EXTRA CRITICUM

REPOST: Attention Playwrights: That Monologue Does Not Belong to You

This post originally appeared in September 2021. Reposting now in conjunction with:

2022 Hear Me Out Monologue Fest - Nov. 25 & Dec. 5

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Advanced Monologue Workshop. Dec. 12, 17, 21 and 28

 

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

The 3rd Annual Hear Me Out Monologue Competition Finalist Winners will be presented over two nights this year: Nov 25 and Dec. 5.

Writing Requires Listening... to everyone including yourself.

Although people looking for a writing teacher often find their way to me, the truth is I don't know that writing itself is something that can be taught. The skill of good (or great) writing starts with listening. Listening to the deepest part of you where the truth of your intentions lives. Sometimes there's a lot of noise coming between a writer and the successful execution of the idea. 

Common Sources of Distracting Noise Coming Between You and Your Vision

Imagine you need to write a synopsis of your latest screenplay. What might be some of the most unhelpful sources of noise, noise that distracts you from effectively coming up with great language to describe your new screenplay? Here are some examples of noisy voices that live inside your head and keep you up at night.

There's nothing original about your ideas.

Nobody is going to want to see this.

You better not get too specific or you'll scare off half your audience.

Your work on this latest script has taken a lot out of you and people need to understand that.

If I was really talented I wouldn't have to waste time writing marketing copy. There would be an army of professionals rushing in to do it for me.

My original impulse for starting this project dominates my view and keeps me from seeing just how far I veered off of my original idea.

I'm not honestly sure what this movie is going to be about in the end.

Someone in my writers group told me I must not forget to emphasize X, Y, or Z.

My Approach to Teaching Writers Starts With You

I have no interest in teaching you how to write like me. Nor do I imagine you want to write like anyone other than yourself. So, the primary focus when I work with a writer is always digging our way down until we uncover your deepest goal for whatever project you've brought to the RT Private Studio.

It all comes down to listening. I listen carefully to what's on your pages as well as what's not on those pages. And eventually a picture of an artist (you) comes into view. My job is to help you see what I see at the core of everything you write.

Now through Thanksgiving Day, Enroll in Advanced Monologue

Dec 12, 17, 21 and 28.

“So many playwriting development opportunities focus on the forest rather than the trees, leaving playwrights stranded with a solid idea but the inability to communicate it effectively. Roland sees every tree in the forest and meticulously helps playwrights communicate precisely and artfully.”
— Laura King, playwright

“No one understands the fundamental engine that drives all monologue better than Roland Tec. His vast experience as a theatre maker and as a filmmaker give him a unique ability to keep any writer honest. Study with Tec and inevitably you’ll begin to understand your own work better than you ever have.”
— Jared Katsiane, filmmaker

“I performed my monologue that night and I heard the laughter and immediately felt relaxed and focused. I emailed a link to the YouTube to a friend and he asked: ‘Where did you get that audience?’  I got it from Roland.”
— J. Lois Diamond, playwright

FULL SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION INFO

The Recent Hadestown Kerfuffle Only Proves One Thing: "It's 2022 and still... we are all just a little out of sorts."

Read full article

How ready are we for live performance as we used to enjoy it? We're circulating a very short survey. Please take 3-5 min. to answer a handful of key questions about your feelings in the fall of 2022.

Oct 2022 Live Performance Comfort Survey

 

 

The Roland Tec Inner Circle Transitions to a Patreon Membership Tier

As I thought about whether to move the RT Inner Circle to Patreon I had to stop and think about everything I'd been producing, presenting, performing or hosting over the past few years. 

Would the offerings stack up and strike all of you as worth it?

Patreon offers artists a reliable revenue stream (albeit a modest one) by inviting members of the artist's sphere of influence to make a monthly financial contribution to the general health and well-being of the artist and by extension everything they create and offer to the world each year. 

It's a tiered model so, those most casually affiliated contribute something you may hardly notice. In our case we set the lowest tier at a $3 monthly contribution.

$3 per month amounts to a little more than $.09 a day. Hopefully anyone who has found joy or value of any kind in any of my workshops or the Hear Me Out programming won't hesitate to join us.

I decided to simply keep the three existing benefits of RT Inner Circle membership as has been the case for free for all these years: subscription to the semi-monthly RT Inner Circle e-Notes, priority notice of contests and other submission opportunities and the exclusive RT Inner Circle Comp Ticket promo codes which allow you to pay zero at many of the online events I host.

This choice, I hope, sends a clear message:

That thing you were getting for free all this time now has a $3 price tag but no one is going to force you to jump on board. You can choose to continue in the RT Inner Circle without signing up on Patreon but I really hope you'll seriously consider enrolling at Patreon, thereby contributing to a community that chooses to honor the value of what I've been making happen for people with a small outlay of cash each month. 

 

It's never simple when something you've been getting for free is suddenly protected by a Paywall. I remember the first time I clicked to read an article in the New York Times online only to be suddenly asked if I had paid for a subscription. It felt like a betrayal.

That's the last thing I want to make you feel. So, if you wish to remain in the RT Inner Circle and avail yourself of certain opportunities, announcements and bits of professional advice contained in the e-Notes and on the YouTube channel, no one's going to be policing you, waiting to stop you.

But, some of the things I've been giving away free of charge, like Wednesday Gathering, for example, have never been free of cost to me. So, in order to continue to drop in on the occasional Wednesday, all we ask is that you set aside $36 a year for the privilege. I hope you'll agree that that's negligible compared to what it means to you to know that the gathering is here. Because of course, the Wednesday Gatherings are not a writer's workshop, like the Roland Tec Online Writers Workshop in which an instructor (me) has carefully constructed a course in order to result in a specific result (your completion of a specific goal for your work over a six month period).

As I said, before launching on Patreon, I thought it might help for me to make a comprehensive list of all the things I'd offered the community since the start of this pandemic.

Here's what I was able to remember:

Only URL You'll Ever Need to Access All Things Roland Tec on the WWW

If you're one of the dozens of folks who've emailed in frustration at not being able to locate a project, deadline, video, schedule or anything else related to a Roland Tec enterprise, you're in luck. As of today, you need only ever remember one address.

R O L A N D  T E C  U M B R E L L A  .  c o m

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.

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.

Attention Extra Criticum readers: If you do click through and read this piece on Medium, please consider taking a moment to follow me, post a comment, clap at the end or highlight text. Engagement really helps. Thanks!

Some thoughts on writing about what disturbs us (or: Please welcome our Process Moderators)

My new play A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored (which I'm currently performing on Wednesday nights) grew out of the January 6th insurrection.  My last film, We Pedal Uphill was my very personal attempt to make sense of the climate of fear which seemed to take root in this country in the months and years immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The first play of mine that was produced in New York, Bodily Function, grew out of an offhand remark made by a midlevel corporate executive about workplace morale and bathroom breaks. The comment was delivered casually, almost cynically over a brunch with friends in Boston. Maybe the fact that the man who made the comment was not a friend of mine but rather a friend of friends, kept me from asking a pointed follow-up question. And so for weeks afterward I was haunted by the values behind his remarks. And eventually found my way to a play about a woman who has reached the pinnacle of success in her career yet somehow finds herself not quite feeling what she always imagined she would.

For whatever reason, there usually is some kind of thorn or confounding riddle at the center of the scripts I write. I'm drawn to the details of how human beings cope. We are uniquely creative and optimistic animals most of the time and how we manage to overcome, work around or stumble through life's towering obstacles is, I think, where the most vivid storytelling lies. 

So it shouldn't have surprised me to find that my latest play, A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored has left some audience members feeling a kind of emotional whiplash. The piece is a kind of attempt to capture something of the tenuous relationship to truth and reality we find ourselves swimming in these days. And so the man at the center of the piece is, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator. 

It's difficult to know what to believe as he leads us from one assertion to the next, not much of it able to be held by the same single reality of one person's life. 

It turns out that after an hour of very dark laughter, distortions of the facts of our reality and the tension of an audience holding one man's future in their hands through their vote at the end of the show, people need  a few  min. to process what they've just been through. 

And you told us as much in the feedback offered online after the first three performances. 

Post-Show Process Conversations Led by Leading Thinkers in the Fields of Psychology, Government, the Arts, Sociology, History and the Law. 

Meet our First 5 Esteemed Process Moderators

A NAGGING FEELING EXTENDED THROUGH SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

This week's sold out.

But we've just added a bunch of additional dates to the schedule so if you weren't sure you were going to get in to see this unique live solo Zoom show, visit the website today and you may be in luck. The schedule has been expanded to include Wednesday nights from now through September 7th.

The following videos feature just some of the raves that have been pouring in from audience members at our first few performances. 

 

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE TICKETS

Audience Praise for A NAGGING FEELING BEST NOT IGNORED

I'm performing my latest play Wednesday nights in July at 8PM, EDT. It's a solo Zoom show because it's all about these past two years -- pandemic isolation, January 6th, social media, Zoom, fear and a social fabric's frayed edges. And believe it or not, it's also funny. Well, funny and dark. That's kinda my M.O.

Here's what audiences are saying. Oh! And if you have any intention of seeing it, you only have two more chances. Last performance is July 27th. I don't want you to miss this one and I have a hunch you might not want to either.

 

 

 

 

"Have you got a video?" vimeo.com/pinkplot/nagfeel

Have you got a video, he asked.

And then I showed him this.

Nag_Feel_3min from Pinkplot Productions on Vimeo.

/p>

And now he's bringing half his office.

#thepowerofvideo #naggingfeeling #spreadtheword #jan6july6

Why my next play had to be a solo show performed on Zoom.

In March of 2020 mankind was thrust into a new paradigm. With virtually every aspect of life squeezed, stretched and stuffed into shapes that many found virtually unrecognizable, the essence of what it means to be human was called into question. And change was all but inevitable.

Change can be painful, frightening, frustrating and uncomfortable. And so for the better part of two years everyone has to some degree found him or herself wrestling with uncertainty and a gnawing question regarding all our life choices pre-CoVid_19.

I feel that my exploration of this challenging and dangerous moment in human history absolutely calls out for a presentation within the confines of the Zoom black box theatre.

Opening 2 min. of the February 7th reading to an invited audience.

This has left us at once hungry for human connection (as the oxygen of life) and wary of it. We have found ourselves surprised by our own behavior. How many friends have expressed the same confusion regarding an acute loneliness and yearning for human connection coupled with an inexplicable paralysis when it comes to returning phone calls, emails and text messages. How odd it has been to observe oneself letting 2, 3, or more days sail by while phone messages or emails went unreturned even as we wished for nothing more than the back and forth of a chat with a friend. 

Zoom is the perfect architecture for this moment.

How'd They Do It? 2021 Hear Me Out Winning Writers Share Their Secrets: Patrick Mulcahey

Over the next few weeks 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 Ecce Mom (winner of the Silver Ear for long form monologues)

Here's what Patrick had to say about the 2021 Festival Theme: Borders.

For at least twenty years I’ve been carrying around a character and a story I didn’t know how to tell. A close friend who’s a physician told me about a patient of his (anonymous, of course) whose life ended in tragedy, and tragically alone, because her children refused to believe the illness she complained of was anything but a cover for alcoholism. Since then I entertained the vague notion I’d write something about her someday — which became the day Roland announced the theme of the next Hear Me Out Monologue contest would be “Borders.” 

 

Why did that bring the character into focus for me? I’m not sure I can explain it even to my own satisfaction. Yes, “Borders” as a theme had some political currency at the time, but I wasn’t thinking politically. In my own life I’ve always had an awareness of the boundaries we draw between each other, even — or especially — in our closest, most intimate, most enduring relationships. And when we make a conscious decision to breach those boundaries, those borders, we do so because we want to accomplish something: revelation, persuasion, a provocation to a response which may or may not be the response we want. What else is drama is made of?

 

I struggled with the writing at first. In the real-life story told to me, the woman didn’t conceal her illness from her grown children: they just didn’t believe her. I had no room for them and no way to explain their skepticism; maybe the reason I never could write it in another form was the prospect of creating a character group with no function but to be wrong.

 

So I invented another boundary, a full and fully concealed intimacy in which the character’s diagnosis was understood and appropriate measures taken. Which became another loss, another secret to tell, another border to cross. 

Watch Mulcahey's winning monologue as performed by Alley Mills at the 2021 Hear Me Out Labor Day Festival & Awards Ceremony. 

2022 Hear Me Out Monologue Competition Call for Entries.

Announcing this year's Festival Theme & Competition Prompt:

WHEN WE NAME IT

In a world in which  social norms, political systems, economic laws and the natural environment are all facing existential challenges, the language we use to describe the world around us takes on new urgency. In order to change a thing, we first need to name it.  In order to care for something or someone it matters that we name it. If we want to understand something that confuses or frightens us, first we must name it. 

Since human beings created language, the labels we assign to things, people, places, activities, relationships, complex issues, etc. etc. have influenced our view of them. There are things we carry with us throughout life that feel so important, so powerful, that sometimes we dare not name them for fear that naming them might invite them to consume us. And yet, oftentimes the act of finally naming something we’ve been living with results in a newfound freedom. And, yes, we also name people, pets, places, projects and creations. 

And sadly, these days, our choices regarding how we identify certain things can even threaten to tear apart our most treasured relationships. 

Your 2022 Hear Me Out entry must in some way refer to some naming and its impact on the characters you’re revealing. As always we hope you will find your own way into our festival theme and we do not require the use of any specific words, language or stylistic choices.  

We only ask that your character grapples with our festival theme in some way.

And remember: your monologue must introduce us to a character who is talking to another person (or group of people). Short stories and essays will be disqualified.

Click here to get started.  Early Bird Deadline June 15, 2022 at Noon.

Title treatment for: A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored

So... what do you all think? How does this make you feel? Would you buy a ticket to this thing?