The 'PlayWright' Stuff: Year-End Angels Needed

Thank you so much to everyone for your enthusiasm, participation and support in 2009! More than 100 of you joined our Angels Needed Campaign this summer, and, as a result, we continued to build our reach and impact to make new stories and new voices heard.

Through our programs in 2009:

• 28 new plays received a hand toward completion
• 10 resident playwrights crafted new works in our studios
• Nearly 500 plays were read and reviewed
• 2 highly successful co-productions and 2 producing partnerships forged deep connections with audiences
• 6 young writers worked alongside expert mentors
• Over 100 students practiced the nuts and bolts of their craft
• More than 120 artists were hired to support the build.

With the support of many hands we have almost finished the job! But we still must raise another $35,000 by December 31st to bring it on home. As the year draws to a close, please consider a year-end gift to Playwrights Foundation and 'Wright' the future of theater!

We really do need your financial support to continue to build new voices and new stories. A donation of only $40 from each of you, right now, would get us to our goal! If you have already contributed to our campaign, we thank you. If you haven’t, or wish to increase your gift, please consider making a tax-deductible year-end gift online by clicking here or by calling (415) 626-2176. You're also welcome to mail in a check!

Playwrights Foundation
1616 16th Street, Suite 350
San Francisco, CA 94103

We thank you again for your continued support and wish you an inspired, creative and powerful new year ahead!

Musical Reading of New Marcus Gardley Play

Join Us December 19 for This Open-Process Reading


Please join us for a musical reading of ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi directed by Amy Mueller. This brilliant new work by Gardley is set on the banks of the Mississippi River and woven through with music and magic. ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi promises to become the signature play of America’s most prolific contemporary writer—born and raised right here in the Bay Area! Come check it out this in-process work as we prepare for the first professional production in partnership with The Cutting Ball Theater.

Details
Saturday, December 19, 2009, 1pm
The Cutting Ball Theater
277 Taylor Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

Click here for directions.

This is event is free to the public, but reservations are recommended. To make your reservation, contact Amy at amy@cuttingball.com.

Visit Us and Chat!

Chat with us -- tell us, ask us, tell us your thoughts.

We loved Goldie, Max & Milk by Karen Hartman -- the other night at ACT. Was so funny and moving! A truly wonderous night -- even at music stands the play carries you into this crazy real world, the uncontrolable, unschedulable, unpredicatble one that YOU live, for real.
Carrie Paff rocked so bad as Max and the entire cast -- along with Jonathan Moscone directing -- were wonderous! Thank you to Dena Martinez, Carrie Paff, Jeri Lynn Cohen, Ryan Tasker and Kate Jopson for your guts!

If you missed, be aware -- these readings are wonderful magic: see 100 Planes by Lila Rose Kaplan on Dec 15 @ Shotgun!

Interview with BAPF Playwright Lauren Yee

PF: Can you talk a little about the inspiration for Our Peculiar Institution and your process in writing it?

Lauren Yee: I wanted to write a play about minstrelsy, and I spent a month at the American Antiquarian Society in Massachusetts actually researching source material from 19^th century minstrel shows. The play, ultimately, is not a minstrel show, but it springs out of a close investigation of the time period where minstrelsy was an acceptable and, honestly, extremely popular form of entertainment. What I tried to do was mine that mindset in a 21^st century context and in doing so, I began to question the reductionist attitude towards morality that exists nowadays. It’s universally acceptable to say that slavery was bad and people should be free; yet, we continue to see a world where these antiquated, morally objectionable practices live on in subtler forms.

For me, revision is always a significant part of the writing process, since so much of what the play is most centrally “about” usually becomes clear by my second or third crack at the play. When I write, I will typically come up with far more material than I need, and a majority of my time will be spent culling this material, rewriting scenes, and filling in holes.

For Our Peculiar Institution, I basically followed this path, but also started with several elements I knew I wanted to include and then figured out different ways to make these pieces logically fit. Music—one song in particular--was one element that I was hoping to fit in, and a minstrel archetypal character was another.

PF: Some of us saw your play Ching Chong Chinaman at Impact last fall or may be familiar with some of your other work. Where do you feel this play fits with your work. How is it different from other plays you’ve written? What were some of the challenges of this piece?

LY: A sense of heightened realism runs throughout my work and often this translates into something lighter and comedic, as with Ching Chong Chinaman. While significantly more realistic and linear in its structure than some of my other work, Our Peculiar Institution also draws from this vein of lightness, which I like to think of it as “cheerfulness in the face of absurdity.”

Obviously, though, one of the challenges of writing this particular piece is my unfamiliarity with many different aspects of the play—geography, time period. In putting characters into absurd, unlikely situations, you have to grapple with balancing a rather off-kilter tone with chronological and geographic accuracy. Also, in my Asian American-themed work, I have a certain surefootedness that I didn’t have here, delving into issues that were specifically about the relationships between African Americans and whites, then and now. The wisdom is that you write about what you know, and for me, the challenge was finding something I could relate to within the story I wanted to tell.

PF: Given that you’ve grown up in the Bay Area theatre community and have recently begun to experience (and have success!) in other cities and other theatre communities, how would you characterize the Bay Area theatre scene? What do you feel it has done for you as an artist?

LY: The closeness of the Bay Area theater community is something that has always appealed to me. It’s more manageable, and as much as we bemoan the lack of X available to us here, it’s a place that has a little bit of everything.

Still, logistically, just the way that the Bay Area is laid out often makes it difficult to foster the kind of energy that you need for a healthy theater community. You don’t have a single transportation system like New York, where you can get from one side of the Bay to the other for two dollars, and that hinders the actors and the audiences from getting to where they want to be. I also think we in the Bay Area have a slight complex about being so far from New York—note how excited Bay Area folk are when a show transfers to New York.

Also, as someone who frequently writes for actors of color, I get anxious sometimes wondering whether I will be able to get the right people I need for my plays and whether that will ultimately interfere with productions.

PF: You’ve got a lot of new things coming up. What are you excited about and what’s next for you?

LY: In 2010, Ching Chong Chinaman gets two more productions, at New York’s Pan Asian Rep and Seattle’s SIS Productions, so it’ll be fun to see still more interpretations of the play.

And I’ll be heading to San Diego in the fall to start my MFA in playwriting at UCSD. It’s a tiny program (with one or two people in a class every year) with the resources to keep me busy and also help me build the body of work I need to move onto the next step in my career.

But I expect I’ll be in the Bay Area pretty frequently; it’s hard to stay away.

Interview with Martha Jane Kaufman

BAPF Playwright Martha Jane Kaufman was interviewed by Sonia Fernandez, PF Literary and Administrative Director.

Sonia Fernandez: How did you get started on your BASH! Play, House and Junction?

Martha Jane Kaufman: The election of Barack Obama led to a lot of conversations about how we were moving into a post-race world. But I still saw racism built into the worlds around me, particularly working in Oakland Public Schools. As a white person, I wanted some models and approaches for resistance so I started researching the underground railroad. I was interested in the roles and approaches of white people in that struggle. I found a lot of fascinating stories, but, of course, the characters I found were not simply heroes. In many ways they reflected the racism that they were resisting. This is clearer nearly 200 years later and allowed me to see how we are all steeped in the attitudes of our time. When the government and culture says that you can own another human being what does it take to start to see that person as human? I think this is a very important question for our time because slavery is not that far behind us and we are still dealing with that inheritance. Of course, my piece is written from my perspective as a white person and would not be the story everyone would tell. The questions that have come to the surface as I’ve been engaging with these characters and stories have allowed me to look more critically and compassionately at the present.

SF: You’re a recent transplant to the Bay Area. What’s it like to be here at this moment in time, and how has it affected your work?

MJK: Well, I’ve started taking astrology a lot more seriously… (lol) No, but actually, I’ve found the writing/performance/theater scene here in the Bay to be edgy, imaginative and insightful. People working in all media are constantly blending genres, mixing media, and eroding the boundaries between disciplines, which is how I feel most comfortable as an artist since I am also a dancer. I’m inspired by how people here manage to do a lot with very little in terms of financial support, space, materials, and time. I’ve found myself surrounded by articulate, creative, and socially conscious artists making street theater, puppets, spoken-word performances, and all of it feeds my work and ideas. Plus, friends invite me to tackle hard questions in my work, hold me accountable and push my boundaries. And, everyone wants to collaborate! Since I got here less than a year ago, I’ve worked on a puppet show for a community garden, a performance piece in which the costumes were made from newspapers, and two dance/spoken-word pieces that were staged in the corner of a living room. And of course, the amazing weather and freshly grown food only feeds a writers soul …


SF: What about the festival itself?

MJK: I love spending time writing and talking with other writers so I am excited about that aspect. And I’m also excited to work with a dramaturg [Jayne Wenger] and actors on this piece - one that still feels so fresh to me- I’ve never done something like this before. Usually I let ideas incubate a lot longer before bringing a director and actors into the picture. I didn’t know my director, Molly Aaronson Gelb, but as it turns out, she also went to Wesleyan, so we share an artistic vocabulary right from the start. I’m very eager to get started with the process!

SF: What do you have on the horizon?

MJK: After the festival I’m going to return to a full length piece I’ve been working on for a while, called A Live Dress, that focuses on the Yiddish Theater, but from a very contemporary point of view, and plays with gender roles, sexuality and the blending of post post modern and traditional art forms. Like other of my plays, the world of the play crosses the time/space continuum. I’m also thinking about the pros and cons of attending graduate school in playwriting – I’ll let you know what I decide!

Interview with BAPF Playwright Robert Henry Johnson

PF Associate Artistic Director Jonathan Spector: You've been a choreographer for much of your Artistic life. How did you begin writing plays?

Robert Henry Johnson: Actually, I grew up in theater. I started out in the theater as an assistant director at the age of three. No, I’m serious. I was the resident assistant director to the Black Light Explosion Company here in San Francisco. My mother was a star member of the ensemble, and she brought me with her to rehearsals all the time. I was quite a disruptive child I was told--all over the place making trouble for everybody.

One day, Keith – the director - announced to the cast, “Okay, everybody. I have a new assistant director I’d like to introduce to you. Everybody meet Bobby.” My mom said I had the strangest look on my face and it completely transformed my relationship with the theater. So that was my first introduction to plays.

For my seventh birthday my mother bought me a yellow toy typewriter. I wrote my first play about two things: spirituality and dance. It was a play about angels and demons and how dance was looked upon as something demonic and the angels had to try to find their relationship with dance as a form of worship and battle. I’m still passionate about those two things. A year later, I graduated to a black Smith Corona antique. The typewriter became my world. I wrote all the time. Instead of going outside to play with the other children, I stayed in and wrote short plays on my typewriter.

J.S.: How is your work as a playwright informed by your dance training and work as a choreographer?

RHJ: Unfortunately we live in a country where art disciplines are separate. I am not sure when the disciplines became chopped up into itty bitty pieces of sushi-like morsels. In other words, if you are a dancer, you are just that and only that. If you are a choreographer, you are that and only that. In my experience throughout my career, I found that that was never true.

Originally when I started my dance company in 1993, I wanted to make work that featured my writing skills. I wanted the artists I worked with to handle text, to speak aloud on stage while dancing. It was going to be a dance/theater company. But the dancers I procured did not know about handling text, and at the time I did not have the craft to train them. I compromised and we became a mostly-dancing-dance company. However, many of my pieces included text. Every season I would make a solo for myself in which I would recite monologues, poetry, prose. It was an aesthetic that was clearly my signature style, and the audience found it refreshing and entertaining. Dance critic Rita Felciano made a statement about my choreography. She said, “Things really start to cook when Johnson the choreographer meets Johnson the writer.” I think that is true.

Of course words and movement can arguably be exacted as quite different mediums. The wonder of how they can be merged to create a seamlessly and equally valued aesthetic is in how the playwright and/or director crafts these disciplines, using them as tools to communicate something impressionable and evocative to the audience. Of course, who knows how verse or dance or a moment in silence or a vocal lilt or the color of a costume will fall on the human heart? This is the exciting part about merging the disciplines.

The Othello Papers does not involve dance. Language dominates this play, though I think there’s a humorous tango between Caliban and Cleopatra. Hopefully, for the sake of this interview, it’ll make the edits.

Instead, I like to think of The Othello Papers as a kind of opera. Maybe it isn’t. And that’s ok. We’re still in the development stages. That’s why everybody should come out and see it. Before it hits Broadway. Wink, wink.

JS: What was the genesis of the Othello Papers?

RHJ: A costume. Well, originally, I wanted to design a one-man show in which I could wear an interesting costume on stage. In my mind, that looked like something Elizabethan inspired. But, since then, I discovered playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and it has put me on a mission to create black characters for the theater that are not popularly seen or offered by history or the media. As I came closer to realizing what the project would look like, I began to ask myself, “Why is this black man dressed like a seventeenth century European?” This began my search for the black presence in old time Euroland. That lead me to Othello, and the play.

JS: As a native San Franciscan, and someone who has been making work here
your entire life, does your work have a specifically Bay Area flavor?

RHJ: I’m sure it does but I wouldn’t know what that was or how to explain it.

JS: What's up next for you?

RHJ: I’m committed to further developing The Othello Papers and getting it a world premiere in 2011. And then, there are the fifty-one drafts of unfinished plays stacked neatly in my room. They haunt me when the sun goes down. All the characters of would be plays are standing in a line in full costume waiting their turn to speak to me and tell me who they are and what they want: Josephine Baker, a French student architect without a name, a black transvestite decocooning in a brownstone in New York City, the three headed dog who guards the brownstone, a young man who keeps blowing a trumpet very badly and a woman with a pink parasol who swears it wasn’t the wind that destroyed New Orleans.

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Interview with Deborah Stein

We caught up with Deborah Stein, whose play Natasha and the Coat was part of this year's in the ROUGH Reading Series and will now be part of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

PF: Last time we talked to you was before Natasha and the Coat was in our Rough reading series. What did you learn about the play? How is it changing?

Deborah Stein: The ITR workshop was maybe the most practically useful workshop I've ever had, since it came so early in the play's development - still in the throes of becoming a play - I rewrote almost the entire second half during the three days I spent in the Bay Area, and for the two readings tried out two different endings. Having Corey and Naomi as part of the process was incredibly instructive, as they actually were able to provide information and background on some of the characters and cultures in the play that I hadn't yet researched. I also decided to shift the focus of the play slightly, making a different character the one whose journey we follow. So, my rewrites are focusing on building this character and also fleshing out the research-based aspects of the play. I think it might end up being a two-act play...I've never written anything with an intermission, so that's freaking me out, in a good way.


PF:What’s exciting going on in your life with your shows? How are you feeling coming into the Festival?

It's an exciting time! I'm gearing up to join Pig Iron Theatre Company in the creation of their next piece, Welcome to Yuba City, and I'm casting a workshop of my play Lifeboats which will be the next play of my own that I produce with my company, Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis. We just finished a sold-out run of Tory Stewart's play 800 Words, which was awesome. Also I just received a 2009-2011 Bush Artist Fellowship. So, exciting stuff--and really looking forward to some weeks in the Bay Area, it can't get here soon enough (except for all those rewrites I need to get done...).

From our interview with Deborah for ROUGH last May:

Jonathan Spector: In addition to writing plays as an individual artist, you have also collaborated multiple times with both Pig Iron Theater Company and director Lear DeBessonet on developing work with and for a specific company. How does the process differ when you're developing a piece specifically with a company?

Deborah Stein: Writing with and for specific actors has been one of the great joys of my creative life. When I write for an ensemble, the creation of character, story, rhythm, and playworld is a collective endeavor. There is often a sense that only these actors could play these roles; while I know lots of writers who would find this limiting, I find it incredibly invigorating and inspiring to know who I am writing for, and to collaborate intimately with them on how the character evolves from the clay. Working with a company, there is collective authorship: I work alongside the director, actors, and designers to create the world of the play. There is a sense of baton-passing, where at various points we are each in the lead, creating all together. Writing independently, I strive to create scripts that are whole yet allow enough space for this kind of active participation from future collaborators.


JS: Along with PF alum Dominic Orlando, you run the playwright driven company the Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis. What was the genesis of this company and how has it grown and changed over the course of the three years?

DS: The playwrights of Workhaus are mostly Minneapolis transplants, drawn to the Twin Cities by the resources of the Playwrights’ Center and the city’s awesome live-ability. The idea behind Workhaus was to create a home for our plays in the city after our scripts had moved beyond the development stages supported by the Playwrights’ Center. Inspired by 13P in New York and also our own experiences producing our own work elsewhere, we are also really committed to creating opportunities for unmediated interaction between playwrights and audiences. Each playwright becomes the Artistic Director for the duration of their production, and is involved in conceptualizing everything from set design to marketing as part of the dramaturgy, part of the audience’s experience of the play. We have produced seven plays in three years. Right now we’re finishing our second season as company in residence at the Playwrights’ Center and gearing up for a third, which will include new plays by me, Dominic, and Alan Berks.


JS: What as the genesis of Natasha and the Coat?

DS: My first job after graduate school was very similar to Natasha’s—I was hired by a vintage clothing wholesaler to design a marketing campaign for her local Hasidic-run dry cleaner. I got the job over Craigslist and lasted about eight days at the job. The parting was amicable—the clash of cultures was too intense; the cauldron of tradition, commerce, and gender dynamics was impossible for any of us to navigate. I grew up in a pretty secular Jewish household in New York, during the years that the Lower East Side and Williamsburg were gentrified. The swiftness with which this process happened was pretty surreal—to find myself bar-hopping on the same street where my grandfather, a Polish immigrant, worked sewing buttonholes forced me to reckon with how quickly the city, and my family, had changed. This reckoning was kind of so overwhelming that I decided to avoid it. This play, which is the most personal piece I have written—and which I began five years ago and then literally stuffed in a drawer, unfinished—is my belated attempt to wrestle with this legacy and these stories.


JS: What's up next for you?

DS: This summer, I’ll be back in the Bay Area to continue working on Natasha and the Coat; then I’ll be in Philadelphia working with Pig Iron on a new piece called Welcome to Yuba City. This fall, my play God Save Gertrude will be at the Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena.

Interview with Festival Playwright Sharyn Rothstein

Sharyn Rothstein's play March, an exploration of the relationships between teens and their parents featuring avatars and other scary monsters, real, imagined, and something in between, will be part of our Bay Area Playwrights Festival this year. Sharyn is a New York City-based playwright whose full-length and one acts plays have been workshopped and/or produced off and off-off Broadway by the Ensemble Studio Theatre, New Georges, 3Graces Theater Company, The Vital Theatre, Soho Think Tank, and at numerous theaters around the country. Sharyn is the winner of the Samuel French Short Play Contest and recently completed her MFA in dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Dramaturg Sonia Fernandez spoke with Sharyn about March and her career.

Sonia Fernandez: One unique aspect of March is the computer game that two of the teenage characters play, which is represented onstage. They create avatars for themselves and play those avatars on stage. How did this device evolve for you?

Sharyn Rothstein: I had read an article that talked about these online games that allow people to take on any personality or character trait that they wanted. Yet, according to the article, the people playing the games usually choose traits very similar to who they are in real life. This was really striking to me, and I began to think about how people- and kids in particular- use these online games live out experiences and create relationships that are obviously heightened from real life, but are also very true to the person sitting at the keyboard. So I knew from the begging that although the avatars might look different from the characters who had created them, the avatars and the real life characters would sound very similar and have the same personality issues. It was also important that that in the online world, in stark contrast to their real lives, the kids could create their environment. I think that’s what draws the kids to the game in the first place.

SF: You’ve had some success in shorter forms of playwriting with several plays published in Smith & Kraus’ “The Best Ten Minute Plays” anthologies as well as Playscripts, and Samuel French. Can you talk a little about how your approach differs when writing a 10-minute play or a one act and full length works?

SR: The key difference for me is the incubation period. When I’m writing a ten minute or one-act play, I wait until I’ve got a good idea- it usually comes to me as a line of dialogue or a funny situation- and then I sit down and write the first draft immediately. With a full-length play, there’s a lot more I need to know – about the plot, about the characters – before I can write a complete draft. And because there’s so much more to know, it’s easier to get lost while I’m writing the play (which can be both a good thing and terribly frightening thing). What’s beautiful about writing a full-length play is that you have the room to let your characters surprise you. As long as my characters are doing things and saying things I didn’t expect them to do or say, I know the play is honest.

SF: You do other kinds of writing -- live event scripts, speeches, a children’s audio adventure series. How do you feel these influence your playwriting?

SR: The number one thing I’ve learned from writing for a living is that you have to be open to other people’s comments about your work. With playwriting, I’m in the fortunate place of owning the words, so no one can force me to take other people’s comments or edits. But what you learn doing other type of commercial writing – where you absolutely must take those edits- is that other people’s input is incredibly valuable. And you also learn how to best receive and incorporate that advice to make the final written product stronger. Often non-writers are responding incorrectly to a problem in your work- but that doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist.

SF: Coming from small-town Connecticut, how did you get into playwriting?

SR: From a very young age, I loved being in an actual theater. Unfortunately, when you’re a kid in suburbia, most of the theater you have access to is musical theater, and I had – and still have – zero musical ability. Moreover, I was never really interested in being on stage. But I didn’t know, or I just hadn’t realized yet, that you could be a part of theater without being an actor.

I was fortunate to have a wonderful English teacher in high school who commandeered the school budget to allow a few of us to go see plays at the Hartford Stage from time to time. Those performances were some of us the first non-musical theatrical productions I saw, and I began to realize that somebody has to write all these shows. And that that somebody could be me.

SF: What’s up next for you?

I’ve been working on a new musical called BeautyQueen, that’s based on the story of Esther from the Hebrew Bible. The musical was commissioned by the 3 Graces Theater Company in New York, and they’re hoping to produce it in the Spring of 2010. It’s my first musical (as I noted above, musical talent was not my birthright!), so it’s been an equally fun and harrowing challenge.

Julia Jarcho's play American Treasure will be part of our Bay Area Playwrights Festival this year. Julia is a member of NYC's 13P and a PF Resident Playwright. We spoke to her about the play and her work.

Playwrights Foundation: Your play American Treasure explores the relationship between the wounds inflicted on Native peoples throughout American history and the role "Indians" play in our cultural fantasies. What drew you to this subject?

Julia Jarcho: I guess a few different things converged for me. One is that I found myself getting really psyched about the fact that my husband is part Cherokee--which made me ask myself what's at stake for me there, what it is I'm romanticizing or wishing for, which I have to suppose is something the culture at large has taught me to wish for. What is it that we want from our "Indians"? Why do we keep creating them over and over as a fantasy, and how do the facts of genocide fit in with that fantasy? This is also a question about how we do history in our everyday lives, and what it means to have desires that are oriented towards the past. Then there were also the movies I was watching (the play is about movies as much as anything else); the play's title is adapted from a certain pair of action movies (starring Nicolas Cage) which basically insist that America needs to keep getting "discovered" over and over again. That's a pretty fascinating idea, to me.

PF: American Treasure uses two actors to play a host of characters. What appealed to you about using morphing actors rather than the traditional one actor per character model?

JJ: Morphing actors! Cool. Well, the kind of theater I tend to be interested in isn't very character-driven. What I mean is that I'm not so into the idea of creating a set of realistic human beings whom the performers have to pretend to be. For me, it's more interesting to acknowledge that the performers are performers, working with a text and a physical world and a set of tasks which are not the ones we normally work with (although some of them might be). So that means there really isn't any reason to assign one character per actor. I think I tend to gravitate towards multiple-role performance because I get excited about theater as something that is getting done every time we see it, as a labor of imagination; and I think having a performer play more than one role emphasizes the work of making a world happen in your mind, which is both more and less than the world in which you just are who you are, no questions asked.

PF: When you were still in high school you worked with experimental theater director and playwright Richard Maxwell. How did this experience inform your aesthetic?

JJ: It was definitely an encouragement to follow my own logic, which is what he was doing (and still does). And that includes taking seriously your ability to amuse yourself. But also, I think working with him (and with other people I met through him: Aaron Landsman, Tory Vazquez) made me more aware of the wild precariousness of live theater, and of the value of honesty-- of not letting yourself disappear into either a fiction or an idea.

PF: What do you hope to achieve during the Festival this summer?

JJ: I hope to become very famous, very quickly. --Actually, 13P is producing American Treasure in New York in the fall, so this is going to be a great opportunity for me to get to know the play better, to start thinking about its existence in space and also to try new things with the text. There's always a question of how much the piece is going to "make sense" or tell a story, and how much it's going to push against its own storytelling, so I hope I can experiment in both directions through this process.

PF: What's up next for you?

JJ: Well, at the beginning of June I'm co-directing (and performing in) an adaptation of Edna St. Vincent Millay's play Aria Da Capo, with Target Margin Theater (in NYC). Then in the fall there's the 13P show. And I'm starting Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College, so I'm pretty excited about that.

Interview with BAPF's Christopher Chen

Chris Chen's play Anomienaulis, an adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis, will be part of our Bay Area Playwrights Festival this year. Chris was born and raised in San Francisco, and his play Into the Numbers was first featured at the 2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, receiving further readings at The Lark, hotINK Festival, Theatre Mu, and Silk Road Theatre Project. Most recently, his play The Window Age was commissioned and produced by Central Works Theatre Ensemble in Berkeley.

We spoke to Chris about Anomienaulis and his work.

PF: Anomienaulis is an adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis. What spoke to you about this particular story?

CC: I was first of all fascinated by the initial sequence of events in the story. For the supposed good of his country, the great king Agamemnon makes the tough decision to send for his daughter to be sacrificed. Then, he immediately changes his mind and sends a letter reneging his first order. But when this second letter is intercepted, he essentially resigns himself passively to his initial decision. It was this existential space of indecision and uncertainty that I wanted to tease out and expand upon. The set-up is very Beckett-like. An entire army is stranded indefinitely on the shore, waiting in vain for the wind that would carry their ships to war. In the midst of this restlessness, endless cycles of paralyzing doubt, anti-climaxes, and Hamlet-like wavering are played out, even as the march toward unstoppable violence grows inevitable. I wanted to specifically focus on how Euripides takes the decision-making process and opens up the psychological and moral gray area in between. I wanted to use his text to explore the arbitrariness and absurdity that more often than not determines our “decisive” actions.

PF: How did you approach writing an adaptation as opposed to an original work?

CC: My approach to adaptation wasn’t that different from my approach to an original work. Even when starting from scratch, I usually find it difficult to put any word on the page without first having in place a detailed outline. So working from the rigid outline of the Euripides text felt very natural. And not only was I working from the structure of the original text- I was also working from the structure of the “postmodern Greek adaptation,” a virtual genre unto itself, complete with its own set of conventions (including finding your “modernized take” on the material). I like working within these confines. Somewhat paradoxically, the more narrow and specific the areas of exploration, the more freedom I feel I have. Armed with a pre-existing storyline and a clear concept of my take on the text, I felt more liberated than ever when I started to write. I found myself working more directly from my subconscious.

PF: You grew up in San Francisco and studied playwriting at San Francisco State. What is the San Francisco playwriting community like and how has it shaped your writing?

CC: The playwriting community here is incredibly supportive and close-knit. I’m sure this is due in no small part to playwright-centered organizations such as Playwrights Foundation, Playground, and S.F. State’s playwriting program. Not only are the professors at S.F. State great playwrights, but they are incredible teachers as well. I owe a huge debt to Brian Thorstenson, Anne Galjour, Michelle Carter, and Roy Conboy for helping me develop my voice. Of course, working in a nurturing environment runs the risk of lulling a writer into complacency, but I’ve found that it also provides the perfect testing ground for new ideas. In a safe environment, I feel I have the courage to run with more wild conceptual impulses.

PF: This is your second Festival experience with PF. What was your last experience like last time, and what do you hope to achieve this year?

CC: My first experience at BAPF was a watershed moment for me. Not only did it help launch my playwriting career, but it was really my first time working with a professional artistic team. The experience ultimately elevated my play to a new level. This time around, I feel I have a clearer idea of how to use the festival to really explore new possibilities of the play. Central to Anomienaulis is a strong sense of anarchy and absurdism. This time I really want to allow my director and actors to tear into the script and tear it apart as they see fit. I want to see what happens when the text comes alive with a cast running with their wildest instincts. I want to see what shape the play will take.

PF: What's next for you?

CC: I am working on another Euripides adaptation- Herakles. It’s set in early 20th Century China and takes the form of a bad translation. It’s been a blast to write, and will get a reading at Fluid Motion Theater Company in New York next year. I am also working on a Borges-inspired take on Mao and the Cultural Revolution. And my first play with Playwrights Foundation, Into the Numbers, is going global. It was recently translated into Russian for the Belarus Free Theatre, and this Summer it will be translated into Chinese and premiere at the 2nd annual Beijing Youth Theater Festival, founded by experimental director Meng Jinghui.

PF: Anything you'd like to add?

CC: Donate to the Playwrights Foundation!

Interview with Deborah Stein

Minneapolis-based playwright Deborah Stein is coming to the Bay Area this May to workshop her play Natasha and the Coat as part of Playwrights Foundation's In the ROUGH Reading Series. She'll be returning to the Bay Area in July as part of our 32nd annual Bay Area Playwrights Festival. PF Associate Artistic Director Jonathan Spector spoke with Deborah about her career and work.

Jonathan Spector: In addition to writing plays as an individual artist, you have also collaborated multiple times with both Pig Iron Theater Company and director Lear DeBessonet on developing work with and for a specific company. How does the process differ when you're developing a piece specifically with a company?

Deborah Stein: Writing with and for specific actors has been one of the great joys of my creative life. When I write for an ensemble, the creation of character, story, rhythm, and playworld is a collective endeavor. There is often a sense that only these actors could play these roles; while I know lots of writers who would find this limiting, I find it incredibly invigorating and inspiring to know who I am writing for, and to collaborate intimately with them on how the character evolves from the clay. Working with a company, there is collective authorship: I work alongside the director, actors, and designers to create the world of the play. There is a sense of baton-passing, where at various points we are each in the lead, creating all together. Writing independently, I strive to create scripts that are whole yet allow enough space for this kind of active participation from future collaborators.


JS: Along with PF alum Dominic Orlando, you run the playwright driven company the Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis. What was the genesis of this company and how has it grown and changed over the course of the three years?

DS: The playwrights of Workhaus are mostly Minneapolis transplants, drawn to the Twin Cities by the resources of the Playwrights’ Center and the city’s awesome live-ability. The idea behind Workhaus was to create a home for our plays in the city after our scripts had moved beyond the development stages supported by the Playwrights’ Center. Inspired by 13P in New York and also our own experiences producing our own work elsewhere, we are also really committed to creating opportunities for unmediated interaction between playwrights and audiences. Each playwright becomes the Artistic Director for the duration of their production, and is involved in conceptualizing everything from set design to marketing as part of the dramaturgy, part of the audience’s experience of the play. We have produced seven plays in three years. Right now we’re finishing our second season as company in residence at the Playwrights’ Center and gearing up for a third, which will include new plays by me, Dominic, and Alan Berks.


JS: What as the genesis of Natasha and the Coat?

DS: My first job after graduate school was very similar to Natasha’s—I was hired by a vintage clothing wholesaler to design a marketing campaign for her local Hasidic-run dry cleaner. I got the job over Craigslist and lasted about eight days at the job. The parting was amicable—the clash of cultures was too intense; the cauldron of tradition, commerce, and gender dynamics was impossible for any of us to navigate. I grew up in a pretty secular Jewish household in New York, during the years that the Lower East Side and Williamsburg were gentrified. The swiftness with which this process happened was pretty surreal—to find myself bar-hopping on the same street where my grandfather, a Polish immigrant, worked sewing buttonholes forced me to reckon with how quickly the city, and my family, had changed. This reckoning was kind of so overwhelming that I decided to avoid it. This play, which is the most personal piece I have written—and which I began five years ago and then literally stuffed in a drawer, unfinished—is my belated attempt to wrestle with this legacy and these stories.


JS: What's up next for you?

DS: This summer, I’ll be back in the Bay Area to continue working on Natasha and the Coat; then I’ll be in Philadelphia working with Pig Iron on a new piece called Welcome to Yuba City. This fall, my play God Save Gertrude will be at the Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena.

Interview with Deirdre O'Connor

New York City playwright Deirdre O'Connor is coming to the Bay Area this May to workshop her new play Assisted Living as part of our in the ROUGH series. PF Associate Artistic Director Jonathan Spector spoke with O'Connor about her career and Assisted Living.

Jonathan Spector: Your play Jailbait recently finished a run at the Cherry Lane in New York. The play was developed through the Cherry Lane Mentor Project and then went on to full production. What about that development model did you find useful as you were working on the play?

Deirdre O'Connor: The best part of the Mentor Project was getting to know my mentor, Michael Weller, who is an exceptionally talented writer, and a very generous person. Michael encouraged me to take great care with the revisions of Jailbait and to spend a lot of time listening to the play both in rehearsal with the actors and in the theatre with the audience. When we put up the workshop production of Jailbait last year, I was shocked by how much I learned about the play sitting in the back row of the theatre listening to the audience respond. I made the strongest revisions to the play after that workshop production, and as a result Jailbait was a much richer play going into the full production this year.

JS: You've been developing Assisted Living this year at the Lark's Playwrights Workshop, and it will have it's first public reading next on the in the ROUGH Series. What was your jumping off point for this play?

DO: Assisted Living is about Jimmy and Jane, a brother and sister whose relationship begins to unravel because of the difficulty of caring for their aging mother. I have always been fascinated by the relationship between adult siblings. I think that our roles within our families are defined at a pretty young age. We are told who is the smart one, the goody two shoes, the troublemaker, etc. And no matter how we may change as we grow older, we often see our siblings only in those childhood roles. With Assisted Living, I really wanted to explore two siblings who think they know each other, but are forced to look at each other anew.

JS: Whose work among your playwriting peers are you most excited about at the moment?

DO: After spending the past seven months in the Lark Playwrights Workshop and getting to know Lisa Kron, Sam Hunter and Thomas Bradshaw I would have to say that I’m currently most excited by their work. We all have very different approaches to playwriting, but I have found our differences to be both challenging and inspiring. It’s been amazing to encounter their unique voices and see their plays slowly come to life week by week.

JS: What's up next for you?

DO: Well, I still feel that I’m pretty early on in the process of developing Assisted Living. I’m really looking forward to hearing it in front of the audiences because I’m sure I’m going to discover a great deal about the play through that experience. And on top of that I’ve got my hands full writing about robots and aliens for the children’s television show, The Electric Company.

Interview with Thomas Bradshaw

New York City playwright Thomas Bradshaw is coming to the Bay Area this April to workshop his new play Job as part of our in the ROUGH series. He'll also be teaching a class, Provocative Playwriting in our New Play Institute. PF Associate Artistic Director Jonathan Spector spoke with Bradshaw about his career and his goals as a writer.

JONATHAN SPECTOR: You've garnered a reputation over the past few years as a "provocateur" playwright, with characters who behave in shocking, outrageous ways. For instance in PROPHET a character gets a message from God telling him to enslave women, and he attempts to follow through, or in PURITY, two professors travel to Ecuador and "rent" a 9 year-old girl. Yet no matter how terrible the actions of characters in your plays, you never seem to pass judgment on them. How do you approach creating characters with such extreme moral stances?

THOMAS BRADSHAW: First of all the issues that I'm dealing with are part of the landscape of our world. We had a president for eight years that claimed that god told him to do things, including going into Iraq, then on the flip side, we have people who want to blow up the western world in the name of god.

So yes, one might say that my characters behave in shocking, outrageous ways, but I would say that they're frighteningly real.The involuntary prostitution of young girls, teenagers, and women is our modern form of slavery. It wouldn't be a problem if there weren't a high demand for it. Look at the show “To Catch A Predator.” It shows men trying to have sex with young girls and boys by the drove — and the people who were caught engaging in this behavior were rabbis, policeman, priests, doctors, lawyers and teachers. My plays deal forthrightly with serious issues that many people don't care to face. I categorize my plays as hyperrealism. They are like reality on crack — reality with out the boring parts.

Most plays make characters fit neatly into clear moral categories. This is pure artifice. No person is pure good or evil. Everyone fits somewhere in between. To stuff a character into a clear moral category is to make that character inhuman. I try to show the human side of characters that people might rather call monsters.

JS: Do you have an ideal audience in mind for your work?

TB: I think everyone should see my plays.

JS: You studied playwriting with Mac Wellman at Brooklyn college and collaborated a number of times with Young Jean Lee. How have they've influenced your work?

TB: I think we all have a desire to push the boundaries of what theater is and what theater can do.

JS: What's up next for you?

TB: My play The Bereaved is opening in New York at The Wild Project in September. I'm currently working on a commission from The Goodman Theater.

Interview with Michael Gene Sullivan

We interviewed playwright/actor/director Michael Gene Sullivan, who will be teaching a class, "The Playwright as Juggler," with us this spring.

Jonathan Spector: You wear many different hats in the theater – as an actor, a playwright, a director and an artistic director. How do keep a balance between all these fields? Do you think of them as a separate endeavors or all a part of the same thing?

Michael Gene Sullivan: I've been very fortunate in having the chance to do all three! And ...how can I say this without sound hokey... they are all, basically the same thing - all aspects of trying to solve the problem of how to tell an important story to an audience. It's all a collaboration, and I've been lucky enough to see the collaboration from each side. I think every actor, writer, and director should do each of the other jobs at least once. Not only will it give them a better understanding of their co-creators, it will make their own work deeper.

Another good thing about acting, writing, and directing is I have alot to offer when it comes to employment, though the myopia of some theaters is startling. Despite great reviews for directing, and the success of my adaptation 1984 and my scripts for the Mime Troupe, most local theaters think of me only as an actor. I performed on tour at the Actor's Gang theater, and the L.A. time said wonderful things about my performance, but the Actor's Gang sees me only as a writer. It really confuses some people when they see you doing something else. But is is fun!


JS: You’ve been the Artistic Director and head writer for the San Francisco Mime Troupe for several years. How did you initially get involved with the Mime Troupe? How do you think the role of the mime troupe has changed since it’s founding, and where do you see it going in the future?

MGS: The Mime Troupe is a Collective. We don't have an Artistic Director. A lot of people make that mistake. At first I thought Arthur Holden was Artistic Director, then Joan Holden, then Dan Chumley. It wasn't until I worked with the Troupe that I understood the Collective Directorship. It's a particular model, and frequently people think whoever is the most prominent Trouper at any given moment is the Artistic Director. Right now I'm an actor, director, and resident playwright.


I first saw the Troupe as a teenager when my father brought me to a show. I was blown away. Music, comedy, and a radical call to arms. And it was free! What more could anyone ask?

When the Troupe started it was at the forefront of the Free Speech movement. People today don't understand how outrageous it was back in the Sixties to say things like "The War is wrong!" or question Capitalism as the system that can produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Odds were you'd get jailed, or beaten, or both. The Troupe made controversy entertaining and informative, revolutionary, and fun. There were still arrests, but as the public became more aware of the problems in our country that had been glossed over the message of the Troupe became less shocking and more an explanation to citizens hungry for information.

The Troupe's job is still to inform and entertain, to point out injustices, and to show the inequalities and cruelty inherent in a system that puts profit before people. And to make people laugh while they are watching it!

My hope with the Troupe has always been to create a world where a company like the MIme Troupe isn't needed. But the way things are going, that may be a while off.

JS: You wrote an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 that was produced to great acclaim by the Actor’s Gang in LA and directed by Tim Robbins. You’re now working with Robbins on a film adaptation. What’s the process of working with a director to adapt a play of yours into a film?

MGS: Ahhhh.... 1984. Well, first of all the show is still touring! It just played Notre Dame, and there is interest in another international tour this Fall! That sucker has been running, off and on, since 2006.

As for the screenplay, I tried to write the play in such a way that it could work on stage or screen. I wanted it to be intimate, slightly claustrophobic, but with space to open out onto the big screen. When Tim told me he wanted to do a film adaptation I was worried he was going to push to make it all Hollywood - boobs, explosions, and car chases. Now, I like exploding car/boob chases as much as the next guy, but I didn't want them in the film. Well, over the course of a weekend he worked on the script without me, and gave me his adaptation of my play. I was shocked - it was almost exactly what I'd written! I think he added, like, one external shot. See, the concept is the play is the re-enactment of Winston's confession by four Party Members, so there was already space for flashback, voice over action, everything. So what could have been a painful, nasty fight between me and Tim - who is about a foot taller than me - was avoided!

The film project is still up in the air at this point. It's the only bad thing about Bush not being in office - everything feels less Orwellian. For now...

JS: What’s up next for you?

MGS: Well, I just finished directing a circus - what a dream come true! Right now I'm preparing for the Mime Troupe summer show. I'll be in it, and most likely write it - though I haven't decided yet. I also have another play I'm adapting from a novel written in the 20's about taking the country back from the speculating Capitalists as America headed into the Great Depression. Sound familiar? I also have a screenplay I was commissioned to write on the life of Duke Ellington. I've gotten some interest from L.A. and I just got back from laying groundwork for pitching the script to a studio. Then there's my adaptation of Christmas Carol...

Interview with Anne Galjour

PF Associate Artistic Director Jonathan Spector spoke to Anne Galjour about her work and her process. Anne is teaching a class with PF's Institute this spring. For more information, visit playwrightsfoundation.org


Jonathan Spector: You work as both a playwright and a writer/performer creating solo work.
Does your process as a writer differ widely when you work in different
forms?

Anne Galjour: Yes. Writing plays is a different cut of meat from writing solo work. I do not have the luxury of so many words in playwriting.

JS: Much of your work draw on your Cajun background. What continues to bring
you back to Louisiana as a source of inspiration?

AG: My family. My dad is a prolific storyteller. It’s how he makes sense of the world. I love the way Cajuns speak. My play OKRA is also running at the Bayou Playhouse right now.

JS: You've been on the playwriting faculty at SF State for many years. How
does your work as a teacher inform your work as an artist?

AG: I simply do my best to impart principles of dramatic writing and create a relaxed environment so that the poetry of the human voice with its needs, conflicts and stakes can emerge. My motto in class is ‘we fail forward’. This is how I feel about my own writing and performing practice.

JS: What's up next for you?

AG: My latest solo show YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE just had its world premiere at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College. We had a very successful New England tour of the show. It was developed at Z Space and directed by Jayne Wenger. Z Space is producing it here in September, 2009. I learned so much from working with Jayne. She and are cooking up a new work together.