EXTRA CRITICUM

3 Broad Principles Courtesy of some RT Online Writers' Scripts

Reviewing scripts for tomorrow's Roland Tec Online Writers Workshop and three common problems I see in many many early drafts caught my eye. So I figured I'd post 3 videos to explain them. 

Take a look and see if you recognize any one of these in your own work.

 

 

 

 

 

The sign reads: Welcome. You are safe here.

When Ukrainian refugees first disembark into the train station in Przemysl, Poland, the first thing they see is a huge sign that reads:

WELCOME. YOU ARE SAFE HERE.

The sign is meant to be a comforting gesture of goodwill. And for the time being it most certainly is. But if the tragic history of Europe in the last century is any indication, safety will surely ebb and flow like the tides.

When my father was in medical school in the Polish city of Vilna, the rising specter of a Nazi-fied Germany was troubling but not an immediate threat. Then in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and WWII could no longer be wished away, an unexpected thing happened to Vilna. 

It found itself suddenly the capitol of the newly independent neutral country of Lithuania. A kind of a trade off had occurred. Lithuania would be given its sovereignty and Hitler would be allowed to plow through the rest of Poland with impunity.

And suddenly Vilnius (as it was referred to in Lithuanian) found itself welcoming wave after wave of panicked Jews from Poland. They flooded into Lithuania because Lithuanian neutrality would protect them from Hitler's brutality. And they came to Vilnius referring to it as Vilna (its Polish name), perhaps also clinging to its informal nickname as "The Jerusalem of Lithuania."

In 2007 I had the rare opportunity to live and work in Vilnius for 3 months while assisting Edward Zwick in the production of the film adaptation of my mother's book, Defiance: The Story of the Largest Armed Rescue of Jews by Jews during WWII. My parents and sister Leora came to visit the set for a weekend. On my day off, Dad gave us a tour of the parts of the city that were still recognizable 70 years after he had volunteered as a waiter in the pop-up soup kitchen of the Jewish Relief Agency.

Delightfully surprising documentary on a much misunderstood figure

David Geffen is so maligned. And there's so much more to him than meets the eye. I highly recommend this documentary which opened my eyes to the depth and breadth of his contributions. Too often in this culture we have a knee-jerk negative reaction to bald ambition and ego. But consider what this larger than life figure has managed to do for the culture. It's inspiring.

In workshop, as I turn my laser focus to helping solve something in YOUR work, my own pathway to fixing MY WORK starts to take shape.

 

 

What do we mean when we speak that dreaded word "exposition" about your new play?

 

 

Everything you're explaining about your play in lengthy stage directions will eventually be made redundant by your close crafting of dialogue as the main engine of the story.

 

 

Whenever my work is about to be read, I work overtime. Here's how and why.

You're having a new play read, or part of a new play. It's a script. What is a script but a tool used by artists who make theatre or film. The artists we should always consider first, middle and last as we go about our planning are of course the actors.

Because actors are reading your script aloud rather than performing the play with full production value, the reading by definition cuts many of your creative collaborators out of the equation. Set designer? Sorry. Lighting? Nope. Composer. Hell, no. Director? Not really, if we're honest. The direction of readings of new work is actually more like a hybrid of casting and stage management.

Essentially, 90% of readings -- regardless of whether they're private, in a writers workshop or public -- are carried entirely by the actors who read your dialogue aloud.

Scriptwriters: Beware the confessional monologue.

 

 

Dear Radio, Television & Podcast Producers: Please take your jobs more seriously. Do the work.

It has become routine to see/hear/read an interview with the same book author/film director/songwriter etc. etc. on not one, not two, but 5-7 supposedly independent unique shows or columns. 

You know what I'm talking about.

Terry Gross will interview the author of X book.

Two days later I'm hearing Allison Stewart interview the same person.

Another day or two go by and--oh, look who's being interviewed again! (Will I learn something new this time?)

What does this tell us?

Producers of these shows are either lazy or underpaid/over-extended or both. 

The programming producers of radio, television and podcasts need to step it up a notch.

This is ridiculous. We live in a country with thousands and thousands of artists and projects and there is no reason (other than casual semi-conscious sleepwalking through your job descriptions) for us to be learning of 3 or 4 new projects when we could be discovering 40 or 50.

And while we're on the subject I would like to report that having just promoted a production of my own, I was repeatedly amazed at the degree to which coverage I read in newspapers or online sites simply repurposed entire paragraphs from our press releases with zero editorial input.

This is all yet more evidence of the fact that we have allowed our media outlets to be starved to near extinction.

What the hell are we prepared to do to save them?

No Words. Helen Levitt's 1948 Silent Film: In the Street Gets a Gorgeous New Score by Ben Model

Helen Levitt was a friend of the family but I only met her maybe 5 or 6 times. As it turns out she was best friends with one of Mom's close friends, also named Helen. Well, these two Helens were often falling out of love with each other and so we only saw Helen Levitt rarely. But I remember studying with astonishment one of her books of photographs of New York City street scenes. What I immediately loved about her pictures was that there was so much richness of the human experience in every shot yet they were framed and angled in a way that did not dictate how I was to feel. Like life, these photographs did not prejudge. There was room the breathe.

Take a look at this marvelous moving picture which really works a lot like her still photographs do. 

 

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.

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?

Of the 5 writers featured on tonight's lineup, 2 just changed titles. Find out why.

Titles are so important. The title of your play acts as a frame, encouraging the audience to discover connections they might otherwise miss. 

In the weeks leading up to each month's Some1Speaking presentation, I meet privately with each playwright to confirm my suspicions as to what lies at the heart of their monologue.

Next our Resident Director, Suzanne Bachner, meets with the artists for one exploratory rehearsal. In this way Hear Me Out Monologues has constructed a pipeline aimed at bringing new character studies to life and in so doing, introducing writers to new audiences by placing the objectives of the writers front and center in everything we do.

This month, something interesting happened.

Of the 5 monologues being presented tonight, 2 have completely changed titles just in the past week as each author came to recognize that the title they'd originally chosen was in some way failing to properly frame the piece they'd written.

The frame suggests ways of interpreting the work of art. So in this way, the title whispers in my ear as the house lights go down. Here are 3 examples:

Please, someone, could you show me the onramp?

Lately, I feel the things I don't know threatening to overtake the things I know for sure. (And please don't ask me about the Rumsfeldian unknown-unknowns. For those you must consult my closest friends and family.)

I have no clue how we're coming out of Pandemic Pause. Though I did just walk through a mall and a grocery store and Bloomingdales, all of which felt way more crowded than my comfort-level barometer could abide.

How are you emerging from the last year and a half?

Are you rising from a deep sleep feeling refreshed, renewed, reinvigorated?

Or are you tentative as you take your first baby steps along a slightly overgrown path, following signs that appear to read:

This way to "normal" --->

or was that:

They say go "normal" ---/

or

Which way to "normal?"

I don't know about you but I notice my mood is all over the place.