Extra Criticum

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.

I keep getting asked about WE PEDAL UPHILL. I think it's really resonating for folks so I've decided to screen it online February 20th

I think it first came up in one of my online writers workshops when Kate Weiman asked if I could share a bit about how the film came into being...where and how it all began, what I wrote first, what we shot first. I was happy to explain that after volunteering on the John Kerry Presidential Campaign and coming face to face with truly criminal tactics on the ground in Florida in the days leading up to the election, I was despairing.

When I told my then producing partner Chris Arruda of my absolute fear that the country I loved (the chosen home of my immigrant parents) was in danger of turning toward darkly undemocratic impulses, he answered the way the best collaborator would.

Why don't you write about it? See what comes up.

Overspecialization has been choking our culture for decades. CoViD_19 offers us a way out of this mess. A way to take back our agency as people who write new plays.

 

Pandemic Pause has taught us many things. Sometimes I think hardly a week goes by without some lesson arriving at my feet. And as I live alone, I feel a responsibility to bend down and pick it up. Take, the business of playwriting, for example. 

I bet if I were to poll all the playwrights on my "inner circle" email list and ask them for a job description, we'd get a lot of talk of drama, the blank page, dialogue, script format, etc. etc. And the American ones at least, would take pains to steer clear of anything remotely related to the directing, designing or performing of their scripts. Heck, many of my friends who are playwrights wouldn't dream of allowing their new play to premiere without first consulting a trusted dramaturg. I remember during my tenure at the Dramatists Guild hearing Mr. Edward Albee on more than one occasion rant against the American Theatre's conspiracy to convince playwrights that they needed help writing their plays.  I must say I always enjoyed that rant and felt he had pretty much nailed it. 

But the problem lives in all corners of life and work in the 21st century and it's literally killing us. It's gotten so completely virulent.

The Fuel Getting Me Through Pandemic Pause is You

It's taken me a good six months but I think I've finally landed on one of the most effective antidotes to Pandemic Pause Malaise. Since March my teaching activities have slowly increased week by week by week. And in a less direct way, perhaps almost unconsciously, I've been increasing the various opportunities for encountering the creative work of colleagues. 

Some of you have joined us for the monthly celebration of monologue we call Some1Speaking. It's been one of the most important means of staying sane for me. And it wasn't until last night when we heard some amazing work from John Yearley, Sara Israel, Sherry Friedman, Alonzo Lamont and my dear old pal from the days of Naked Brunch, Mr. Rick Park. Rick's piece, by the way, closed out the hour with a riveting performance by a Minneapolis-based actor I'd never met before,  Andre Shoals. Wow. So, yeah, one of the things that keeps me sane these days is the work itself. It's inspiring to hear writers like Yearley and Israel who are really working at the top of their game.

And then the other thing that's huge for me is the warm fuzzy feeling I get when I can see first-hand that simply making the space for this is having an impact. Now, more than ever, I feel we artists need each other. We need to see and hear each other and be reminded of others who, like us, may occasionally fall into deep dark despair but manage against all odds again and again to sit down and make new work.

When I see you creating something powerful it renews my faith in my own ability to do the same.

That's why, as it became clear that this Thanksgiving was going to contribute to bigger hotter fires of infection all across the country, I knew what I had to do. I had to make room in my week for more opportunities to bump up against your new work.

And so from now through the end of February (at least), I'll be hosting a free online Wednesday Gathering from 8PM to 9PM, EST. This will be a kind of open mic but I really hope that visual artists will join us too. Take 5 min. to show us some slides or film or just talk about your practice. We'll gather weekly and in so doing, I have no doubt, we'll each, in our own way emerge renewed and energized.

For security reasons, if you want to join us, you'll need to sign up in advance. Please join the circle.