EXTRA CRITICUM

Coming Out (Again)

For a long time, I would not admit to it. Sure, I budgeted, talked directors into signing on, arranged for rehearsal space, built websites, ordered postcards, bought snacks to sell during intermission, handed actors an envelope with a stipend. That’s part of being a playwright, isn’t it? There would be a point, I thought, when I passed all that off to other people, and just went to rehearsals, did rewrites, and read the program, rather than handing it out, on opening night.

If you want to bump it...go to Philly! (For the Peek-A-Boo Revue)

 Ah, Paris…home of the Moulin Rouge, the Folies Bergere, the Crazy Horse Saloon, where Josephine Baker shook her bananas, and where artists and poets chased the green fairy in the Belle Epoque and beyond…providing much art and merriment in a time that inspired this year’s Philadelphia International Arts Festival. 
 
Ah, Philadelphia, home of the world-famous Trocadero, a Victorian-era theater, once a vaudeville and burlesque house, where the likes of Gypsy Rose Lee and Tempest Storm strutted their stuff, now a performing arts center. Sister cities, indeed!

New plays a-cookin in Philly (it's a bake-off!)

Plays & Players' homestage, on Delancey St. in Center City (left)

 What’s better than a 72-hour play? Well, a 24-hour play, but then I’m hardcore.

In fact, the “bake-off” (a term used for a writing exercise popularized by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel), in which dramatists are given several “ingredients” they must incorporate into a play that has to be written in 72 hours or less, has become a popular genre-within-the-genre of live theater.

Going to "Hell" and back...in Philly

Hell was sitting on Lane Savadove’s bookshelf for years.

Savadove, artistic director of Philadelphia’s EgoPo Classic Theatre, has adapted, with EgoPo actor Ross Beschler, the Henri Barbusse 1908 novel Hell. The play will have its world premier at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, opening April 27 at the German Society of Pennsylvania, 611 Spring Garden Street, running through May 15.  Tickets are $15-$30.

“Hell, the novel, was actually handed to me years ago by an associate, just a friend who thought it fit my interests,” Savadove said. “It sat on my bookshelf for close to 8 years.”

Hallman's "Raving Beauty" sings songs of playwright, poet, lover...

 
First the important question: does being an artist in residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library  in Philadelphia (pictured at left) involve actually staying in the two 1865 townhouses where the collection resides? Because that would be very cool.

Wanamaker's Pursuit: from Philadelphia to Paris

"Meet me at the Eagle" is a Philadelphia tradition.

When I was a little girl, my mother used to take me to John Wanamaker’s department store in downtown Philadelphia. It was a special treat to go down and see the great bronze eagle in the lobby, to eat at the Crystal Tearoom, and to stop by the founder’s office…left exactly as it was the day John Wanamaker died, behind a wall of glass, the day of his death outlined in red on the office calendar. To me, Wanamaker’s was one of the things that made Philadelphia a great city. A great city should have a fine department store, a world-class symphony orchestra, beautiful art museums, and a mediocre team in the National League.

Up against the wall...for a duet

 

A short video clip of Grounded Aerial performing at a preview for PIFA in Brooklyn I think that's my head in the lower left hand corner!

Blowin' in the wind (so to speak) in Philly

I’m very excited that the city of my birth, that is, the City of Brotherly Love, that is, where the Phillies play, is having an excellent international arts festival, and I’ve been invited to write about it. I’m certainly planning on grabbing one o’those cheap buses with the free Wi-Fi and making my way 99 miles south for some of the events. I had a chance to see a sneak preview here in NYC a few weeks ago, and have been going over the festival brochure and marking it up with “got to see” and “this looks good!”

Rejection? Of COURSE it's personal!

I’m very busy figuring out ways to market and publicize Best Lesbian Erotica 2011, of which I’m the series editor. The part I like best about being editor is sending word to the people whose stories have been chosen that they are in the book…particularly if I know the person who wrote the story.

What’s not as much fun, but is also necessary, is to notify the people who didn’t get in this year. I don’t like doing it, and I don’t like getting those notes myself (particularly if I know the person sending it).

Wasser(stein) Under the Bridge?

While I meant to blog more frequently than this, the kinds of things I could blog about are also the kind of things that keep me too damn busy to blog. (And the rent is too damn high).

By “the kind of things I do,” I mean: writing plays, producing plays, helping develop other peoples’ plays, attending plays, curating a reading series, keeping up an online bulletin board with opportunities for playwrights, editing an annual fiction anthology, and by day, editing books that make your domestic and international trips more interesting and easier. (Not to mention supporting six guinea pigs, four turtles and a dragon.)

But this weekend’s Internet storm about the Wendy Wasserstein Prize (or more specifically, the choice NOT to give a Wasserstein Prize this year) reminded me that sometimes I blog.

The first Lilly of spring: women playwrights recognize themselves (as fabulous)

Five o'clock on a Monday on an overcast May day; Broken-field running down 42nd St. to get to Playwrights Horizons at the appointed time. Spring is the time when all your invites and dates get so compacted that you'd have to bend the time-space continuum to get everything in: the reading of a new play at Coyote Rep; the benefit for WOW on E. 4th St. On this overcast day I picked the Lilly.

A month ago, The Lilly wasn't even an idea; but May's also the time when nominations and awards are announced. Of the plays racking up honors and mentions, and trophies and afterlifes in the regionals, that clamoring silence you heard was when they announced the names of plays written by women. 

I'm beginning to think I do too much...

I was telling Roland just a few weeks ago that I intend to start blogging here more often, because I've got a lot of irons in the fire, pots on the stove, metaphors that need freshening. However, when you're that damn busy doing things, sometimes blogging about them slips further and further down the list.

However, there are two things that (I think) are a whole lot of fun coming up in the next week, so I am making it a point to spread the word.

First of all... (I have a friend who was an adjunct English professor who received a paper which began "firstable." It took her a few minutes to realize the student meant "first of all." And she was told NOT to grade him down for it. She lives in Canada now).

Drunken! Careening! Writers! gears up for another careening season

When I started DCW, the reading series I host at the KGB Bar back in 2004, it was in part because I missed the emerging and professional writers at The Writer's Voice, the literary arts center at the West Side YMCA where I worked for most of the last decade of the last century.

Well look who the wind blew in...long time no post, Kathleen!

But one of my (albeit tardy) New Year's Resolutions is to be a more active poster here on Extra Criticum.

I've actually been traveling a fair amount for theater lately, so I've got some posts planned for that, and I'm cross-pollinating at the moment, with a link to a post I wrote this afternoon for Frommers.com's "Behind the Guides" blog, where they let me write about my fangirl obsession with The Amazing Race, which is only the most awesome reality show EVER! 

The Way In: Kathleen Warnock

I heard voices. Not the saints, like Joan of Arc, but pretty damn close: Geraldine Page, Elizabeth Ashley, Amanda Plummer.

This was in my first post-college career, when I was working happily as a sportswriter on a newspaper in the Deep South. I always wanted to work in newspapers, and one of my favorite plays is The Front Page.

I got to see a production of it (with Terry O’Quinn in the lead) at Center Stage in Baltimore, back in the days when a college student could pay $3 and sit on the steps of the auditorium (I guess they didn’t have fire codes in those days!) Others in the cast included James Rebhorn, Patricia Kalember, and the playwright John Pielmeier as escaped convict Earl Williams. Another Center Stage production that blew me away was their Cyrano de Bergerac, with F. Murray Abraham (well before Amadeus) playing the title role, brilliantly. And with a student rush ticket, I could see touring shows at the Morris Mechanic Theatre, where I answered an ad when the company was looking for a taxi horn for the pre-Broadway run of A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. They comped me to the show, and after, I went backstage and haggled with Alexander Cohen as he tested the horn, and finally decided to buy it (and give me more tickets to the show). I believe it was the understudy horn, though I like to think Priscilla Lopez used it in her Tony-winning performance.