Entangled

Produced by The Amoralists

Written by Charly Evon Simpson & Gabriel Jason Dean

Directed by Kate Moore Heaney

Nominations: Outstanding Actress in a Lead Role – Naomi Lorrain; Outstanding Original Full-Length Script - Gabriel Jason Dean & Charly Evon Simpson

About the Amoralists

We are The Amoralists. A diverse collective of uncompromising artists. Founded in 2006, we produce original work that confronts the American condition in all its complexity. Our stories are emotionally charged and character driven, a place where politics and perspectives collide and no side emerges unscathed. Explosive, vital, raucous and raw, we do theatre, no moral judgement.

Photos by Travis Emery Hackett

About Entangled

In the aftermath of a mass shooting in NYC, the black mother of a victim and the white brother of the shooter try to make sense of what happened, each individually grappling with a soul-shattering experience that few understand. An exploration of loss and survival, Entangled is the story of two strangers connected by tragedy in a nation still struggling to see itself for what it is.

The nominees and producer James Kautz give us some insight into developing Entangled.

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What first attracted you to Entangled?

James: The opportunity to explore this very important topic with extremely talented playwrights and artists

Naomi: I am an eternal fan of Charly Evon Simpson's writing and I originated the part of Greta in her previous play Stained.

Gabriel: I was commissioned by the Amoralists as part of their 'Wright Club. I had been working on a musical, OUR NEW TOWN, with the Civilians which was about a fictional shooting on a college campus and so the crossover to the Amoralists Ricochet project was easy.

What was your favorite part of this production?

James: The creation process was incredible personal for all involved - and sharing it with our audience - the conversations in the lobby and the house after the show - was our favorite part of the production. The conversations were heartfelt, heated and abundant.

Naomi: I especially enjoyed illuminating the racial politics that exist within the modern day epidemic that are mass shootings.

Gabriel: It was so rewarding to work with Charly over the course of 18 months. Our conversations were incredible. Entangled was the first time I’ve done something so collaborative with a straight play. And I feel the work is a lot deeper and more examined as a result.

Charly: Getting to work along side Gabriel was a true delight.

What was the most challenging aspect of this experience for you?

James: Building new plays around difficult subject matter with multiple playwrights takes time and care - and scheduling was by far the most difficult part of this process. Our two playwrights exploded with popularity and productions in 2018/2019.

Naomi: The subject matter was extremely difficult and the monologue style of delivery had its challenges but I believe in Charly's writing and the importance and urgency of the story being told.

Gabriel: Charly and I both had rolling world premieres through the National New Play Network going on at the time and so finding the time to get together was tricky. We eventually settled on writing the script via a Google doc which we both edited and offered comments on and then we followed up with phone conversations.

Charly: Co-writing a play when you are barely in the same place at the same time was a huge challenge for us and really affected how we wrote the play.

What did you want the audience to take away with them after seeing Entangled?

James: I wanted them to have a greater need, ability and urgency to discuss gun violence (and violence in general) in our country and a deeper compulsion to change the status-quo.

What was the most unique or noteworthy part of this production?

James: Our two playwrights wrote this play over the course of two - three months through phone calls, emails and a shared google doc. They’re warriors at the top of their craft.

Naomi: Entangled was one of my most unique & noteworthy experiences I've ever had because of three main things: One, I've never been in a play were I never spoke directly to my scene partner. Two, we had an extremely sparse set consisting of only two chairs and a projector and lastly, I've never been in a show with literally no props whatsoever. The story and connection with the audience was all we had.

Gabriel: When Charly and I first began talking about the characters for Entangled--the brother of the shooter and the mother of one of his victims-- we both knew we were attempting an impossible conversation.Rather than forcing a more theatrical conflict on characters who were already traumatized, we decided it would be more honest and ultimately more thought-provoking to explore the characters’ conflicts through soliloquies and instant messages, both sent and unsent. We had many meetings and phone conversations, but ultimately created the play together on a Google Doc with Charly writing for Greta and me writing for Bradley. That process allowed us to respond to each other in real time, leaving notes and ideas for each other along the way. By accident, we also discovered that the writing process we were experiencing for the play ultimately correlated almost seamlessly to the structure and experience of the play we were creating.

What was it like working with this company of artists?

James: They risk being vulnerable - really vulnerable

Naomi: They are fearless. They enjoy challenging the mindset of their audience and I think that's vital in order to amplify the empathy and humanity we have as a society.

Gabriel: With the entire project, we had 18 months to talk, think, try things. It was an amazing experience to have a company get behind and stage your first draft and to work on crafting that draft during rehearsal. Typically there is a lot of development along the way and in my experience, sometimes the play can lose its force that way.

Did you gain any insight or learn anything new throughout this process?

Naomi: Most definitely. I realized how unnecessary props, sets or even lights are to telling a story. The connection to the story and relying that story to the audience is key.

Gabriel: Work with Charly as much as possible!

What does receiving this nomination mean to you?

James: It’s an incredible honor that we’ve been recognized for contributing something noteworthy to NY’s Indie Theatre community.

Naomi: Working on this show was especially difficult. It was one of the hardest plays I've done this season (specifically due to the style and lack of traditional play elements) and this nomination is a reminder that the intense emotional life that I brought to Greta was recognized and appreciated.

Gabriel: It's really a true honor to have our experiment and collaboration recognized with this nomination. I'm very grateful!

Charly: I love that I get to share this nomination with Gabriel. The writing process for this play felt a little crazy at times, but it is nice to know that Gabriel and I found our way and the story we were trying to tell came alive.

Letter to a Younger Self

Contributed by Chana Porter


An out-of-the-blue letter from an ambitious ex (whom I haven’t spoken to in many years) recently got me thinking about how my career expectations have shifted since I was a wee thing in the city. About how my writing life has become less about milestones and more about the daily practice. About making room for the unexpected. Small, seemingly inconsequential experiences that continue to resonant. Big deal "water-shed moments" that were disappointments. How I tried to follow a more traditional path until it felt like I was flinging my body against closed doors. How I turned and walked another way.
 

Here is what I wish someone had told me when I was 24.

1. You cannot wait for something to come and change your life. Your life is happening right now. Change the things about your life that you can control. Say it again: Your life is happening right now.
2. Screw the schmooze. Find people you care about and can critically engage with on a deep level. Cultivate genuine friendships. (And like Taylor Mac says, people you dig will eventually have cooler jobs.)
3. Those blanket pieces of advice like: Form a writing group! Go to grad school! Have a production! Get an agent! Only do these things if they make sense. The right people, place and time. Otherwise, they are undercooked pasta on the wall of life. They will not stick.
4. Say no. Don't take every opportunity that comes your way. Be precious about your time. Learn how to direct the fierce fire of your energy. This will make you unstoppable.
5. As a woman, an artist, a person--not everyone has to like you. Wear this like a badge of honor.
6. Say number 5 again. Not everyone has to like you. Sometimes, directors will try to pull fucked-up shit, like asking women in your play to be perpetually naked as an “edgy choice”. Sometimes, actors will think you are upset with them because you do not smile constantly. Sometimes, casting directors will try to cast a 31-year-old for a character in her 50s because she’s “got a quirky look.” Speak your mind clearly and without guile. Then allow yourself to be surprised—the relationships worth keeping don't mind a little rocking. And everyone needs to be called out, sometimes. Because #7.
7. Recognize that, no matter how well-intentioned, you too have grown up inside white-supremacist, patriarchal capitalism. It is the air that you breathe. As a writer, you must interrogate your own assumptions. You will get it wrong sometimes. Listen louder than you sing.
8. Present yourself as authentically as possible. There is no image to cultivate. No one else can be you or write the things you write. You are not in competition. Not with your peers, not with Lena Dunham or any other person who you think had more access to opportunities. You are simply yourself, and the path you are carving is your own.
9. Use your writing practice as a fierce investigation of your own mind. Go deep. Scare yourself. If your play runs away from your original intention, you’re probably doing it right. Art should surprise the maker. Be unapologetic in your wildness. We have many tidy, well-made plays already in the canon. Remember, Shakespeare was weird as fuck. Brecht broke so many rules he wrote his own. Your play is not a static, literary object. It is a blueprint for a theatrical experience, meant to be expanded by other great collaborators. Leave room.
10. Cultivate a bodily practice that gets you out of your head. Once a day will go a long way to keeping you sane, especially when the opportunities you’ve been striving towards actually start happening.
11. Keep finding ways to do your work without the need for outside validation. The poet Bhanu Kapil once said that when you make a work you are sending a future interaction into the world, like a lover walking down a road to meet you. Trust that the meeting is already in motion.
12. But, after all that, outcomes are unpredictable. I come from a nice, Jewish family that pushed getting a law degree, no matter what you were interested in— everyone should get law degrees! (And they are very supportive of my being an artist, hi Mom and Dad.) Our world is tremendously uncertain, even for the lawyers. The middle class is largely fiction. You might die tomorrow. Why not dedicate your life to what you love?

 
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Chana Porter is a writer and teacher living in Brooklyn. Her plays and performance pieces have been developed and occasionally produced at Cloud City, 3LD, Rattlestick Playwright’s Theatre, Cherry Lane, The Invisible Dog, Primary Stages, Movement Research, PS122, and The White Bear in London. She has been an Artist-In-Residence at Space On White, CAVE, and Dixon Place. She is currently shopping her first novel, SEEP, book one of her queer-pagan-punk science fiction trilogy, POST HUMAN CLASSICS. Chana is the co-founder of the Octavia Project, a free SF/F summer program for Brooklyn teenage girls. Learn more: www.octaviaproject.org

Theatre for social change, continued: thoughts and doubts about Theatre of Compassion

Contributed by our Guest Blogger of the week, Mariah MacCarthy

When I was twelve, my parents were smart and nice enough to enroll me and my brother in a summer playwriting class. I turned my focus towards God that summer, and wrote the Job-like tale of a guy who gets to choose between erasing Original Sin from history—killing the serpent that seduced Eve with the apple and creating a world where no one feels any pain—or leaving the world as it is. There were angels and devils tempting the protagonist at every turn, and of course he fell in love with a girl from this parallel sin-free universe, which further complicated his decision-making. Lucifer was, for no real reason, a cross-dresser who went by Lucy, and I decided that the song “Amazing Grace” needed to make an appearance (which, at the final reading, my actresses could not get through without a straight face, for which I am still a teeny bit ticked off but don’t really blame them). In the end, the protagonist chooses the world as it is—sin and all—and ends up deleting his lady love from existence.

I share this, not to celebrate my former precociousness, but because the above story explains a lot. I haven’t lost my penchant for cross-dressed characters, and while my focus has secularized since my tweens, all those years of church continue to influence me as a writer and a person. Namely, the basics: love your neighbor; love your enemy; be the Good Samaritan; love, love, love, etc, etc, etc.

This is probably where my obsession with Theatre of Compassion comes from. (Side note: I’m happy to note that when you Google “theatre of compassion,” that blog post is the first thing that comes up. My SEO is AWESOME, yo.) Not that you need a Christian background to understand or practice Theatre of Compassion; the basics of Christianity are pretty much the same as the basics of most other religions, and it is precisely this universality that makes Theatre of Compassion so potent, in my opinion.

In case you don’t feel like reading my whole big original post, let me just lay out a few tenets of Theatre of Compassion:

-In Theatre of Compassion, gray is the new black. Moral ambiguity is the rule, absolutes are the exception.
-While we may not sympathize with every character in Theatre of Compassion, we are at least given the opportunity to do so.
-There are no heroes in Theatre of Compassion, and there are no villains—or, everyone is a bit of both.
-Theatre of Compassion does not preach. It does not yell (though its characters certainly might). It may ultimately take a moral stance, but not without giving the other side a voice.

Because vague, unsupported concepts drive me batty, let’s talk examples.

One of the first times I can remember being profoundly affected by Theatre of Compassion was when I saw Eric LaRue in the UK. To summarize Eric LaRue: our protagonist, Janice, is the mother of a teenage boy, Eric LaRue, who has shot several of his classmates, Columbine-style. It’s clear throughout the play that she’s in a kind of hell and that no one—not her husband, not her pastor, no one—is really listening to her. In the end, she visits her son in jail and tells him, “You did the right thing” by killing his classmates. He is appalled and basically disowns her, begging her to tell everyone that he “feels remorse.”

It was an excruciating play to watch. When Janice said, “You did the right thing,” you could feel, if not hear, the entire audience suck in their breath. We went on an excruciating journey with her, watching the mothers of the victims berate her and blame her for their sons’ deaths, watching as her repeated requests to process her grief in her own way went ignored. She completely had our sympathy. And then, by professing that an act of murder was “the right thing” to do, she basically took a huge dump on that sympathy—and it was UH-MAY-ZEENG THEATRE. No blameless martyrs here, folks.

But, no one is pure evil, either. The pastor and husband, as obnoxious and intolerable as I found them, thought they were helping. And who can blame the mother of a murdered son for being furious and lashing out? Even the boy who killed his classmates is sympathetic. He feels remorse, and the shooting was a reaction to being bullied. All gray. All hopelessly complicated and infuriating—and five years later, I’m STILL thinking about that damn play. Had we been allowed to see the mother as a blameless victim of her environment, I assure you, I wouldn’t be thinking about that play today.

While I gravitate toward most Theatre of Compassion, I’m specifically interested in it as a means of creating social change. If we show somewhat-good, somewhat-flawed characters on both sides of an issue or a spectrum, can we change how our audience feels about said issue? Can we then continue the debate about that issue in a more respectful manner, increase our likelihood of the debate actually getting somewhere, rather than just spewing vitriol at each other?

A commenter on the original Theatre of Compassion post admitted that she had her doubts about it being a successful tool of change. She cited her own unsuccessful experiences with trying to tread lightly when talking about issues of race. And hey—I get it. People may like honey better, but sometimes the situation calls for vinegar. I don’t feel like having an intellectual discussion about gender roles with the guy who catcalls me in Hell’s Kitchen late at night; I feel like hitting him in the face (though I don’t do so). And on a better-lit street where I feel safe enough to pull this off, I may respond with a “fuck off.” I say “fuck off” because I want him to experience some negative consequences to his actions so maybe he’ll stop doing it. When I feel threatened, I feel no need to be polite.

But when I get home and I’m alone with my Microsoft Word, I have an asset that I don’t have walking home from Hell’s Kitchen. I have the asset of fiction. We accept things from fictional characters that we don’t accept from real people; we can sympathize with a fictional murderer more easily than we can a real one. Even if the characters are real people, they are probably fictionalized somehow, and so we can let ourselves sympathize with that particular author’s version of that real person.

My hope, then—my pipe dream, maybe—is that we can take that compassion for those fictional people and transfer it onto their real-life counterparts. People who demonize each other, I’ve found, rarely get anywhere in conversation. But people who respect each other are more likely to try to meet each other halfway, and, therefore, increase their likelihood of getting somewhere.

Example: a program called Sex Signals came to my college every year. It lured people in with its humor and pseudo-racy title, but then about halfway through the evening, they started talking about date rape. It presented a situation that started as consensual sex, then became, shall we say, complicated. The guy in this situation—the perp, if you will—seemed genuinely unaware that he’d done something that constituted an illegal or harmful action. He was a sympathetic character.

I can’t tell you how many times I have mentally referred to that show, or sometimes in conversation with friends who saw it too. It gave me the tools to understand how something that is devastating to one person—something like date rape—can happen through no malice on the other person’s part. And this allows me to address the issue in a more productive way. After all, date rape won’t stop if we don’t talk to the people doing it—which, 99% of the time, is men. And men won’t listen to me if I seem unwilling to consider where they’re coming from. By saying, “I understand how it might seem like an innocuous situation to you, but…” I increase my likelihood of being heard.

Then again, I find myself getting just as cynical as my commenter sometimes. Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, for example, is a magnificent example of Theatre of Compassion. There are some villains, sure, but there are far more characters who float in that gray space—most importantly and deliciously, Mama, who protects girls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the violence outside, but does so by making them prostitutes. However, we have yet to care as a country about the atrocities happening in the DRC, Nottage’s well-deserved Pulitzer notwithstanding. Lawmakers aren’t doing anything.

The play that has accomplished the most tangible social progress, on the other hand, is by no means gray. It’s The Vagina Monologues, and it makes no attempt to humanize those who commit atrocities against women. Yet it’s still a magnificent piece of theatre, which has raised millions of dollars that have gone toward ending violence against women, or helping women who have already experienced violence. And I am sure that if Eve Ensler had written a grayer piece, it would not be as widely performed, because gray is less empowering (or at the very least, it empowers in a less obvious way), and then the play would not have raised as much money as it has. So maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.

What do people think? Can Theatre of Compassion change the world? Can theatre change the world at all?

American?

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, John Patrick Bray.

    Hello, all. Today’s blog will be a bit brief.  I was watching the election results from across the country, and there have been a number of upsets, and a number of surprise victories (and depending which side of the equation you find yourself on, the two may not be mutually exclusive).  One of the people who read and commented on my blog regarding Regional Theatre was Jason Loewith, the Executive Director of the National New Play Network. I asked him if he had considered the definition of an American playwright. Today, I would just like to pose the same question to everyone here.       

    When I was a little boy, I said the pledge of allegiance every day at school. Sometimes we sang “God Bless America” or “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” I never doubted my feelings of patriotism. As I grew older, I grew more skeptical due to the various administrations that I watched come and go, each bringing a hidden agenda that lead to war, greed, and corruption.  Now that I’m even older, an historian, and a parent, I find myself wanting to reclaim the word “American” and look being an American as something to be proud of.  In this regard, I want to include all of the Americas, not just the U.S. There are many of us who are entitled to the word, and at the risk of exposing my politics, there are many more who should be.

    My question to you is: what is it, in your opinion, to be an American? How does this play out in your art? How does the idea of being American play out in theatre you have seen or that you have been a part of?

    I have enjoyed writing these blogs. I look forward to wrapping it up tomorrow!


Best to you and yours,
John P. Bray

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On Dramaturgy and the American Theatre

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, John Patrick Bray.

    In my first two blogs, I examined what I feel to be the quintessential American Theatre (Theatre of the U.S.).  In the first blog, I examined the Independent Theatre model, specifically, the Cite des Arts  in Lafayette, Louisiana, and how it escapes some of the totalizing of the commercial Regional theatre via the (unspoken) motto of “have theatre, bring show.”  In the second blog, I championed the plethora of independent theatres that create the Off-Off-Broadway community, focusing specifically on a few of the companies that I have the most familiarity with. In each blog, I have suggested that the NYC independent theatre is vibrant, and while it stands at the threshold of defining itself, I have cautioned that it needs to avoid some of the traps that previous models have fallen into. That is, models that have attempted to provide an outlet for regional artists have fallen victim to commercialism, often in the name of survival, resulting in the inability to serve the artists of the immediate community.  It is my hope that Off-Off-Broadway and independent theatres around the country will continue to provide a home for artists who are not necessarily “names,” and who do not fit the profile of the majority of successful regional artists.

    Many of my opinions about the commercial theatre vs. indie theatre come from my experiences as a playwright and as a dramaturge. There was a time when I thought, “Geez, am I crazy? Am I the only one who feels this way?”  But then two events occurred, practically simultaneously. The first was the publication of OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE NEW AMERICAN PLAY,  which I spoke about in my first blog. The second was a meeting with a dramaturge from a major regional company who spoke to a group of PhD students at LSU about the life of a dramaturge in new play development. During the course of the conversation, she told us that most playwrights do not know how to write a play anymore, and how dare they waste the dramaturge’s “precious time?”  As a result, she solicits scripts during an open submission period without reading the submitted scripts (?!?!?!), and feels that open submissions should be done away with all together. After all, dramaturges know playwrights, why not just ask them for scripts? By the by, this dramaturge has an MFA from an Ivy League institution. The playwright she asked?  Also an Ivy Leaguer. 

    Rather than fume over this, I think the best course of action is to consider the role of a dramaturge. You’ve heard the word before, right? Maybe you’ve been one.  Maybe you’ve been one and haven’t even known it (the magic of theatre!). So, what exactly does a dramaturge do? Or, better yet, what are they supposed to do?  For most of us, it’s kind of hard to exactly put our collective finger on it. What I have come to understand is that a dramaturge wears, primarily, one of three hats.

    The first: the dramaturge performs research alongside a director in order to heighten the historical-socioeconomic context of an established work.  The dramaturge may give a presentation to the cast and crew, or perform specific tasks in terms of historical research (so, if a dramaturge is working on a Restoration play, perhaps he or she will research the various ways to flirt with a fan).  While a director, I believe, should conduct a majority of their own historical research when approaching a work, as a means of creating a coherent concept, I believe the dramaturge may help fill in some of the historical gaps, and be a go-to person if and when questions arise which require additional research.

    The second hat is new play development; that is, a dramaturge sometimes doubles as a literary manager. So, the dramaturge solicits scripts which fit the vision of the company as dictated by the artistic director. If a company says they seek “diverse voices,” you need to read a little more closely. Each company has, for better or for worse, its own ideology; so, as a playwright (I try like hell to speak from experience here), I need to get the sense of which company might be interested in which work.  Once a work is accepted, it is up to the dramaturge to help the playwright develop his or her work. Again, this is tricky.  Playwrights are very protective of their work, and rightfully so, considering the reality of development hell (the dramaturge who sat in with us at LSU claims that “developmental hell is a myth”; um…playwrights, back me up here?).  So, it’s up to the dramaturge to get on the same proverbial page as the playwright and make sure that the playwright’s work is being served, while also making sure that the work stays within the margins of the company’s mission statement. This is often easier said than done. And if the dramaturge fails, they become the enemy to everyone (which could explain, but certainly not excuse, the behavior of the professional dramaturge who sat in with us).

    The third hat has to do with community outreach and audience building: talk-backs after productions, lectures at libraries and colleges, etc.  This is where the workshop readings come into play, which – as many playwrights such as Richard Nelson, James Ryan, Jeffrey Sweet, and Edward Albee have remarked – have more to do with satisfying grants for a company rather than serving the needs of a script.  I personally do not feel that the two need to be mutually exclusive, but over the years that has become more and more the case. Another problem with this model is that if a reading is lip-service to a playwright and lip-service to an audience who will hopefully come back and spend money, then in the end no one is being served, and everyone is getting a kind of subtextual “f*** you.”  This warrants further evaluation (even further than that provided in OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE). Certainly there has to be some way to make this model work?  Another topic for another time.

    So, the dramaturge has a host of responsibilities, depending on which production they are serving, or which theatre company they are hired to work with.  My favorite two personal examples were when I was the dramaturge for the “punk-rock” themed Antigone at LSU.  My wife and I spent a lot of time digging through our records and burning CDs.  The other example is when I was coordinator for “It’s Scary, Y’all! Horror Fest 2009” at LSU.  I produced four one-act plays (one was my own; the other three were written by LSU undergrads), directed and designed by students.  I let them stretch their imaginations. The result was fun, incredibly GOREY, and had Intro to Theatre students (our primary audience) saying things like, “Man, I never knew you could do that in the theatre!” That was probably the greatest thrill of all.

    Where is the problem with dramaturgy?  If a dramaturge is randomly assigned to a playwright or director, the dramaturge first has the task of explaining his or her role, followed by the never ending justification of their position. Also, the dramaturge can be a problem by soliciting scripts during an open submission process, not reading the scripts, approaching scripts with cynicism, or, okay I’m stepping in it, trying to sue the estate of a playwright claiming authorial credit on a work they helped develop.  If anything, that makes the dramaturge look even more like a nuisance. Bottom line, a bad experience with one dramaturge can poison the well for everyone else. I have heard directors say “I’m never working with playwright J. Smith again, he’s a real pain in the ass,” but I have never heard a director say “I am never working with any playwright ever again.”  On the other hand, I have heard directors swear off dramaturges after one poor experience.  Imagine if I had no awareness of the dramaturge position when I met up with the so-called professional at LSU?  I might have been tempted to do the same.

    Dramaturgy is both the most exciting and also the worst job in the American theatre. The successful dramaturge, in my opinion, resists burn-out and cynicism, approaches new works with an eye toward the uncanny, and is the silent bodyguard of the American theatre by trying to keep it fresh, alive, plural, and culturally important (which should really be a given; I think we spend too much time trying to justify theatre rather than treating its importance as a commonplace). My hope is that the dramaturge in the independent theatre, and in the academy, is aware of their great responsibility to the plurality of American theatre (again, here defined as Indie theatre of the U.S.), resisting the tendency to look at other models that may have worked for other plays. After all, if each play is different, why treat them all the same?


John Patrick Bray (ABD, MFA)

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Writing a play – I rant I rave, I write.

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, ML Kinney.


It started with an iota of an idea. It actually started by me getting rather pissed off one day by something I read. I don’t need to go any further with the “what.” My friends and family already know how I deal with getting pissed off – I rant, I rave, I write! (Usually taking an opposing argument, most times theirs, and using it to push my own home.) It gets frustrating for them that they have no rebuttal in my process, but it makes for good theatre.

So this iota of an idea, this tirade took form, of course, as a play. It actually took form as a one-joke play of thirty pages. I brought it to the Milk Can and asked for a read. So one evening we sat down as a group and read out loud the jumble of pages I had assembled. From feedback, and me listening to both the script and comments, it became clear that this joke was more. It was more than an iota of an idea, a joke, but a reality for a script.

I spent some months reviewing the script and making notes. I then sat down with the arguments in the background, an echo bouncing in my skull, and I started in earnest to form a fully evolved reality that went beyond the punch line and actually became a play.

With this draft, I started in the Milk Can’s Scene Herd Uddered (SHU) development workshop series. After seven weeks of working, I was amazed at how the script grew -- it become a world of its own, which is Life Among The Natives.

I am now in the midst of pre-production for the premiere of this new play, a play which has taken a two-year trip down the aisle to center stage. The process and the piece astound me daily.

That’s not to say that my work is done. We are two weeks into the rehearsal process and I find myself re-writing as we go along. Most evenings I sit in the rehearsal room cutting and pasting scenes beyond recognition, where the actors can’t even follow along. I change a word, a sentence, I write a monologue. I come home and re-write new pages and drift off to sleep with the characters talking new arguments in my ear. I listen, re-write and listen again. And through this process, I watch as a world takes shape and an event, the event of theatre, takes form.

I sit nightly humbled in rehearsals by the energy present from a group of artists who are there to fully realize an iota of an idea that formed in my brain some two years earlier. It would have remained there, floating voices for my therapist, or stayed splayed on an unread page, but for the ability I have with the company I work with. This play would not be if it wasn’t for a group of people, The Milk Canners, whom I respect and cherish. They prodded and pushed for me to take this iota, this joke, this part of me to its realized conclusion, which shall complete its two year journey on May 8, 2010, as it is handed to an audience to devour and enjoy.

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Cultivating a Theatre to Grow Plays

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, ML Kinney.


I have been around the OOB block more times than I care to admit. Through the years I have discovered a diverse community and an amazing wealth of talent. I am happy to say that I consider OOB my home. I live, I work, I create, and I thrive within this community. I am fed daily on its spirit.

I have been involved with The Milk Can Theatre Company since its inception in 2003. I believe in its mission, I helped to form it, and I have worked towards strengthening its purpose to the OOB community and to itself as a producing theatre company. The Milk Can’s work is primarily new play development. We work diligently to foster an environment where plays can grow. We examine and change this process yearly to help improve, not only the end result, but the path taken to get there.

As a playwright I know just how difficult it is to get an idea onto paper, into dramatic form. I also know how difficult it is to get that idea off the paper and into a living, breathing theatrical entity. Before 2003, when I started working with the Milk Can, I had acquired file folders full of first and second drafts; I had badgered my friends and family into reading and critiquing beyond politeness; and I had received enough rejection letters to wallpaper my bedroom. Yes, once or twice I was lucky to have some group take pity on my pages and allow me to hear a group of actors sit in chairs and speak my words. I even had the luck to be commissioned twice for projects, where I actually got to witness my ideas take form and play to an audience with costumes, lights, sets, and music. I know that this is an amazing thing. I know there are playwrights who have not gotten that far, and I also know that some of my work was produced before it was ready for prime time.

In formulating our mission and methods at the Milk Can, we agreed as a group that this phenomenon happens more times than not when producing new plays onto the OOB stage: most are just not ready to be in the spotlight. We decided to wrestle with the problem and came up with some solutions that have worked very well for us. We not only continue to produce quality new works, but we also help develop the artists creating them.

The Milk Can as a company takes an innovative approach to developing new work. We believe and think a play must have a fertile environment and time to grow. We provide artists with the opportunity to work on their plays in a no-pressure environment. We provide money, space, and time. Our seven-week "Scene Herd Uddered (SHU)" workshop series is the perfect opportunity for artists to develop an idea, and to concentrate on process rather than product. The end result is a solid foundation where a play can blossom.

The SHU process is divided into three phases:

PHASE ONE: In the first four weeks, a team -- usually composed of a playwright, a director, designer, and a group of actors -- goes into rehearsal and development. At the end of this period, there is an in-house run-through of the project. Extensive feedback is given to the creative team. The focus is on script development.

PHASE TWO: The playwright/director team is given a "quiet week" -- one week to write, re-write, and consider how to deal with feedback before going back into rehearsal.

PHASE THREE: Over the next two weeks, groups rehearse and continue to polish and refine the play. The focus is on performance, though the process of script development continues.
After the performance, there is always a talk-back to get audience feedback.

I have had the pleasure of experiencing this process five times as a playwright, with the end result being five scripts that are stronger, more focused, and workable as a theatre product. It is amazing to have the time to write, listen, re-write, listen, and write some more. The ability to be in a room with actors, director, and designers working on a script is the most amazing experience I have had, and to do it without the pressure that it must be perfect for a performance gives you the perspective on how the play works and doesn’t work. The final stage of the SHU is a staged reading, where the community is invited in to see the work and comment -- the final piece of the puzzle.

We all know that the process of theatre is collaborative, yet as playwrights, we are most often working alone. We sit with the voices in our head creating theatre; theatre as an art form that is three dimensional, a living breathing entity, which does take a village to create. Writer, director, actor, designer, and audience all make the art of theatre. So doesn’t it make sense to have everyone involved in the process of developing? The Milk Can’s answer is yes! We have produced twenty-three SHU workshops in the last seven years; from this group we have produced six new plays, world premieres, for our mainstage, and we still have projects under consideration for the future.

As a playwright, I have found that the SHU experience has helped me write better plays, and has allowed me to form bonds with directors, actors, and designers who now share with me a common language and a style of working. It has also allowed me to take risks and grow both personally and creatively.

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Big Dreams, Right?

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, Mac Rogers.

Well, as per usual, big dreams, right? I had this grandiose scheme of writing a brilliant five-part series for my week as an IT blogger, but of course, with a full-time job, opening one show (first preview went great!), prepping for a major benefit (ten years, people!), and trying to talk to my fiancé every once in a while, I didn’t quite pull it off. So the question becomes what to make my last blog post about.

I have my own blog, but I haven’t written on it in quite some time. I’ve had a chronic, possibly terminal case of what I’ve called “blog choke,” where it wasn’t that I couldn’t come up with anything to write about, but had a nervous nelly meltdown at the idea of making it public. Sometimes I’ve thought the posts were too rushed to be of value, sometimes I thought that maybe they were only substantial in my head and would prove to be pointless and baffling upon public contact, and sometimes I was scared of getting into a fight. Whatever the excuse, I choked every time.

The last time I wrote a blog post that was of any public interest was back in May 2008. The post, “The Safe Zone,” addressed the issues of civility in the theatrosphere and the idea of publicly sharing artistic processes online. This post, and the many wonderful comments that people made on it, started me on a thought process, but it wasn’t until I read and considered James Comtois’s marvelous series on self-producing Off-Off-Broadway that I had started to conceive of how I could possibly return to blogging.

Look, obviously I’m thin-skinned. And I get mad easily, particularly at what I see as insincere behavior. All too often, I feel as though people utilize worthy content – subjects that go to the heart of theater today, and theater into the future – as truncheons with which to bash each other. The point is not the content of the conversation, the content’s a MacGuffin. The point is the bashing. And I don’t write this from a perspective of superiority. I write it because I’ve done it as much or more as anyone else.

There’s no point in asking people to be more civil. It makes them want to be less civil. The theatrosphere can’t go back. It’s big and bad and mean, now, like all the other ‘oshperes. Only the strong will survive. I didn’t survive, because I wasn’t one of the strong.

Why is it worth using my last day on Full of IT to write about this subject? Kinda meta, isn’t it? Blogging about blogging? Well, here’s my justification: this is a blog. A blog devoted to writing about theater, particularly low-budget, independent theater, from a number of perspectives. I’d like to make an argument for the venue itself as being something worthwhile, with a reason to exist. I talked with Adam Szymcowicz on his site about how hard it is to share a site- and event- specific live art form like theater in an online forum, but we have to try. This is our best way to reach each other.

Back to James Comtois’s series. I was talking to my longtime colleague Sean Williams about the admiring and uncontroversial response it elicited, and Sean pointed out, “See, Jimmy didn’t write, ‘Here’s how to do it.’ He wrote, ‘Here’s what we did. Here’s what worked and what didn’t. Here’s what we learned.’” Exactly. James didn’t present himself as some all-knowing oracle here to school the rest of us snots, he presented himself as a struggling, learning, practicing producer of theater, trying stuff and seeing how it works. This encourages a reaction not of, “You’re wrong, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re serving your secret agenda, and I hate you!” but more of “Oh, seriously, you tried that? I always wondered what would happen if you tried that. I on the other hand tried this, and here’s what happened as a result.”

I feel like theater blogging is at its most successful when it’s tied to practice, in some form or another. That doesn’t have to mean playwriting or producing or even the creation of a single play. That can mean the ongoing maintenance of a theater company, that can mean advocacy, that can mean political organization, that can mean any number of things, as long as its some sort of theater-related activity taking place outside of cyberspace. It seems to me that many of the most brutal and least productive fights take place over theory, what each of us thinks all the others should be doing. It’s hard to build on that, because while you’re talking about one-person’s-utopia/another-person’s-hell, it doesn’t exist yet. So there’s no material to work with, no research to share. So the fights have to run on fumes, and without content to burn, personalities and lovingly nursed grudges take over.

The best online theater writing, it seems to me, is almost more like reporting (though of course not impartial): “Here’s what I’m doing to make my utopia come true. Here’s how it’s going. How’s it going at your end?” That doesn’t mean all nicey-nice for wimps like me. A real high-water mark of this form has to be Travis Bedard’s three-part post-mortem of the Cambiare Productions mounting of Orestes:
Deep Well of Forgetting
Food Chain Orestes
What We Have Here is Orestes Post Mortem

These aren’t mean-spirited at all, but they are tough-minded, and certainly must have led Travis into some difficult conversations, but maybe also a more refined artistic process in the future.

Of course we will always need to be able to use blogs for grand theories, manifestoes, and the like. Big dreams, right? I’m not saying those should disappear. But I think the path to a heartier, more sustainable theatrosphere not teetering on personal animosity and blood-feuds lies in using our online venues to talk about what we’re doing (or what we did), why we’re doing it, and how it’s working out. I haven’t done that much myself, even on this blog this week, but I’d like another crack at it. This is how we share the evolution of the art form with each other. None of us is smart enough to figure it out on our own.

Thanks again Shay, Morgan, and the IT Gang.

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Angry Gods & Monster Wars

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, Mac Rogers.

So on Tuesday I tried to make a case for science fiction as a legitimate genre for theater. But obviously that’s all theory. How are we supposed to actually do it? We’re New York independent theater! We don’t have a robot to piss in!

Well, good, we should talk about the practical. That’s more or less the definition of theater to me. It’s all practical: “How are we going to make that happen? They’re gonna be watching us while we do it.” This is all pretty prominently in my head right now, as the Red Fern Theater Company prepares to open an anthology of science fiction one-acts entitled +30NYC , which includes pieces by Bekah Brunstetter, Victor I. Cazares, Christine Evans, Michael John Garcés, Ashlin Halfnight, Tommy Smith, and yours truly.

Two of the theater companies I follow the closest do a lot of genre theater. The brains behind Nosedive Productions, for example, are brilliant at achieving impossible effects. Last year, wincing in shame, I gave them a play that involved people eating the flesh off a severed head, and they figured out how do it! Vampire Cowboys have a different approach, which I also love: they let the strings show. Fight Girl Battle World, I remember, had an outer space tool of some sort floating around in zero gravity, but they made sure we could see the metal pole holding it up from offstage. In this way, they create effects that mimic the movies, but make sure that we can see how they’re achieving them, which 1) is awesome and hilarious, and 2) conjures cinematic associations while remaining defiantly theatrical.

As a writer-producer, I design my scripts so they can be produced on a budget without losing impact. (I design them that way; I’m not saying the design always works.) With science fiction, you have to give the story a good think-through to figure out how it would best be realized in theatrical terms.

In 2007 and then again in 2009, I wrote and produced a science fiction play called Universal Robots. The story presented major challenges. It spanned many decades, involved the invention of robots, and the eventual robot conquest of the Earth. I knew it wasn’t a question of just writing the story, handing it off to some producers, and swanning off humming a careless tune. I would be one of the producers. There was no escape.

The play that was my original inspiration, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., mostly relied on expository dialogue to explain the earthshaking events that took place between scenes. I decided to not so much fix that as feature it: I created a narrator, who could explain the bits we needed explained without having to shoe-horn them into conversation between the other characters, who had no reason to be explaining the plot to each other.

But who was the narrator? This is a hangup I have. If someone is talking to the audience, I want to know why. I want them to be a character. I want them to have a reason to be talking to us. So I brooded a bit more, and then I thought: what if she’s a robot? What if she’s telling us the story of the robot conquest? Because this (and this is when you know you’ve hit on a winner, ‘cause it starts solving multiple problems for you) addressed the problem of how to end a play that closes with all the humans in the whole world getting killed.

And then it hit me: hubris. Capek’s play fell squarely into the whole Greek/Icarus/golem/Frankenstein tradition of human aspiring to God-hood and getting smacked down for it. I wasn’t trying to mimic that particular moral framework, but the associations involved – the chorus, the ritualistic aspect, the religious dimensions – pointed me squarely in the direction of greek tragedy, and toward that crucial realization:

The whole play would be about a theatrical presentation by a troupe of robots after the extermination of the human race, led by the narrator. A presentation that had spiritual significance to the presenters – a confession, an expiation. It would start and end with a chorus, and in between it would tell the story of strivers who tried to be Gods. The answer of how to present a science fiction epic on stage, unsurprisingly, was to be found in Greek tragedy – in a genre of theater. One of the oldest.

It was the best idea I ever had, and it wasn’t my idea. I didn’t come up with anything new. I combined a bunch of very old, tried and true ingredients with a sprinkle of my own seasoning on top. Human beings have been presenting fantastical stories as long as there has been theater. Angry gods, monsters, war. The long night of revelations in a living room is what we often associate with theater, but it’s a more recent invention. There are other options. And science fiction is a natural fit with ritualistic, symbolic, hyper-experiential theater that defined the earliest incarnations of the form.

My subsequent play, Viral, was more Karen Fowler-style “we’re already living in a science fiction world” science-fiction. It involved a group of characters who come to engage with each other about as intimately as people can – but they never would have met were it not for methods of online communication and expression that barely existed a decade ago.

It made more sense to realize that story as your standard-issue living room play. I wanted everything to feel as ordinary as possible so that the extraordinary parts would really jump out. In my original draft, the first five or six pages took place in the virtual world of chat-rooms where the characters meet, but the director, Jordana Williams, sensibly convinced me to junk it. We simply had the characters on the couch in the living room, typing to the stranger who would change their lives, who stood apart in a separate light. Simple, elegant, and the audience, who spent much of their daily lives online, clicked into the concept instantly. The scene played solidly for suspense and laughs every time. Again, science fiction is never about gadgets or aliens, but how we, as human beings, adapt to them, and reveal ourselves through that adaptation.

Speaking of aliens… I’m writing a couple plays right now, but the one that’s falling into place the fastest? I must be losing my mind. It’s a trilogy of plays about an extraterrestrial invasion of the Earth. I must be off my frickin’ rocker. I’ll tell you this, though. My number one guideline in writing these scripts? This is not a movie. This is not a miniseries. This is a piece of live theater. And that informs every choice.

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