Up is Down, Black is White

Feel like America has fallen Through the Looking Glass?

Me too.

Anyway.  

Whenever you're talking to, emailing, faxing, writing to, or protesting at your senator or representative on the latest Outrage du Jour, please remember to mention NEA funding too.  The National Endowment for the Arts supports all sorts of art - it's especially important in getting arts into the countryside and into smaller towns, where students (or adults) wouldn't otherwise have art funding at all.  

My personal experience of NEA support comes mostly from Kitchen Dog Theater, where for five consecutive years (the only Texas theater who can say this!) we have received national funding for our New Works Festival.  

New plays by living American writers!

If you do feel moved to write your congressional folk, you're welcome to use this postcard:

Please feel free to use - print at 4 1/4" x 6" on card stock

This year will be Kitchen Dog's 19th New Works Festival.  In our time we've produced 26 world premiers of new plays and 125 staged readings of new works.  That's NEW work by living writers.

Please help us - and all those other artists that count on it - by helping the NEA.

Kitchen Dog Theater's PUP FEST Today

Come celebrate 15 years of PUP Fest today as we launch 5 new high school playwrights into the world! Today at 1 and 4- totally free at Booker T!! Please spread the word!!

JUN11

TODAY at 1:00 at Booker T. Washington H.S.

Reading Playscripts

Lately I've been helping read new play submissions.

For those who plan on submitting your work to any theater company for any competition, here are a few suggestions - just personally, from me to you, as a help - but let's call 'em "Rules" because that sounds so much more important:

SUBMISSION FORMAT:
1)  Follow competition rules: the deadline is the deadline.  And if the theater says they recycle rather than return submissions, don't include a SASE.  (Stamped And Self-addressed Envelope.)
2)  Don't print in funny-color ink.  Just black.  No hard-to-read-fonts.  Go for neat and legible.
3)  Even if it sounds cool, don't publish your playscript in magazine or book form or as a music video.  Or illustrate it.  A plain ol' paper script is best (or a PDF if that's requested or whatever).

Public domain images messed with.

THE SUBMISSION:
4)  Weirdness might hurt you.  Not that you can't submit a good, weird play - please do!  But naming characters all numbers makes a hard read.  Dressing a character as a toaster had better, you know, work.  Your MS is being pulled from a pile of weird-and-terrible competition - you see the danger?
5)  Don't bore.
6)  Or disgust.  This play could be performed by real people for real people.  Impossible-to-perform or impossible-to-watch scenes of sex, violence, or nastiness makes your script impossible.  Like treating puppies or little children badly.  (Real kid, remember?)  Not that you can't be edgy...  But edgy theatre is different from icky theatre.
7)  The merely physically impossible might be... possible.  But easy to stage is a plus.
8)  My personal corollary to Rule # 6: don't try to shock the reader.  By the time they get to your MS, the reader has read pretty much everything you can think of (and then some!) and is no longer shockable.
9)  It's nice if you write a play.  You know, maybe a plot, dialogue, action, a beginning, a middle, an end... and a point.  Characters.  (Nice if these differ from each other and are, perhaps, something like real people.)  Extra points if it's more like a stage play than a movie.
10)  Write a good play.

All rules can be bent to accomplish Rule # 10.

Play Writing

Yesterday  I took part in a play-writing workshop led by Vicki Cheatwood at the MAC.  (The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, for those of you who haven't yet visited its art galleries or theatrical performances.  Whatcha waiting for?)

This was my first writing workshop.

I've been part of writers' groups before, including the Dallas Screenwriters' Association - a great group, truly helpful and welcoming, with good speakers and resources.  (Alas, I decided I'd never develop a thick enough skin for the movie biz.)  But yesterday was my first time actually writing in the same room with other writers.  Fun.  Educational.  Oddly comforting to see others trying to do similar things.  Vicki's voice-of-experience was useful.  She had good advice especially on the utility of using writing prompts which, till now, I'd always ignored just like the questions at the back of the chapter - you know the ones.

Vicki gave us a series of suggestions to kick-start short writing exercises.  My favorite was probably the one where each of us wrote a sentence about ourselves; from these sentences, we each chose someone else's to spark a monologue.  (I'll stick my result on at the end of this post in case you're curious.)

Writing from any (fairly random) suggestion gets the creative brain in gear.  By the time I left I was bubbling with ideas!  As soon as I got home I had to sit at my desk.

Mind you, what I actually created there was drawing and architecture, rather than progress on The Big Writing Project...

Believed public domain image.  If it's yours, please let me know!

But that's a personal problem.

There are more play-writing sessions coming up - join in!  Info HERE.  My best-of-session writing?  (Please keep in mind, this was written quickly and I'm not tidying it up.) (Much.)

Monologue:  

143, 144... Boring, boring. Boring. Copying. What's the copier say? 147, 148... Of 300. And that's just the fourth page. Of 25. Oh what a...

No. Not boring. Glorious. Outside this soulless white(ish) copy room it is a glorious spring morning. Wouldn't you think there could be a window in here? But no... 

Yet it is a wonderful morning.

(Begins to sing.)"Oh!What a wonderful morning!

Oh! What a wonderful day!

I've got a wonderful feeeeeling...  

(Begins to dance.) Everything's going my..."

Shit. Hi, Steve. Sure. You can run your copies. 

297, 298, 299, 300.

I talk to myself and sing and dance in the copy room... and I'm usually interrupted.*

*Thanks to the anonymous fellow workshop attendee who wrote this sentence.  I had fun with it.  If I knew who you were, I'd gratefully credit you.  Thanks also to the organizers of this workshop and its leader!

Attention Aspiring Playwrights!

Here's a press release with your names on it: Kitchen Dog Theater, ScriptWorks and TeCo Theatrical Productions,in association with The Dramatists Guild of America, are excited to present the DFW Playwrights' Forum,  a series of quarterly free playwriting workshopsfor the DFW community. This exciting new opportunity will provide aspiring local playwrights a chance to work with local and national luminaries Vicki Caroline Cheatwood, Eugene Lee and Will Power in an informal, intimate setting.   "The purpose of the forum is primarily to foster a sense of community among DFW playwrights, emerging or otherwise, and to raise awareness about the work of the Dramatists Guild of America", says Teresa Coleman-Wash, Executive Director of TeCo Theatrical Productions and DFW Regional Rep for The Dramatists Guild of North Texas. "Kitchen Dog Theater, as a founding member of The National New Play Network and long time champion of new work in North Texas, is always looking for more ways to actively engage our local writers", says Co-Artistic Director Tina Parker. "This exciting new partnership provides an accessible avenue for that and we hope will further develop the already high caliber of works/writers generated from DFW". ABOUT THE WORKSHOPS Workshop with Vicki Caroline Cheatwood  - Sunday, April 21 at 11am at Kitchen Dog Theater at The MAC, located at 3120 McKinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas 75204.  Workshop with Eugene Lee - Saturday, August 24 at 12pm at Jubilee Theatre, located at 506 Main Street, Ft. Worth, Texas 76102 Workshop with Will Power - Wednesday, October 16 at 6pm at Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, located at 6101 Bishop Avenue, Dallas, Texas 75275 All workshops are FREE and open to the public but advance reservations are required as spaces are limited. To reserve a spot, send an email totwash@dramatistsguild.com .

Living Playwrights

As a theater set designer I've been lucky enough to get to work on several plays-in-progress with several actual breathing playwrights.

Strangely enough, they don't usually say much more to me about sets for their shows than the dead ones do.

This is partly because the playwright writes into their script whatever they feel strongly about as a scenic element - and then whatever doors or furniture the writer envisions are required or implied by the play's action.  The "look" and the details for any particular production are then left to the director's and designer's discretion.

Even when a living playwright is in rehearsals and actively rewriting the play, they seldom make much comment on the proposed set as it's being designed and discussed.  The set is still in the director's purview.  The etiquette, I suppose, is that if the playwright really hates something scenic, they'll have a quiet word with the director, who might pass on the criticism to the designer.

Generally the only opinion I hear from the playwright is praise at the Opening...  Mostly this has sounded sincere, I think.  Once in a while it's clear that the playwright is genuinely thrilled by a production and maybe the set too: that's wonderful.

Kitchen Dog Theater - where I'm a company member - specializes in new works, so I've been especially fortunate to work on world premiers, to sit in on read-throughs and rehearsals, and to talk with several real live playwrights!  Right now I'm working on the new play Ruth, whose playwright is also a company member.  It's fascinating to hear back-story and author's reasoning or intent for things in the script.

The occasionally difficult part of having a living playwright - from the designer's point of view - can be that sometimes, in modifying this work-in-progress-play, the writer will change or add locations.

Savvy playwrights have a good notion of what's feasible to put on stage (at the likely budget) and they'd never add a new, scenicly demanding location late in the process, but I was once startled by one who told the theater company the script had changed (they didn't realize it was being revised!) and a big scene had been added: a character spontaneously combusting in a brand-new-to-us outhouse!

My whole set (a complete house with swamp) had to shift stage left in a hurry to make room for this exploding outhouse.

It was a cool effect though.

Color sketch for the set at WaterTower Theater

See the stand of reeds on the far left of the drawing? (Stage right.) That's where the outhouse ended up.

The actress (the "bad" sister) went into the rustic outhouse; spontaneously combusted, with flame-colored light and smoke leaking from the plank door; came out again, now looking ashy and wearing a singed feather boa; met the Devil (in a nice suit) on a little bridge over the swamp, whose water lit redly and bubbled as if boiling (a very cool effect); and was led away, protesting comically.  

Funny stuff. I didn't mind moving the set for it.

(How'd we "boil" the swamp?  Easy.  Red pool lights and a garden soaker hose - the kind with tiny holes in it - through which air was pumped.)

Honestly

Some playwrights make it hard to design much of a set.

Either they set their story in yet another default living room - which can be designed well, of course it can - but seriously?  How many good, different, nuanced present-day living rooms does any designer have in them?

Or the playwright picks somewhere so impossibly big, grandiose, or detailed that few performance spaces or budgets can handle it well.  Or too many scene changes ditto.

Or they pick somewhere... visually boring.  Recently it was a soccer field.  Flat.  Green.  Grass.  (Grass if the budget allows anyway.)

Reason for this mini-rant?  A reviewer objected to my giant leaves/clouds as too fanciful for a soccer field.  Because there are (and this is very true) no trees on soccer fields.  Of course the playwright actually describes a soccer field with autumn leaves...

Sigh.

Playwrights.  Please consider setting your stories in locations with both some fresh visual potential and some possibility of a reasonable budget.  Personally, I think these might be interesting settings and some have been used a few times:

A garage, either residential or a repair shop; a retail store (that doesn't need too much stock displayed); a basement rec. room, possibly taken over by the computer game obsessed teen; a tool shed and garden; a fishing cabin; inside a camper; a circus tent or sideshow; inside a warehouse, the kind with tall racks and rolling ladders and dollies; inside a huge storm drain, a la Ninja Turtles' hideout; a computer room with banks of CPUs and lift-up floor and ceiling panels; a steam room; a ship's engine room; a teachers' lounge; a Las Vegas bar; the crawl space under an old house and the kitchen above; maybe an attic room and on top of the roof outside the window; an artist's studio; a space ship; a dorm room; a nursing home bed-sitting room; the bottom of a tenement light-well and/or its communal laundry room...

Public domain image of computer room from Clker.com

Don't one or two of these locations just cry out for a story to go with them?

Earlier posts on the slandered leaves HERE.