Just Wrought

Long Live Living Newspapers!

 

When The Stranger asked me at the end of the year what my biggest regret of 2011 was, I said:

I regret that due to limited resources, we had to mothball NewsWrights United prior to the Occupy movement blowing up, because I would have really liked to cover that in a living newspaper. Adjacent to that is my regret that none of the big houses in Seattle (or small, for that matter) saw fit to include making topical theatre, based on events happening right here right now, as part of their regular programming this year. 

Well, shade my regret mitigated by the news from across the pond that my former playwriting student German Munoz has organized a living newspaper about the Occupy movement called The Occupied Times.  After spending a month researching and visiting the Occupy sites in London, emerging playwrights will present a night of short plays in the format of a living newspaper. They will act as reporters and cast a critical eye on the Occupy movement, its supporters and detractors, all under the Arcola Tent. 

And color me even more vividly gratified when I saw that the project gave Seattle a shout-out in their press release:  “This project was inspired by It’s not in the P-I: A living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper presented in Seattle in 2009 as a response to the closing of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper by Newswrights United.”

Not surprisingly, The Occupied Times seems to be garnering the same sort of media excitement that the two living newspapers NewsWrights United produced in 2009 and 2011.  The London Evening Standard ran a preview of the piece   and quoted my friend German thusly:

We want the show to explore sides of the movement that have not been heard. We're hoping to reach people of all ages who feel they've made up their minds about the Occupy movement. People who either think of the protesters as a bunch of lazy hippies who don't want to get a job, or see them as martyrs fighting the good fight against a system that is unbearably corrupt. Of course neither of these are completely true, and we want to show audiences our responses as artists and help them make up their own minds.

I heartily encourage my friends in London to check out this fresh, locally grown theatre inspired in the crucible of the right here and the right now.  Here’s the show info:

Six Degrees Productions presents  . . .

The Occupied Times: A living newspaper
about the Occupy movement

Venue: Arcola Tent, 2-8 Ashwin Street, London, E8 3DL

Date: Sunday 19 February, 2012

Time: 3:00pm and 7:00pm

Ticket prices: £12 (£10)

Venue Box Office: 020 7503 1646 or http://www.arcolatheatre.com 

For all enquiries and ticket requests, please contact:  German Munoz of Six Degrees Productions on 07854 231 085 or g@germanmunoz.com

And as for my friends in Seattle, do you ever wonder why the Big Houses haven’t picked up such a wildly popular and media magnetizing idea?  Well, in fairness, maybe they will now that it is being done in London, one of the two officially approved cities for sourcing new plays.

Come Hear Undo

What’s better than being a playwright having a reading of a play you think might be good?   Easy.   Being an actor in a reading of play you know is good.

 

 

Holly Arsenault was already a friend and colleague of mine when she took my playwriting class at Freehold a couple years ago.  Towards the end of the 8 weeks, we all sat down to read a nice chunk of her play Undo.  I was blown away by the wit and natural craft Holly showed in this early draft.  I swallowed my jealousy and gave her the only note I had.  “Finish this thing.”  Later, when Holly informed me she was pregnant with her first child, I’m pretty sure I said something like, “That’s amazing news!  Mazel tov!  And finish that play!”

And in surprisingly quick time, she did.

Come hear as I help to read it publically for the very first time, with a coterie of actors so far superior to me in their skills that I’m not really sure why Holly asked me to join them.  And yet I shall join them, confident in Holly’s play’s power to make me look good, and hopeful that somehow this old strutter can somehow return the favor.

Here are the details:

Undo
A new play by Holly Arsenault
Directed by Matthew Richter

Featuring Basil Harris, Gretchen Krich, Hana Lass, Jonah Von Spreecken, Paul Mullin, Roy Stanton, Samar Lerman, Sarah Harlett, Tina Rowley and Zoey Cane Belyea.

When:  Tuesday, November 29 at 7pm

Where:  Seattle Repertory Theatre’s PONCHO Forum, 155 Mercer Street, Seattle, WA 98109.

Face Book Event: http://www.facebook.com/events/151916888242933/

Hawking Whole Theatre at “What’s Next?”

Last night I joined a small but extremely energized group of theatre professionals at the second iteration of “Seattle Theatre: What’s Next?” hosted by Jim Jewell and Peggy Gannon.  I want to talk more about what was discussed and what action items came out of that discussion, but I think I will wait until Jim publishes the official minutes.  Until then, here’s a transcript of the three minute spiel that I was asked to give on what’s currently exciting me about Seattle Theatre:

 

Whole Theatre

Be careful what you wish for, sure.  But when it comes to Seattle Theater, it’s also wise to be specific what you wish for.  For a good while now Seattle’s Big House theatres have been gradually increasing the percentage of local actors they hire.  And rightfully they have then touted this change as a noble step in the direction of locally grown theatre. But let’s be honest.  We all know one of two things happened.  Either the artistic administrators of Seattle’s Big Houses all got together in a room and decided, “Hey, we should do the right thing and hire more local actors.”  Or... they all independently realized that in the current depression it was becoming cost prohibitive to fly in every actor from New York or LA.  I’ll leave it to you to decide which scenario seems more plausible.  But look, when a good thing happens it’s churlish to over-analyze the reasons for it.

The problem is that using local actors isn’t enough.  And so when we advocate for locally grown theatre, we need to be more specific…  Whole Theatre.  Theatre that is soup to nuts local: written by local talent in collaboration with local talent.  Zero degrees of separation among everyone from the playwright to the director to the designers to the actors to the audiences. 

Zero degrees of separation. 

If what I am proposing sounds radical or overly ambitious, consider this: we do it all the time.  In fact, if I can brag a little, as a playwright and an actor, I have done very little in the last five years that hasn’t been Whole Theatre.  Going back to 2006, there was the Empty Space production of Louis Slotin Sonata.  When the floor needed final painting, Allison Narver was there in jeans, helping designer Gary Smoot to finish it.  I’m trying to picture one of Seattle’s Big House artistic directors doing that.  To be fair, I’m sure there are union rules against it.

Then there was The Ten Thousand Things, which Washington Ensemble Theatre produced.  I sat in a room with the director and the designer Etta Lilienthal talking through her sketches. Later, I sat in the theatre while audience members rewrote my play one word each performance.

And most recently there was Newswrights United producing two living newspapers, researched, written and produced by Seattleites, about Seattleites, for Seattleites.

And of course it’s not just stuff I’m working on.  There’s the incomparable 14/48, perhaps the most consistently exciting weekend of theatre in town.  All local actors, directors, designers and crew mixing it up on plays written by local playwrights in the space of maybe ten hours, tops.

There’s Printer’s Devil, opening yet another Scot Augustson world premiere, Shadow Odyssey in their unique committed relationship with him.

There’s Sandbox Radio which just staged its second all original slate of short pieces, combining some of Seattle’s best actors with the best playwrights and musicians.

And right on the horizon is Rebecca Olson’s new project Custom Made Plays, commissioning local playwrights to write for specific local actors.  I’m happy to be the playwright on the pilot play, writing for Rebecca herself and Hana Lass.

Whole Theatre.  Theatre that hasn’t had the yummy good-for-you stuff processed out of it.  Non-corporate theatre that ain’t stale from being packaged three years ago in a theatre scene 2,700 miles away by MFA’s who have never stepped foot in your town.  Whole Theatre. Seattle’s crawling with it.  And surely it gives us the most solid shot at World Class.

 

(I want to do a version of the poster that says Enjoy Whole Theatre!  Or as Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov called it, “Theatre.”)

American Theatre Hearts Scot Augustson

Slip this clipping into the “Seattle’s-Big-Houses-May-Not-Care-Much-about-Seattle’s-Locally-Grown-Plays-But-the-International-Media-Sure-Does” file.  You know, it’s that one that’s getting a little over-stuffed by now with pieces like NPR’s On the Media’s story about the first edition of NewsWrights United’s Living Newpaper (you can listen here), and the UK’s Guardian covering both Seattle’s hosting of the Outrageous Fortune discussion as well as Just Wrought’s vibrant comment stream regarding the Intiman debacle.

This time it’s the vaunted magazine American Theatre giving Scot Augustson a little much deserved love for the opening of his latest Sgt. Rigsby joint, Shadow Odyssey, produced by Printers Devil Theatre at Theatre Off Jackson.  Apparently this side-bar shout out doesn’t appear on line, but only in the print version.  So I asked Scot to send me a scan.  Scot apologized to me for his “Flintstone scanning technology”.  (I’m picturing a bird with a pen in its beak, furiously copying the page and then flying with it to my house in Green Lake.  Once I take the image, he turns to the camera, shrugs and squawks, “It’s a living!”)

I’m going to see Shadow Odyssey tonight, opening night, ‘cuz I’m cool that way.  But whatever you do, you better get your tix soon, before all the folks flying in from all over America buy up all the seats.

KING 5 Hearts Sandbox Radio

 

Taking a break from talking about the problem of horror in theatre to let you know that Nancy Guppy gave us crazy good love today on KING 5’s New Day Northwest’s “Weekend Zone”, kicking off the segment with a huge plug for Sandbox Radio, calling us Seattle’s Prairie Home Companion, only Leslie Law is “a lot better looking than Garrison Keillor”.  Well, duh, Nancy!  (Oh, and funny story, Margaret Larson has volunteered to be our foley artist.  Gee, thanks Margaret, but uh… we’ll call you, okay?)

I am pretty sure we are all sold out on Brown Paper Tickets, but if you really want to come see the live recording, message me and I will see what strings I have left to pull.

And of course, if you haven’t already done so, check out the podcast of Episode One.

 

A Show You Don’t Have to Come See

How often do you get a plug for a show in which the plugger says he doesn’t really care if you come see it?  Well, that’s exactly what I’m telling about this second edition of Sandbox Radio Live: The Halloween Episode.

 

 

Well, all right, hold on a second.  Fact is, I really would like to see you there in the audience, but our seating at West of Lenin is extremely limited and we will sell out.  So no matter what happens, some of you who show up without reservations will be frozen out, S.O.L, on the sidewalk outside, while the happy few who booked at Brown Paper Tickets early enough watch it live.  (Book ahead here.)  But do NOT despair.  It’s Sandbox Radio remember?  And the whole point of us doing it is to make a permanent recording.  Our first episode is available for you to listen to right now, for free! at iTunes.  (Listen here.)

The podcast of Episode One, at 90 minutes, is admittedly quite sizable.  In future, perhaps The Sandbox might look at ways to create a table of contents with time-stamps so you can go to the sections of the show that most interest you.  In the mean time, download it so that you have something to play the next time you’re stuck in traffic.  You won’t regret it.  (And after you have a listen, please consider posting a review of the show.  It’s the best way for you to let us know what you do and don’t like, and it also raises Sandbox Radio’s profile on iTunes.)

And look for the podcast of Sandbox Radio Live: The Halloween Episode coming out shortly after the live performance on October 10!

Sandbox Radio – Worth the Wait

 

A bunch of us founded the Sandbox Artists Collective a few years ago “as a place for mid-career artists to explore their craft in the company of their peers.”  Unlike most assemblages of show folk, the Sandboxers weren’t in any hurry to produce publicly as a group.  Most of us were already performing, writing and/or producing professionally elsewhere. We were not, however, completely quiet in our first years, hosting salons, like “Playground” in which four Sandbox playwrights wrote specifically for Sandbox actors.  Finally, however— and fully to the credit of Leslie Law’s leadership— the membership felt the urge to share what happens when we put  our collective mind into putting on a show.  The result was last month’s Sandbox Radio Live, Episode 1, available now in podcast here.

On an individual artist’s note, Sandbox Radio Live has given me the opportunity and motivation to finally flesh out a project I have been percolating since high school.  For all that time, all I knew was that I wanted to wright a nasty noir angel detective saga.  Now you can listen to the first chapter of Markheim on the podcast, with the incomparable Charles Leggett starring in the title role of the reluctant semi-heavenly gumshoe.  Below the fold I am posting the script in case you want to follow along. 

And be sure to attend the next episode of Sandbox Radio Live on Monday, October 10th at West of Lenin, the fabulous new theatre space in Fremont, when Markheim adjusts to life in the strange city of Seattle, and begins his search for the reasons that brought him here.  Special appearance by the fellow that Jesus Christ Himself once called “the Prince of the World.”

Making “Nows” from Now Matters Too

Here’s another dirty secret for you: I am as essentially indifferent to theatre as the next 21st century adult.  I like it fine, but if you were to tell me I could never see another production of American Buffalo or Titus Andronicus, I’d find a way to somehow suck it up.  And even though I spent a good part of my youth as an actor, and managed to pay for what little college I got with a performance scholarship; and even though I still really enjoy doing it, if you were to tell me that I had some strange incurable disease, basically benign but which would strike me dead if I ever again strutted and fretted, I’d still somehow find a way to live the rest of my natural days in non-thespian peace.  But I experienced something Sunday that reminded me yet again that there is one aspect of theatre I cannot and will not give up.  So if you tried to tell me I couldn’t write another play for live performance, and I thought you meant it-- well, you and I would have a bit of a war on our hands.

My wife and my boys, ages nine and six, decided late Sunday afternoon to attend the opening performance of Balagan’s Theatre’s 2011 summer outdoor offering, King Arthur and the Knights of the Playground.  It was a perfect Seattle summer day, a rare enough jewel of deep greens and blues.  About a hundred and fifty of us, maybe more, gathered on the rich lawn behind the Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park beneath some of the most glorious old trees you could ever hope to see.  There were friends, and friends of friends, and friends and family of cast members and crew, and just plain lovers of theatre, young and old; and we all watched some truly sublime goofiness with a wide open heart at its core. I wrote the section—one of five— called “The Ballad of Balin and Balan”, and based my interpretation of these two tragically fated brother-knights on the relationship of my own two sons.  Sitting there on a blanket with my mostly oblivious models, my heart was in my throat from the beginning of the piece, and I was embarrassed to have to wipe my eyes at the corny final scene:

[They both fall to the ground, gasping.]

BALAN:  You know what this means?

BALIN:  We’re gonna die.

BALAN:  Well, yeah, but something else.

BALIN:  Yeah?  What?

BALAN:  The curse said you would kill your best friend.

BALIN:  Yeah.  So what?

BALAN:  So that means I’m your best friend.  Curses can’t lie.

BALIN:   Hey, yeah, that’s right.  And I’m your best friend.

BALAN:  That’s right.

BALIN:  Forever.

It didn’t bother me one bit that my sons were more interested in the toy light sabers wielded by the actors than the fact that I had used their sweet, easy devotion to each other as my inspiration.  I’m pretty sure that if the real Richard III had a chance to see a modern Seattle production of Shakespeare’s play about him, he would be way more fascinated in the costumes, props and actual women on stage than in any resemblance to the biographical facts of his life.  (This is, by the way, another glorious feature of theatre.  We all see something deeply different.)  What blew me away was my own awareness of a profound and magical moment, wherein the very beauty of the earth seemed to host this collection of stories, as sweet and true and fresh as life itself; that my boys were watching grown men attempting to match the matchless nobility of love that children can hold for one another.  And I was part of it.  A very small, perfectly happy part of it.  And because my job was done, all I had to do was breathe and gratefully accept the moment knowing that I can have no idea what experiencing the moment might mean down the road for either of my boys, but suspecting there’s a good chance that it might mean something.

Making plays matters.  Alas, I still have immense difficulty convincing many of my colleagues of this truth.  There’s a director in Seattle whose work I consistently admire who has maintained publicly more than once that he doesn’t believe we need any more new works for the stage because we will never have enough time or resources to produce all of the great plays that have already been written.  Many powerful decision makers in American Theatre agree, most implicitly, but some even explicitly, that the canon of theatrical literature is full: like the Bible, we cannot, should not, and even must not, add volumes to it.  I shake my head and smile at this notion, so apparently provable in the abstract, and yet so falsifiable by one deep blue green gorgeous Sunday afternoon in Seattle’s Volunteer Park.

Please forgive the geek metaphor, but if plays are algorithms—timeless software to be run on a particular time’s theatrical hardware (i.e. actors, sets, costumes, props, lighting and sound designs and, yes, even directorial concepts), then I want some of those future algorithms to be from my time.  Put more simply, if plays are “nows” thrown forward into “then”, then I need to believe that some of those “then-nows” will be from this now, if only so my sons’ daughters might know something of how wonderful their fathers were to each other when they were boys.

The SunBreak takes The New New News to Heart

 

Artists want their work to have impact, and certainly theatre artists are no exception.  Unfortunately, a lot of us, a lot of the time, stay caught in the trap of thinking that exquisite craft is the only way we can really move people.  After all, our stories are old, often ancient; surely we can only make them relevant by telling them so well that our audiences will be altered somehow by the excellence of our execution.  Why else would you do Of Mice and Men?  Or Hamlet?  Or All My Sons?  Most of us already know the message of these works, so the value must lie in the medium.  And so it does. 

Please understand, I am not looking to explode the canon.  I, too, see great value in revisiting the classics over and over again.  But I also believe that there is another path to relevance available to theatre artists.  When we bring current local  issues into our theatres we replenish its vitality for effecting change in the here and now; and we guarantee its rightful place among the arts that lean into the future and not the just the past.  Theatres do not just have to be museums.

So as gratified as I was by The Sunbreak’s very positive review of The New New News:  A Living Newspaper, imagine my even greater gratification when I saw in a separate piece these words written by the online magazine’s editor, Michael van Baker:

I have to admit to having been inspired by The New New News to sit down and write this update on the site's progress. The play's argument that transparency is lacking as news is reinvented (at least as a business model) online hit home with me. We're in one of those historical periods of exploration, financing tiny little caravels to travel uncharted paths, and it's just plain discourteous not to leave a journal behind.

Let me start with the more reader-relevant details before moving on to a discussion what makes The SunBreak tick, and what our online magazine plans are. 

The New New News continues its run for two more weeks at the Theatre One Stage at North Seattle Community College.  While we at NewsWrights United understand that the piece will never join the ranks of the classics, we are nonetheless very proud of the immediacy of the stories we are telling, and the overt impact they are having in our community.  Theatre for, by and about the people of Seattle!  Market fresh, and indeed, quite perishable!  (We only have two more weeks.)

You can check it out by ordering your advance reservations here.

What is Going on in this Pic?

 

Gee I wish I could tell you, but then you might think you don’t need to come to The New New News: A Living Newspaper, and that would be so so wrong.  Because you do need to come.  We open FRIDAY!  Book your reservation now so you you too can get a taste.