EXTRA CRITICUM

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?

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.

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.

Making new work for the world is anything but selfish. In fact, I'd argue it's an act of wild generosity.

The other day I received an email from a delightful writer, a member of one of the online writers workshops I'm now teaching. It was a really simple email but it contained one detail that leapt right out and slapped me across the face. So I knew I'd have to hop on Extra Criticum to get this off my chest.

Two of the online writers workshops I teach are winding down in the next month or so. Over the course of our months together inevitably, some workshop members write less than they'd hoped to. Others write more. And so as the final sessions approach there's always a certain amount of negotiating to try and find time to address as much new work as possible before it's time to say goodbye.  I always remind everyone at least a month ahead of time of the last session date and I make it clear that anyone who wants to claim time during our last workshop simply has to email me to say so. If we have too much work for the 2.5 hours scheduled, we'll just squeeze everyone a bit to make sure everyone's stuff gets heard and addressed.

Kia Corthron, Gary Garrison, Tammy Ryan and Sophfronia Scott on How to Reach Us in a 140-char World

Over the past several months, I've had more than one student working on a full-length play or musical that starts out seeming to be one thing only to eventually reveal itself to be something entirely different. And in each, the moment when it becomes clear that we've been toyed with, that the real story is here not back there, the shift is thrilling.

I should say that my writers workshops never banish questions of ambition. I want participants to show up with their real-world dreams for their material out in the open for all to see, up for discussion.

And, when it comes to these types of pieces, I can't help but worry a little. And so I've been wondering.

How is a writer working on material that takes more than 10 pages to reveal its true nature going to have a chance of being picked up in a world of ever-shrinking attention spans, where gatekeepers may not stick around long enough to discover the hidden treasure beyond page 19?

I put this question to four clever writers who all happen to care deeply about teaching and paying it forward for the future of our shared culture.  Here's what each of them had to say:

The Power of Monologue at this Unique Moment in History

When I decided to launch a nationwide monologue initiative I hoped that writers would be inspired by the call to take the lemons of pandemic shutdown and make some serious lemonade. I hoped. Maybe I'd say I even suspected that the 'Me & My Masks' prompt we used in our call for submissions to the 'Hear Me Out' New American Monologue Competition would inspire writers to write and send us their pieces.

Well... more than 350 submissions (from 43 U.S. States, Canada, South America, Europe, Asia and New Zealand) later, the verdict is in. Writers everywhere are ready willing and able to take hold of this unique historical moment and forge a viable path forward for making exciting theatre happen again, one talking head at a time.

And naturally, the infrastructure of this competition has been challenged by the overwhelming flood of entries. [Recently, I shared about the frustrations of having to say "no" to last-minute requests for "a few more minutes" past entry deadline.] Although I'd spent months inviting a hand-picked collection of seasoned actors, directors and writers from both stage and screen to serve on our National Circle of Judges, the circle was not going to be big enough to evaluate so many entries.

So I did what I've done since the beginning of this initiative. I reached out to some trusted leaders in the field, people like Gary Garrison, Kate Snodgrass, Faye Sholiton, Vicky Pittman, John Wooten, Paul Outlaw, Jeremy Dobrish, and Teresa Coleman Wash. And boy have they delivered!

A Writing Competition Perfectly Suited to These Pandemic Times

Anyone who tells you their adjustment to life under soshedist has been smooth sailing, A-OK, is without a doubt one of those annoying frenemies who only present the rosiest picture of themselves to the world in an attempt to psyche-out the competition. Make no mistake, life during Pandemic, life under partial lockdown is merely an approximation of life for the living because human beings need human contact to thrive. 

As a writer, I've found the past few months excruciating. Because while it may be true that writing itself is a solitary activity and actually depends upon the writer's disciplined ability to end conversations, usher guests out the door and ignore phone calls in order to actually get the requisite alone time needed to write, writers, at least those who are consumed with questions of what it means to be human (which certainly includes those of us writing plays and films), need human interaction to feed the flame. I'm inspired every day by people I work with, people I love, people I grew up with, people I share a city block with, etc. etc. And I use the word "inspired" in the most neutral sense. People offer me fascinating stuff the chew on. Being consciously separated from the unpredictable chaos of other human people's agendas for the past four months has driven me to a place called Zoom.

"Ain't" & "Fuckin'" - 2 Common Tells of Street Dialogue Written by Upper-Class Hacks

I've been catching up on some "must-view" watching from this golden age of television and have discovered a new intense pet peeve. Dialogue written for characters who are working class, poorly educated, or non-white that has obviously been written by some rich white kids who have a pretty shallow notion of what people of "less privileged" backgrounds sound like.

Look out for these 2 tells as you binge watch TV shows that feature anyone working with their hands or their genitals or outside the law.

Robert McKee is So Much More Than I Imagined Him to Be

All filmmakers know his name. It's virtually impossible to have written a screenplay in this country (or any other, for that matter) without having come across the name Robert McKee because it is McKee who towers over all of us, or the idea of McKee, an omniscient master analyst of any story told on screen. As we write our screenplays, it's almost impossible to ignore the nagging fear whispering from within. The fear that when the film is finally made and screened and (God willing!) released in movie theatres, McKee might see it and emerge from the darkened theatre shaking his head in disbelief at the multitude of glaring failures of storytelling on display.

As I was making ALL THE RAGE, which I adapted from my stage play A BETTER BOY, I wondered what McKee might make of my radical reworking of the story's structure, specifically, the last 15-20 min. of screen time, which departed radically from the play's resolution. I uprooted what had been the the last 25% of my protagonist's journey to construct an end that really landed 180-degrees from where the play had arrived. What's amazing to me, looking back on it, is that somehow without ever having read McKee's books or taken his world-famous workshops, I'd managed to absorb one major point he's been making about storytelling for the last thirty years: the relationship between the audience and a story's protagonist is essential to a story's power to move us and engineering that relationship is delicate surgical work that demands our undivided attention.  Turn away from that question for even one moment during the crafting of a screenplay and... well, good luck selling more than a dozen tickets.

An Oldie But Goodie for Playwrights and Screenwriters

I'm embarrassed to have to say I forget which teacher first taught me this old trick. If you're out there and reading this, please forgive me for not giving credit where credit is due. But this is a tried and true little exercise every writer of scripts ought to do every few years just to be sure we're firing with all pistons, as they say.

Take two pages of one of your plays or screenplays and print them out. Now white out all the character names. 

A Farewell to Dave

In 1980, I was working as a temp in the offices of NBC. A TV screen hovered above my desk, playing the daytime shows. David Letterman was (briefly) on daytime then, until he landed his first late night gig two years later. His acerbic and witty brand of humor was clearly not meant for daytime. We are used to him now, and his style of humor, but he was an original. The thought of Larry "Bud" Melman still makes me laugh. He and his staff invented the Top 10 List. "Dave" has been part of my entire adult life, from age 22, just as Johnny Carson was part of my entire childhood. We aren't friends. We have never met. I have rarely even watched his show in recent years. But 34 years is a long time to remain a familiar presence, glowing pixels through the TV screen or emanating light from the laptop, 5 nights a week - a bastion of comfort in this fast-paced ever-changing world. So I will watch Dave's final show tomorrow night. And It will bring back a flood of memories from the past 34 years. And I will miss him.

Dennis Danziger on Amy Friedman's visit to Katie Couric's show

Really fun piece about EC pal Amy Friedman's long journey to appear on Katie Couric's daytime talk show to discuss her marriage to a prisoner and her wonderful memoir, Desperado's Wife.

 

"Girls" and the sitcom fantasy of being rescued from yourself

Girls is the antithesis of the modern sitcom, most notably in the way it depicts sex as awkward and only intermittently satisfying — as opposed to the happy, off-screen "banging" that's talked about on shows like How I Met Your Mother and is only occasionally disrupted by cute-as-a-puppy instances of impotence. This week's second-season finale closes with a skewed take on a romantic comedy cliché, as Adam responds to a phone call of distress from Hannah by dashing out of his apartment at night without a shirt on, taking the subway to her place, breaking down her front door, and lifting her out of bed in his arms.

The lowered expectations in binge-watching TV shows

You might think that binge-watching a TV series, or going through an entire season in one day, is a sign that the series is really good. That is, each episode is so satisfying that you can't wait to get to the next one.

But TV critic Jaime Weinman, in contemplating Netflix's decision to put all 13 episodes of its original series House of Cards online on the same day, suggests that binge-watching might be a way of managing expectations: