Post Reading Post

The reading of Writer's Block on Thursday went well. I waited until now to post something because I wanted to give it a little space to sort of matriculate before I did.

The turn out was good. Nice mix of members of the Fringe Playwrights Unit and other folks unrelated to that but who are good friends who keep coming out for stuff.

Thanks to Peter and Victor and James, the cast. They have pretty much been the only ones reading this piece over the last year or so that I've been taking it in to the Fringe. It was really valuable to hear it read. Though I have to say, it generally got better laughs in the workshop . . . it sort of makes me wonder if too much of the humor is theater-centric, but y'know what? That's ok because so am I!

I got great feedback . . . and confirmation for some things I kind of already felt about the piece. There were some clunky and problematic things about the script that I looked at very closely today and sort of think I solved most of them.

We'll see. I'm taking the new pages in on Tuesday so hopefully all will go well. There is a build to the end of the piece that felt a little abrupt before, but I worked to fix that today . . . and I think I did.

It had been a very long time since I had heard one of my full length plays read all the way through and it was refreshing to say the least. You can really get a better sense of the arc and how it works . . . I think this one does. But then I think all my plays do! Surprise!

So the next step is getting it out into the world. We'll see how it goes. It has been incredible fun to work on this piece and it's a real good example of how our lives intersect with our art. One of the key elements of the play, for example, is a play called The Conversation of Death. In the early days of working on this idea I read H is for Hawk . . . and one of the things she talked about in the book was the interaction between prey and hunter . . . well . . . that was too juicy to pass up so that influenced the play. There are other, smaller things as well . . .but it all goes into the baggy and gets mixed up until it comes out as this play . . . the title of which, by the by, I didn't put all that much thought into. Actually, when I was writing the program for Like a Sack of Potatoes, I wanted an announcement of this reading and I needed a title, which it did not have at the time . . . so I said what do I call it and the first words that bubbled up were Writer's Block . . . and it fit so beautifully . . . it kind of tells you that the piece is about the creative process without really rubbing your nose in it, so I think it's perfect for the piece . . .we'll see what kind of traction I get with it!

So . . . register with the Library of Congress and away we go . . . onto the next one!

Writers Block around the corner

I took the first ten pages of the second act of Writers Block to the Fringe last night. It went very well . . . my cuts proved to be timely . . . I mentioned in a previous post that the 80 page play is now around 55,and most of that cutting is in act two. Specifically, the first twenty pages of the act. What is now the first page of act two was 23 pages in before . . . a lot of stuff I kind of like got lopped out, but it doesn't really matter whether I like it or not, what matters is if it serves the play . . . and in this case the play is better for the cuts.

So it'll be nice to have the whole thing read in one fell swoop. Last year we only read the first act of Brother of the End of the World, and I really missed not hearing the entire thing . . . but this play is significantly shorter and moves more spryly I think. It got nice feedback last night and some nice laughs (which is the best feedback of all if its in the right places, and it was). So I feel like we're ready. The three actors reading it have pretty much been doing so for the entire time . . . all last fall when I was bringing the piece into the workshop ten - fifteen pages at a time, so they know the parts pretty well and it's fairly ideal. It would be nice to have time for a run through, but I doubt that is gonna be possible.

So we'll see what happens. I'm gonna read stage directions since sitting and listening to a reading of my work is hard, there aren't that many directions and I can make notes in the script real time if something is awry.

I'm ready to start submitting this one now . . . I think it might have a shot at some interest since it's: 1) small cast, 2) one set and 3) a tip of the hat to the creative process.

But we'll see.

Beckett

It was, I guess, unavoidable in this year of Beckett, that we would go see the evening of three pieces performed by Lisa Dwan. The three solo pieces, Not I, Rockabye and Footfalls were at the Skirball Center at NYU.

Traffic was bad news (not unusually bad in Manhattan, but really really bad on the Sawmill Parkway), but after we got there everything settled down. We went to Dojo on Mercer St. which is a couple of blocks from the theater. I've always been fond of that place and it didn't disappoint; food is good and prices are extremely reasonable. The one downer about Dojo is it's across the street from what used to be The Bottom Line . . . ah memories!

The first thing out of Wallace's mouth when he saw the space was 'This is not the right theater for these plays'. And he was right. Especially for Not I. The disembodied mouth was a tiny speck elevated 10 feet or more and way upstage. You could barely see it. I guess for a lone voice screaming into the void it was an interesting choice, but I think the piece would have been better served in a more intimate space.

I didn't have a similar problem with Rockabye and Footfalls. I guess with virtually any play the more intimate the better, and Bette had seen and been knocked out by these two plays with Billie Whitelaw when she originally performed them in the early '80s in NY in one of those smaller spaces on Theater Row. In the case of last night's performance, I think haunting is the best adjective. Beckett had a real sense of not only the poetry of the words but of the stage pictures themselves. In these two pieces an actress alone in the world, with the exception of the recorded voice. In the case of Footfalls the voice is the mother of the character and in Rockabye it is the internal monologue of the lone figure rocking her way through life 'alone in a window'.

Technically these pieces were amazing. The lighting in footfalls was ghostly and evocative, and in Rockabye it was stark white, from the side as she rocked and we hear the voice, providing an image of one side of her face lit and the other as dark as the far side of the moon, then the lighting would change when the voice and rocking stopped . . . and the woman in the chair would say simply: More. And the lighting would change back and the rocking start again.


Lisa Dwan was very good; in fact, Bette said she surpassed Whitelaw in Footfalls. At any rate, I'm glad we made the effort and went . . . a rare opportunity to experience Beckett on a very high level of performance and production. The director was Walter Asmus, who also directed the amazing Godot I saw a few years back. He is also a direct link to Beckett, having worked with him extensively.

Good stuff. I'll sure never forget it.

Next up in Beckettland: Happy Days with Diana Weist at Yale Rep! And you know what comes after that!

A moment for my poor ignored blog

Time flies don't it? You get up look around and a couple of weeks have gone by without a blog post! So anyway, lots of stuff happening in this most amazing of years. Now we have Like a Sack of Potatoes behind us, next up is the reading of my new piece Writers Block. It's Thursday, May 28th at 7 pm at the Westbeth Community Center. Then there are no other encumbrances to distract from Happy Days (except perhaps working for a living of course!).

I'm pretty happy with where Writers Block is now. Still working on it of course but it will be very nice to see how it goes over with folks. We read the first fifteen pages in the workshop last week and lots of laughs; it seems my surgery on the piece has worked its magic. And the real reconstruction has been in the second act. Vast swaths of the second act are gone now . . . to the extent that what was once an 80 page play is now under 60.

My process involves finding the story a little at a time . . . and then when I finally figure out how to end the piece I have to go back and make sure all the little bits that were written piece-meal fit together into a satisfying whole. A lot of work, but that what it's all about . . . so this is a fun piece. I like the characters, and I like the resolution of the piece . . . swinging for the bleachers . . . and if it works . . . what a rush . . . if it doesn't? Back to the drawing board.

So anyway, lots going on right now and couldn't be happier . . . one thing that does suffer though is this bit of navel gazing . . . but that's ok . . . you can't do everything!