Just Wrought

Seattle Likes its Playwrights Nice

I wrote that in my pocket notebook while bussing it home recently from a happy hour with a highly placed Big House theatre administrator.  We were having that well-worn vodka-sodden conversation about how, while very few new works get developed in Seattle lately, the ones that do tend to be by the same “go-to” authors, invariably defended with some variation of the following:

“Say what you will about the innocuousness of his plays, _______ really is the nicest guy.”

“Sure _____’s work isn’t that strong or well-researched but she’s just so darned sweet.”

Having jotted down that title, it was my intention go back and explore the idea in one of my longer essays, but now, looking at them I realize that if those five words don’t already make manifest the problem, another thousand won’t paint the picture any clearer.

 

NewsWrights United has Hit the Ground, and We are Running

A few days ago the NewsWrights United’s Managing Producer, Jim Jewell, sent out a kick-off press release to all sorts of fancy media folks about NewsWrights United and our upcoming production The New New News: A Living Newspaper.  In it he made a few key announcements:

• NewsWrights United will be producing a second edition of our Living Newspaper called The New New News, on the heels of the frankly astounding success of our first edition It’s Not In the P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper.  The New New News will provide a theatrical examination of the rise of new media and how we know what we know… or not.
• NewsWrights United will be tossing this Living Newspaper up onto your theatrical doorstep in February of 2011 (and by “theatrical doorstep” I mean a Seattle stage or stages to be named later.)
• NewsWrights United just launched our blog, conveniently located at http://newswrightsunited.blogspot.com/.  On this blog my fellow writer/producers and I will do our best to keep up-to-date on our progress developing The New New News for production.  As much as we can, we keep you apprised of our hopes, our fears, our failures, and ideally, our ultimate triumph.   See?  That’s what’s exciting about locally grown, intensely fresh new work.  The outcome is not a foregone conclusion.  Following us is like rooting for a local sports team, whereas supporting our more museumified colleagues is more like, well, supporting a museum.  (Tantamount-to-dead things don’t readily engender lively metaphors.)
• NewsWrights United just launched a “wiki-scene” here, where anyone who wants to can help us write a section of the upcoming show.
• We have a web page: http://www.newswrightsunited.org  it ain’t super fancy yet, but it will be.  (And any support you can offer us in that regard would be most welcome.)
• We will be hosting  an awareness-building/fund-raising event on the evening of Monday, November 15, tentatively titled Journalism: a.WAKE.ning? in the Upstairs Gallery above Theatre Off Jackson, from 7:30 – 9:30 PM.  The event will include art installations examining new media, a preview of The New New News, a panel discussion on coverage of the November elections and, of course, a reception, in which guests will be offered their choice of a flute of champagne or a shot of rye, depending on whether they think journalism is ready for a new baptism or last rites. So HOLD THAT DATE!  

A couple of things Jim did not mention but that I wanted you to know as my special Just Wrought readers:

• NewsWrights United has a Face Book page.  Go there by clicking http://www.facebook.com/NewsWrightsUnited  and then “like” us.  That’s one the quickest easiest ways to stay on top of our mercurial movements.
• NewsWrights United has a twitter profile: “NewsWrights” Follow us.  (We have been, admittedly, Twitter-resistant in the past, but since half our stories involve the tool, and most actual journalists appear to be addicted to it, we figure we would look like idiots if we did not tweet.  (And possibly still look like idiots when we do.)

Now rest assured, we’re going to be asking you for money to support this production.  And not just for the obvious reasons, like we like ourselves, think you will too, and need money to put on a show.  We also have some not so obvious reasons for asking for you support, such as:

1. Every performance of our Living Newspapers is offered on a suggested donation basis.  We do this because we believe information and art should be as accessible as possible, and not just for those lucky few—and ever fewer—folks that can afford the enormous sum demanded for a theatre ticket these days.
2. Journalism costs money.  To gather the news and to disseminate it.  NewsWrights United is no different, except we have actors and production designers and staff to pay to help display and distribute our news instead of printers and truck drivers.  We want you to participate directly in the financially supporting the journalism we provide, because such participation is the fair price of democracy.
3. We are covering YOU!  We aren’t just staging Titus Andronicus or Glenngary Glen Ross because we want to, and  then making tortured arguments about how these plays are somehow relevant to your own stories today.  We are telling your own stories today!  We believe that ought to be worth something to you. 

So here’s our hat.  You can start filling it by clicking on it.  It’ll take you to our Shunpike donation page.   

Early support is always deeply appreciated support.  So thanks.

We have hit the ground.  We have spread out and chased down stories from sources all over this town and beyond.  We have begun to stitch them together into a script.  From this moment we will not stop until we give you the freshest, hardest-hitting local news-based theatre you have ever seen.

When Plays Pay in Odd Ways

My play The Sequence has made me more money than any other play I have written.  This is true, even though The Sequence has only been fully produced once, at the Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena in 2008, and I did not receive any more than the usual compensation for that production.  How can this be?  For starters, The Sequence was a commission, meaning that, through a generous grant from EST/Sloan Project, I was paid up front simply to write it.  And while that commission was larger than any I had previously received, it was not huge by any measure, and certainly did not exceed the total that, say, Louis Slotin Sonata had brought in by that time through productions.  However, once I had a full draft of the script—albeit by no means final—I started getting inquiries from bio-tech organizations interested in hosting readings of the The Sequence at various symposiums and meetings around the country.  After a few of these readings, I became bored and started charging more than I thought  anyone would pay.  They paid anyway.  And thus I came to learn what should have been obvious in the first place: bio tech organizations have more money than regional theatres, and less myopia around where good plays can come from and what they are worth.

Now another yet-to-be produced play threatens to vaguely embarrass me by making money through means even less tangentially related to theatre.  My most recent full-length on-spec script is called Gossamer Grudges, and presents the story of a family-owned business devoted to “holding your grudges so you don’t have to.”  I have been nursing this premise for several years on the belief that it was deliciously absurd enough to fuel a proper full-on farce.  All that time I never guessed it might be absurd enough to inspire an actual business. 

Here’s a link to the first in what surely will be a long line of promotional videos for a new service called Grudgr, uniquely poised to—you guessed it— hold your grudges so you don’t have to.

 

Negotiations around my compensation for inspiring this business are on-going.  It could well be I won’t see a penny.  I am notoriously stupid when it comes to predicting the success of Hollywood enterprises.  I remember a phone conversation I had with Jeff Probst over a decade ago in which he told me about his upcoming television show wherein ordinary people would compete to be the last person on an desert island.  I remember thinking as I got off the phone, “Poor guy.  What a stupid idea.  They’re going to cancel that crap in two weeks tops.”

Another Sample of MSK’s Insight on her Award Day

 

Every truly great actor whom I know personally possesses something that all of the just-almost-great actors whom I personally know utterly lack.  (I must tread carefully now.)  Actors like Marya Sea Kaminski and William Salyers, with whom I inevitably compare her, nurse a kernel of contempt for the charms of their craft.  Or is it contempt?  Disdain? Skepticism may be kinder, if not more accurate.  They quietly eschew that most of loathsome habit of actors, self-back-patting.

SELF-BACK-PATTING ACTOR: “How many people do you know who can do what I do on stage?”

EVERYONE ELSE: “Well… not many, but perhaps that’s a blessing?

Great actors do not celebrate themselves.  Great actors, perhaps to a fault, don’t celebrate much at all in the theatre (unless, of course, the character they are playing is celebrating).  They are almost always too busy, too focused, keeping their heads down and digging deeper.   They understand that the show is not them, but that, counter-intuitively, they are in fact the show.  And thus people keep coming back to see them, or not them, per se, but them breathing, them giggling, them preening prancing prattling, sloppily kissing, them dying and killing, them living.  Or put another way, them [anything but acting].

 

One of the reasons Marya is such a pleasure to work with is that she quietly leans her brain more deeply into the art than most of her colleagues.  Evidence, is it, you need?  This from her current Stranger feature explaining why she was given this year’s Genius Award for Theatre.

…that's the fear that people have been talking about with the Method since the beginning," she says. "I can think about my dog getting hit and get teary—until the day thinking about my dog getting hit doesn't get me teary anymore. And then I've failed in two ways: I've failed to bring an honest emotion to the stage and I've numbed myself to that personal experience."

Simply. . .

Briliant.

That's Marya.

Chicago Public Radio Glows for Slotin

I was determined not to bore you with reviews from the Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, but this one from Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ, has several things going for it:

1. It’s extremely short.
2. It’s completely, unequivocally positive. :-)
3. And you don’t have to read it.  You can just listen to it here.

Money pull-quote: 

“… Intellectualy thrilling and rigorous.  It really is a must see.”

*Inside Baseball: Vocally, this critic Kelly Kleiman sounds remarkably like The Seattle Times’ Misha Berson; only difference being she doesn’t hate my guts…yet. 

Just one more reason to love the Windy City!

Steve Schine Joins a Very Exclusive Club

 

Gotta say, my Chicago home boy, Steve Schine, is practically a dead ringer.  Don’t ya think?

 

Compare with . . .

 

No dis,  mind you, on my former Slotin homeboys, the inestimable Paul Morgan Stetler (The Empty Space Theatre, Seattle) and the seminal William Salyers (Circle X Theatre, Los Angeles and Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York).

 

Sun-Times Previews A Red Orchid's Slotin Nicely

Ask anyone who's been doing theatre long enough and they'll tell you, "I don't care if they review me so long as they preview me." 

Well, The Chicago Sun-Times just gave a very nice one here to A Red Orchid's Chicago premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata, which will be starting preview's tonight, on my birthday! 

A Red Orchid’s Poster for Louis Slotin Sonata

The poster for the new production of Louis Slotin Sonata in Chicago. . .

 

 

I have to say…

I like it.

I like it very much. 

Eye-witness accounts of atomic blasts invariably share some sentiment to the effect that the explosion’s aftermath easily rates as the most beautiful and simultaneously horrible sight the witness has ever seen.  Richard Rhodes collects page after amazing page of first-hand reports from the test shot at Trinity in his seminal history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.  Here’s just one from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brother Frank: 

And so there was this sense of this ominous cloud hanging over us.  It was so brilliant purple with all the radioactive glowing.  And it just seemed to hang there forever.  Of course it didn’t.  It must have been  just a very short time until it went up.  It was very terrifying.

And the thunder from the blast.  It bounced on the rocks, and then it went—I don’t know where else it bounced.  But it never seemed to stop.  Not like an ordinary echo with thunder.  It just kept echoing back and forth in that Jornada del Meurto.

By cropping the mushroom cloud neatly by half, the designer has de-iconized the image, forcing us to look again more closely at the amazing, disturbing forms and colors, not to mention the cloud’s sheer enormity.

Posters are for putting butts in seats.  I have no idea if this will do that.  But I could stare at it all day.

May human eyes never witness such beauty again.

blue yonder

 

Falling is good falling is fun falling is
natural it will kill you some day today
South San Francisco is fog-ended through
the morning but the afternoon will break
deep and clear like you always get
at least once an autumn even
though it’s August and it's warm it’s
autumn just the same.

You’ve seen these skies before broken
only by fighter jets screeching circles
around the city smoking on its end
beauty is woven into everything
horrible maybe so we know to let it in.

“The model could be throttled back” someone
says on the conference call poets unaware