Archive for June, 2005
Cheating Eyes
Back home from Nebraska - still pretty exhausted. It was a fantastic time but being “on” for that length of time is tiring! Looks like we’ll be doing five more conferences in the fall travelling from New York State to New Orleans.
It hasn’t been much of a writing month, nor should it have been. There were lots of other things to take care of. One of the jobs I’ve been on this month is proofing the new scripts. I’m not sure how people who proof novels do it - proofing dialogue is hard enough! It’s amazing how the eye will fill in missing words in a sentence because the brain knows they are supposed to be there.
Both my partner and I usually go through the scripts at least three times looking for errors. Last night I was amazed that on my third pass I caught two missing words! Very frustrating. But we’re much better than we used to be. Now we’re catching the errors before it goes to print - the worst is when you get the copies back and you start finding mistakes. It’s almost like Christmas (well not really but still) when I see something I’ve missed before.
Now though I’m looking forward to July - I’ve got four weeks of straight writing. And funnily enough I’m going to be working on only one play! I plan on trying to get out a first draft of the science play I’ve been doing research on. Hopefully I’ll also do a blog diary to go with it so you can see what the process is like.
The only other thing I’ve got going is a 24 hour playwriting contest I’m doing next week. You get 4 items (people, places, things or concepts) and you have 24 hours to come up with a play. I did one a couple of years ago - they’re great for forcing focus and forcing out a complete draft. One of my biggest problems as a writer is that I’m always re-writing the beginning so that it takes me forever to get to the end. I like being forced to bang out a finished product!!
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Festival Craziness
I’m in Lincoln Nebraska this week (It’s hot. Very hot. And the buildings are air conditioned to the hilt so that it’s almost too cold. And you have to go outside to warm up. Where it’s too hot.) for the International Thespians Festival. Over 3000 students and teachers going to plays all day long, doing workshops, ALL interested in theatre. I love it! I wish I had this when I was in high school. The days are pretty long as we’re manning a Theatrefolk booth for roughly 12 hours and in the middle I go off to teach workshops for 3 hours. It’s exhausting, but a thoroughly worthwhile exhaustion. I like talking to people about plays. It’s about the only thing I can talk about!!!
The workshops are going well too - I’m not a natural speaker. I don’t speak off-the-cuff well and I have to plan everything out. It’s taken a couple of days of practice to get everything set in my head. But knowing what I have to do (and then doing it) the workshops have been pretty enjoyable so far. It’s nice teaching people who want to learn! And I learn things too, watching everyone work.
I’m doing two character workshops, both very catchily entitled “Character Slam!” One is subtitled Inside Out which looks at how to find clues and hints in the text for character development, and the other is subtitled Outside In where we use physicalization as a tool for building a character. The first one is so interesting as I use scenes from my own plays and I love seeing how they are interpreted.
So far so good and they’re still two days to go!
Workshop success
Nothing feels better than having an vivid idea about how a play is supposed to look and sound and then being right. Of course the opposite can also be true. I worked on a short play last year - we have a number of vignette plays which are plays based on a theme made up of short scenes and monologues. Really great for classes. The particular theme was driving and I had so much material I decided to spilt the work into two plays. (Skid Marks: A Play About Driving and Skid Marks II: Are We There Yet?)
So, I did a workshop of the first play and it went fabulously. Ok, that’s great, I think, and put together the second play exactly like the first one. I organized a reading, was very excited, everything’s moving and grooving and it sank like a stone. It was not funny, it didn’t flow and my partner and I are sitting listening to the play with growing horror. We were having a full day workshop and during lunch he and I went for this long walk where the conversation basically went over and over again - “Did you think that was funny?” “No, did you think that was funny?” Not good.
But in essence this is the reason that plays need to be seen and heard. They don’t exist on the page, they need life to them. Words that look right on the page don’t necessarily sound right. Now I’ve been doing this for awhile and I’m pretty good at hearing what’s on the page as I work on it. But you just can’t assume things are what you think they are. The good news is that because of that workshop I did pretty much a complete re-write to Skid Marks II which I love and I think is better than before.
So my Tick Talk workshop on Friday was one of the good ones where I had this image of the play and as the students were working on it everything fell into place. I basically did three or four dances of joy throughout the morning. These students were fabulous to work with - very theatrical and smart. They gave me exactly what I wanted so that I could really focus on the play and say that works, that doesn’t work, let’s try it this way or that way. So much fun! I really love this part of creating a play.
International Thespian Festival
Been a busy week getting ready to go to the International Thespian Festival in Nebraska next week. We’ll have an exhibitor table for Theatrefolk and I’m going to be doing workshops during the week as well. The festival is quite an experience – I went for the first time in 1996 and the first show I saw was The Pirates of Penzance. We walk into the theatre and there are four-colour programs and matching buttons for everyone. The cast had at least 50 Pirates and Maids. The play opened with a life-sized Pirate ship moving on stage (with pirates on it) with cannons booming and belching smoke. This was a high school production! The next year I saw a Jesus Christ Superstar that had eight follow-spots.
Based on what I’ve seen, it does seem that some plays make it to the mainstage because they are large and they can fit the space – the theatre is a 3000 seater. Sometimes large does not equal good. On the other hand, I also saw a mainstage show that first year with four actors and four wooden chairs. They played on the lip of the huge stage and it was great. I imagine the festival must be such a wonderful time if you’re a teen – I would have loved it!
I got some good news this week – my workshop that got canceled two weeks ago is on again! I’m off to the school tomorrow and I can’t wait. I have three hours to work with the kids and I’m sure to get lots done. My process towards publication is different than most – the plays I’m writing are often quite short - twenty minutes. Because of that I can go from a reading to being on the feet really quickly. I know exactly what I’m looking for in a play (being that it’s my company) and whether or not it’s ready to move forward. It’s very effecient. It’s one of the things I like about our company mandate – we have pretty specific requirements and that makes writing plays (and reading submissions) not necessarily easier, but focused. I know exactly what I need to see in Tick Talk tomorrow – here’s hoping I get it!
American Theatre Web
The American Theatre Web is one of my favourite websites - it’s a one-stop shop for newspaper articles about theatre; news, reviews, releases on theatre company seasons, interviews with actors, playwrights and so on.
I read an interesting article on Alan Ayckbourn today who talked about his new play, but also about where he finds inspiration. There was an article looking back on the past season on Broadway, and a review of a Chicago production of Beckett’s Endgame that really made me want to see the play!
A good way to stay in touch with what’s happening in the theatre centres.
POW
Cool word of the day - Mendacity which means lying, untruthful. Divide the word in two and you have Menda City, which could refer to a whole lying community. There’s a play in there somewhere…
Finished off my last POW (playwriting online workshop) class today. I teach an online course that takes students from the idea stage to the second draft to a play. I work with a couple of schools who take the plays to the next step and perform play festivals which is awesome. It’s the one part of the process that I can’t see to fruition.
I enjoy reading student plays and have on more than on occasion been blown away by the quality of the scripts. It’s interesting to see their view of the world through their writing. And no matter what the temperment of the particular class, there’s always at least one student who makes it all worthwhile.
I find it hard to mark the work at times - I’m not interested in saying “you’re a good writer, you’re a bad writer.” I want them all to write. There’s something about putting their voice into an outside character that’s very powerful. I believe in the power of theatre. And sometimes the not so good writers show learning better than the talented writers.
I remember one play a couple of years ago that wasn’t great - it was very movie-like, not a lot of character definition, not a lot of interesting action. But then in the final weeks the student took one character and wrote this raw emotional monologue that literally had me jumping up and down in the office.
I had a student once tell me that playwriting was stupid and a waste of time. She wrote a play about a girl who got pregnant and decided to give up her baby. I later found out that the student was in a similar situation, she was pregnant and before the play was certain she was keeping the baby. After she wrote the play, she changed her mind.
The most common problem I see is students writing plays as if they were movies - quick cuts, huge sets, tiny scenes, things blowing up. The hardest thing to get across is convincing them what will work on a stage and what won’t. I try to get them to visualize their plays on a stage, to the point of suggesting they go stare at their own theatre stage and imagine how their play will look.
As the company gets busier I find that I have less time to take on classes and won’t be teaching as much in the upcoming year. This is both good (cause we’re busy) and bad because I like doing it.
The Honeymoon stage
I think the best stage of a play is the research stage. Well, maybe not the best stage; finishing a play and seeing it published is pretty great. But it’s certainly the most enjoyable. In this stage all I have is a notebook and a pen and all I do is write notes. Nothing is wrong, nothing is undoable, everything is possible.
I’m not a writer who can create on the computer. I always start with paper and pen. There’s something magical (and I’m not someone who’s keen on magical things) about the way words flow from the mind, down the arm, through the fingers, out the pen and on to the page. And I adore being able to just let the thoughts come out, almost in a stream-of-consciousness style. It’s rather airy-fairy sounding but there you go.
I have a science play that’s in the research stage right now. I spent yesterday afternoon surfing the web and taking notes and writing snippets of dialogue. I’m a science moron so I’m starting with a blank slate. The play is going to be about the brain and how it works, particularly when it’s damaged. I’m excited, if not a bit daunted, about how to theatricalize it all.
By the end of the day, I had a main character, plus two side characters. One potentially exciting and vivid moment. I had a somewhat beginner’s grip on the brain. A couple of pages of dialogue. No story yet. Lots of work to do.
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