EXTRA CRITICUM

Still Fighting My Most Unhelpful Inner Skeptics

So I started working on a new play not so long ago and decided to gather some of my favorite members of the RT Inner Circle to hear me give it a read and see what's what. It's a solo Zoom play and for now at least, while I figure out what shape I want it to take, I'm reading/performing it myself.  Because the play is a kind of response to the January 6th Insurrection I had the inspired idea to schedule its first reading for 1PM, Thursday January 6th, exactly one year to the hour when the angry mob breached the Capitol. 

On Monday, riding a wave of confidence after a particularly good day of writing, I hit SEND on an email to the Inner Circle inviting folks to preregister for the private Zoom meeting which I decided to frame as a lunchtime first read. Within less than 24 hours I heard from a significant number of folks begging me to pick another day due to various prior commitments, many related directly to efforts to mark the historic anniversary.

As often happens with me, on the first whiff of complaint hitting my InBox I began to consider moving the date. And I fell right into seriously unproductive self talk along the lines of:

What were you thinking?

Who do you think you are offering people barely enough lead time?

Could you possibly have handled this any more poorly?

And those thoughts quickly morphed into:

What do you think is so great about this piece anyway? 

If it possibly just belongs in a drawer you might be better off saving yourself the humiliation. 

Maybe its best you cancel the thing entirely.

I got myself so tied up in knots over it that the only thing I became certain of was that with each passing hour, there was little to no chance in hell I was going to be able to perform the thing. 

I wrote an email apologizing for the inconvenience and letting folks know I'd be looking for a better date since so many had complained about the inconvenience of January 6th.

Almost within minutes of my hitting SEND on the correction about 10 people emailed asking if it was too late to register for Thursday's play reading.

Arrgh! I wanted to scream. But instead of screaming I let the anger and frustration turn inward as I told myself I must really be wearing out my welcome with members of the RT Inner Circle. 

I was just about to move the date  to January 18 or 19 when Suzanne, my director, asked if I really wanted to start something new with Mercury in retrograde. 

Without really quite knowing what that meant, I heeded her advice and picked Monday February 7th also at 1PM, EST. 

And now, looking at my calendar recognizing that I have just stumbled into 3 weeks of extra lead time, I find myself having to consciously resist with every fibre of my being the urge to trash the whole thing and start the play over from page 1.

However I will say this: I had the main character's journey moving in one shape and as of this writing I decided that he needs to end the hour in a completely different emotional and moral position than what I'd originally mapped out for him.

So, I suppose if I end up pleased with this absolutely fundamental revision to the piece I will only have one person to thank: my deeply neurotic and fearful inner child.

Any writer who's taken one of my workshops knows how relentless I can be in reminding anyone who'll listen to please never make the mistake of stopping the initial writing of a first draft to consider the first few pages.  And, like an idiot, I recently did that before I had properly fleshed out the last scene of the play. So I am here to fess up to the magnetic power of this, to acknowledge just how tempting it can be to stop, turn to page 1 and take stock of what we've got so far. 

The moment I noticed that I had sort of started to do this on this play, I really had to make a conscious effort to very intentionally write my way free of that burden. How did I manage to write and escape the crushing silence of having just taken a peek under the hood of scene one?

I told myself I had to write at least two completely different paths to the finish line. And by doing so, by giving myself an assignment that contained within it the absolute certainty that at least one of my solutions would end up tossed into the circular file, I was able to shrug off the crushing burden of wanting desperately to insure that whatever I might be creating would eventually find its way to absolute brilliance.

There is no greater enemy to a writer's creativity and productivity than the determination that for whatever ego reason, this piece you're working on must be brilliant. Once I tell myself I'm just playing with ideas, just writing something cause I want to have it laid out. Period. Then the real work can begin. And it happens in my peripheral vision when it might seem as though no one at all is even looking. 

If you're wishing you could join us Feb 7th to hear this first draft of a play I'm tentatively calling Now is the Time For All Good Men to Rise to the Aid of Their Country, you should join the RT Inner Circle. It's free and painless and you may unsubscribe whenever you like. 

A December Tradition: The RT Holiday Email Stuffer

As the end of the calendar year approaches, members of the Roland Tec Inner Circle are treated to my longest email of the year full of cultural content and career opportunities for anyone who cares deeply about the performing arts, specifically theatre and filmmaking. Here's a glimpse into this year's. If you haven't yet signed on as a member of the RT Inner Circle, membership is free, you may unsubscribe at any time and since March of 2020 (as of this posting at the end of 2021) RT Inner Circle members have saved a combined $1,250 on workshop tuition and online ticket sales. 

 

Click this Button to Sign Up Now

Recently Asked Questions re: RT Advanced Monologue (Dec. 26-28)

Registration is open for the upcoming installment of my popular workshop, ADVANCED MONOLOGUE.  And over the past week or so several questions have made their way into my InBox that have the potential to become Frequently Asked Questions so without further ado, here are a few Recently Asked Questions about the workshop and my answers.

Q: I noticed that on December 26th, the workshop begins at 4PM and runs for 2 hrs. If there's a chance I may have to miss all or part of this first 2 hour session would I still be able to participate fully?

A: The Advanced Monologue Workshop always begins with a 2-hour session followed by two 3-hour sessions on the following days. Day One is devoted primarily to an introduction to Roland Tec's theory of the case, sharing the 5 Essential Ingredients which I've always found to be present in the strongest most enduring examples of monologue. Days Two and Three then get down to the fun and excitement of you putting these principles to the test through targeted in-class writing prompts. Because all three sessions are recorded in Zoom and made available to you as a participant, you could easily miss the first 2 hours, watch the video before Day Two's session begins and not be at any great disadvantage in terms of your ability to understand and implement the approach.

Q: It says on your website that the last six hours of workshop are devoted almost entirely to participants' writing. How much of our writing will be done in class vs. at home as homework between sessions?

A: Most of the writing you'll be doing will be fast and dirty in response to targeted prompts I've developed over the years to address what I see as some of the most common problems in the generalized approach to the form.  However, you're definitely invited to take something first created in workshop and develop it more fully in the time between Day Two (Dec. 27th 5-8PM, EST) and Day Three (Dec. 28th 1-4PM)

Q: I've taken this workshop before (and loved it!). Would it be silly for me to sign up again?

A: The first 2 hours of the total 8 hours might be similar although I'm always evolving in my remarks. The bulk of this workshop is devoted to your writing in session so absolutely, I encourage people to repeat whenever they like. And, if you are planning to take Advanced Monologue for the second or third time, please first send me a private email so I can send you a repeat offender discount code!

visit RolandTecTeaching.com for more info.

My RT Inner Circle Emails are way too long. What should I do?

It's a problem.

I know it.

I don't deny it.

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.

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

My How These Limits Can Set You Free. Join me for Advanced Monologue Weekend Oct 1-3.

You write for the theatre. That pretty much guarantees that you are like me in at least one respect. You stand or sit in a darkened theatre as the curtain goes up on your latest play and every fibre of your being is tense as you wait for the verdict to come in. Did you manage another bullseye aimed squarely at the universal truths of human nature or did you miss slightly, just enough that the people sitting all around you in the dark, your audience, are not buying the characters you're selling.

Sounds stark but you know it's generally that simple. With each passing moment of the play you've written, you (perhaps with more certainty than any other member of the creative team) you know whether you've hit or you've missed your mark. It's the playwright who cannot help but grimace and sweat at the first false note, at the first sign of a play shaped more in the head than in the heart, or to put it even more plainly, the difference between the words on the page and the lives on the stage.

So when the pandemic hit, it hit you right where you live because in an instant you found yourself cut off from your oxygen supply. Without the barometer that is a living breathing audience, the script writer is left to make her best guesstimates based on experience with characters and circumstances similar to the current one but not identical.

How Zoom Forced us to Build Back Audience Better (One Unmuted Microphone at a Time)

In the Spring of 2020 as a pandemic rose to take center stage, theatres everywhere shuttered in the face of clear evidence that crowding indoors with hundreds of people could cost us our lives. 

So, what did we do, ever-resourceful artists that we are?

For the most part, we took our theatre to the Zoom box. 

Only pretty quickly I noticed a problem.

Several times during the first 7- 8 months of Pandemic Pause I found myself attending a reading of a play written by a friend who I know to be extremely talented.

Yet the plays felt stale.

Without exception these Zoom readings of new plays were falling flat. Hardly a moment felt alive. In fact, I'd argue, plays were being killed by the Zoom platform.

Why?

It took me a few weeks before it suddenly dawned on me.

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.

Hear Me Out 2021: Submissions Are Already Pouring In. The Why and the How and the What For of Deep Diving into Monologue Writing... Again and Again (and again).

Last Spring as the possibility that CoViD19 lockdown might eat up more than a month of 2020 turned gently into probability, then undeniable certainty, I noticed something interesting. Those of us who have a hand in the creation of film and theatre--of entertainment in the form of stories that unfold before a live audience--we were all showing clear signs of cabin fever. Playwright friends were having readings of new and old work. Actors were gathering to perform sonnets. Songwriters were grabbing their guitars, logging onto Zoom and sharing stuff. 

It was exciting. And healing. We needed that. We needed to connect and to reaffirm what it is we do best. 

But there were problems. For one thing, Zoom is a pretty sorry substitute for actually being there. [Look for my upcoming argument: Zoom: Fear her not. But pity her a little bit. She'll never convince us that nothing's lost.] When it comes to live theatre, the most obvious problem is that no two actors can ever really make eye contact via webcam.

RT Action Network Member: William Ivor Fowkes

In early 2020 I began an experiment in mutual cooperation and career accountability. I'd noticed that many of the creative folk in my workshops had to contend with a lot of fear, uncertainty, indecision and isolation and that all these were undermining what should have been a steady forward momentum in their careers. These were seriously talented people who more often than not found themselves slightly paralyzed by not knowing which next steps for a given project made the most sense. I've always believed that when we form coalitions when we offer help to friends we respect and enjoy, everyone benefits tremendously. So I started the Roland Tec Action Network. Based on the simplest premise: going it alone is ten times as difficult and feels lousy too. Each month the 9 members of RTAN meet for a Saturday morning accountability and business brainstorming session. Members are encouraged to share whatever's challenging them most that day. And a couple weeks later we gather on a Friday evening to share work and further bond as artists. Now, the accountability part of this equation has a new home online in a private forum that allows members to post project goals each month and solicit the input of colleagues. In April, RTAN celebrated its first year of existence. And I decided to ask the current members what the Action Network has meant for each of them. For the next few weeks I'll be posting some of their answers. 
- Roland Tec

William Ivor Fowkes

Having a monthly meeting at which we were held accountable for taking the steps we committed to at the previous meeting

New Remastered Demo Tracks for The Curse of Batvia

I'm really happy to have finally taken the time to organize the best versions of the songs that make up the musical THE CURSE OF BATVIA so that they now live in one online playlist for anyone considering producing this silly scary and slightly insane little show. Katherine Burger wrote the book and lyrics and I composed the music. It was fun to collaborate with a wordsmith who is also a musician and shares my passion for dissonance as a theatrical spice. I'm very proud of this baby of ours. And hope one day soon it will be produced.