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.

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.

THE LISTENER by Crowded Fire

Last night I went to opening night of Liz Duffy Adams’ The Listener, presented by Crowded Fire at Traveling Jewish Theater. Once again, I was reminded of what a tight community we have here in San Francisco. I saw Julie and Kent and Trevor and Alex and Amy and Kathy and Enrique. Two of the stars of the show, Lawrence Radecker and Cole Alexander Smith, have been in staged readings of my plays. And I just took a class with Liz Duffy Adams herself.

The play is set in the same kind of post-apocalyptic world that Liz’s Dog Act was set in. It’s a couple hundred years from now, and after all the pandemics and the flooding and the chaos and the what have you, everyone from Earth took off for the moon and created New Earth, or Nearth.

The one’s left behind, the Unfit, have built a world from all the leftover junk and are left to interpret what they can from the relics. CDs become precious decorative objects, and stories of the old gods Okrah (giver of gifts who “everyone loves”) and Sam the Uncle get passed along and distorted through time. Into this world comes a guy from Nearth, hoping to save the savages. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned.

Lawrence gets a great speech and gets to play bad; Cole is incredibly natural and charming as our entree into this strange world; and Juliet Tanner is completely riveting throughout as the Listener — the one person broadcasting to the rest of the world in the hopes that somebody, anybody can hear her.

After the show, there were drinks and cookies and what Alex called “Build Your Own Lunchables.” I spent much of my time talking to a couple of Crowded Fire’s board members and finding out exactly what board members do. And if I play my cards right, I might get the recipe to the crazy-good brownies that Charles, the board president, made.

The show runs for six weeks: three in San Francisco and three in Berkeley. So you have no excuse not to go. (Although you won’t get any brownies.)

The Listener by Liz Duffy Adams, directed by Kent Nicholson, produced by Crowded Fire in partnership with the Playwrights Foundation. Jul 12 – Aug 3 at Traveling Jewish Theater, SF and Aug 15 – Aug 31 at Ashby Stage, Berkeley. Tickets at crowdedfire.org.

I’m Taking A Workshop With Liz Duffy Adams

Last night I started a playwriting workshop being taught by Liz Duffy Adams through the Playwrights Foundation. I’ve taken several workshops through the Playwrights Foundation and they’re always really great. This one, though, is even more near-and-dear to me because it uses the Tao Te Ching as a springboard for writing exercises.

I’ve been following the Tao (as best as one can) and have read several translations of the Tao Te Ching over the years. I’d even go so far as to call myself a Taoist if that wasn’t absurd because you can’t really be a Taoist since the -ist implies a dogma and the whole point is there is no dogma. (I mean, the opening line is “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”)

Whatever. I didn’t mean to get off on a philosophical discussion. The point is that the writing exercises in the class are inspired by verses of the Tao Te Ching, and even during the first class I had a breakthrough in a new play I’m getting ready to start. I’m not gonna get into all the exercises and give a blow-by-blow because (a) they’re Liz’s exercises and who am I to give them away and (b) I don’t want to ruin any surprises for people who take the class later down the line and (c) I can never remember how the exercises were set up in the first place.

Suffice it to say that in writing a scene with a random character who is not our protagonist, I stumbled upon a character who would actually make a much better protagonist for the story I want to tell. So even after just three hours, I’ve already got my money worth.

I’m Back. Did You Even Know I Was Gone?

One of the benefits of being married to a Lonely Planet travel writer is tagging along on research missions. While it’s no vacation for her, with all the running around and investigating hotels and interviewing winery owners and writing down new addresses and photographing everything to keep it all straight — for me, it’s three weeks of seeing a lot and writing nothing.

Last year, she spent six weeks in Florida, and I only went along for one because, you know, it’s Florida. But this time, it was the Pacific Northwest. Three weeks in Oregon and Washington, from Portland to Astoria (where they filmed The Goonies) to Seattle to Leavenworth to Yakima to Walla Walla and points in between. Thirty-five hundred miles, to be almost exact. Which is why we recently sold the 1995 Honda with 120,000 miles on it and got a Prius. From Bend, Oregon to San Francisco on one tank of gas! Take that, Exxon.

Knowing that we were going to be going every goddamn place in two states, I spared you from a bunch of posts about how we stayed in a different hotel in a different town every night and how good our gas mileage was and how much I was enjoying the Velvet Painting Museum and the Doug Fir Lounge and the Columbia River Maritime Museum and RichArds Yard Art House and Bern’s Tavern and Voodoo Donuts and the (pictured) Museum of Glass.

In fact, I chose to do no writing whatsoever. No revising of plays. No plotting out new ones. No work-related beer label writing or financial brochure writing. No blogging. No journaling. I didn’t even take notes; if I needed to jot down an address, I took a picture of it with my phone.

So now I’m back, refreshed and itching to get back to it, just in time for this. Pretty smart, eh?