Extra Criticum

How'd they do it? 2020 Finalist Winners and the 'Me & My Masks' Prompt: Michael Wells-Oakes

Over the next few days several of last year's Finalist Winners will share their process of getting from the festival prompt to a monologue they felt excited to submit to Hear Me Out Monologue Competition.

Today, we hear from:

Michael Wells-Oakes, author of "You Labor" (winner of the 2020 Silver Ear)

I wrote my monologue, “You Labor,” in answer to a question ignited by an article I’d read in The New York Times.  Pennsylvania voters, mostly male voters, working class men, supported Trump in his election and continued to support him in his presidency.   These were people I was related to, loved, went to school with, attended church, grew up with.  We had arrived such different political and life views. How?  I wanted to understand.  These were people I still loved, still knew.  I wanted to write a monologue from their viewpoint.  As closely I could, to understand and articulate what I learned and felt. 

How'd they do it? 2020 Finalist Winners and the 'Me & My Masks' Prompt: Lucy Avery Brooke and Fran Handman

Over the next few days several of last year's Finalist Winners will share their process of getting from the festival prompt to a monologue they felt excited to submit to Hear Me Out Monologue Competition.

Today, we hear from: Lucy Avery Brooke & Fran Handman

Fran Handman, author of "The Sticking Point" (winner of the 2020 August van der Becq Special Prize for Daring)

I don't think, in writing The Sticking Point, that I set out to show that Angie used the mask of the jokester to keep herself from seeing the bleakness of her existence. It was only when I read the theme of the Me & My Masks Monologue Competition that I realized that that was who Angie was and that was what she was unconsciously doing. Her mask kept her on an even, impassive keel, protected from panic, until the final moment when she realized that she was disappearing.

How'd they do it? 2020 Finalist Winners and the 'Me & My Masks' Prompt: Lizzie D. Combs

Over the next few days several of last year's Finalist Winners will share their process of getting from the festival prompt to a monologue they felt excited to submit to Hear Me Out Monologue Competition.

Today, we hear from:

Lizzie D. Combs, author of "Film Studies 101" (winner of the 2020 Bronze Ear)

I’d originally written an entirely different monologue in response to the “Me & My Masks” prompt. It’s about a bereaved, elderly woman looking back on her life, grappling with the death of her husband under the guise of discussing a lost dog (her “mask”). Close to the festival due date, I read the monologue to my husband. He liked it but challenged the subject matter. I’m decades younger than my character, and I’ve never suffered the kind of loss she’s working through in the piece. It’s a solid monologue I’m proud of, but it isn’t me. I decided to write something new.

How'd they do it? 2020 Finalist Winners and the 'Me & My Masks' Prompt: Janet Kenney

Over the next few days several of last year's Finalist Winners will share their process of getting from the festival prompt to a monologue they felt excited to submit to Hear Me Out Monologue Competition.

Today, we hear from:

Janet Kenney,  author  of  "What  I Wear Outside"  (2020  Hear  Me  Out  Finalist  Winner)When I first heard the prompt, I thought: I’m doomed. I really wanted to enter the contest because a) there was significant cash involved and, b) I’m studying with Mr. Tec at the moment and I wanted him to have a good turnout from among his students. But I had that “I’m doomed” thought because every little thought shows on my face. Always has. When I was a junior in high school, our history teacher, Miss DePietro, exhorted, begged us to ask questions if we were confused. “Except Janet,” she said. “If Janet’s confused she looks like she’s going to cry.” A friendly laugh from my classmates, a flush and a laugh from me. During my years of acting on the stage, I only had to think a thing to have my strong, fine-tuned body respond. A mask? I wish. So I did some scribbling in my notebook and, after I pushed through several vague ideas, I finally came to admit that I did have a mask: my dog, Grace, who’s snoring gently by my side as I write this.

How'd they do it? 2020 Finalist Winners and the 'Me & My Masks' Prompt: Patrick Mulcahey

Over the next few days several of last year's Finalist Winners will share their process of getting from the festival prompt to a monologue they felt excited to submit to Hear Me Out Monologue Competition.

Today, we hear from:

Patrick Mulcahey, author of "A Good Turn" (winner of the 2020 Golden Ear)

After I quit my job in November of 2019, I wanted to begin writing for stage performance again, after a hiatus of decades. My connections to theaters and theater professionals had lapsed, so I had to start over, find a new way in. A friend had turned me on to the NYCPlaywrights mailing list, where I saw contests posted. Those looked like a possible portal for a writer without contacts or referrals or an agent, so I proceeded to submit nine plays, each written to the sponsoring theaters' rules and specifications.

How'd they do it? 2020 Finalist Winners and the 'Me & My Masks' Prompt: Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Over the next few days several of last year's Finalist Winners will share their process of getting from the festival prompt to a monologue they felt excited to submit to Hear Me Out Monologue Competition.

Today, we hear from:

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro author of "Torched" (2020 Hear Me Out Finalist Winner)

When I first saw your call for submissions, I instantly was inspired to revise “Torched,” which had been in a reading by the Asian American Theater Artists of Boston as part of my evening of five monologues, “Amazingly Annoying Women.” The theme of masks is critical to a play about a multicultural dean who at first seems to be delivering a run-of- the-mill speech commemorating the performance artist Kathleen Change, who died by self-immolation. By the end of her speech we realize the dean has come with “props,” a can of gasoline and a match. She removes her dean’s mask and becomes Kathleen, the tortured political activist who torched herself on the same spot 23 years before.

How'd they do it? 2020 Finalist Winners and the 'Me & My Masks' Prompt: Lillian Ann Slugocki

Over the next few days several of last year's Finalist Winners will share their process of getting from the festival prompt to a monologue they felt excited to submit to Hear Me Out Monologue Competition.

Today, we hear from:

Lillian Ann Slugocki author of “Angelica on the Balcony” (2020 Hear Me Out Finalist Winner)
I wrote most of “Angelica on the Balcony” at a hotel, Extended Stay America, in late July-- next to a highway and a Dunkin Donuts. I had a small studio with a kitchenette, and all the doors opened the wrong way. I had an editing job, remote. I sat at a strange little desk and did my work. At 4:00 p.m., I closed the plastic blackout curtains, made a cup of coffee, and wrote. I saw her outside, with the backdrop of a gray sky. It’s cold-- masks are clipped to the railing on her balcony.

For those who have struggled with Zoom audio. Here are some helpful hints.

To those of you who've ever entered a Zoom meeting and wondered why some of us can be heard better than others, here at long last is Rolando Teco's answer to the question:

What actually makes a microphone think?

 

 

Dad would have been 102 today.

So my sister reminded me that our Dad would have been 102 today. 

Wow. And I still can't quite believe he's gone. I still dream about him all the time. Here in his honor is a blog post from 2011. Thanks, Dad, for showing me the way in so many ways.

Leon Tec says: Follow Your Heart

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.

4 new videos welcome folks to Roland Tec dot com.

Just gave the home page at Roland Tec dot com a bit of a refresher. Check out these videos.

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.

What keeps us on the edge of our seats?

What is a hit? Every writer wants one. But ask anyone to define the term and you're likely to get a confused salad of mixed vague impressions. The definition of a hit in the worlds of theatre and film it seems is even more difficult to pin down. Of course we know what it means at the Box Office. But I'm asking a different question. How the devil we get from here to there.

There's one thing I know for sure. You can't have a hit without intense audience hunger for your story.

When your audience is sitting on the edge of their seats, hanging on every beat, your show is a lot closer to a hit than a bomb.

Think about it.

How many films have you watched start to finish with a full bladder? When you find yourself running as fast as humanly possible to and from the restroom during a film or before the Act break of a play or musical it's because you don't want to miss a beat.

What sort of entertainment inspires this sort of behavior? How is it that every now and then you find yourself sitting there in that darkened theatre unwilling or unable to tear yourself away, even for a brief minute?