Pub Night Lucks Into Ideal Timing

Saturday night was a pub night, when a bunch of playwright friends (and an opera director!) got together to catch up outside of the usual “see you at a premiere or on a panel somewhere” thing.

Karma was with us: first of all, we just happened to pick a date when Liz Duffy Adams was in town, so we had an out-of-town guest. Perfect timing.

Even better, we somehow managed to make it to the Valley Tavern right in between two huge crowds. I’d met Liz for dinner beforehand, so the two of us got to the tavern a little early, and the bar was packed with about 80 people, all dressed in some form of plaid, all staring up at a basketball game but not seeming to care who was winning (or playing).

Just when we accepted we were in for a night of screaming “Have you finished your first draft?” across the table, the game ended, one guy yelled “To the bus!” and the bar was immediately deserted — two minutes before playwrights arrived. Perfect timing, again.

Everything went swimmingly from then on. Fun conversations, good beer, lousy wine: just what you want in a pub night. Then, the moment the very last of us stood up to head out, another group of 80 walked in. These folks looked like a bunch of PR interns who’d just attended a wedding in the Financial District. They were loud, but we were done. Perfect timing, again again.

Liz Duffy Adams Is Teaching In SF

Liz Duffy Adams sent me a quick note to let me know there are one or two spots open in her Tao of Playwriting class through Playwrights Foundation.

I took this class in the summer of ‘08 and it was fantastic. The exercises help you create characters and language you never would have found on your own. I’d take it again if I weren’t traveling during the last half of the class. But that means there’s room for you.

The official description, to me, is irresistible:

Playwriting is an art of negotiating between strategy/impulse, intellect/raw creativity, yin/yang. There is no better guide than the Tao te Ching for a roadmap to getting out of your own way and letting the creative juices flow. For new or accomplished playwrights, for writers who have been stuck, or those who just want to change up their process and see what happens, this will be an exciting, high-focus, all-out writing challenge. Speed without haste, language without obstacles — a first draft in ten days!

The class runs from Feb 6 – 15. If you’re interested, go here.

Outrageous Fortune On Tour

Don’t forget to RSVP for the Outrageous Fortune conversation/dialogue in the Bay Area. This is the book that everyone’s been reading and blogging about, sometimes even posting opinions about it without even having seen it. (Speaking of, the iPad is going to change publishing! People will subscribe to magazines just to see the cool iPad-optimized ads!)

In case you haven’t ordered the book yet, which you can do here, this is the blurb: It “examines the lives and livelihoods of American playwrights today and the realities of new play production from the perspective of both playwrights and not-for-profit theatres.” It’s based on six years of research and discussions. And it seriously is required reading for anyone creating theater (or attempting to) in the U.S. today.

The Theatre Development Fund, who published the book, is traveling the country, holding conversations to discuss the issues raised in the book and look for solutions. On February 9, co-writer Todd London will lead a discussion here in the Bay Area. It’s an event that theater people with day jobs are taking off to attend. If you want to go, you have to RSVP, but it’s free.

Outrageous Fortune Discussion, Tues Feb 9, 10AM to 2PM, Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berkeley. FREE. To RSVP, which is REQUIRED, go here and send an email. I don’t post email addresses so I can never be blamed for spam. That’s how much I hate spam. And ants. Man, I hate ants.

Table Work Begins

Last night we did table work on my BOA play Three Little Words.

For those who don’t know, “table work” is when the actors, director and playwright gather around a table and move little game pieces from Monopoly or Candy Land around a tiny model of the set. It helps everyone visualize the play in three-dimensions and gives insight into who the director likes best, since they get to be the race car.

This is different from what’s known as “putting it on its feet,” which is when the director gets up on his/her feet and runs around the stage, acting out every part and giving line readings so that the actors know precisely how to say each of their words.

Wow, this post is turning into a virtual master class on directing.

BOA Program 2 Group Table Read

Last night was a group table read for the plays in Program 2 of the Bay One Acts Festival. Not only was it great fun to hear the other plays and to meet some playwrights I’ve corresponded with but never actually met — but it was also a valuable rehearsal tool.

Oftentimes as a playwright, the only time you hear your play out loud is at a writer’s group or a staged reading, where it’s read by other playwrights or by actors who don’t end up being in the produced piece. In this case, the actors who will actually be performing got a chance to see how the audience reacts and to feel where the laughs are. I talked to them afterwards and they found it extremely useful. And I, of course, now have a better idea of what little tweaks I need to make.

But the most important part was the casual hanging out, talking, drinking — PianoFight is involved, so there was of course some bourbon on hand — and building a bit of a community amongst the playwrights, directors, actors, designers and producers.

Not sure why I said “amongst;” I guess the rain is making me feel British.

Behind The Scenes Of OEDIPUS EL REY

I was out of town and didn’t get to attend First Rehearsal of Luis Alfaro’s upcoming Oedipus el Rey. (Attending the first rehearsal of all the shows is one of the benefits of being in the Magic’s Artist Lab.) But lucky for me, Magic Theatre filmed it to give a taste of what the process is like:

Musical Monday Night PlayGround

Tonight’s Monday Night PlayGround at Berkeley Rep is an evening of short musical theater, with special musical guest J. Raoul Brody. We were given a workshop on songwriting, a topic of FISH OUT OF WATER, and about four days to write a ten-minute play featuring one two-minute song. (Lyrics by the writers; music by Brody.)

The top six were selected and will be staged tonight. If I’m reading between the lines of the PlayGround writers listserv correctly, I think one may feature a singing shark. At least, I hope at least one features a singing fish of some sort:

• Above Water by Adam Chanzit
• Breathless by Mandy Hodge Rizvi
• Back to Earth by Evelyn Jean Pine
• Back In by Martha Soukup
• The Origin of the Species Showtune by Tom Swift
• A Lovely Day by Malachy Walsh

PlayGround, in residence at Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St, Berkeley, tonight. Tickets at playground-sf.org.

This Is Good News

I just found out this exists.

Sam Hurwitt has started a blog: “a place to collect my thoughts about all the plays that I’m seeing but not reviewing per se” because “I wasn’t able to properly trumpet the virtues of standout shows while they were still running.”

He’s already written about two shows and it’s only the second week of 2010. Read it. Bookmark it. If he puts ads on the site, click on them.

As a side note, his twitter feed @shurwitt is pretty damn funny, too.

(Full disclosure: I’ve never met the man, but he did once tweet that my play Zombie Town: A Documentary Play was “deuced clever stuff.” I mention this only because I wanted to mention it somewhere.)

Interview With Bennett Fisher of San Francisco Theater Pub

A couple days ago, I got an email from playwright Ben Fisher about a new thing he’s starting up called the San Francisco Theater Pub.

As I’m sure he knew, any time you put “theater” and “pub” that close together, you’ve got my attention. So I emailed him back to find out exactly what this wondrous thing called a “theater pub” could be. It turned into the interview below.

Q. I’m intrigued. What exactly is San Francisco Theater Pub?
It’s pretty much what it sounds like — a hybrid of a theater and a bar. The idea is that an audience comes in, has a few drinks and enjoys a bar atmosphere, watches a performance, and then goes back to socializing. The other founders and I have been in discussions with the owners of the Café Royale on Post and Leavenworth, and we are planning to produce a series of performances over the course of the year (and, if it all goes well, hopefully well beyond that).

Q. Is this a new thing for Café Royale?
Currently, the Café Royale has live music, poetry readings, stand-up, and improv, but this is going to be a little different. Because of the bar setting and the unique opportunities that affords, the sorts of things we hope to mount in the Theater Pub are going to be somewhat unlike the kinds of performances you might expect to find in more traditional theater space.

Q. So you’ll tailor the pieces to the performance space.
It’s still a bar even when the performance is happening, which gives us some limitations in terms of the sort of things we can do, but those limitations are also empowering. I think it allows us to create an atmosphere that is a little more casual and a little more playful. The four of us have talked about the word ‘play’ a lot as we put together our season — we want people to come in and have a good time, enjoy pieces that are good and artistically engaging but also little scrappier and a little more spontaneous.

Q. And hopefully reach people who aren’t already going to theater.
I keep thinking of Brecht’s essay on “Theater as Sport,” where he talks about his desire to make a play like a soccer game — a play where the audience is active and engaged, rooting for the characters like sports teams. The bar setting does something similar. People who don’t go to theatre (because they see it as elitist or pretentious or whatever) will hopefully enjoy the experience because the performances are short and lively and there will be beer.

Q. My kind of show.
We want people to have a good time and to be entertained. We want it to be fun, really fun, and we don’t think we need to compromise ourselves artistically to do so. If anything, we have greater freedom to be artistically adventurous — when was the last time you heard of any theater staging Cyclops?

Q. Your adaptation of Cyclops is the first reading. Why that play?
It’s a perfect play for a bar if there ever was one. The story is a reboot of the story from the Odyssey where Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk and blinds him, and the characters feel much more contemporary than their Homeric counterparts. Like many of Euripides’ plays, it’s incredibly modern in its thinking. It’s also fantastically irreverent and very clever.

Q. You guys have a history with Euripides.
Victor Carrion, Brian Markley, Stuart Bousel and I are the four founders. Victor and Brian are two of the founders of AtmosTheatre in Woodside, and Stuart and I are both Associate Artists there. I met them all last summer when I played Euripides in the Atmos production of The Frogs (which Stuart directed).

Q. This isn’t just a one time event, though. It’s more or less monthly?
Next month, on February 15th, Stuart is directing a Valentine’s Day Pageant — we asked ourselves why is it that only Christmas and Thanksgiving have pageants? There’s a lot of comic potential to be mined there. In March, Brian is putting together a new work that revolves around the San Francisco bus system. And there are some other things in the pipeline as well.

Q. Well, I think a Theater Pub is an idea whose time has come.
It seems like there is a real demand in the theater community and in the city itself for a place like this — a great haven for artists where you can go see something different and original every time, where you can stay up having great conversations about the meaning of art, where people who aren’t in to theater become engaged and people who are heavily involved find a new outlet to express themselves.

Q. Anything else you want to add?
If you are interested in being a part of The San Francisco Theater Pub in the future, come to Cyclops and the other events. Drag your friends. Buy a lot of beer and tip well. I want to make January 18, 2010 the best Monday night on record for the bar so that we can prove that the Theater Pub idea not only works, but that it will flourish. And then find me or one of the other founders afterward and let us know you want to be a part and what you’ve got in mind. Hell, the event is free and what else have you got happening on a Monday?

Q. And there will be live music.
Live folk music played by West of Shannon. They’ll play a little to underscore the piece, and also some songs before and after that are tied in with some of the play’s themes.

Q. And beer.
There will be beer.

Cyclops by Euripides, adapted by Bennett Fisher, at San Francisco Theatre Pub, Café Royale, 800 Post St, San Francisco, Jan 18 at 7:30 pm.

What I Missed Over The Holidays: Year-End Wrap-Up Edition

The other thing I missed while I was traveling was a chance to look back at 2009 while it was still 2009. It was a pretty good year, actually:

• Them had a staged reading on the set of In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) which was oddly ideal since my play called for the stage to be divided in half. And the play was remembered later by a friend who recommended it to a festival.

• I got a fellowship and a commission to write a full-length for PlayGround. What’s tentatively called The Secret Rulers of the Universe Go To Camp will tentatively be finished in March and definitely have a staged reading in May.

• Exit Wounds was a finalist for Playwrights Week at The Lark. Down to the top 12. That play is my almost play: almost produced twice, but not quite. Almost in two development festivals, but not quite. I need to send that around more.

• Zombie Town: A Documentary Play had a sold-out, extended run at Sleepwalkers, got reviews I was super happy about, and was one of those productions that makes it all worthwhile. Not one thing I would change about that experience: the cast was awesome, the music was amazing, every night I went was unbelievably cool, and it was what better be the first of many collaborations with director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp, who is a goddamn genius. And who showed me where to find chicken fried steak in San Francisco.

• A Futurist Supersaga in Six Acts had a killer staged reading at a really crowded Monday Night PlayGround, with Stacy Ross and Steve Irish. I really enjoyed watching that one.

• I got a residency at KHN Center for the Arts, which I’ll talk about soon.

• Theatre Bay Area asked me what I wanted to see this season and then published it in their season preview issue.

• I wrote a short play for PlayGround called Afterlives which wasn’t selected but which I think I could expand into a pretty nice one-act.

• And I got word that Three Little Words will be produced as part of BOA this February.

So 2009 was a pretty good year, and 2010 starts with a production, a residency, and a full-length in progress. Not too bad.

Here’s hoping all our 2010’s go well, and that we all pronounce it “twenty-ten” because “two thousand ten” sounds stupid.

What I Missed Over The Holidays: San Francisco Edition

Holiday franticness and post-holiday traveling means I also missed a bunch of stuff here at home:

• All the holiday shows: Merry FORKING! Christmas, Tenderloin Xmas Hustler and Let It Snow!

• The ReOrient Festival.

• This great summary of the state of San Francisco Theater in 2009 by Robert Hurwitt. (Especially these two; one good and one bad):

GOOD: #6. Where new plays come from
…Where once the Bay Area had an international reputation for experimental, interdisciplinary work, the adventurous spirit of those long-gone companies has turned into a passion for developing new works. It may be the region’s most common feature, from Berkeley Rep’s large-scale commissioning program and ACT’s high-profile premieres to the Magic and Marin Theatre Company’s dedication to original works, the groups that nurture new writers (Playwrights Foundation, Z Space, PlayGround) and the multitude of companies — from the intrepid Campo Santo on — with unique approaches to creating original work.

BAD: #10. Where have all the critics gone?
…With the cutbacks at daily and alternative papers, the region now has about half the critics and review space it had just a few years ago, while theater blogs of varying degrees of credibility have proliferated. Theatre Bay Area recently held a panel discussion to explore how companies can reach the general public in a rapidly morphing media environment. The answers, as they evolve, will shape a lot of what we see onstage in the decade to come.

What I Missed Over The Holidays: Blogosphere Edition

Boy, you disappear for a few weeks and look what happens:

• Anonymous blogger 99seats is no longer anonymous.

• Paul Mullin is writing brilliant long-form essays about creating a world-class theatre town and why locally grown plays matter.

• Everyone is reading Outrageous Fortune, a TDF study of the current state of institutional theater.

• Isaac Butler may be dropping out of institutional theater and going indie, perhaps because of the abovementioned study.

• The Prof linked to a David Byrne essay calling for a shift in arts funding priorities, prompting lots of comments and follow-up posts.

NSFA: Not Safe For Anywhere

Here’s hoping you have a happy holiday. I’ll be gone for, I don’t know, a little while, so here’s a little something for you. Not safe for work. Not safe for anywhere. Curse words, sacrilegious imagery, Jesus fighting Santa….

South Park, of course. The original Spirit of Christmas movie, made for $750 back in 1995 and passed around Hollywood and then the advertising world on crappy VHS tapes, looking pretty much as bad as this looks.

Ignore the YouTube person who claimed it was “banned from TV” because this was way before the TV show even existed; but thank them for posting it. If you haven’t seen it, remember Stan’s immortal words: “Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here.”

Quantum Theatrics

August Schulenburg posts one of the best explanations I’ve read for what “the liveness of theater” actually is. Now if, unlike me, you didn’t just finish a short play two days ago dealing with quantum physics and probability waves and parallel universes, the first couple paragraphs might be harder to relate to. But do stick with it to get to this:

When we say a great actor has Presence, what do we mean? What do we mean when we say In The Moment?

I think we mean that a great actor’s performance is like that probability wave of quantum mechanics: it is both here and there, a superposition of possible states; until, acted upon by the pressures of the audience’s perception, that possibility crystalizes into a choice; and if that actor is very good, we keenly feel the current of that feedback running through each moment we make together.

So in this way, theatre is more than the observation of a human moment; it is the practice of shaping it. In this framework, the audience is participatory in more than just passive terms; they are the essential pressure which gives the play life.

The liveness of theater isn’t just about the fact that the actor can hear you when your cell phone goes off. The fun of live theater is that the energy of the room affects the performance. You are a co-creator of the event, simply by sitting there watching the show and drinking your beer and reacting.

I assume the same thing works in theaters where you can’t drink beer, but I don’t really go to those very often.

Notice: A Merry FORKING! Christmas

Check this out! The video teaser, and then the play. Which opens this week. Daniel Heath and PianoFight and a fully-scripted play where the audience votes on how the play proceeds and this sentence:

A Merry FORKING! Christmas chronicles the final hours of the Christmas shopping frenzy through the eyes of a pot-dealing Santa and his cookie-stand partner in crime, a mall security guard on his last legs, a bride-to-be deserted by her would-be fiancé, and a bored mortician who’s got nothing to do while those near death hang on until Christmas Day before they get back to the business of dying.