that somehow without ever having read McKee's books or taken his world-famous workshops, I'd managed to absorb one major point he's been making about storytelling for the last thirty years: the relationship between the audience and a story's protagonist is essential to a story's power to move us and engineering that relationship is delicate surgical work that demands our undivided attention.  Turn away from that question for even one moment during the crafting of a screenplay and... well, good luck selling more than a dozen tickets.

YouTube Promos 4 Live Theahtuh!

Here's a re-post from 2008. I was reminded of this problem/issue/question recently when I stumbled upon the super slick promo video for the Flea's upcoming show. Here it is so you can take a look.

I don't know about you, but as lovely and adrenaline-pumped as this is, there's absolutely nothing here that would make me decide to open my wallet and purchase tickets. How about you?

What follows is my original post on the subject. And links to two promo videos that I think were super cool and effective.

Death on the Tracks. What a Railway Accident Can Teach Us About Filmmaking

Recent news of the criminal prosecution and sentencing to two years in prison of film director Randall Miller in the death of camera assistant Sarah Jones on an indie film shoot in Georgia has been stuck in my brain like glue. They were shooting a scene on tracks used by freight trains. They weren't permitted. And the freight train just came up too quickly. It crashed into a truck bed, debris from which flew into the crew, killing Sarah Jones.

See, it wasn't so long ago that I was leading my own skeleton crew through the fields and back roads of Omaha on a 3-day shoot of a scene in We Pedal Uphill, the culmination of which was a 2 min. sequence featuring a parked truck on the railroad tracks, a bottle of champagne and enough dirty doings to keep us all up at night.

Here's what I remember about our shoot. I'm not sure we got a permit. But we did check in with the local film commission and they provided us with details of the freight train schedules for our particular crossing so we knew when the next train was scheduled to come by and planned accordingly. But that scene took more than an hour to shoot, even on our shoestring budget so you can imagine how much time it might eat up on a bigger production. We needed our moment to be the edge of dusk so we really couldn't afford to draw it out much anyway.

But this news of the accident in Georgia has me doing a good deal of soul-searching about just how easy it is to succumb to the temptation to cut corners, especially when working in the low-budget arena. I like to think I didn't put my actors or crew at risk but can I be so sure? We took the precautions we felt were prudent at the time while still managing to squeak out a feature film for thousands, rather than millions. And lucky for us, no one got hurt or killed. 

But I am reminded of another film I worked on years before that one where lines of safety were far more blurry.