May 2011 Archives

Jenn Book Haselswerdt and I (Laura Esti Miller) had the opportunity to dramaturg the three 20-minute excerpts presented at The Inkwell's Blood 'n Guts showcase reading this past March. Jenn dramaturged The Body and Twigs and Bone while I dramaturged Cassandra.

Included here are reflections on our work during the process:

Jenn: I was happy to be an Inkwell reader last year; I love new plays, and I love the coffee-shop debates that follow the individual play-reading from my couch. Which plays fit The Inkwell's aesthetic? Which have beautiful and challenging language and evocative visuals? During the reading process, I absolutely fell in love with the three plays that ultimately wound up being explored during the Blood and Guts Showcase -- The Body, Twigs and Bone, and Cassandra. None of them were like anything I've read before, and when I was asked to dramaturg excerpts for two of them, I leapt at the chance.

Having an opportunity to look at a 20-minute excerpt is advantageous both to the playwright and to The Inkwell. The playwright gets a chance to work on a small snippet that they think needs the most work, whether it's in the middle of the play or at the end. It gives us a chance to take a concentrated look at the relationships and circumstances in the play, along with the structure. It gives The Inkwell a chance to get to know a new playwright, his/her work, and what s/he is like to interact with. And it gives an audience a small taste of a new play, which will hopefully intrigue them enough to want to see a full production later on down the line.

It's an exciting part of the process, and one that I relish. Of course, I like these three plays a great deal, and can't wait to work with them further (a fact proved during the talk-back session when I started talking at great length about what we didn't get a chance to see in The Body -- though I will point out that I didn't spoil the ending).

Laura: Since I came to the Inkwell during the open call for submissions this past year, I've had the chance to be part of the development process from an early stage, which has been an incredible joy. Watching and interacting with other artists as we make progress on our own artistic journeys will never cease to inspire me and I am thrilled that, as an Inkwell dramaturg, I get to be a part of so many fascinating adventures.

One part of the process I find especially illuminating and helpful is a phone call between the playwrights, director, dramaturgs, and an Inkwell staff member -- in this case, the remarkable Anne McCaw. Not only is it a way to introduce ourselves before spending a few hours together in a rehearsal room; it is a way to make sure the team members are working towards the same goals during the rehearsal and reading.

Anne encourages the playwrights to discuss what they are currently working on within the plays, what they might be stuck on, what areas they might want to focus on for the reading. This call gives each playwright the chance to speak candidly about their work, and it gives the team the opportunity to focus on a manageable chunk of the play for the 20-minute excerpt. 

Dramaturgs also get an unusual opportunity when working on these showcase readings for The Inkwell.  We get to introduce each play to the audience and gush about what we love about them.

Below are the notes Jenn and I shared with the audience on March 5th about The Body by Steve Moulds, Twigs and Bone by Tiffany Antone, and Cassandra by Katharine Sherman.

--------------------------------------------------------------

The Body
by Steve Moulds

What would you do if you were stuck at home alone with your anxiety-ridden stepdaughter? What if she wouldn't stop reminding you that you weren't her "real dad," and that you don't follow her mom's rules? What if you have trouble sleeping, a trait that slowly begins to creep into your day?

In this play, Joe faces a tenuous relationship with his stepdaughter, Abby. His wife, Lauren, is out of town, and he is unemployed, left to care for Abby during her summer vacation. One day, a life-sized rag doll with no face and an enigmatic instruction manual arrives on their doorstep. Joe and Abby set to work trying to decipher the instruction manual, but soon find more differences than similarities as the doll begins to wreak psychic havoc on their waking and dream lives.

We love the growing sense of dread in this play, and the constantly blurring line between dreaming and reality. Steve's exploration of the tenuous stepfather-stepchild relationship is one that doesn't appear often in dramatic literature, and one that immediately presents actors with a sense of tension. His use of language and pacing lends a sense of near-gothic dread to a very real-life situation. One of our readers gave the compliment, "It's like a horror film on stage!"

Tonight's excerpt explores Joe and Abby's shifting reality after the doll has been in their home for several days. Dreams have started to invade reality, and the world around them is changing. We find ourselves asking the question, what happens if we enter the dream and don't wake up again?

Twigs and Bone
By Tiffany Antone

They say you can't go home again...But what happens when you do? In Twigs and Bone, Moira returns to the home she hasn't visited in eight years, to find her parents are different from the people she left behind. Moira is a big-city lawyer, and her parents live in a small country house, surrounded by trees, dirt, and the smells of nature. And then nature starts encroaching on the house...

Our excerpt takes place during act 2 of the play. By this point, nature has invaded the house to the point where the entire ground floor is filled with dirt. It has literally buried Moira's father, William. Moira is left alone in the storm with her mother, Bonnie, whose only goal is to protect a bundle of twigs she is raising as a new daughter, Maeb. The bundle of twigs has replaced another daughter--also named Maeb--who was weak for most of her life, and died in a hospital years ago, leaving Moira a bereaved only child.

The Inkwell's readers were fascinated by Tiffany's use of language and the organic, natural qualities of the play. The script has brought gothic melodrama into a modern milieu, and has given us characters and relationships we can understand as actual people. Tiffany's scope, vision, and grasp of things dark and scary were incredibly intriguing to us. The feeling of dread as nature makes its presence increasingly known in the house is very creepy, and the structure of the play gives the audience just enough information as they need it, leaving a delicious sense of mystery around who William, Bonnie, and Maeb are.

Twigs and Bone raises many interesting questions surrounding family and the larger world around us, as we explore mother versus daughter, science versus spirituality, modernism versus the traditions of the old world--specifically, fairies and paganism. And ultimately, we find ourselves wondering: even amidst family, is anything we do ever not selfish?

Cassandra
By Katharine Sherman

Katharine Sherman's Cassandra is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth from Cassandra's perspective. As a young, beautiful princess of Troy, Cassandra caught the eye of the god Apollo. They make an arrangement -- Apollo grants Cassandra the blessing of foresight in exchange for sex. When Cassandra breaks her promise, Apollo retaliates by poisoning the gift he has already bestowed upon her. She will be able to see the future, but no one will believe her prophecies.

Inkwell readers loved this fresh take on the story through Katharine's eyes.  We were fascinated by the way that others in the play relate to Cassandra and her perceived madness and mesmerized by just how far into the future Cassandra can see.  Cassandra has the unique ability to see her own current events and future tragic events in one moment, and though she knows the inevitable outcome, she still fights for even the tiniest difference -- she holds out for hope.

In this excerpt, we focus on key moments when things "get twisted," as our playwright says.  First, Apollo and Cassandra attempt a gift exchange that goes sour.  Cassandra then reveals, through perhaps the-not-so-familiar tale of Cinderella just how overwhelming and devastating seeing the future can be. Cassandra has another psychological test of wills with her would-be lover Apollo, and finally, on the brink of tragedy, she is able to enjoy a few moments of unlikely friendship with her sister-in-law, Helen, the only person she knows who has been treated as badly by the gods as herself.

I'd like to share with you all, Intrepid readers, a new concept that was just introduced to me (this is Anne, by the way) last night by the lovely and mischievous Rebecca Bossen, playwright and wordsmith.

That concept is the FUNKNOWN.

The Inkwell has long embraced the FUNKNOWN, although we didn't have any clue that's what we were doing.  But the FUNKNOWN is at the heart of playmaking.

I'll stop with the mystery.  The FUNKNOWN and just another way of looking at the unknown.

Why coin a new term?  Because the unknown can feel really, really scary.  It's what you don't know about a play.  It's when you don't know what the heck to do when you don't know what you don't know about a play.

So why am I bringing up the FUNKNOWN right now?  Because we just put together a team of playmakers to work with Rebecca on her play Blue Straggler.  They met last night for the first rehearsal of our Inkreading process.  We just sent them into the FUNKNOWN for a week, from which they will emerge for a stage reading of the latest draft of the play. (That staged reading is next Saturday, May 28th at 8:00 p.m. in Woolly Mammoth Theatre's classroom.  We hope you can come on down to see it.)

Do you remember Rebecca?  If you look back at Inkblog!, you'll find that we first met her through our open call for submissions, and we started work with her last September, when we presented a 20-minute excerpt of Blue Straggler.

Rebecca's play is a musing on loss and the rules of the universe.  Yes, she's writing about characters wrestling with the rules of that big universe that's full of stars and phenomena that bend the rules that we think we understand.  Her play is all about our compulsive, desperate search for knowing all that is unknowable.

So it seemed so easy to begin a conversation about the FUNKNOWN at this first rehearsal.

Why talk about it all?

What we've found is that the actors, directors, and dramaturgs we work are looking forward to and working toward moments of epiphany in the rehearsal room.  They put their brains and hearts to work to help the playwright find something out -- the motivation of a character, the right momentum of a scene, a critical choice that changes the course of the play.

But what they don't expect are the moments of unknown... the moments when an actor has absolutely no idea why he/she is on stage and why they are talking to another character or why they are ready to hang themselves one minute and go to a wedding the next.  These are the moments in the rehearsal room when everyone looks at each other and realize that they don't have an answer.

It's the unknown.  It's the FUNKNOWN.

And we at The Inkwell love those moments.  Because those moments of not knowing -- of the FUNKNOWN -- are just as important as any other in making plays. 

If we as playmakers can help playwrights find what they don't know about their plays, if we can encourage actors to ask questions that a playwright can't answer, and we can push dramaturgs to feel as clueless about structure and pace and character arc as the playwright... then we've created a really successful play development process.

Scary?  Sure.  But we hope it's scary in the way that a funhouse is scary, or a haunted house at the boardwalk.  We hope it's the kind of scary where there's a surprise around the corner and a question that makes us all think harder and more deeply.

So good luck, Rebecca, Amber, Jason, Sheila, Anna, and Esther.  We at The Inkwell hope you enjoy your weeklong journey into the FUNKNOWN.  And we can't wait to hear more about the things you just don't know about Blue Straggler.

Let me share something with a small piece of advice with you all, intrepid readers.  You need to get to know Gary.

That's Gary Garrison, who is a teacher, mentor, terrific writer, and the executive director of the Dramatist Guild.

There are so many ways in which to praise Gary, but let me let one of The Inkwell's founding members, Dan Ennis, do all the work.  He and I (Anne, your faithful Inkblogger) attended a master class taught by Gary this past weekend.  This is the second master class that Gary has taught for The Inkwell, and we hope to bring him back again and again and again.

Here's heaps of praise from Dan... as well as some tidbits of sage advice from Gary on the fundamentals of a writing life.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gary Garrison inspires me. I knew this three years ago, when I took his course on improving the 10-minute play, hosted by The Inkwell.

But a lot can happen in three years. One might become disenchanted with theater, stop writing and move to Alaska, for example. Just saying, it can happen.

But those who write rarely stop for good. And when I decided to start writing again after returning to D.C. permanently, I could think of no better way to motivate myself than to take Gary's master class on the fundamentals of the writing life (again thanks to The Inkwell).    

Two things struck me, and I'm sure that's because of where I am in my writing career. One is that there are an awful lot of small theater companies asking for submissions, and with so many options, it may be hard to know what's best. The second is even more fundamental to theater, and I'll save it for later.

Gary always seems to be espousing the "personal." Indeed, the first half of the class was less about what we write than who we are, and yes, our insecurities, strengths and influences.

So it should come as no shock that Gary would suggest, in the submissions process, pitching who we are ahead of what we write. Don't pitch the play, pitch the writer. Theaters are much more interested in investing in a line of work, he says, rather than just one piece.

How to do this? (And this is music to my inner dramaturg's ears) Research.

Instead of taking a "shotgun approach" to submissions -- scattering scripts far and wide, applying to every opportunity -- he suggests investigating the plays that theater companies produce. Do you write to similar themes? A similar style?

Find five or six theaters (and not necessarily local ones) and try to form a personal relationship with them. Write them. They may not be currently seeking submissions. Write anyway.

"I'd like to introduce you to myself as a writer."

"I notice you do plays about this."

"I notice you did so-and-so's play. Here's how we're similar."

Sure, not every company will respond. But the potential benefits of forming a relationship with one will last a lot longer than one production.

My second discovery here is even more about the personal -- or rather, interpersonal. Theater is collaborative, after all.

I've resisted networking for the better part of a decade. Several years ago, while interning at a large regional theater, my mentor gave me an ongoing assignment: Have lunch with 20 people whose careers interest you (roughly one a week). I failed horribly. Not because I couldn't do it. Because I didn't want to. I wanted to write. I wanted to research. I wanted to get everything on my own merit. How twentysomething.

Gary made it clear to me how small the world of this business is: During the course of the day, he mentioned my former mentor by name. (This is without him knowing where I interned.) I realized that I already know several people who know people who know people. This is after years of not trying, just working. House-manage here, direct there. And I thought, "Imagine what I could do if I actually tried."

Shoot. Within the past two months, I went to see a show to support an actor I knew, and I never let her know I was there until days afterward. That won't happen again.

Gary covered more ground, too.

Ways to improve your resume (Lack experience? Don't hide it. Put a one-sentence synopsis under the plays you've written. That one-day master class? That's experience, too.)

Agents (They go for writers who are not going to make them work.)

Publishing (They have to be able to promote something. Submit reviews with your play.)

Writing synopses (Get an objective source. Hire an MFA grad to read your play and do it.)

One great thing about writing is, it's never finished until you say it is. There can always be a new draft to. I'll just consider this class the primer for the next draft in my writing life.