Marsha Norman in American Theatre Magazine

And in case the previously mentioned M.R. Fall is still reading this blog, here’s an article that follows up on what we were talking about at Short Leaps. It’s by Marsha Norman, published in American Theatre magazine, and it’s really, really good.

The gist:

The U.S. Department of Labor considers any profession with less than 25 percent female employment, like being a machinist or firefighter, to be “untraditional” for women. Using the 2008 numbers, that makes playwriting, directing, set design, lighting design, sound design, choreography, composing and lyric writing all untraditional occupations for women. That’s a disaster if you’re a woman writer, or even if you just think of yourself as a fair person. We have a fairness problem, and we have to fix it now. If it goes on like this, women will either quit writing plays, all start using pseudonyms, or move to musicals and TV, where the bias against women’s work is not so pervasive.

And an interesting aside:

Literary managers are caught in a kind of limbo. They don’t have much real power and they are swamped with work. They probably know more about good writing and good writers than anybody else in their theatre, but in practice, they feel very much on the outside, underpaid and underused. Worst of all, they have been put in charge of readings and re-readings, the process by which most new plays are worn out. We are wasting our lit managers, their time and their talents.

Richard Nelson, writing in these pages in September ‘07, was right: Theatres need to abandon development, talkbacks and rewrites. I suggest they adopt the rules of the fine art world—if you like it, you buy it. You don’t bring a piece into your gallery, take a brush and change the red patch in the bottom of the painting to green, and then decide not to buy it and send it back. That’s exactly what happens to playwrights’ work in development.

I believe “if you like it, you buy it” may very well be the policy of Sleepwalkers Theatre — which is only one of two hundred and twelve reasons why they rock.

‘GHOSTS OF THE RIVER’ and ‘SHORT LEAPS’

On Sunday, I had a jam-packed day of theater and food. First of all, our show closed on Saturday night, so Sunday morning came way earlier than I’d have liked. I rushed off and would have been late to Ghosts of the River by Octavio Solis at Brava, except much of the audience was also late (probably because a Veteran’s Day Parade coincided with a Forty-Niners’ game).

Ghosts of the River was a shadow play performed by ShadowLight, a group that does stunningly beautiful work with shadow casting, puppets, actors, cutout sets and live music. Combined with Octavio’s gorgeous storytelling — switching rapidly from hilarious to tragic and back again — it made for an astonishingly brilliant afternoon.

After grabbing a maple bacon donut at Dynamo Donuts — since (a) it’s right across from the theater and (b) it’s a donut with freaking bacon on it! — I rushed off to an early Burma Superstar dinner with a friend of mine who’d flown in from Austin to see closing night of our play, then headed straight back across town to Off-Market for Three Wise Monkeys‘ Short Leaps Festival.

This was three things at once: a fundraiser, a night of staged readings, and an announcement of the plays that are being produced as part of the Bay Area One Acts Festival this spring. I was a bit late, ducking in right before intermission, but got to see the second half, with some pretty cool short plays, including a very funny one by someone named “M.R. Fall,” who I didn’t know I knew until I found out afterwards. Them initials can be tricky, which I believe is the point.

And here’s the news I alluded to in an earlier post, which I not-so-cleverly bury at the bottom of this too-long post: my one-act Three Little Words will be produced as part of the festival. Rehearsals probably in January; show in February; posts about it all somewhere in between.

‘Most Theatre Is Still Really Bad’

Playwright Mike Bartlett was interviewed in The Observer yesterday:

If you’re still going at theatre-in-the-1970s speed and your audience has been watching The Wire, then your play’s going to seem pretty slow.

….We’ve got to get away from the idea that it’s good to go to the theatre. It isn’t church. There’s nothing innately good about it. Most theatre is still really bad.

Must-Read Interview With Amy Mueller

The New Play Blog — run by NEA’s New Play Development Program at Arena Stage — has an extensive interview with Amy Mueller, artistic director of the Playwrights Foundation. It covers everything from the history of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival to the criteria for choosing the plays in the first place, including a discussion of the all-important retreat before the festival:

The artist retreat is a kind of a crucible for the writers, a brain trust of the artistic members of the team, and is a time for the company to bond and get to know one another. No one is ever allowed to make suggestions for the writing of the plays, but asked to respond only to the work itself. We follow the Artist Response Format modeled after Liz Lerman’s well known process. We’ve found, and playwrights tell us, that for the retreat, writers find this incredibly useful. It allows the playwright to think about the questions s/he has at this point in the process, and gives them info about how the play is landing and that sort of thing.

I was a part of BASH (Bay Area Shorts) a few years back and can attest that the retreat is a really amazing experience, particularly the part where playwrights read their entire play out loud. Nothing like hearing a writer read a work-in-progress to really understand their intentions. Plus there’s free food and occasionally bourbon.

If you’re planning on submitting for the festival, you should definitely read this article. And get cracking on your play: submissions are due November 30. Info on the submission process is here.

‘GOLDFISH’ at Magic Theatre

One of the benefits of being an Artistic Associate at Magic Theatre is that I get invited to the first rehearsal of new plays, such as the one that opened this season, Goldfish by John Kolvenbach.

One of the very few downsides with having a show of my own in production is that I didn’t actually get to attend said rehearsal, nor the opening, nor any production of it until yesterday. It opened on the same day of our final dress and closes the day after our closing, so I had to do a little maneuvering to finally get a chance to see the show last night.

Man, I’m glad I did. Kolvenbach is a great writer. In fact, here’s what I said off the top of my head when emailing a fellow Magic Literary Committee member about the show, after she mentioned that playwrights in particular have been going out of their way to praise the play:

I’m not surprised playwrights are digging it; there’s some great dialogue there, with brilliant performances to bring it to life. I really enjoyed how he was able to make the emotions front and center without either resorting to irony on the one hand or getting maudlin and soap opera-ish on the other.

And I fully agree with what Nathaniel Eaton said in SF Weekly:

Last year, when Loretta Greco was hired as artistic director for the Magic Theatre, she said she wanted to bring back some of the Sam Shepard-esque energy to its productions. With playwright John Kolvenbach’s Goldfish, she (serving here as director too) does just that.

It’s a great script with powerful acting. And here’s the coolest part, if you jump on it: They’re running Goldfish in rep with Kolvenbach’s follow-up to the play, called Mrs. Whitney, featuring one of the best characters in Goldfish, set five years later.

You can even see both shows the same night, with a dinner served in-between. The last two marathons are Nov 6 and Nov 7, then Goldfish closes on the 8th and Mrs. Whitney continues until Nov 22. Knowing me, I’ll squeak in and catch it the very last week, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

In fact, you should go to the marathon, see them both the same day, and then go to the comments here and tell me what the experience is like. I’d love to do it, but, as I said, my play’s running those exact dates. So there you go.

Goldfish by John Kolvenbach at Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, through Nov 8. Tickets at magictheatre.org.

‘THE BALD SOPRANO’ at The Cutting Ball Theater

After months of being consumed by the premiere of my own play, I finally got a chance to get back to seeing other people’s plays this weekend, starting with The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco, in a brand new translation by Rob Melrose — the person I once called “the best interpreter of absurdism in the Bay Area and possibly the planet.”

I stand by the quote. This was a wonderful translation, based on Rob’s realization upon seeing the original French production, still running in Paris after playing over fifty years, that, as he put it in the program, past productions of the play “can often veer off into ornate parody of British people.”

Seeing the French production (which doesn’t try for a British accent or particularly British costumes), made me realize that these overly British productions tend to miss the point. Ionesco himself said that if he had been learning Italian or Russian or Turkish, then the characters would be Italian or Russian or Turkish. If anything is being parodied, it is the simple language of textbooks….

That, of course, because, as anyone who reads this blog probably knows, The Bald Soprano was inspired by Ionesco’s trying to learn English and noticing how absurd and inane the dialogues of the husband and wife in the textbook were. “You are my husband. I am your wife. We have three children. The cat is on the chair. The monkey is on the branch.”

This production rocked, from the translation to the hilarious and precise movement of each of the killer actors. The audience really dug it, and not just because it was opening night — although that always does give the room a nice post-show buzz.

In fact, we ended up laughing and eating and drinking and talking for twice as long as the play itself. Caught up with some local theater people I haven’t seen since before the summer. Got some good news about a play of mine that I’ll share later, when it’s official. And all in all had a really fun night.

The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco, translated by Rob Melrose, at Cutting Ball Theater, 141 Taylor Street, San Francisco, Oct 23 – Nov 22. Tickets at cuttingball.com.

Hey, The SF Bay Guardian Loved ‘ZOMBIE TOWN’

Check it out! Robert Avila at the SF Bay Guardian gave us a great review — with a cool headline, as well: “Sleepwalkers’ Zombie Town has brains (and eats them, too!)”

This gem is penned by Tim Bauer, a San Francisco playwright and former Texas resident, whose eye and ear for the culture clashes attendant not only in zombie movies but also between the humbler masses and certain rarified sections of the theater world makes Zombie Town a consistently witty treat. Sleepwalkers’ artistic director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp directs with an equally strong parodic sense a lively cast of living and post-living characters — played to perfection by an ensemble that could hardly be sharper or funnier were it to have a mining pick protruding from its collective forehead.

Read the whole thing; it does a fantastic job of summing up the play. Then come see the show and see if you agree!

Monday Night PlayGround

Monday night was the season opener of PlayGround at Berkeley Rep, and I was lucky enough to have my play selected as one of the six that received a staged reading.

The topic was Futurism Revisited, in honor of the 100 year anniversary of the original Futurist Manifesto. I chose to focus on the movement’s appreciation of hyper-conciseness and speed and conveniently ignore its later association with Mussolini and fascism.

So I wrote a 10-minute play called A Futurist Supersaga In Six Acts. Which is a bit of a misnomer, actually. One of the six acts is actually broken into three acts itself, making eight acts total — but who’s counting?

Even though rehearsal was only 90-minutes long, it was a complete joy. Stacy Ross and Steve Irish, two of the best actors in the Bay Area and beyond, were cast as the Man and Woman. (I suppose that should be Woman and Man.) And Jon Tracy, of The Farm at Shotgun Players fame, directed. Watching the play move from page to table read to a brilliant performance in about 2 hours was unbelievably fun.

After a 45-second tech — you can’t really have a lot of light cues when doing a six act play in 10 minutes — I was part of a pre-show panel with Marisela Orta, Ken Slattery and Raelle Myrick-Hodges, the artistic director of Brava. Raelle had just directed a number of the original Futurist plays from 1909, so she gave a lot of insight into how Futurism evolved and still influences the art world today.

Then came the readings, which rocked, feeding off the energy of an almost-full Roda Theater. Afterwards, one of the biggest groups yet of playwrights, actors, directors, board members and friends headed to Beckett’s for a lively post-show drink.

You can tell the conversations were captivating because Eric Hayes went off to buy me a beer, got caught up talking about Eugene O’Neill, and didn’t come back for quite a while — and I was so busy laughing and talking I didn’t even notice I was sitting in front of an empty beer glass. Trust me: that is a very rare occurrence.

Bay Area Fave Liz Duffy Adams Interviewed

Adam Szymkowicz has been doing an amazing series of interviews with contemporary and indie playwrights. Today is #78: Bay Area favorite Liz Duffy Adams:

Q:  A lot of your work has been done in San Francisco. What is the theater scene like there?

A:  In my experience, there’s a wealth of small theaters doing new work there; it’s a fantastic place for new plays. I’ve worked with a handful — Crowded Fire, Shotgun, Cutting Ball — and there are many more. And Playwrights Foundation is tremendously supportive of local and visiting playwrights. I love the Bay Area, I’ve had nothing but wonderful experiences there. The audiences are marvelously smart, receptive and un-jaded.

Read the whole thing.

Magic Theatre’s New Website

I’m a bit of a design nerd (which is why I’m a big fan of Cheshire Isaac’s posters for Impact and Berkeley Rep, FYI) so I was surprised when I saw how cool Magic Theatre’s website redesign looks.

Not surprised that it looks cool, but surprised that I hadn’t thought about how boring the old site looked. Whoever did the new design did a great job.

Although I suppose I should say I could be biased since I’m a Magic Theatre Artistic Associate — but I’ve been away so long because of summer and then the production of my play that there’s a good possibility no one remembers that.

Prince On Giving Feedback To Writers

I’ve been away from my writer’s group for about a month and a half because I was in rehearsal for what’s been called my “kick-ass” “don’t miss” play (which I won’t mention is currently running at the Exit — and SOLD OUT again tonight — because this post is not about that).

But now that I’m heading back to writer’s group, this is perfect timing: Prince Gomolvilas, guest posting on Parabasis a few days back, on his approach to giving playwrights feedback. Which is distinctly different from my group’s approach of saying we should start with the positive but then cutting right to the negative.

I kid, I kid. We are actually pretty good at starting by asking what the playwright wants to accomplish and attempting to keep our own biases out of our criticism. Still, it would probably be good for us all to read Prince’s article, especially this part:

My rule of thumb is, if it’s finished, then we can give complete and all-encompassing feedback. If it’s not finished, if it’s still a work-in-progress, if we’re seeing just parts of the whole, then we have to reframe the way we generate and give feedback….

What we would like to see in a piece is not necessarily what the writer would like to see in a piece. Our aim is to help writers develop their work in accordance with what he/she would like to see in his/her own work….

With all this in mind, these are the rules for discussing works-in-progress. Answer only the following questions:

1.) What did you like about the piece? (“I liked the monologue on page three,” “I liked the way the main character handled the situation,” etc.) This overlaps with #2:

2.) What things that are already in the piece would you like to see more of in the piece? In other words, what parts can be expanded for your enjoyment and/or understanding? (“I think the mother’s dark sense of humor is really intriguing, and I would like to see more of that….”)

3.) What confused you or what didn’t you understand about the piece? This includes perceived technical/logistical problems. (…”One of your characters looks out at the sun and comments on it, but earlier in the piece someone says it’s midnight,” etc.)

It’s much longer and well-worth-reading. As is Bamboo Nation, Prince’s blog. But you probably already know that; he has about a zillion adoring readers.

Cutting Ball’s Rob Melrose On KPFA Today

If, like me, you are spending today sitting in front of the computer; and if, like me, you are way into absurdist theater; then, like me, you might want to listen to Rob Melrose being interviewed on KPFA at noon today about his new translation and upcoming production of The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco. Listen live online, like me, or use one of them old-fangled radio things by “tuning” it to 94.1 FM.

The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco, translated by Rob Melrose, at Cutting Ball Theater, 141 Taylor Street, San Francisco, Oct 23 – Nov 22. Tickets at cuttingball.com.

‘Meet The Critics’ Follow-Up

Karen McKevitt, on the Theatre Bay Area Chatterbox blog, and sirtorgo, in the comments on this here blog, have both graciously posted a bit of follow-up to the recent critics panel for those of us (like me and Travis Bedard) who couldn’t make it.

First up, sirtorgo did a brief summary that I’m excerpting in this post because nobody ever reads comments:

I am not so naive to have thought that they did not have pressures from editors and dwindling dwindling space. But I had no idea how bad it was…. Almost all of them repeated a refrain of wanting us to ask our audiences to write the papers they work for and talk about the articles they read — whether good or bad. But I just don’t see that happening….

Robert Hurwitt made this great point about online versus print. He said that people who read the paper can be reading an article about a movie or whatever and stumble on a theatre review and possibly become interested. When it is online, in a blog, whatever — people have to go find the article. In other words, people who are already interested in reading about theatre will be the main consumers. And new audiences will continue to shrink, etc.

Oh boy. I wish I had some great ideas about this. But I don’t. I just know how to make good shows.

Karen picked up on this in her first post, which does a quick summary of what happened that night:

Papers are collapsing, and the arts section isn’t the only section that’s getting smaller. All of the sections are getting smaller, all of the news staffs (business and sports included) are being decimated. It seems completely unrealistic to think that we could ever expand coverage in the short term. Yet, it seems equally impossible to come up with a solution to save papers — how many stories have we seen across the blogosphere from Arts Journal to Slate to the papers themselves, etc., on how to do this?

In a fantastic second post, she then submitted some questions that the panel didn’t have time to get to. There are too many to excerpt, making it essential that you go read the post, but one gets to the “this whole thing seems impossible” theme above. “What can theatre companies do to keep arts coverage available?”

Robert Hurwitt: All I can say is that the more the editors are made aware that the readers want more arts coverage, the more likely they are to put resources there….

Jean Schiffman: I can’t think of anything other than encouraging your audiences to write letters to the press in response to reviews (or lack thereof)….

Chloe Veltman: Encourage foundations about providing philanthropic support to people who write about the arts, e.g., bloggers. For example, artists who serve on the TBA CA$H grant committee might consider providing bloggers and podcasters with support. Some small efforts are being made…e.g., Andy Warhol foundation paying $30,000 to each of a number of bloggers in the visual arts (so far no one to my knowledge has stepped up to the plate for theatre journalists or other disciplines).

The more I stew about this, the more I end up in the whole “I can’t think of anything; I wish I had some great ideas but I don’t” camp. So it’s slightly encouraging that Chloe brings up at least a little something that I had never thought of and that just might be a start.

But overall, it’s still kinda depressing, which might be why people have yet to jump in over at Chatterbox. But I hope people do; Karen said, “There’s certainly a lot here to discuss, and if the conversation really takes off, I’ll be writing new posts on it,” and we definitely need new posts — and new ideas.

African-American Shakespeare Company’s New A.D. Is…

…L. Peter Callender, who you may know from everything. Over 25 plays at CalShakes. Off-Broadway. Broadway. Theaters around the country.

And, starting May of 2010, artistic director of African-American Shakes. Very exciting to have one of the best Shakespearean actors on the West Coast leading an entire company!

Meanwhile, before he officially takes over, their 15th anniversary season offers two shows: a “dazzling, soulful holiday production” of Cinderella from Dec 10-27 and Othello from March 12-28. They’re doing a special season preview event of the two shows soonish, too.

Theatre Bay Area Is Hosting A Free Critics Panel

TBA is hosting a free panel tomorrow night with a bunch of Bay Area theater critics: Robert Hurwitt (SF Chronicle), Karen D’Souza (SJ Merc et. al.), Robert Avila (SF Bay Guardian), Chloe Veltman (SF Weekly), Sam Hurwitt (Marin IJ), moderated by Chad Jones (Theater Dogs/Berkeley Rep).

It’s a chance to hear how to up your odds of getting a feature story or a review, to ask questions, and to report back to me what they said, since I’m not going to be able to make it. (Dammit!)

TOMORROW!! Tuesday, Oct 13, 7PM to 9PM, at Brava Theater Center. It’s FREE, but you should RSVP to Karen McKevitt. Her email is her first name followed by @theatrebayarea.org. I’m not making it a link for obvious spammy-spam related reasons.