Just Wrought

Day 7 / Reason 7: My Sons

When I fully and officially retired from theatre in 2013, my younger son Keelan was only eight years old. My older son, Declan, was eleven. This means that the person in their lives mostly likely to spark an interest in them for the artform is also the person who cut it out of his life when they were little.

I was mostly okay with this for most of the last eight years, but this May I was blessed with a unique opportunity, which caused my mind to start changing. May 21, 2021 was the 75th anniversary of the accident dramatized in my play Louis Slotin Sonata, and thanks to generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and additional support from Circle X Theatre and Trial and Error Productions, I got to produce a virtual "Zoom" performance of the play, directed by John Langs leading a cracker-jack cast and crew.

Running up to the night of the broadcast, we had no idea what kind audience we were going to have (as it turned out, quite sizable, thank you very much) but I found that in my heart of hearts the only two people I really I cared about watching it were my two sons. See, most of what I have written for the stage is for grown up audiences. So neither of my sons had ever seen a staging of one of my full-length plays. And I didn’t even know this sad fact bothered me until I had the opportunity to rectify it.

My sons enjoyed this virtual staging very much (or at least credibly claimed to, smart fellows.) And I subsequently promised myself to expose them to more theatre, when more theatre was available, especially now that they are both close to the age I was when I fell fully in love with the artform.

I never regretted not encouraging Declan and Keelan to do more theatre. They have their own interests, and to me there’s no one quite so cringey as the quintessential stage parent, foisting their dreams of show business glory onto their children in hopes of vicarious fulfillment. But, on the other hand... a man does prefer for his sons to understand what he wasted his youth on.

An added reason for taking them to this particular production of A Christmas Carol at ACT is the fact that neither one of them really knows the story beyond the Muppet movie version. (A fine iteration, for the record. No need to fight me in the comments on that point.) So I will be delighted indeed to sit with them and watch a great story, staged at one of Seattle’s great theatres, performed by actors I know and love.

 

Day 6 / Reason 6 for Going Back to the Theatre: John Langs

 

Yesterday I called out A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) as a reason for my going back to the theatre. What I didn’t include in that short essay is a disclosure of my profound bias, namely John Langs, who has been ACT's Artistic Director for the last five years, and served on its creative staff since 2013.  You should know that for even longer than that, John has been my artistic collaborator and very good friend.

I first met John when we were vetting candidates to direct my play Louis Slotin Sonata at Seattle's now departed Empty Space Theatre back in 2006. He was living in Los Angeles but had directed some shows up here, including a very well received King Lear at Seattle Shakespeare Company. Before I even met with John, let alone hired him, I did my due diligence and asked around with theatre artists, mostly actors, who had worked with him. The praise they gave was effusive. To hear it from them, Langs was like some sort of directing savant always drawing the best out of every performer while making them want to do better. Their unadulterated adulation made me nervous. I get suspicious whenever I hear actors heap praise like this on a director. Stage directors have a tendency to build cults around themselves, with actors serving as acolytes. This arrangement can be deadly for a playwright trying to get a “clean” production of their play, unplagued by high concept and schmaltz . So I insisted on meeting the guy over beers. He seemed normal enough, offering questions and concerns about the script that were sharp and incisive without being arrogant or overbearing. And an additional fact helped weigh the scales in his favor: we didn’t have a lot of other options. Langs went on to give me the best production of the play it has ever had. And so when it was time to hire someone to direct the world premiere of my play The Sequence, his name was at the the top of my list. Since then John has served serious time with me in the trenches of new play development, and has became a treasured friend, remaining so long after I retired from the art form in which he continues to toil.

From what I hear, Langs is catching some flack for ultimately deciding to open ACT back up to live audiences with the theatre’s beloved annual cash cow A Christmas Carol. As I understand it, the argument goes something like this: “In this moment of radical artistic re-envisioning and reorientation, when the theatrical slate has been nearly wiped clean, why on earth would someone restage a dusty old play based on a dusty old book by a dusty old white guy about a dusty old white guy?”

I would love to avoid wading into the current quagmire of cultural revolution, while also pointing out that it was me calling for radically new work since the inception of this blog in 2010. So I'll bite my tongue and offer the shortest riposte possible: theatre is an art form which feeds on repetition. And it is precisely those plays most familiar to us that can sustain the most radical re-thinkings and reimaginings, while still offering the "clean" essentials of their stories. Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor-in-chief of American Theatre explained this better than I ever could in a eulogy for the recently departed giant of American stage, Stephen Sondheim.

This, after all, is what a canon is, if we must have canons: not invariable paragons of perfection, necessarily, but works that somehow stay alive with surprise, with the shock of recognition, with argument. The musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote with a handful of deft collaborators remain among the most teemingly alive works anyone has ever composed for the stage, and it is hard to imagine a day when they won’t feel that way. As he put it in the second volume of lyric collection/memoir, Look, I Made a Hat, “The very thing that makes theatre impermanent is what makes it immortal. In a sense, every night of a show is a revival.”

Revival.

The word takes on a much deeper meaning in the context of the vast challenges Seattle Theatre now faces.

Langs understands that in order to get back to telling new stories with force, he has to let us have the old ones, with love. I don’t doubt for a second that John Langs’ future holds huge opportunities for him far beyond his work as the creative leader of downtown Seattle’s flagship theatre complex. He personifies that rare blend of cultivated charm, raw talent, and confident leadership that allows someone to excel in pretty much any career they choose: business, politics, the law. John chose the theatre— God help him— and the collective life of my plays has been bettered by that decision. The least I can do is go see this show he’s producing.

 

 

Day 5 / Reason 5 for Going back to the Theatre: A Contemporary Theatre

 

When I attended the University of Maryland on an acting scholarship, I was required to meet at the end of every semester with the faculty advisory board to discuss my progress as a student of the theater arts. At one such meeting, in the middle of my sophomore year, the head of the department expressed his concerns that I was “not a team player”. At the end of that academic year, I left college, for good as it turns out, though I didn’t know that at the time.

I have been a practicing Buddhist for over thirty years. The three jewels of Buddhism are the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha. “Dharma” is just a fancy sounding Sanskrit word for “the teaching” or “doctrine”. “sangha” is Sanskrit for “community” or “monastic order”; what Christians might translate as “the congregation” or “the church.” I feel pretty good about my relationship with the first two jewels, but I am the first to admit that I am bad at sangha.

I have an inherent distrust of institutions, and I am especially bad at trusting large theatre institutions. The larger they are, the less I trust them. From my perspective as a playwright, large regional theaters operate to maximize their own survival as institutions over the quality of the work they produce. I used to relish comparing the Seattle Rep to the Queen Mary ocean liner, now permanently attached to its mooring in Long Beach, trotting out the old adage, “Ships are safe at harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” I used to think I could do something to help change this sad status quo, but after doing my damnedest to move the needle for at least ten years, I gave up. This impasse can certainly be listed among my reasons for retiring from theatre, but I’d be lying if I claimed it was the only one.

I always assumed that Seattle’s Big Houses would survive, regardless, because that’s what they were designed to do. I assumed they would always be there for people who wanted to watch safe theater, and, because I wasn’t one of those people, I didn’t have to care. Now, after nearly two years of lockdowns and dark stages, I am not so sure.

With eight years to think things over, I will straight up own my institutional distrust as a character flaw, particularly egregious for a playwright, for whom every achievement is necessarily the result of a team effort. I will also openly admit that A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) has been a pretty good friend to me as a theatre artist over the years. In 1997 ACT commissioned me as one of four playwrights to participate in a new play development workshop, and my play Louis Slotin Sonata received its first ever staged reading in ACT’s Bullitt Cabaret space. I have acted and written for many iterations of 14/48 at ACT, and for many years I was a teaching artist associated with the theater’s FirstACT program, which brings playwrights into Seattle high schools to teach young people the craft.

ACT has two mainstages, and several other smaller performance spaces, and has been very generous in opening these venues up to outside performing arts organizations, like New Century Theatre, The Seagull Project and 14/48, just to name a very few.

Until The 5th Avenue Theatre comes back online in January, ACT is the only live theatre actively producing in the downtown corridor. Think about that. Then think about the relationship of live theatre to the health of a city. What would Seattle look like without a flagship complex of performance venues like A Contemporary Theatre?

Would it look like Seattle’s downtown core does right now? Half-empty, garbage-strewn, whole blocks lined with tents and active drug markets obstructing the entryways to the small businesses.

Do we really want live in a city devoid of live theatre?

I’m not interested in that.

I want ACT to survive, so I am shifting gears, breaking my fast, and heading back to the theatre on Sunday, December 12 to join the crowd coming downtown to see A Christmas Carol.

Maybe I’ll see ya down there.

 

 

 

A Delightfully Disorienting Video Sneak Peak at the French SLOTIN SONATA

When I decided to travel to Quebec to see this upcoming production of Louis Slotin Sonata translated into French, I thought to myself, “Well, this experience will certainly be new, but what will it be like?” I had so little idea that, even though I wanted to write about it in advance, I couldn’t.

And then came this trailer…

 

What I love about it is that its director trusts the play so much that he leans exclusively into the power of the words, and the power of the actors to speak them, to sell it to a potential audience. Of course, because there are no “staging landmarks” for me to follow, I am delightfully disoriented. On my first watching of it, I only really gained my bearings when an actor started speaking Hebrew. Ironically, once he heard the Mourner’s Kaddish, this born-and-raised Irish Catholic boy felt on familiar ground.

It’s a fundamental and powerful truth of theatre that the spoken word is orders of magnitude more primal than the written. Plays are not literature. They are an altogether different form of art.

Seeing my words transformed into another language, and then transformed again back into life by these captivating actors, gives me chills. The good kind.

I can’t wait to see the whole thing. Live!

 

J'adore la Nouvelle Affiche pour La Sonate Louis Slotin

Before retiring almost exactly a year ago, I worked on and off professionally in the theatre for well over a quarter of a century.  Most of that time was spent as a writer, but I also worked as an actor and producer. (I did not do much directing—maybe two or three shows, tops—as I find that particular job wracks my nerves in ways I don’t like having them wracked, and besides, there are so many folks better at it than I am.) With my experience under many hats, I can assure you, without fear of convincing contradiction, that no one gets more excited about a new poster than the playwright.

Sure, it’s exciting as an actor to see the image that will sell your show, but other distractions and responsibilities tend to absorb you just at the time a poster usually rolls out. As a producer, you were likely so involved with a poster’s design and production that it’s impossible to think clearly about it anymore. You’re a bit like the chef who can’t enjoy the meal once it’s been brought to the table.

But for a playwright, let me assure you that there is no joy as pure and powerful as seeing the new poster for the first time, especially when it’s as good as this one, designed by Sonia Caron for the upcoming World Premiere of Claude Germain’s French translation of my play Louis Slotin Sonata, produced by L’Escadron Creation at the Auditorium du Séminaire in Saint-Hyacinthe in Quebec.

And added bonus: it’s in French.  Nothing says “I’m Classy” like hanging a big framed poster in French.  I can’t wait for my copy! (God, I hope I get a copy!)

 

Related articles

Louis Slotin Electronic

A Friend Visits my Slotin Notes

My Last Play Reading

You might rightly judge that title to be half fib, depending on how you read it.  The upcoming public reading of  Philosophical Zombie Killers, happening on September 14 at 7:30 pm at Freehold Theatre, will certainly, and happily, not be the last public reading of a play of mine. The Sequence is scheduled to be read on October 12 at 2pm at the Bathhouse Theater at Green Lake.  (More details here.)  But Philosophical Zombie Killers is indeed my last full-length play. I have no plans to write another, and no great prospects for future full production of this, or any other play I have written. On September 15, the day after this reading, I will officially step away from the theatre. I have no plans to return. Of course threads of sadness run through this decision, but it is also interwoven with hope, and anticipation of new adventures. I hope you’ll wish me well. And if you can, I hope you’ll come see this reading. Here, below the fold, is the press release with all the info:

A Friend Visits my Slotin Notes

Experimental Results

I made a promise to myself a while back that if I was going to use the word “experiment” in association with my work as a theatre artist, I had to do so more like a scientist and less like some avant garde poser.  As I said in my earlier post “Putting the Fail back in “Experimental”: 

Any actual scientist understands that true experiments have rules and consequences. Experiments are tests of hypotheses hoping to become theories; and theories, in order to prove useful, must be falsifiable.  In other words, true experiments by definition contain the possibility of failure.

I would add that good scientists publish their results whether or not they find them gratifying.  And that’s exactly what I intend to do here and now regarding the experiment of publishing my play Ballard House Duet simultaneously with its recent world premiere.  (I enthusiastically explained my reasons for initiating this experiment here.)

So as of this posting, here is how my sales break down by channel:

Not a data/chart nerd like me?  Okay, here are my plain English conclusions:

1. I have too much unsold inventory.  If I had listened to my publisher and ordered the number of books he recommended I’d be sitting on a mere 3% overhang now, which would have been right in the estimator’s sweet spot.
2. “Show sales” was my strongest channel, which is gratifying, since offering the script simultaneously with performances was the main point of this effort.  If I did this again I would lean even more heavily into this channel: maybe invest in a more visually pleasing display than the cardboard box with the words “Scripts for Sale - $10” scrawled on the front of it in ballpoint pen.

The bottom line is I turned a profit about three eBay sales ago.  I am now $19.59 richer for this experience; but based solely on the data, I would have to give myself a C +, since I moved only 78 % of my product. 

Of course, it is much harder to quantify all the things I have learned from the experience, not to mention all the nerdy fun I have had.  Here’s a quick list:

• People will buy scripts at a show, but they have to be reminded, in the pre-show speech and then again at intermission and after the show.  The display of scripts has to be prominent.  You have to make buying them easy and fun.
• eBay is not the best means of selling a script on line.  It wound up costing me $2.31 out of every $10 script I sold on-line.  Given the cost of printing, that left me with very little margin to take any profit.  If it hadn’t been for show sales, with their much wider margin, I would still be bleeding red ink at this point.

The best outcome of this experiment was, of course, the chance to talk about the experiment itself: to revisit the question of whether it makes sense to publish play scripts simultaneously with world premiere productions, and more specifically, whether it makes sense for a playwright to put up his own capital to do so. I would say the short answers to these questions are, “Yes, with some improvements in the process.” And “No, a playwright already banks enough when he or she antes up their play for staging.”

Fellow playwright Joshua Conkel chimed in on Facebook to point out, “…In the U.K. it's common to get the script at the show. It costs a few pounds and it also serves as the program…. Oberon Books does it. And then of course the script goes out to bookstores and all that. It's great!”  Perhaps as Seattle grows as one of the nation’s hothouses for locally grown new theatre, it might behoove us as to explore a script sales model like the UK’s, though it should also be noted that the simultaneous publishing experiment has been run quite extensively here in decades past. Bret Fetzer explained in comments posted on my earlier blog:

The experience of Rain City Projects -- which published plays in conjunction with productions for over ten years… was that when the theater promoted selling the script, it succeeded, and when they didn't, it didn't. The single most significant factor, by an order of magnitude, was having someone hold up the script in a preshow speech and say "This is for sale in the lobby; if you enjoyed the show, we encourage you to buy the script." Other approaches -- such as plugging the script for sale in a program ad -- had a fraction of the impact of a live preshow plug.

Over time, theaters became less invested in promoting scripts. There was a trend away from preshow speeches, and even the theaters that still did them just wanted the speaker to say the essentials and get off the stage. Most of the theaters producing new plays were small, volunteer-run organizations, so there was no one to consistently make a plug for the script, and trying to educate a rotating crew of house managers about this was too much to accomplish on top of all the other stuff that had to get done. Everyone supported the idea of selling the scripts in the abstract, but in practice it fell by the wayside.

But the main reason Rain City Projects stopped publishing individual scripts was that, as these were brand new plays getting their first production, a majority of playwrights learned a lot of new things and did significant rewrites after the production. Immediately the scripts were obsolete and the playwrights didn't want them sold or distributed....

My experience working with Original Works Publishing, eBay and Amazon Direct Publishing leads me to believe that new technologies and processes might allow theatres and playwrights to keep their inventory small and flexible enough to offer scripts, either in hard copy or electronically, such that some of the challenges Rain City Projects faced might now be mitigated. 

One conclusion seems certain: folks who bought my script seem very pleased indeed to be able to own a permanent document  of an otherwise inherently ephemeral experience.  Theatre is fleeting, but perhaps we theatre artists could work a bit harder to bottle some of our volatile moonshine for future times.

 

Louis Slotin Electronic

Did you know that the only way you can get my play Louis Slotin Sonata is to order it as an e-book available  here? That’s an offer so exclusive I can’t even take advantage of it. (I don’t have a Kindle or any other kind of e-reading device.) So until Houghton Mifflin decides to publish the deluxe coffee table edition of the script, this is the only way of owning it.

If you don’t know the play, here’s a synopsis:

At 3:20 PM on Tuesday, May 21, 1946 Louis Slotin's hand slipped-- a small, practically insignificant blunder, except that Slotin was the chief -bomb builder at Los Alamos, and at that fateful moment he held in his hands a plutonium bomb core named "Rufus". The slip caused a chain reaction that in turn released a deadly "prompt burst" of radiation. Slotin and others saw a blue glow and felt a momentary flux of heat on their faces. Slotin flung the shell to the floor but it was too late. The damage was done. In the milliseconds it took for the plutonium to spit its deadly neutrons, Louis Slotin became a walking dead man.

With a structure inspired by classical music's sonata allegro form, LOUIS SLOTIN SONATA traces a brilliant scientist's last nine days, as his body and mind gradually succumb to the chaos wrecked by radiation. Reliving the moment of his accident again and again, Slotin slowly makes his own unique way to redemption.

If you do know the play, please consider adding your review to the Amazon page.  It would help me out a lot.

* WINNER of the LA Weekly Award for Best New Play
* WINNER of the Backstage West Garland Award for Playwriting
* Nominated for Theatre LA's Ovation Award for Best Writing – World Premiere Play
* Pick-of-the-Week, The New York Times
* Excerpted in The Best Men’s Stage Monologues of 1999, Smith & Kraus.
* WINNER of The Seattle Times Footlight Award for Best New Play

 

The New York Times “...a crafty narrative... irresistibly gripping....  as a historical episode suitable for dramatizing, you can’t do much better.”

The Los Angeles Times “...a rare bird-- a new play that wraps intellectual complexity, emotional depth and theatrical derring-do in one tight and memorable package. It’s bleak, it’s cheeky-- it’s dazzling.... Be there!”

WBEZ Chicago Public Radio “… Intellectually thrilling and rigorous. It really is a must see.”

Backstage West “...a powerful play, full of ideas, extremely verbal, creatively written and extraordinarily presented... imaginative, gut-wrenching, thought-provoking, and unexpectedly, highly amusing.”

The LA Weekly “... drama and symbol couldn’t be more delicately interwoven.”

The Seattle P-I “...Like the crazed geniuses in science fiction, Mullin mixes gobs of this and gobs of that and then -- Good heavens! It's alive! It's powerful!”

The Seattle Times “…a tumultuous, tour-de-force staging that spreads plenty of intellectual and emotional fallout.”

Louis Slotin Sonata is #1!

Funny story: I mentioned on Google+ this morning that sales of the Kindle version of my play Louis Slotin Sonata seemed to have gone through the roof (though in the interest of perfect honestly, I must now instruct you to picture a roof approximately six inches off the ground.)  Shortly thereafter, my friend and colleague Wes Andrews chimed in to point out that the play is the bestselling e-book in the playwriting category.  (See the rankings here. ) 

Shocking!

At this point I began mentally listing reasons this might be so:

1. In November, Louis Slotin Sonata will be receiving a production on the retired ocean liner, The Queen Mary, produced by California Repertory Company, or Cal Rep for short, the resident theatre company at California State University – Long Beach.  Now, a staging of the play does not necessarily translate into a significant boost in Kindle sales.  I only saw a small uptick when A Red Orchid produced Slotin in Chicago last year; but I wonder if, since the play is being done under the auspices of a university, perhaps certain professors are assigning the text as course reading.  If so, that would be sweet.  I’d like nothing better than to start feeding at the trough of mandatory academic assignment, especially in light of how often and eagerly I rail against the dangers of academia infecting American Theatre with the debilitating disease of elitist inaccessibility.
2. It ain’t exactly hard to top a list of books about playwriting.  It’s a bit like being the best ice-hockey player in Chad: an achievement, undeniably, but one that needs to be placed in context.  Adding to the irony is the fact that that Louis Slotin Sonata isn’t about playwriting, it is playwriting.  When I first published the script “playwriting” was the closest category Kindle offered.  (A further irony is implied here: Amazon recognized that books about playwriting were more likely to sell than plays themselves.)  All that said, I flatter myself to think that reading Louis Slotin Sonata might teach you things that you won’t learn from Playwriting for Dummies (number two on the list).
3. You can only get Louis Slotin Sonata on Amazon.  While Slotin is probably my best known play, it is not necessarily the most successful by all standards.  Tuesday has had more productions and The Sequence has netted me more money.  A while ago I decided that I would hold Slotin back from hard-copy publication, if only to see how well it might do if solely offered electronically.  It was an experiment. I like to think Louie would approve.

Regardless of how I might try to explain it, the situation remains absurd.  And thus, it is my sworn duty as a theatre artist to do everything possible to perpetuate it.  You can help.  You can order the play for your Kindle of course, but if that does not work for you either because…

• you do not have a Kindle (I sure don’t)
• or you already have a copy of the play
• or don’t have the $7.99 to spend

… you can still help by going to Amazon and supplying a review of the play.  Reviews and good ratings help raise the profile of an electronic title. 

So think back.  Did you see Slotin in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle or Chicago?  What did you think?  Type those thoughts out and post them to Amazon.  Maybe give the play some stars.  Then sit back with me and see how long we can keep this absurdity going.