I'll take "Generic for 100, Alex"

So just got forwarded a play submission opportunity, where the first thing on the Theatre Company's application page is "Check out our mission statement. Make sure you get what we are all about!"

This is the mission statement:

[Theatre Company] is an empowerment to both audience and artist, fostering artistic growth and opening new avenues for creativity and full self-expression. [Theatre Company] brings the conversation directly to the audience; engaging them and creating an environment where powerful ideas flourish, leaving all enlivened and inspired.

So... I should submit a play, then?

No Smoking On Stage in Colorado

Colorado has concluded that its ban on smoking in public areas extends to its theaters and the people acting in them. Link from Extra Criticum.

This is highly annoying to me. I don't smoke myself, though I have smoked onstage (back when I was acting, in a college production of Harold Pinter's One for the Road, where I tortured someone with a cigarette). A number of my characters in the plays I write smoke. I hate seeing fake smoking.

Tom Robbins has a wonderful section in Still Life With Woodpecker about smoking:

Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

You just can't get that with fake cigarettes.

I have for some time wanted to have an evening of short plays where smoking is the point: get a fire marshall to stand by with an extinguisher for the night. Just need to find a theater where that could happen. Maybe just do it outdoors next Summer.

Write Your Own Play

I'm firmly of the opinion that if you don't like a play, either because of politics, style, or if it just doesn't work, the best response is to write a better play.

I wrote my upcoming The Empress of Sex after being inspired by the awfulness of the book of Triumph of Love...

Recently I saw and reviewed The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever!; there were many things about the play I didn't like, but what was perhaps the most frustrating were the great ideas that they let slip by- they took the idea of having two Queer shepherds seeing an angel and witnessing the birth of Jesus, and instead of saying something interesting which might have illuminated the relationship of homosexuality to religion, the playwright chose to make a Bareback Brokeback Mountain joke (which consisted of the phrase "I Wish I Knew How to Quit You" and ridiculous stripper-cowboy costumes).

SO, I'm taking the idea they abandoned and writing my own Nativity play, called Pleased as Man with Man to Dwell, after one of my favorite lines from "Hark, The Herald Angels Sing".

A side of Penang

I recently reviewed Penang. I didn't care for the script.
Martin Denton reviewed it and seemed to like it a lot.

I was listening to an interview with the playwright on Broadway Bullet, and he had some interesting things to say- he himself has been in combat, and he said that he hates the war movie trope where the men turn on each other and end up causing each other's destruction, and so wrote Penang to counteract that, to show how men in war come to love and support each other- as evidenced by a man throwing himself on a grenade to protect the rest of his troop.

...but that's not the play he wrote. Penang mainly takes place out of war. Everyone who dies in the play dies through accident, and not while in combat. The two leads meet and come to be close comrades while on R&R (in the titular country)- they certainly rail against war, and lose their faith in god, and comfort each other, but they never actually serve together.

I'd like to see the play he thought he was writing.

Going for the Juggler

In one of American Theater Wing's SCDF Masters of the Stage podcasts, featuring the late Robert Whitehead and Brian Clark, one of them says:

Someone once said, I wish I remember who, that The Playwright’s spiritual ancestor is not a poet, but a juggler. And I think that’s right.

That's an amazing statement, and so true. My job as a playwright is, first and foremost, to entertain the audience, not to be poetic or philosophical. If I can be poetic and philosophical along the way, so much the better, but the audience is paying to be entertained, to see a good story.


Just saw Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In The Red and Brown Water at The Public last week. It was immensely entertaining because of the direction (Tina Landau) and performers, so much so that it nearly covered up for a strangely empty story (I've since discovered that it was based on African Yoruban Mythology, which accounts for some of the weird poetics of the script). The whole thing plays like a vivid dream that seems really important until you wake up. It's evocative, but not of very much.

Leading Ladies

Just watched the latest American Theatre Wing's Working In The Theatre (which I get on my ipod- they alternate between the new episodes and ones from years past- they're often amazing). This one was Leading Ladies and featured Alice Ripley, Bebe Neuwirth, Beth Leavel and Laura Benanti. It's quite enjoyable.

One thing Bebe was saying was that, as a female performer who is both funny and sexy, she almost never plays a lead romantic interest. I've been trying to think of roles where that is not the case (Beth Level points out in the episode that she herself, just stepped into Mamma Mia!, has a rare one, with three men competing for her attentions).
I came up with:
* Sweeney Todd. Maybe not the best example, and maybe sexy is not the point- and it's really only because of the perspective flip of the story: the ingenues are the B-story there.
* Born Yesterday. Not a musical, of course, but that sort of screwball comedy does lend itself to wise-cracking dames in the lead.
* The Sisters Rosensweig. Also not a musical, but was Wendy Wasserstein's plan to consciously write an adult funny woman and a man who falls in love with her at first sight.
* Mame. Although her type would more likely be cast as Vera.

It's pretty clear Bebe has a point. Any other suggestions?

I am blog!

I've been keeping a private journal for years, and have recently decided to make some of my thoughts on theater public. I am a playwright and theater reviewer in New York City.