mtorta's Xanga

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:05:33 GMT

New Play Blog Interviews Amy Mueller of the Playwrights Foundation

I'm a big fan of the Playwrights Foundation. It was their support and their amazing Bay Area Playwrights Festival that put me on the playwriting path.

New Play Blog recently interviewed Amy Mueller, Artistic Director of the Playwrights Foundation, about the foundation and its work. It's a must read.

So, you must read it.

-M

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:39:48 GMT

Weekly Dance Card

This week I'm going to an alumni happy hour, which I think purposely coincides with homecoming back at the old alma mater. We're meeting this Thursday at the Tunnel Top on Bush Street, just atop the Broadway Tunnel.

Friday, I'm thinking I'll go see The Bald Soprano at Cutting Ball. I'll try and invite a friend to come along so at least we can maybe have dinner before hand.

Saturday will be a full day. First there's the film screening of 389 Millas: Viviendo La Frontera / 389 Miles “Living The Border” by Director Luis Carlos Romero-Davis. Luis Carlos is a friend of a friend and as someone who writes about the border (3 plays and counting), I definitely want to check out the film. It's playing this Saturday at the Lumiere.

Saturday is also the final Playwrights Pub Night of 2009. We're gonna be in the Mission this time and I hope we have a good showing to close out the year.

I'd also like to go to the movies this week, but we'll see it it all pans out.

-M

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:19:49 GMT

For All My Lovely Poets

A larf.

Monday, November 09, 2009

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:35:06 GMT

What I'm Humming Today

I've got this tune stuck in my head. And as songs to get stuck in your head go, it's not so bad.

Monday, November 09, 2009

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:08:07 GMT

One Weekend, Two Shows, And a 10 Minute Play

It's been quite a weekend. Friday I decided last-minute to go see The Future Project: Sunday Will Come, a collaboration between Campo Santo, Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project, and musician Denizen Kane at Intersection for the Arts.

Erika Chong Shuch and Sean San Jose

Thankfully this mix of abstract performance movement / dance, scenes, and songs was accessible, that is allowed a way to enter the work and piece together the meta narrative. There were some really great moments and of course I'll find any excuse to go see Sean San Jose perform--he's really wonderful to watch and a charismatic force on stage.

Today, Sunday, I went to Brava to see Ghosts of the River, Octavio's shadow puppet ghost stories play. It was great! I loved the ghost stories, the mix of puppets, stencils and actors. Bravo! I need to remember to email Octavio tomorrow to tell him how much I dug it. Oh, FYI, Ghosts of the River is on the front page of American Theatre. Go O!

And finally, I finished my 10 minute play for Playground (due tomorrow afternoon). I'm happy with it, though I wish it were a tad longer, though there are a few pauses and I'm hoping that add on some time (it's 7 pages, the max is 10). I think I made the play a little more even handed for O'Neill's benefit and I have him singing a sea chanty at the end. Cross your fingers and let's hope it gets picked for the next Monday Night Performance.

More later,
M

Friday, November 06, 2009

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:56:04 GMT

Playground Deadline Fast Approaching

Last Sunday about half the writers from the Playground Writers Pool went on a field trip to Tao House, Eugene O'Neill's home in Danville. We took a tour, had lunch, and then learned the topic for our next Monday Night Playground submission (which is due this following Monday). The topic is: The Hairy Ape.

The Hairy Ape is one of O'Neill's plays and we can use that topic as a jumping off point or re-imagine his play / adapt it.

Now, there's something you have to know about me as a playwright. I only fell into theatre about four years ago now--that's about the time that I started writing Braided Sorrow and began to consider writing more plays. I don't have a theatre background, no theatre degree, didn't study it in undergrad or graduate school (I got an MFA in Poetry). Since I started down this playwriting path I've made an effort to read as much as possible, but there are still gaps in my knowledge. O'Neill is one of those gaps. In fact, I've only ever read one of his short plays (Ile) that was in an anthology of 10 minute plays.

So before the trip to Tao House I decided to learn a little about O'Neill and found myself becoming very interested in the man, rather than reading his plays. In particular it was his relationship to his daughter Oona that caught my attention. You see Eugene had 3 wives. Oona was 2 years old when Eugene ran off with the woman who would become his third and final wife (Carlotta).

When Oona was 18 she married Charlie Chaplain, who was 54 and only a year younger than Eugene O'Neill. Eugene was not happy about it, he disowned his daughter, never seeing her again.

That's what I was struck by: a man who abandoned his daughter as a child getting so upset over her choice of husband that he cuts her out of his life. Why care so much about her life when he was so able to abandon her as a child? Was it the fact that she was marrying a man his age? A man who was known as a womanizer and who liked to date young women?

Couple that thought with The Hairy Ape, a play about a man who suffers a sort of identity crisis when he over hears a women call him a filthy beast. That's what propels the character forward through the play, trying to find his place in society, where he fits in. I'll take it a step further, the character in The Hairy Ape is upset by what someone else "thinks" of him. So I muse, did O'Neill worry about what people thought about him?

I've learned that in his other plays O'Neill works through his family history. At Tao house we were told that Eugene had 2 older brothers. James and Edmond. Edmond died as a baby when James (though warned not to go near the baby) gave him the measles. James grew up guilt-ridden and Eugene was conceived as a "replacement" (I think that's Eugene's reading of events). When Eugene was born, his mother had a hard labor and was treated with morphine. When Eugene later discovered she had become an addict as a result of his birth, he felt responsible. It seems Eugene carried around a lot emotional baggage for things that were not his fault (his mother's morphine addiction) and emotional hang-ups (thinking he was a replacement child).

So as I sit in front of the computer to write I think about O'Neill and his preoccupations. For some reason I feel like Eugene O'Neill cared very much what people thought of him, cared very much for how things appeared. At least, that will be the O'Neill in my play. That's right, I'm going to try and write a 10 minute play about Eugene and Oona. It'll take place the year before he dies, and the last time she's in the United States--while on a trip to England Chaplain is told by the U.S. he can't re-enter (it's the McCarthy era and they find him too left leaning). Oona went back to California to secretly get their money out of security boxes, she even went so far as to line her mink coat with bills.

I've got 3 pages worth of play so far. Gotta finish it fast. Monday is right around the corner.

-M

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:56:44 GMT

Get Thee To A Theatre

There are so many plays out now that I want (and should) see, the list is just growing. This Sunday I'm meeting up with fellow playwright (and friend) Tim Bauer, theatre friends Maryanne and Sonia, and good friend Carrie to go see Ghosts of the River by Octavio Solis. It's not just about supporting Octavio's work because he's a friend, but he's also an amazing playwright and I'm making a point to see his shows.

Octavio collaborated with Shadowlight Productions to produce a "multidisciplinary shadow theatre work that tackles the highly charged and complex subject of the US/Mexico border by illuminating the lives of people on both sides of the divide in 5 Twilight Zone-like vignettes." The performance uses silhouettes of puppets, masked actors, and cutouts of sets and projects them all onto a screen. I'm really looking forward to it. Check out the play's website.

Also on my list of plays I want to see are: Drip which opened this past Monday at Crowded Fire. I'm sorta organizing a posse of people to go see it--perhaps we'll go next week, I need to propose a date to the growing group of peeps.

Then of course I need to see The Bald Soprano at Cutting Ball, I should try and go to see it one of the nights Nakissa is running the talk back so I can learn more about the play and playwright.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. I know there are more shows just beginning to open.

More later,
M

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:20:26 GMT

RPI Recap

It was late in the afternoon yesterday that I got a call from the Playwrights Foundation staff who for the past few weeks has been trying to find available actors for our workshop session. Turns out, one of the actresses I requested to work with was indeed available and she did attend last night, but the more pressing issue was that no male actors were able to make it.

Cold reads are tough so it can help if you have actors familiar with your work or who can easily play (in my case) a menacing husband and also easily navigate the Spanish in the script (not that there's lots, but it helps with the flow of dialog for there to be less tripping over words).

So no male actors. All of the resident playwrights were sent an email encouraging us to call / contact any actors we knew who might be able to come last minute.

I'm reminded of the time Marin Theatre Company was trying to cast the part of Lalo, a fifteen year old boy for my staged reading of American Triage. We had a hard time finding a Latino actor who looked like a teenager. At the time I wondered: where were all the young Latino actors (and by young, I mean can play teenagers to 20 something). I suspect they had moved to L.A. or NYC where there are a lot more casting opportunities.

Anyhoo, for my part I updated my Facebook status: needs one more actor for tonight--where have all the guys who can play menacing and read/understand/pronounce Spanish gone?

I did get messages to contact an actor who lives near San Jose, unfortunately it was too last minute to work with his schedule--but at least I have the name of another actor I could potentially work with, I'll file that one away for later.

So I had to make do. Which is fine because the first 15 pages of Wolf at the Door are so new [read rough] that it was very helpful to just hear it aloud and make all sorts of notes about the language (I'm looking for language that sounds too modern or anachronistic).

I asked to go second in the evening so I could hear all the actors (the ones I didn't know) before deciding how to cast the roles for the read through. And I'm glad I did go second, I think the casting worked very well, indeed.

Afterward, one of the actresses, someone I've worked with before remarked how cinematographic it is, that perhaps this play wants to be a film. Hm...I will say that I did notice how many stage directions I had in the script, something I try to limit--I don't like micromanaging actors, plus if you put too many in then they ignore them all. But as someone who's very image driven (and comes from an Imagist leaning in poetry) I find myself writing very specific stage directions, actions that convey a specific image ergo meaning or mood.

I'll keep working on it and let it become whatever it is that it wants to become. We'll see.

-M

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:54:19 GMT

RPI Meeting Tonight: I'm Up

At tonight's RPI (Resident Playwright Initiative) meeting at the Playwrights Foundation I'm one of three playwrights scheduled to bring pages in for reading. My pages are very rough, very new. That's the good thing about RPI, it gets you to write--nothing like peer pressure and deadlines to get a writer writing.

I'm working on bringing in at least 15 pages of Wolf at the Door, and I think my instincts were correct, it's going to be a short play. I guess it'll be a one act (I'm hopeful for 45 minutes).

As for tonight's reading, I don't know what actors they've wrangled. I did suggest a few people I'd like to work with--and it really helps if at least one of them can read Spanish. (Side note: I would like to have this play translated into Spanish.) And I'm more interested in just hearing it all aloud than having a conversation about it with the other playwrights.

More later,
M

Monday, November 02, 2009

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:53:05 GMT

Goldfish at the Magic Theatre

Yesterday I went to see Goldfish by John Kolvenbach which is currently running at the Magic. I had been told before going to see the play that, even though the premise isn't a new one (young person struggling to go to school and struggling with parent who has self-destructive behavior issues which makes going to school very challenging--in a nutshell), the writing was very good and that you'd forget that the aforementioned premise isn't necessarily new. The writing, in fact, is so good it sucks you in and the acting is so good that during a table reading of the play tears were shed.

[SPOILER ALERT]

I shed more than a few tears last night myself thanks to the writing and the powerful performance by Bay Area veteran actor Rod Gnapp who once again doesn't disappoint as the father whose gambling addiction wastes away the meager savings and results in his son dropping out of college because there's no money for tuition.

Rod Gnapp (Leo). Photo by Jennifer Reiley. Andrew Pastides (Albert), Rod Gnapp (Leo). Photo by Jennifer Reiley.

And wow, what a great last line. I mean, the father tells his son, "Resist me." There was so much in that one phrase. So much. In those two words he acknowledges how challenging it'll be for his son to leave, to return to school well-knowing that the father will continue his self-destructive path of gambling, and also he gives his son permission to shake off the burden of trying to keep the father safe, to save himself (the son) from the life that the father will only pull him back down into.

It's like the parable of the crabs in a bucket. If one tries to escape, another will pull it back into the bucket. So they stay trapped forever. It's fitting to think of the ending and that story since throughout the play the father used animal stories to convey his relationship to his son. At the top of the play in fact he tells the story of the goldfish, how it'll eat until it explodes, because it's too stupid.

Very nicely done, I didn't find those animal anecdotes too devicey (if that's even a word).

[SPOILER ENDED]

Kudos to the playwright for a wonderfully written play and to the cast for some powerful acting (Andrew Pastides also gave a great performance as the son Albert--my heart just ached for him at times).

So if you have the chance, head over to the Magic and check out Goldfish before its run finishes.

-M