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.

Interview with Melissa James Gibson

Current Nobody Director Jonathan Spector speaks with Melissa about the play and her process. Just Theater presents the West Coast Premiere of Current Nobody November 14-December 13 at the Exit Theater.

Jonathan Spector: You have a very idiosyncratic way of writing dialogue, which seems to both mimicking the rhythms of actual human speech while creating a very specific kind of heightened language. Can you talk about how you evolve this style of writing?

Melissa James Gibson: It's really just an effort to capture the way I hear things, the way peoples' thought processes are reflected in the way they speak--all the self-edits, misfires, revisions and pauses that surround and inform, and sometimes form, human expression.

JS: In so many ways this piece appears at first glance to be an extremely loose adaptation, yet on the plot points and structure it’s actually very faithful to the original. How did the process of adaptation differ for you from writing an original work?

MJG: Well, it's both thrilling and daunting to be grappling with source material of genius. My hope was to honor that material by turning it on its head, while also retaining its heart. At the same time, I've dispensed with many elements that didn't feel germane to my particular take (and, of course, plays and epic poems are different beasts).

JS: Current Nobody is a project that had a somewhat lengthy development process. So much of the play deeply integrates the dialogue with the physical action and design in such a way that it’s all completely interdependent. How much of the physical action of a piece do you conceive in the writing, and how much do you typically develop while working on it with actors and a director?

MJG: The short answer to the two parts of the question is A, lots, and B, lots. I think about the architecture of my play worlds carefully, and in ambitious and sometimes unrealizable terms--the Brooklyn bridge is assembled before our eyes, for example--and then rely on the visions of talented designers and directors to imagine ways of elegantly executing these notions in three dimensions. The actors we work with in first productions play an important investigatory role, as well.

JS: What's up next for you?

MJG: I'm working on commissions for playwrights horizons and the Atlantic Theater company; a musical with composer Michael Friedman and director Mark Brokaw for Center Theatre group; and a film for a small independent company.

An Excerpt from Current Nobody

OD
Okay
This is good This is good I’m doing
good I feel good

(Tel makes a small cry. Od rocks the crib.)

Okay
She’s been gone

(Od look at his watch.)

six no seven and a half hours and it hasn’t felt like more than five and
I support her decision to do this
as I always support her decision to do this This
is the woman I married I feel good

My wife has
places to go people to shoot in thirty-five millimeter
wars to cover wars to capture and no one captures atrocity like Pen
Everyone says so everyone says
she’s got an eagle eye and a daring heart and My Wife
needs to see things first-hand God I miss her hand It’s okay It’s okay

because
She’s Never Not Come Back and
it’s just for one or two weeks
tops
This is good

(Od looks at his watch and then crosses over to the sleeping Tel.)

She
said the general said this was a
Besiege Becalm Begone type of thing and
she said the general said In And Out and
generals are generally right
Right


PEN
I mean I’m not one of those children
I mean I’m not one of those people who wanted to have children but didn’t want to have to raise them Well
I am a little bit like that I guess or I was until I met you
And you just fall in love you do
But you know when there’s so much you want to accomplish
(large exhale)
Parenting is a complicated mathematical equation
to which there is no known solution
It’s easy for us all to say we put our children first but a messy and contradictory business in practice or I mean
that’s what I’ve heard
Was it awful all the time

TEL
No no
not all the time
not at all
I mean
definitely dad was in despair a good bit
And I was in despair mostly too but
We did try to you know stagger our despair
unsuccessful though we were

Intern Performance

Moe here, volunteer of no particular persuasion.

Just saw the staff/intern impromptu reading. Unsurprisingly, many folks who work with PF are themselves playwrights.

Also unsurprisingly, they are decent playwrights.

The performance did not disappoint, presenting short plays about everything from a vegetarian meal to the essence of American Cock. Quite a variety of voices and styles from a group of folks examining different issues in their lives.

The grand Mr. Spector hopes for this to become an annual event. Hooray. Looking forward to next year.

Update from Elijah the Intern

Greetings from Elijah the Intern. Who, you ask? You might have noticed me making photocopies at the office. Or behind the concessions table. Or taking out the trash. Or doing one of many things to make your (the audience, the playwrights, the artistic team, the administration) life easier. My goal is to make everything run as smoothly as possible so that everyone can let their creative juices run uninhibited as the Festival goes on, instead of worrying about what food is missing, what the logistics of the events are, or how Dominic Orlando acquired his stunning wardrobe.

For those of you who came to the Festival last weekend, thank you so much. For those of you who didn't, I know you're planning to come this weekend, when we'll be showing all of the shows...again. Or, hey, if you saw them last time, why not see them again? Most of you have probably seen The Dark Knight twice, anyway. It's just like that, but imagine seeing it again the second time where the characters are suddenly more developed, the language is more clear and concise, and the thematic elements are fuller! (I don't know how that would look for The Dark Knight - maybe The Joker reveals his favorite ice cream flavor.)

A couple of specific shout-outs go to:
Richard Ciccarone - one-man show (with the help of our wonderful tech team) production manager extraordinaire, who had the brilliant idea of holding a Mini-Festival with the interns' and PAs' work, tomorrow at 2pm at the Magic (I'm not plugging anything...) Sonia, Cris, Jonathan and Amy at the Playwrights Foundation, for staying insane hours to make sure everything gets off the ground...Molly, another intern, whose company made those last-minute supply runs bearable...Jen, Graham, and the Crane Story gang for being incredibly nice to their PA (yours truly), and.......EVERYONE ELSE (so much for being specific. I knew it was as failed endeavor as soon as I started - there are so many people to thank) Rest assured, I love you all. I'm out for now.

Wanda Sabir Blogs About the Playwrights Foundation!

Click HERE to read what Wanda Sabir, Arts Editor of the San Francisco Bay View and a columnist for the Oakland Tribune, said in her Blog about the Bay Area Playwrights Festival!