EXTRA CRITICUM

You conceived, nurtured, birthed and edited your baby. And now it's up to you to share it with the world.

For too many years I held onto a childish myth about show business that cost me dearly. 

The myth goes something like this:

Artists create the work.
And the marketing and PR folks promote it to the world.

To occupy yourself with the dirty business of promoting the new works
you've had a hand in creating would be unseemly and make you appear desperate.

The truth is: there never has been, nor ever will be a show, book, movie, song, or other cultural commodity that soared to popular success without the tender loving care and devotion of its original author. The fact of the matter is there never will be another living soul as fiercely loyal and devoted and confident of your original work than you. And the sooner you get comfortable with this fact of life, the easier life as an artist will be.

You see, we can waste an awful lot of time and energy waiting and hoping and wishing and praying for someone (anyone!) to show up one day displaying the same absolute confidence in the importance, the beauty and the power of your work that you do.

Once you stop holding your breath with your ear to the wind waiting for a sign, the sooner you'll be able to see and hear the genuine and more objective enthusiasm for the work that many among your team come by honestly.

For this reason alone, you should resist the temptation to convince yourself to sit out the necessary and time consuming process of figuring out a path to bigger and more passionate audiences for each particular work.

If a script lands in a forest with no one to read it, can it make a noise?

In 1922, an unknown composer who supported his family by working as an insurance man, did something audacious. He self-published a collection of songs he'd been writing over several years and proceeded to mail out complimentary copies to practically everyone of some importance he could think of. His name was Charles Ives and today, thanks to the efforts of another composer of a younger generation who championed his work, he is widely regarded as one of American music's greatest composers.

It would be easy to take this little anecdote as evidence that all we need in order to succeed is perseverance and a touch of audacity but the sobering truth is that of the hundreds of copies of Mr. Ives' 114 Songs that he sent out, most sat on desks and languished unopened for years, if not decades. Had it not been for the passion of the young composer Henry Cowell who made it his personal mission to get the establishment to recognize the great leaps of imagination made by the older man, we might never have heard much of this groundbreaking music. 

Those of us who write for the stage do so in an environment in which the discovery of something wonderful and new is well on its way to becoming nothing short of miraculous. With virtually no meaningful governmental support of our theaters, there is no place really to which a playwright can send his or her script and be assured of a thoughtful read. 

The sad truth is when you send your full-length play or screenplay to the literary department of a target theatre or the development department of an independent film production company the odds are stacked against you.

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?