I met Micheline Auger when she was putting together a fun and kind of audacious experiment: placing a desk and lamp and chair in the window of The Drama Bookshop to be a weeklong installation which she called Write Out Front. Installed in the window in 2 hour time slots playwrights were invited to just do our thing... allowing our playwriting to be projected above our heads for all passersby to stop and read if they liked.
Micheline is one of those artists who can't or won't stop asking probing questions, challenging our assumptions about how things are supposed to go. Everything she touches seems to call upon us to ask ourselves why we do and how we do what we do. The result is there's often a lot of interesting and inspiring stuff swirling around her. And lately the form this takes online is her delightfully positive interviews with super smart and generous writers on her website.
This one I just stumbled upon really hit me at just the right moment. I needed to hear Victoria Labalme's clear-eyed reassuring message. And the questions Micheline tosses at her friend are pretty wonderful. Take a look.
I'd run in to grab some peanut butter (confessed addict. I know, I know...) and there was a woman on a cell phone having a conversation.
In 2021, no less!
And she was not happy. But she was taking great pains to appear calm while her thumb and forefinger did a little dance which seemed to be more about chipping the nail polish off of her thumb than anything else.
It was clear she was talking to a man. One she'd slept with. A lot. And also one that she clearly regarded more as a boy than a man.
And he was really asking a lot of stupid questions.
It has become routine to see/hear/read an interview with the same book author/film director/songwriter etc. etc. on not one, not two, but 5-7 supposedly independent unique shows or columns.
You know what I'm talking about.
Terry Gross will interview the author of X book.
Two days later I'm hearing Allison Stewart interview the same person.
Another day or two go by and--oh, look who's being interviewed again! (Will I learn something new this time?)
What does this tell us?
Producers of these shows are either lazy or underpaid/over-extended or both.
The programming producers of radio, television and podcasts need to step it up a notch.
This is ridiculous. We live in a country with thousands and thousands of artists and projects and there is no reason (other than casual semi-conscious sleepwalking through your job descriptions) for us to be learning of 3 or 4 new projects when we could be discovering 40 or 50.
And while we're on the subject I would like to report that having just promoted a production of my own, I was repeatedly amazed at the degree to which coverage I read in newspapers or online sites simply repurposed entire paragraphs from our press releases with zero editorial input.
This is all yet more evidence of the fact that we have allowed our media outlets to be starved to near extinction.
One of the many workshops I've offered over the years to playwrights and screenwriters is a weekend intensive called Cracking the Producers Code. The goal of the 11-hr crash course is to arm script writers with some of the most important questions a producer will ask as she gets acquainted with your script and thereby comes to see it as more than a script but actually a property.
What do we mean by "property" in this context?
Something that can inspire the public to purchase tickets and thereby form an audience for the work. When talking to distributors or foreign sales agents regarding a small indie film, the most common question any writer/director will have to contend with is: Who is the intended audience for this film?
Most people who read between the lines of any one of my course descriptions understand a fundamental core of my approach to empowering writers.
I believe that writers are some of the most mistreated taken-for-granted unappreciated artists on the planet.
And because of this fact (and it is a fact) most of the structures that hold our theatrical ecosystems together are built on the assumption that writers are a dime a dozen and anyone who produces your work is doing you a huge favor.
Of course the opposite is true; writers do the world a huge favor every time we put pen to paper.Sadly, most writers (myself included) who are fortunate enough to ever write something remotely commercially successful generally don't recognize this fact until it's way too late for them to make requests or demands remotely in line with that value. This pattern continues from generation to generation for reasons which are deeply important and alarming and beyond the scope of this post.
Suffice it to say, the world is built with countless hidden (and not so hidden) signs which say to writers:
Yet month after month I find myself starting out to compose the RT Inner Circle E-Notes with the clear intention of sending out something light and breezy and easy on the eyes.
And month after month I fail.
Why might that be?
I have some theories.
Because I'm weaning myself from all social media (I decoupled from Facebook after the 2016 election and have occasionally wondered whether I'd made a marketing mistake and so have allowed people to promote my workshops on the platform with serious reservations and angst). Twitter remains a mystery to me. LinkedIn, as I've said before, feels like the Cinderella to the wicked step sisters of social media (FB & Twitter) in that it's more transparent, less sexy and therefore gets most of my attention. Despite the fact that I don't know how many of you actually go there.
So every time I set out to send information about things I think are important in the world of theatre and filmmakers (including but not exclusively limited to workshops of my own) I feel a kind of burden cause I doubt folks are stumbling upon posts of mine on social media.
So that I think contributes to my unconscious need to put every possible dish on the menu on the table. Just in case. God forbid the one person who doesn't eat meat or gluten forgets that I always prepare a rice veggie medley no matter what.
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.
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.
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 itand 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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