July House

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

Every year, since 2009, the Public Theater’s EWG has been invited to bring writers to spend a week at Vineyard Arts Project on Martha's Vineyard. Thanks to incredible generosity of Ashley Melone, who founded and is the artistic director of Vineyard Arts Project, the writers spend 7 days in what could only be described as an artists’ compound (with none of the gulag implications) creating and revising whatever play(s) that strike their fancy. It’s where this blog post is being written as I look out through French doors to a pastoral scene of writers sitting around a table, faces buried in laptops, backgrounded by trees, trees, and trees. It is quite easy to get lost on the grounds or on one of the floors or basements, but that's part of the magic of being here surrounded by birds chirping, bunnies romping, and clear skies where you can actually see the stars at night. It's like Narnia for playwrights.

What’s extraordinarily special about Vineyard Arts Project is that it brings together artists and companies from other disciplines as well. The sickeningly talented guys from PigPen are here this week, as well as amazing playwrights Bekah Brunstetter and Lauren Whitehead – all of whom are a part of the New Writers. New Plays residency. Last year, the mesmerizing dancers of Keigwin + Company shared the week, leaping and turning in one of the four massive studios that are built into the two houses. We got to sit in on their rehearsals and watch their end-of-the-week performance and they joined us in a couple of our page-sharing sessions. Vineyard Arts Project is a chance for artists from all areas to spend time creating work and communing (and commiserating) with one another. And a bonus for us is getting to spend a week with Liz Frankel, the Public Theater Literary Manager and EWG facilitator, who takes a week away from her desk to devote her time and energies to us. 

I was fortunate enough to come last year and lucky to come back this year (residency is offered to current EWGers members first with open slots going to alumni picked via lottery). I loved the experience so much, not only the sharing of work, laughter, and frustrations, but also the freedom to create whatever I wanted to without any pressures to produce any work. I could lay out on the lawn in the sun for the entire week if I wanted to. But that would defeat the purpose of being here. And being here magically inspires you to want to create your best work. Or to take that problem play and make it amazing (or at the very least better). 

While each class of the EWG in and of itself is always diverse, what is especially incredible about this summer’s random selection at Vineyard Arts Project is that it includes 2 South Asians, 1 Middle Eastern, 1 half South Asian/ half Middle Eastern, 3 Latinos, 2 African Americans, 1 Native American, and 1 Caucasian collectively representing each year of the EWG from the inaugural to the current group. This is diversity at its best in a time when artists of color are underrepresented and ignored in the theatre (tokenism not withstanding). It makes me feel so good to spend time with all these incredibly talented and diverse people, some of whom I have only known by name or met a handful of times. I am walking away with new friends and artists-in-crime. I have laughed copious amounts, made others laugh, and shared in nightly communal meals where conversations have ranged from RuPaul’s Drag Race to the Native American presence in pre-colonialized Manhattan. 

We are pushing and driving each other to want to do our best work, partially because we want to put our best foot forward (especially with EWGers who were not in our group) and partially because we want one other to succeed so damn much in an industry where jockeying and elbow-shoving can get in the way of making true connections with other artists. We get to be open and honest about our fears and dreams; our frustrations about feeling less-than; our impulsive decisions to leave the business completely; our confessions of not having any self-worth as artists. And it’s ok – we’re detoxing. We’re giving ourselves one more shot. We’re taking another leap because that is what we do as artists when we get beat down – we take a moment to check in with one another and realize we’re not alone and that we don’t have to be alone. 

Having recently sat in the audience of February House at the Public, I wondered what it must have been like to spend that much time living with other artists, all that creative energy and all those egos rubbing up against one another, and all the work that could be generated from it. I realized that I was getting to experience my own version of that up here (albeit without all the tension and hedonism). We’re sitting on decks drinking beers and smoking cigarettes talking about life. We’re asking one another to read this page or that monologue to make sure we’re on the right track. We’re excited about one another’s projects and asking to read the whole script when it’s done. 

We are getting to be artists free of any other annoyances or disturbances. We are getting to be a community with a shared intention and understanding of learning, growing, and creating to not only make ourselves grow as artists, but also to change the face of the American stage and to broaden the scope of storytelling. 

Sevan Greene is hoping to finish his new play at Vineyard Arts Project. Well...start and finish the new play. As soon as he takes a quick break to frolic in the grass and feed the bunnies. 

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.

Adventures in Webcasting, Part 2

By Jerome A. Parker, member of the 2011 Emerging Writers Group

It was a rainy night, two Fridays ago, when I ventured down into the heart of the village towards the Players Theater. Despite the rain, the streets were crowded with tourists, students, party-goers and village dwellers. I pushed passed these folk because I wanted to check out NYLive!, a live, web-based, interactive, variety show. It sounded like an event close to my heart since one of my main interest lies in viewing live theater on the web. My mentor, who works behinds the scenes, invited me and I was pumped up about seeing an event unfold in front of me of something that had only lived in my imagination. 

The show was already in progress as I walked in. On the stage was Broadway Star Karen Mason belting out to a very enthusiastic audience. In the center aisle was a cameraman, and flanking both sides of the stage were two extra cameramen – 3 cameras in total focused on the diva as she sang to both a live audience and a virtual, live audience. Since I’ve worked in television before, the set-up reminded me of a T.V. studio, though lower tech. As the night went on and a handful of talent paraded in front of us – a comedian featured on the Today Show, The Glamazons from America’s Got Talent, the Native American from the music group The Village People, and a ballroom dancing couple – I felt as if I were trapped in some kind of vaudevillian dream of the future. Perhaps this is what the early days of radio, and even television, felt like – borrowing from theater and live entertainment to push a new medium. 

In between each act a bell sound cue would go off and the host would read comments from people that were watching from their computers. It was a treat to hear as viewers flirted with the Glamazons through their comments and fawned over the lone Village person, who was very excited to be there in the spotlight and sweating. After about 45 minutes of uninterrupted entertainment, I left the theater/studio emboldened in my quest to one day be able to sit in front of my own computer and watch quality actors in a quality play or musical, and live. 

It’s an experience that I personally would pay for – like pay-per-view fights or concerts. Imagine that your favorite actor was performing in a play in another state, or that you were in Florida during the run of Shakespeare in the Park’s INTO THE WOODS, or that your favorite regional theater was having an out-of-town tryout of a Broadway bound product…. It’s an idea. And more importantly than the idea, it’s an idea that is taking shape. 

This fall I have the amazing opportunity to help this idea, and other ideas in this genre, to become a reality. The TimeWave Festival, for which I’m one of the many writers, is a trans-continental experiment. Produced by LoNyLA, artists from Great Britain, Hong Kong, and the US will be collaborating on different kinds of web-based theater. As one of the producers John Gould Rubin puts it, it’s a chance to “be disruptive”. “It's by disrupting common practice [that] we innovate, and such disruption normally contravenes our notions of what’s wise.” So, I suspect that those of us participating in this festival will come to the table with very different approaches to theater, to technology, and to the melding of the two. We will be creating as we go and, even more importantly, we will be open to results and implementing those results towards our own artistic endeavors in wildly different ways. 2 John, who is a celebrated actor, director and artistic director of the Private Theater, is currently rehearsing “an international Peer Gynt project right now via technology, as we have people involved from three countries. [It’s] the technology that makes that possible, and the rehearsals are becoming material for the show itself, because we tape them and record them, and the very act makes some of the work self-reflective.” He became a producer of the festival because he believes that technology can have a positive effect in bringing out the “unexpected”. 

“One could perform with a mix of what can or can't be seen, what's in or out of frame; how to hide, what is the range of sound... It should develop into its own genre of theater work.” 

Admittedly, this idea of using the technology as a tool of creation and collaboration instead of simply a transmitter of images and sound for the benefit of the viewer’s entertainment is a different approach than the one I’m pursuing. Still, I’ve found this band of rogue theater makers who see technology as an important step in the evolution of what we do, and there is no looking back. 

Jesse Ricke, who works at the Culture Hub and is one of the brains behind the technological set-up for the festival, believes that once venues start to enfold these tech-practices into their performances, then “it’ll become a force of nature” instead of merely “cool”. “When we do this stuff over distances and [we] broadcast it, we expand the scale of the performance… What we do with Contact [Theater in Manchester] we can do with a lot of confidence – [an example is the Digital Duets Performance]… [Still], we're just the first ones out of the gate, but the mainstream is inevitable. As we get better at this we'll start to figure out how to treat the tele-theater as its own form. Redesign of live narrative for the network is the central challenge with making it mainstream. And hell yes I want mainstream. ” 

I also want mainstream. So, I look forward to a future where live theater can be broadcasted on the web regularly, where live performances challenge our concepts of space and time, and where performers in different time zones perform side by side and in sync. 

Stay tuned….There’s more to come! 

Jerome A. Parker is a playwright and lyricist from NYC. His play with music, SUITES FOR SAD MEN, had a staged reading this June with Mixed Phoenix Theater Company. This fall he is one of the featured US artists in the TIME WAVE FESTIVAL produced by LoNyLa.com. 

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.

Writing The Past

By Chris Cragin, member of the 2008 Emerging Writers Group

While Pia was watching a movie from the 80's set in the future, (see her recent EWG blog post titled "Writing the Future"), I was watching a movie from the 21st century, set five hundred years in the past. I found myself sighing at the dark medieval shadows and the serious looks on all the characters' faces. (Didn't people joke around or fall in love in the middle ages?) Despite my disinterest in the film, I was excited by the challenge before me: I'd just been commissioned to write a play about the same historical figure lurking in the shadows of my television set.

In her blog, Pia claims that writing about the future is as much about commenting on the present as it is predicting what is to come. I've never written about the future, but this makes sense to me because, anyway, how can anyone predict the future with any real hopes of accuracy? The question before me now is whether Pia's claim is also true about writing about the past.

I've watched two films and read five biographies, one play, and several journal essays about my historical figure, the Great Reformer Martin Luther. I've also read numerous essays and sermons by him, and I've only begun to break through the top soil of the information about his life. I've hired a brilliant assistant to read and report back, hoping that between the two of us I can fulfill my due diligence. I am surprised at how much I'm loving this research process. I hate history. It was the only AP test I failed in high school. I do not care to memorize the names of the people who signed a particular document or first landed on a particular piece of earth. But when I research this character, I feel like I am doing something illicit--peeking into his diary, unmasking the hero and seeing him for the rascal he really was. I love it.

There is a character in the play that I feel a certain kinship with--Martin Luther's wife, Katie Von Bora. My assistant laughed when I confessed this to him, and rightfully so, because this character and I have nothing in common. She lived in the middle ages; I live now. She had no family; I have an amazing one. She lived as a nun for fifteen years before her courageous escape from the convent...strangely enough, there's something in this that echoes in my soul. No, I was never a nun and I never lived under the strict code of silence that she endured, but I grew up as a missionary kid then later left the bible belt to come to NYC...I am learning something about myself as I learn more about her.

Is this irresponsible, to use my writing of the past to unearth the secrets in my own heart and my own times? Am I lying about these people, twisting their stories for my own purposes? Am I dishonoring these people who I have fallen so madly in love with? Am I betraying them even, when they have trusted me with their secrets? I know, it sounds like I need to see a therapist. But these are the very real struggles that face me.

Relativism repeatedly declares that history cannot be known. It is always told from inside the bias of the teller, and that is unavoidable. If this is true, why do we care? Why study history at all? Why reach for something that isn't even there? And when we study it, why do we want it to be true? I want it to be true. I want to do these people justice. But if I am honest I have to admit that it is not the history that interests me, it's the story of these courageous characters triumphing and failing, and showing me how to do both.

I suppose this is why I am a playwright and not a historian. I am scared of the historians. They will say I am wrong no matter how right I try to be. Pia says that "no one will ever be right...only right now." But I feel the burden of both. God help me. 

Chris Cragin's new musical, SON OF A GUN, written with Don and Lori Chaffer, will be produced by Firebone Theatre at Theater Row this November. SON OF A GUN was part of the 2011 O'Neill National Music Theater Conference. 

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.

Writing the Future

By Pia Wilson, member of the 2008 Emerging Writers Group 

I was watching a movie from the ’80s: it was set in the future. I found myself chuckling at the film’s vision of the world that would be, with everyone riding super-motorcycles and working with huge super-computers and wearing beige or gray clothes. Oh, and we’d all be using Japanese yen as our currency of choice. 

You see, back in the ’80s, Americans were obsessed with the idea that the Japanese were taking over the world with its roaring economy. It makes sense, when you look back at the time in context. The manufacturing bubble was upon us. The Detroit auto industry was on the precipice of its descent, and its main competitor was the Japanese auto industry. Stories about Japan’s efficiency and demanding work culture peppered our evening news. Those people were machines! How could America possibly compete in the future?! The screenwriter of any futuristic film could reasonably project a world in which the yen was our national currency. 

Because, after all, writing about the future is really about making commentary on the present as much as it is about predicting what will happen. I’m working on a futuristic play right now called THE DOMINANT GENE, and the world in the play is one in which Black and Asian populations have been made extinct through genetic manipulations, war, disease, etc. The themes of the play are of my usual variety: what makes a family – genetics or choice – and how do we identify ourselves. And although it has been fun to make up words and map out a history of the future, the crux of the play is commentary about our present society’s obsession with race (and to some extent, sex). 

 I got the idea for the play from reading a newspaper article on genetic testing being done in India, which some parents used to determine whether they were having girls or boys. The girls were aborted. In a patriarchial society, the advantage goes to the boys, and what parent wouldn’t want to give their child any advantage they can? As I thought along those lines, I thought about all the African-Americans who choose “light-skinned” partners to give their children that advantage and Asian women who wouldn’t buy “yellow” makeup, only white. How far would people go to change their skin and eye color, as medical testing and manipulations got better? To oblivion is my guess. 

Will somebody laugh at my work in the future? Probably. I’ve likely made some goofy choices. (Though, I would like to take a moment to note that some family members have already started using my new words.) It’s all o.k. because I am satisfied that my play is making the statement I want to make about the present and what we should be doing to care for each other as human beings, regardless of our social constructs. 

 How does the saying go ... Tomorrow never comes. I think any writer must keep that in mind and think big when writing the future. Sure, you may be wrong, but that is fine, since no one will ever be right – only right now. 

Pia Wilson’s play THE FLOWER THIEF will premiere in August as the first full-length production of The Fire This Time play festival. 

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.

Writing Against the Past

 By Aaron Wigdor Levy, member of the 2011 Emerging Writers Group

I’ve been lucky. I’ve been able to see the greatest plays in history performed by some of the greatest actors. Long Day’s Journey into Night. I saw that with Brian Dennehy. I saw him in Touch of the Poet too. And Death of a Salesman. I just saw Philip Seymour Hoffman in it a few months ago. Both were amazing performances that I’ll remember the rest of my life. I’ve seen three revivals of A Raisin in the Sun and every time I’ve gotten something new out of the play. I’ve seen Long Day’s Journey three times. I’ve seen four different productions of Glengarry Glen Ross, not including the monologues that are used for auditions. I’ve probably seen ten different productions of Macbeth, going from brilliant to not so brilliant. And Romeo and Juliet… I’ve seen a few of those too.

Theater respects its past in a way that few other industries do, but when we constantly look to what came before rather than what will come can we ever really move forward? Recently I was in a bookstore and found myself looking over the drama section. I saw the usual suspects of Shakespeare, O’Neill, Brecht, Ibsen, Chekov, Miller, and going all the way back to Sophocles. Aside from a Pulitzer winner of two, there wasn’t a single copy of a new play. How can a new playwright compete with something that’s been performed for over 2500 years? I walked over to the new fiction section saw a table filled with new books. Both fiction and theater have a heady respect for the past, but literature seems to have a different appreciation for new work than theater. A new author doesn’t have to go head to head with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. We always criticize Hollywood for recycling ideas over and over, but I doubt anyone is saying there’s a need to remake Citizen Kane every few years. Yes, Spider-Man is getting another reboot this summer, but how many times is there a new take on The Seagull, Mother Courage, Hamlet or Iphigenia?

On an economic level it makes sense. Give the people a product they know and that they’re familiar with. But what are we saying about new work when nine out of ten times it plays on the smaller stage while a revival or known work plays the main stage. This is especially true with regional theaters. Google regional productions of Neil Simon and see what happens. For theater to remain relevant and have a lasting dialogue new work has to be on an equal footing with revivals. Most likely a new play isn’t going to have the lasting cultural resonance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but we’ll never know if we don’t give it a chance. Writers know they’re competing with the past. There are only a few spots in most theaters’ seasons for new work and by looking over most season schedules a writer can easily see where they stand. The message to the writer is clear.

This is not to say that revivals should go away. I’m not advocating that at all. One of the great things about theater is the way classic pieces can still have life and new audiences are able to see fresh takes on work that may have been written hundreds of years ago. This is our legacy as theatergoers and practitioners. But I don’t want to see theater go the way of classical music and opera where the same standards are trotted out year after year for an audience that refuses to embrace anything new. There are a lot of great companies and institutions concentrating on new work, but we still put so much weight on the classics that new writers feel stifled. We need to find a way for new work and classics to co-exist on equal ground.

Sometimes I’ll mention to an acquaintance that I’m working on a new play. If they’re up on new plays they’ll talk about writers they’re excited about and new plays they’ve seen, but more than likely they’ll start talking about a classic they saw years ago. To them this is what theater is because that’s what they’ve been told it is. They act astonished that people still write new plays. In New York it’s easy to ignore that most people aren’t aware of new work for the theater. As writers and members of the theater community we need to make sure that we respect the past, but to also remember we need a future as well.

Aaron Wigdor Levy's profanity laced short play, TRUBIE, was commissioned and recently produced by the American Theater Company in Chicago for their 10X10 Play Festival.

 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.