EXTRA CRITICUM

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.

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.

When the format is the content and vice versa. (or: you'll never escape the power of proper script formatting so run if you like you fool but in the end the show will prove this truth: when it comes to script format you can run but you can't hide.

It happens every few weeks or so, at least once a semester and definitely more than once a month. One of the scriptwriters in one of my workshops has brought in pages to read and they look like this:

STAGE BARE. MAYBE A CHEST OF DRAWERS SOMEPLACE NOT TOO NOTICEABLE. ALICE ENTERS SHABBILY DRESSED. SHE'S HUMMING A TUNE OF SOME SORT.

A: Hey, Idiots! You're all still here?

L: Yeah. What you gonna do about it?

etc etc.

Or maybe they look more like proper Dramatists Guild modern script formatting with one lone and glaring exception; the writer has chosen one element among the elements we expect to see on these pages -- stage directions, character names, dialogue, parentheticals. etc. -- and has given this familiar member of the family a new way of appearing on the page. Perhaps they've decided that ALL CAPS is not enough, they need ALL CAPS AND BOLD or ALL CAPS AND BOLD AND ITALIC or ALL CAPS AND BOLD AND ITALIC AND PURPLE.

When I was in grad school for Music Composition occasionally one of us would bring in pages of a new masterpiece that didn't look like normal music notation. 99% of the time, whatever strange visual we were taking time to explain and debate was referring to a way of making sound that was not new. Just the approach to notating it was. One of my professors Martin Boykan enjoyed such moments immensely.

After a few years, your own work might surprise you.

So on Saturday night we held a Zoom screening of my film, WE PEDAL UPHILL, a tapestry of 13 filmed stories (each in a different U.S. state).  It had been a couple years at least since I'd watched the film and I'm glad I did. I learned a lot (again) about the power of the unconscious creative brain.

I noticed a bunch of recurring images or themes or details that I  don't recall thinking about consciously when we began shooting in early 2005. That was the beginning of the second 4-year term of the George W. Bush administration. Some of us were stunned to learn that, for example, support for the Iraq War President had actually increased in Manhattan between the 2000 and 2004 elections.

What did this mean? Where were we headed as a nation? Were we destined to grow more enthralled by simple slogans aimed squarely at the fear that gripped us in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001? Would we ever be the same people we had been on September 10th of that year?

These were questions on my mind as we started out on what turned out to be an almost 3-year production and post-production period. It was raise a little cash, shoot one. Pause to regroup. Rinse and repeat. Until by the Spring of 2007 (just a few months before I'd fly to Lithuania to assist Ed Zwick as co-producer of DEFIANCE) when we'd composed a tapestry film, using 13 of the 15 short films we'd shot.

Saturday night I noticed some repeating tropes or images. For example, there seemed to be a lot of digging. Was my unconscious guiding me here? Possibly, although the Alabama piece ("We Dig a Big Hole") is inspired by actual remarks made by an Alabama state rep who introduced a bill in the state legislature to ban books written by gay authors.