Nobody Knows the Rejection I’ve Seen

By Bridget Kelso, member of the 2009 Emerging Writers Group

Ahh... the life of a playwright. It goes a little something like this:

Denial

You spend months writing cover letters, personal statements, revising resumes and filling out applications for grants, and admittance into festivals. “Please sir, may I be in your new play festival? Please may I be considered for a fellowship? Commission? Please like my play and pay me for it.” Months later, the envelopes arrive. They are thin and light. You say to yourself, “Maybe they just want to congratulate me first. Yeah, that’s it! More details, in a bigger, thicker envelope will follow.” But no, it’s the standard form: “Thanks but no thanks. Beat it kid, you stink.” It’s confusing, because your play is AMAZING. Everyone in your playwrights group said it was AMAZING. Everyone tells you all the time that you’re REALLY talented. And your play is AMAZING. How could anyone not like it? Because it really is an AMAZING play.

Anger 

As the letters and emails pile up (what should you do with them by the way? Should you keep them in a “You rejected me and I’ll never forgive you and you’ll regret it when I win the Pulitzer and a Tony and one day I’ll take a meeting with you and I’ll bring your rejection letter with me and throw it in your face, so I need to keep it” file? Or should you throw them away because they may be attracting toxic energy and vibes?), you start to get angry, because these jokers have rejected an AMAZING play!!! Who do they think they are? The fuckin’ nerve. It’s ridiculous. The whole system is rigged. It’s “who you know.” You don’t fit into their mold. They’re intimidated by your subject matter. You are TOO MUCH for them, and they are afraid of your AWESOMENESS. It’s sexism/racism/hater-ation!!! They should be begging you for your play. As you ceremoniously burn the rejection letters (it just feels right), you realize that you never liked that company anyway. Their last season sucked. They never do anything innovative or revolutionary. Why did you even apply there? You HATE them. They suck. And your play is AMAZING, so it’s their loss.

Bargaining 

Okay. You hate them. But it’s been over a year, and no one on the entire face of God’s luscious green earth is even remotely interested in your play. Maybe, just maybe... your play isn’t amazing after all. Is there something you can do about it? Maybe you don’t need 14 characters in your play. Maybe the actors can double up. What if you rewrote one of the characters as a white male? What if you wrote a comedy for several white men? What about a romantic comedy with 3 white characters, and one “ethnic” character? That’s always hot. After all, people ask artists to make adjustments all the time. That’s how commissions work – it’s all about COLLABORATION. You’re willing to make some changes. But wait a minute. No one ever said to Mozart, “Could you write that in E flat instead of D?” Did anyone ever say to Picasso, “Hey Picasso, that’s a great picture, but could you change all the blue to red, and add some yellow in there too?” HELL NO. Are you a man or a mouse? You’re an ARTIST and you’ll do it your way (cue the Sinatra song).

Depression 

More time passes, and you reluctantly admit that you are not the next August Wilson. Your play might have been alright, but it’s old news now. You find yourself talking about your last accomplishment, and realize it was years ago. You are washed up before you even start. Why even try anymore? A newer, younger, prettier crop of playwrights is on the scene now. They are about to “blow up.” And thank you, Facebook, for broadcasting on a daily basis how successful everyone else is. Each and every playwright that you know personally, or have ever heard of, is having a reading, going into casting, having a world premiere. There are invitations to everything, everyday. You used to click “maybe” but now you don’t even reply. You drop off the radar. People you haven’t seen in a while bump into you on the street and ask if you’re “still” writing. And that is just as it should be, because you have no talent. And your play is not amazing. If it was, it would have been produced by now, and you would have paid the cable bill with all the royalties rolling in. You suck. You might as well start asking people if “they want fries with that?” Oh God. Your life is a debilitating morass of inertia and heartbreak wrapped in thunderclouds and disappointment. Oh, the humanity.

Acceptance 

You lay awake at night, wondering why you just can’t get a break. Just one break. And while you’re formulating your prayer or a new game plan, something clicks. A new idea. All of a sudden, you have the last two scenes for a new play. You can’t write it down fast enough. And so maybe that’s the secret. You take all the stuff that looks like rejection, and you turn it inside out. Spin it around, and see that none of this is about you. You take all of your feelings – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and you use them. They become a poem, a melody. All the self-flagellation that you’ve mastered... you put it into the script. You add it into the dialogue. A character gets fleshed out, a problem gets fixed. You look around and there is your son, your brother, your friend. You laugh at something funny someone says. A new day dawns and you breathe, and press on. You realize that no one can put two words together like you can. And the only thing that matters is how it feels when those words fly across the screen, and become flesh.

Bridget Kelso is an Adjunct Lecturer at the City College of New York and a teaching artist for Judith Sloan’s EarSay Project at the International High School in Queens, which helps Immigrant Youth by transforming trauma into art. She is “still” working on a solo performance piece entitled SLIDE SHOW: THE EVOLUTION OF RADICAL FEMINIST THEOLOGY.

This post is part of a weekly series from the Emerging Writers Group community of playwrights. The EWG is two-year playwriting fellowship at The Public Theater seeking to target playwrights at the earliest stages of their careers. In so doing, The Public hopes to create an artistic home for a diverse and exceptionally talented group of up-and-coming playwrights.

Where Do You Come From? A Meditation on Time, Place, & Setting

By Andrew Kramer, member of the 2012 Emerging Writers Group

New York City.
Indianapolis.
Cleveland.
Nashville.
Houston.
Australia.

When I take stock of all the places I’ve traveled to this past year and the reasons that brought me there, I am endlessly thankful that it’s because of my playwriting. But then I get weird and lofty and start thinking a lot about TIME, PLACE and SETTING. 
I start thinking about this notion of “home”. 
I start thinking about my writing and how the physical environment, the place, is at once vital to the story, but also almost totally removed from my immediate experience. 
I start thinking about why? 

One of the major elements of a play is setting, or where the play is taking place. This element is essential in establishing the why, who, what, when, and where. A play about an indigenous African culture and the colonization of their tribe and home is going to be a drastically different play than one that features the concerns of an Upper-Class, White family living amidst family lies and love in a privileged neighborhood in Cape Cod. All because of place. Because of home. 

Setting: A middle class neighborhood.
Time: The snowfalls of July-August. 
       - The Dog(run) Diaries 
I was raised in a small town in Ohio. It was genre-abiding Midwestern living with slow-stride warm summers and lake-effect cold winters. But when my father passed away, we moved north to Cleveland and it was here, in this new cultural mecca, that I began write plays seriously. It was the early 2000’s, my family had just experienced a supreme loss, September 11th had devastated the country, the Second Bush was in office (also devastating to the country), my family ate macaroni and cheese and hot dogs a few nights a week because we were dirt poor, and my mind was turning towards college. To embody these elements, things that felt so unreal to me at the time, I chose to theatricalize my fear, my understanding of loss, my confusion, through a massive blizzard that inexplicably occurs during the summers months, a time that is usually associated with the warmth, growth, relaxation, and comfort of the Midwestern sun. I was establishing time and place that was at once familiar and personal but distant and theatrical. My play, The Dog(run) Diaries, is made-up of people and situations that are heavily inspired by my experiences of growing up in the Midwest. Yet, as the above setting/time show, I chose not to set it specifically in Cleveland. Instead, I place my characters in a middle class neighborhood during a summer blizzard. Again, though informed by my past life, my “homeland”, my experiences, there’s nothing that’s specifically Ohio. Not specifically Cleveland. Not specifically 2012. 

It may have been any –or all of these things that propelled me into writing plays, but this wasn’t something I was conscious of at the time. And to this day, though Cleveland itself inspired me in some intense ways, none of my plays take place in that crazy-beautiful, economically struggling, artistically blessed city whose river caught on fire. 

Setting: A secluded house. East of the Rocky Mountains. 
Time: Now.
Crying for Lions 
My new play, Crying for Lions, was written during my time with Tennessee Repertory Theatre in Nashville, TN under their Ingram New Works Lab. The play utilizes a heavily invasive natural landscape to externalize the character’s fears, desires, and insecurities. Their house, secluded in a dense forest, becomes overrun with weeds, trees, and plants. A large, stalking Mountain Lion stealthily appears/disappears and has desires to feast upon their new baby. By experiencing the drive to Nashville as a beautiful scenic route, full of highways lined with tall rock formations, beautiful varieties of trees and animals, and on nice days, endless sun bouncing off every possible surface, I began thinking about the ways natural environments, especially isolated ones, can influence human behavior. But Crying for Lions doesn’t specifically take place in Tennessee. And it doesn’t specifically take place in 2012. It takes place Now. Whenever that may be, in a secluded cabin east of the Rocky Mountains. 

All of my plays continue in this way. They feature variations of the people I’ve met in my life inhabiting variations of places I’ve been to. Why the ambiguity of time and place? Is there some sort of disconnect within me that will not allow me to write a play that is specifically set in the now and in the city I was raised in? I’m not attempting to be elusive or exceptionally original in these declarations of time and place, but when I begin to write a play, some things tend to figure themselves out. People and places emerge out of the ether and sometimes it feels wrong to shake that up. I trust my instincts. And so far, I’ve not felt the need to craft a play that takes place in Cleveland, 2012. But why? 

I look at so many of my incredibly talented playwright peers and I see a trend in writing that exists in ways opposite than what I’ve just described. So many incredible writers list the settings of their plays IN their home cities, during the years they were growing up. Or list setting as their home state, influenced by their very specific experience. 
I think this is awesome. 
I admire these writers so much; writers who come from a place and a time and want to write about it. 
Their work pops. 
Their work drives. 
Their work seems to soar. 
So much poetry is contained in time, setting, and place and when writers access this poetry in a way that presents something compelling and theatrical AND indicative of their personal experience with place and home, something special happens. My favorite recent example comes from fellow 2012 Emerging Writer’s Group member A-Lan Holt’s stunning, shocking, play 8BALL. She has the beginning pages of the script tell us this about the setting and time: 

The Time: 1989-1991. One of accelerated movement.The Place: The Milky Way, Third Planet from the Sun,Earth, North America, United States of America, California, Southern California, Los Angeles County, Los Angeles City, Athens on the Hill Neighborhood, a residential city block,the interiors and exteriors of three homes, the interiors and exteriors of five characters
Where do we come from? 
From when? 
How has that informed us as writers, as artists, as people? 

As I continue to grow and develop as a writer, influenced by incredible friends and artists that come into my life and profoundly touch me in ways, I am striving to answer these questions. And further, to integrate them into my writing. 

Do our voices, our plays, lack a certain dynamic edge if we’re not writing specifically of our time and of our setting?


Andrew’s play, CRYING FOR LIONS, is currently being developed by Tennessee Repertory Theatre’s Ingram’s New Works Lab under the mentorship of Steven Dietz and will have staged readings on June 1st and June 3rd. For more info: http://www.tennesseerep.org/

This post is part of a weekly series from the Emerging Writers Group community of playwrights. The EWG is two-year playwriting fellowship at The Public Theater seeking to target playwrights at the earliest stages of their careers. In so doing, The Public hopes to create an artistic home for a diverse and exceptionally talented group of up-and-coming playwrights.

Desert | A Note on Perspective

By A-lan Holt, member of the 2013 Emerging Writers Group

This April I spent three days in the Indio valley just north of Los Angeles. I was there outside of New York and back inside my California for the first time in months, and it felt like the kind of warmth that familiarity brings. Three days living in the bottom of a valley with a handful of close friends calling me by nickname, all of us reveling in the music above and the laughter left floating. All of us hugging what magic we could take with two hands and living untamed with the aggravated belly of desert air. Yes, what a migrant and mellifluous people I found dancing at this festival. What a utopia of lights and night sky. Oh, what 360 degrees of mountains (and not buildings), sand (as opposed to concrete), and people (all kinds of people) can do for one's spirit, can do for one's work, and all this, just in time for spring.

The poet, Saul Williams once told me that the best cure for writer's block is breaking routine. After a winter of daily wrestling with this new play, begging loose pages to become something coherent, I am now fully embracing the feeling of things dislodged. The first being me from my computer. I am finding more ways to untangle myself from this screen that I stare into daily. I am turning off my phone often, and finding something familiar about myself in this silence. I am also trying to connect more with people. When I say connect I am talking about the kind of contact that requires touch, the inefficient kind of face to face interaction and full, singular attention that I almost forgot about somewhere amidst my productivity. I am trying to slow, things, down, for sure. And surely I did not know how much I needed this change of pace until I was wading, body deep, into this new world for three days. I did not fully realize how easily bodies adapt to the rhythms of a place, until I was taken outside of this new city, this New York, that I have come to call my home.

Similarly, stepping outside of the world of this play for a moment helped to give me a better understanding of my relationship to the work; a perspective I have found to be crucial. These days, I am learning that the work won't come from the writing alone. It manifests itself in the places I frequent; be it this desert, or Los Angeles, or my small bedroom in Brooklyn, or in the stories of a close friend, whom after months of travel has gracefully found her way home. These small connections, I am finding, are the things my plays are made of. What a blessing it has been to return with new eyes. What a curious and welcomed perspective I have found in this space.

A-lan is currently developing a new piece entitled THE BOTTOM, a play re- inspired by her recent trip to the desert; a play about a boy living in a world of his own design.

This post is part of a weekly series from the Emerging Writers Group community of playwrights. The EWG is two-year playwriting fellowship at The Public Theater seeking to target playwrights at the earliest stages of their careers. In so doing, The Public hopes to create an artistic home for a diverse and exceptionally talented group of up-and-coming playwrights.

Please Find Attached

By Sevan Kaloustian Greene, member of the 2011 Emerging Writers Group

Submitting applications is exhausting.

Truly.

I took a break from completing six different ones due today to write this post. And part of me felt anxious because I want to get these things done and submitted, but the other part was happy for a moment of respite from talking about myself (not a favorite pastime) and expounding on my beliefs as a playwright.

The kicker is that no two applications are the same. In general they ask for a resume, a personal statement, and a statement of objectives. But it’s the specific questions for each of the latter two that make it difficult to just copy and paste and save time. Trust when I say I have spent upwards of 6 hours sitting in front of my computer deciding between plays, researching the theatre companies or grant organizations, tailoring what I say for the specific program objectives, deciding what I want to work on with the play I am submitting (if it’s a writers program) or blathering on about why my play should be awarded the prize that several other hundred playwrights are also vying for.

At some point you stop and ask if people actually read these things. I mean assistants and interns, undoubtedly, run through the first round of applications. Having helped out on application processes for other programs, I know the kind of mindless drivel and hackneyed aphorisms that can make it through. Not to mention the sheer volume of applicants who clearly haven’t read the requirements. And some who don’t even know what they are applying for.

And those who DO copy and paste but don’t change the names.

And I freely admit to having a couple moments of that moronic move myself.

So the lucky few who do manage to get through to the next rounds are now pitched against one another in a non-physical Hunger Games gauntlet of vying for importance in the American Theatre. The assumption is that once you get to a semi- or a finalist round you are not a hack and have some kind of measurable skill and talent. Ah, but you need an edge. What sets you apart? Some will bring their minority cards to the table, others their sexual preference, a few their refugeeism (ding ding ding: ME), and perhaps a smattering of disabilities make their way through. And don’t forget about the exhaustive list of awards, recognitions, accolades, reviews, recommendations from luminaries, and letters from doting grandmothers. It’s not always just about the writing; I mean it IS called show BUSINESS and you have to figure out what the smartest way is to get up to the next rung of the ladder. Marketing attraction and marquee value are not to be underestimated when it comes to things like play titles, playwright names, and personal histories.

The feeling of relief when you are done and submit the application is indescribable. It lasts for about a minute when you realize you have one more left or get forwarded an e-mail from a peer telling you about a grant, award, program, or fellowship you somehow managed to leave off your spreadsheet that you use to track deadlines and submissions.

Or maybe I’m the only anal-retentive overachieving minority who does that…

And then you procrastinate. Oh God, do you procrastinate. You have a month. You have two more weeks. Let me go to the bar tonight since I have one week left. It’s due tomorrow? Hm. I can do it in the morning.

And then you have six to do before midnight.

I’d hate to be the inboxes on deadline days or even during the final hour of the deadline.

But your job is done. Relief. Now you just have to wait. You can get back to looking for applications due in another two or three months, get to those rewrites or the new play you have been meaning to write, go to your survival job, or call up a few pals to get some alcohol in you to reward yourself.

Until a few weeks later when the rejection letters and e-mails come in droves. These formless template form letters thanking you for your play, saying you have promise, explaining how many applications came in and how difficult it was to decide, and how the hope is you will apply again the following year.

The first time you get that letter you feel upset but emboldened. The third time you realize that you are not the only one who got that letter. After the eighth time you just read the opening paragraph and throw the rest out once you know that the odds were not in your favor this time, Katniss/Peeta.

And the reasons you tell yourself you didn’t get in? They include but are not limited to: I am not well-connected enough, no one knows me, I’m too new, I’m too good, I don’t have a name, I’m not friends with this artistic director or that literary manager, the chosen have been produced, I don’t have any awards to my name, I write weird plays, I’m not white/black/Asian/Middle Eastern, I’m not male, I’m not female, they just don’t get me, I’m just not good enough.

That last one is the killer.

It makes you stop writing for a while. Makes you give up for a bit. Makes you question why you are bothering. Makes you tired of trying to break through. Makes you open to feeling professional jealousy. Makes you waste time asking: Why them and not me?

And once you’re done consuming more calories than any human should in one sitting…or two…or a whole week. Once you’ve finished watching reality shows so you can feel better about your life in light of the hot messes on TV. And once you finally manage to open up a file to start rewriting or writing something new, you slowly find your way back. You take that deep breath. And you get back to work. Because feeling sorry for yourself won’t really get results at the end of the day.

And at the end of that day someone is bound to like you sometime soon so that you never have to fill out another application packet again.

At least - that’s what you cling to.

Sevan is at the brink of submission exhaustion and would like to open his own application process for wealthy benefactors to support his artistic endeavors. No statements or resumes needed, but there will be a credit check.

This post is part of a weekly series from the Emerging Writers Group community of playwrights. The EWG is two-year playwriting fellowship at The Public Theater seeking to target playwrights at the earliest stages of their careers. In so doing, The Public hopes to create an artistic home for a diverse and exceptionally talented group of up-and-coming playwrights.