Adam Szymkowicz's Blog, page 27

I Interview Playwrights Part 978: Barbara Kahn

Portrait by Seth Ruggles Hiler



Barbara Kahn



Hometown: near Philadelphia, in Southern New Jersey, the half a state that should have seceded from the Northern half, unlike those treasonous rebels of the 19th century.



Current Town: New York City. (I believe that when you have lived in a location longer than the number of years in the town where you were born, you should be able to claim it as your hometown.)



Q:  What are you working on now?





A:  I’m researching and writing a historical drama, set in Amsterdam during World War II, about a group of artists—musician, poet, composer, sculptor and others, both gay and straight—who formed a resistance group against the fascist Nazi occupation. Inspired by a true events.



Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?



A:  In my ideal world, people would see the value of the arts, especially theater, how it is vital to the well-being of people along with food, water and a peaceful planet. My second choice would echo Nijinsky, who wished for a theater where the poor would be let in for free and those who could afford to pay would have to wait their turn.



Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?



A:  Bob Sickinger, my first professional acting teacher, who taught me, a teenager, how to be a professional in the theater and who added organic, method skills to my earlier technical training.



Ellen Stewart, who produced my first play, co-authored with Ray Hagen, at LaMaMa. I still remember her introduction to each of the 12 performance. She rang her bell and proclaimed, “Welcome to LaMaMa, dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theater.”



Barbara Barondess, former Broadway and Hollywood actor, author, designer, philanthropist, friend of Garbo, Harlow and Monroe, who befriended me and mentored me. She inspired me with the Torch of Hope Award from her foundation, previously given to August Wilson, Terrence McNally, John Guare, A.R. Gurney and other theater artists.



Bob Dahdah, legendary director of Off-Off Broadway, a friend and advisor. He introduced me to Crystal Field at Theater for the New City.



Crystal Field, founder of Theater for the New City, who has kept a non-profit theater alive in New York City for nearly half a century. She brought me into the TNC family. Among the 30-40 new American plays produced annually at TNC, Crystal has produced my new full-length plays every year since 1994.



Q:  What kind of theater excites you?



A:  Almost any, but if forced to choose, I’d say German Expressionist as represented by Brecht. Perhaps it’s because my grandmother was a real “Mother Courage” bringing her children, including my father, safely from a war zone to the U.S. via Cuba. Someday maybe I’ll write her play.



I would also add musical dramas to theater that excites me. I’m not very successful at attempting expressionist plays, but I’m very proud of the book and lyrics I’ve written for a number of historical musicals.



Q:  What kind of advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?



A:  Since I coach playwrights (and actors) at all levels of expertise and experience, I have lots of advice. What has worked for me: I joined two peer groups early on—the Women Playwrights Collective and Village Playwrights. I learned from each how to both give and receive critique and how to ignore what doesn’t resonate with me. Some beginning playwrights rewrite after every comment, whether from colleagues, friends or strangers at a reading. I tell them to trust themselves; they are the best critics of their own work.



As far as getting your work produced in NYC, I recommend volunteering at a theater whose play selection feels like a good fit for you. Become part of the theater’s family. I volunteered at Theater for the New City for almost two years before my first play was presented there. I also recommend being better than I am at scouting submissions and following through by actually submitting your work.



Q:  When not writing on a computer, what’s your go to paper and writing utensil? When on your computer, what’s your font?



A:  Summer is my research and writing time. I bring my research material, a yellow tablet and a black felt-tip pen to my “office” at a public access pier on the Hudson River. I’m a terrible procrastinator if I try to work at home. I blame Turner Classic Movies for that. When I type up what I’ve written by hand, I usually am able to clarify, expand or cut and paste changes to the structure. I use Word with Calibri as the default font and keep forgetting to ask someone more tech savvy than I how to change it to Arial or Times Roman, my preferred fonts.



Q:  Plug: 




A:  The play I am currently writing will be produced at Theater for the New City in April 2018.



Q:  Additional comments:



A:  I am the daughter of a child refugee from European war. My father’s legacy has inspired all of his four children. My siblings have careers in social service and human rights activism. I write plays about oppression and injustice—racism, antisemitism, misogyny and homophobia. Many of my plays retrieve the people and events of the past that have been omitted or distorted in popular culture and bring them to the stage. Writing plays is my primary method of resistance.





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I Interview Playwrights Part 977: Sandy Asher

Sandy Asher





Hometown: Philadelphia, PA



Current Town: Lancaster, PA (after a 36-year detour to Springfield, MO, where my husband taught history at Drury University and I was writer-in-residence.)



Q:  What are you working on now?



A:  "Death Valley: A Love Story," for adults, a tale of love, loss, grief, and recovery based on real-life journals. Also, several plays for youth and family audiences: "Win-or-Lose Stanley"; "Stuff! A Curious Collection," "Chicken Story Time," and "Princess Bee and the Royal Good-night Story," all in various states of development, production, or disarray.



Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.



A:  My second grade teacher, Mrs. Lomozoff, used to read us excerpts from "Arsenic and Old Lace." I can still see her pretending to blow on a bugle and charging up the aisle toward San Juan Hill. We loved it! She also had beautiful rod puppets that we used to act out the "Blue Willow Plate" legend. She encouraged me to create and perform playlets with my classmates and sent us on tour through the school. I am of a generation that was expected to grow up, get married, and raise children. Period. I did all that, and I'm glad. But my teachers, Mrs. Lomozoff and many who followed, helped me become so much more -- the writer and person I am today.



Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?



A:  The constant money pressure that causes scripts that feed the soul to be by-passed all too often in favor of those that pay the bills.



Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?



A:  The drama and dance teachers at Allens Lane Art Center Day Camp whose names I've forgotten, but whose spirits have never left me. The late Dan Rodden and Jean Williams, director and choreographer at the La Salle College Masque, who believed in me and taught me so much. And every playwright, director, actor, and designer who has ever filled me with gratitude for being alive, human, and present to witness their work.



Q:  What kind of theater excites you?



A:  No one kind. I'm open to happy surprises. But I do like the intimacy of a smaller space, and I prefer story over spectacle and actors over special effects.



Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?



A:  Get inside theaters and get theater inside you. Read and attend plays, of course, but get physically, mentally, and spiritually immersed. Act, sew costumes, paint scenery, sell tickets, usher, sweep, whatever, so you can look, listen, and reflect. Let the art and the business of it seep in through your eyes, ears, lungs, skin. Network, and if I may paraphrase President Kennedy, not by asking what others can do for you but, rather, what you can do for them.



Q:  When not writing on a computer, what's your go-to paper and writing utensil?



A:  Pilot G2 pens of various colors and legal tablet, or pens and printed-out drafts of script. I love to cross out and scribble in.



Q:  When on computer, what's your font?



A: Times New Roman, mostly.



Q:  Plugs, please:



A: My latest full-immersion play for the very young, CHICKEN STORY TIME, based on my picture book of that name, is scheduled for a run at Pollyanna Theatre in Austin, TX, in November, 2017; a tour by Trike Theatre, Bentonville, Arkansas, in March and April, 2018; and a tour by Eastern Michigan University's Theatre of the Young in June, 2018. Also, I've received a grant from the Children's Theatre Foundation of America to develop "American Theatre for the Very Young: A Digital Festival," scheduled to debut via Vimeo on March 1, 2018. A related American Alliance for Theatre and Education symposium will take place here in Lancaster in January, 2019. And more. Details as they reveal themselves at http://sandyasher.com.







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Jack And Jill Plays - Part 14 - @*#$

About Jack and Jill Plays:


This is a new thing I'm doing.  Posting a short play every day as long as I can.  This does not mean that I wrote this play today but I might have.  (My life is not always my own what with work and a 4 year old running around so maybe I wrote it today or maybe it was stockpiled in preparation for the days I can't get in writing.)  My goal is to do at least 100 of these or maybe more but probably 45 or 50 is the length of a full length play so even that would be good.  100 would be better.  300?  amazing.  500?  Does anyone want 500 of these plays?  Anyway, the goal is consecutive days.


The normal things about plays apply-- don't produce or reproduce this play without my permission.  I wrote it so I own it.  Etc.










@*#$

by Adam Szymkowicz



(JILL is writing with paper and notebook.  She is frustrated.)



JILL

Mother Fucker Fuck Fucking Fuckest!



(JILL throws the notebook and pen.  Enter JACK, not having seen this, carrying a shovel.)



JACK

Hey.  How's the writing?



JILL

Good.  ... I might get a typewriter.



JACK

Like electric?



JILL

No, manual.



JACK

Cool.  Cool.  I'm gonna go dig a hole.



JILL

Okay.



(Exit JACK.  JILL stares daggers at her notebook.)



JILL

Fucker.



(She puts her foot on the notebook and grounds it out with her heel like a cigarette.)



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NOW PUBLISHED

RARE BIRDS



http://www.dramatists.com/cgi-bin/db/single.asp?key=5678



Full Length, Drama
4 men, 2 women
Total Cast: 6, Flexible Set
ISBN: 978-0-8222-3756-3





THE STORY: Sixteen-year-old Evan Wills is an avid bird watcher who wears colorful songbird shirts to school despite the constant antagonism it brings him. Evan’s mother just wants Evan to be normal, and happy—and normal—and get along with her new boyfriend. While Evan summons the courage to talk to Jenny Monroe (whose locker is next to his), troubled bully Dylan has something darker in mind. After some stupid choices and unexpected results, Evan learns that the worst thing you can do in high school is admit you love something.


“RARE BIRDS proves that talent and skill can make an ‘issue’ piece a compelling work of art…What’s rare is Szymkowicz’s gift for naturalistic dialogue…After a sequence of smoothly escalating episodes of conflict and cruelty, gentle good humor mingles with nail-biting anxiety in the climactic sequence. We’re left shivering with angst, yet aware of the possibility that goodness can sometimes triumph…It’s a winner from start to finish.” —BlogCritics.org. “RARE BIRDS may be about teenage bullying, but this play is anything but childish…[it] plumbs the depths of how cruel teenagers can be…RARE BIRDS is a story the world needs to hear.” —Charged.fm. “[RARE BIRDS] is well written, with dark comedy, intense drama, and an intriguing plot arc. It sheds a harsh light on cyber-bullying…The main characters…are complex and believable, with deep inner lives…[RARE BIRDS] shares an important message through a heartfelt story that takes the audience on a memorable emotional journey.” —Theasy.com.










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Mac Rogers Talks Audio

Over at the Sam French Blog, I talked to Mac Rogers about writing Audio Dramas.  Of interest to all those of you interested in radio plays and miniseries and the like.  Mac is unquestionably the most successful at this right now.



https://www.breakingcharactermagazine.com/playwright-feature-mac-rogers/



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I Interview Playwrights Part 976: Maureen Brady Johnson

Maureen Brady Johnson



Hometown:Lakewood, Ohio



Current Town: Oberlin, Ohio



Q:  What are you working on now?




A:  I am working on a monologue play inspired by photographs I have taken of vintage and antique dolls that I have seen at flea markets and antique stores. It has been picked up for publication and I am doing the final proofs. It is titled “Curious Dolls and the Tales They Might Tell”

I have been working on this particular project for over 5 years. My focus with this play is to challenge both performers and audiences alike to think and discuss the real issues behind the doll's tales, issues like loneliness, abandonment, inner beauty, diversity, and strength.

The play will come with a set of photos of the dolls that are speaking to use as a projected set above the heads of the performers and a set of discussion ideas and questions for teachers or directors to use after the audience has seen the performance. I hope to complete at least two more monologue plays using the hundreds of photos I have taken.



I taught theatre for over 30 years and I was always looking for a vehicle for my students that gave the youngsters a chance to connect deeply with a character and have a chance to develop and to showcase their solo and ensemble acting skills. I am hopeful that this script will help theatre teachers to do that for their students using an economical, simple set. I also see this as a production for smaller theatres to tackle some interesting questions in a non-confrontational style. It would be fun to see adults in a production giving voice to these dolls.



Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.




A:  As I reflect on my drama life, there are so many signs that this was my journey from the very beginning. I think the very first time I saw a production at the Lakewood Little Theatre and the lights were dimming and the play, “The Little Princess”, was beginning, I knew I was hooked.



I think another story that happened when I was older that gave me immense confidence as a writer was when I met Chris Durang at a theatre conference and gave him a copy of my monologue book, “Namely Me” and he actually wrote to me and told me that he had read the book and thought it was quite wonderful. That was a moment when I knew I was on the right path as a playwright. Very grateful to him.



Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?




A:  To make it less expensive to attend. Theatre is powerful but it must be seen by larger groups of diverse people and it should be more affordable. I would also make Drama and Theatre classes mandatory for students, K thru 12. Drama classes save lives, as do all of the Arts.



Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes? 




A:  My mentor was my HS drama director, Mary Bill. She was also a playwright and the managing director of what was to become Playhouse Square in Cleveland, Ohio. She wrote and directed plays, saved historical theatres and taught me to aim high and never give up. She gave me my theatre life...and that is HUGE. She also taught me how to balance my professional and personal life as a teacher with a family of a husband and four children. I dedicated one of my books, Middle Mania: Imaginative Theatre Projects for Middle School Actors, to her.



Q:  What kind of theater excites you?




A:  I love it when theatre makes you think. I have seen some perfect productions and I love when a production has layers. If I find myself still thinking about a play years later, I know that it will stay with me the rest of my life. At 66 years, I carry a lot of theatre with me.



Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?




A:  My playwriting teacher (a class I took in my 50's so it is never too late) Linda Eisenstein, told us that you must SEE lots of theatre. She also said to volunteer at a local theatre and learn everything you can about production. It is really good advice. I think learning to listen is incredibly important...and learning to know when to change something when it isn't working. AND write, write, write. My job as a theatre teacher helped me make a living...but I found time to write plays, even if I had to get up at 4 or 5 am.



Q:  When not writing on a computer, what's your go-to paper and writing utensil?




A:  I use a pencil and a legal pad for the first draft...writing on every other line so I can add or scratch out as I go along. Then I transfer it to the computer and edit as I transfer it from the legal pad to the screen. Then I edit it like crazy on the computer...many times...sometimes with input from my husband, who has a great ear for things that aren't working. He was my set designer for years and years. And we are still happily married! Theatre is MAGIC!



Q:  When on computer, what's your font?




A:  Something stark and simple.



Q:  Incredible theatre experiences: 




A:  Two of my short plays, BEATLEMANIA, And STALKING THE BEATLES, won the right to be performed as part of the Ticket to Write Theatre contest in Liverpool, UK. I also was chosen to be a part of a delegation of theatre teachers sent to China to meet with theatre teachers there. Our upper school was chosen to perform in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and it was a life-changing experience for all involved. Along the way, I have made such wonderful friends who share my passion for educational theatre and playwriting.



Q:  Plugs, please:




A:  My books, “Middle Mania” 1 and 2, and my book of monologues, “Namely Me” a collection of monologues based on a person's name, are published by Smith and Kraus, also available on Amazon. “Shoes on the Highway: Using Visual and Audio Cues to Inspire Student Playwrights” is published by Heinemann. My plays are published by Samuel French and Brooklyn Publishers. “Curious Dolls and the Tales They Might Tell” will be available from Brooklyn Publishers next year. If you have a need for any of these, please take a look and support a retired theatre teacher and full time playwright. They make just about the same amount of money.



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Jack And Jill Plays - Part 13 - Fifty

About Jack and Jill Plays:


This is a new thing I'm doing.  Posting a short play every day as long as I can.  This does not mean that I wrote this play today but I might have.  (My life is not always my own what with work and a 4 year old running around so maybe I wrote it today or maybe it was stockpiled in preparation for the days I can't get in writing.)  My goal is to do at least 100 of these or maybe more but probably 45 or 50 is the length of a full length play so even that would be good.  100 would be better.  300?  amazing.  500?  Does anyone want 500 of these plays?  Anyway, the goal is consecutive days.


The normal things about plays apply-- don't produce or reproduce this play without my permission.  I wrote it so I own it.  Etc.









Fifty

by Adam Szymkowicz



(JACK sucks on a lemon, makes a face.  JILL sucks on a lemon, makes a face.)



JACK

It prevents scurvy.



JILL

Yeah.  Okay.    Can't we just put it in some water?



JACK

Of course, yeah, we could do that.



(JACK sucks on a lemon, makes a face.  JILL sucks on a lemon, makes a face.)



JILL

Or lemonade.



JACK

I like lemonade.



JILL

Me too.  Or like a lemon cake.



JACK

Sure.



(JACK sucks on a lemon, makes a face.  JILL sucks on a lemon, makes a face.)



JILL

We're hardcore.



JACK

Right?



JILL

Will anyone remember us like fifty years after we die?



JACK

I don't know.



(JACK sucks on a lemon, makes a face.  JILL sucks on a lemon, makes a face.)



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Jack And Jill Plays - Part 12 - Or

About Jack and Jill Plays:


This is a new thing I'm doing.  Posting a short play every day as long as I can.  This does not mean that I wrote this play today but I might have.  (My life is not always my own what with work and a 4 year old running around so maybe I wrote it today or maybe it was stockpiled in preparation for the days I can't get in writing.)  My goal is to do at least 100 of these or maybe more but probably 45 or 50 is the length of a full length play so even that would be good.  100 would be better.  300?  amazing.  500?  Does anyone want 500 of these plays?  Anyway, the goal is consecutive days.


The normal things about plays apply-- don't produce or reproduce this play without my permission.  I wrote it so I own it.  Etc.










Or

by Adam Szymkowicz



(JACK and JILL reading in separate areas.  After a bit, JACK looks up.)



JACK

Or Tomatoes.



JILL

Okay.



(They go back to reading)



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I Interview Playwrights Part 975: Jon Robin Baitz

Robbie Baitz



Hometown: Los Angeles.



Current town: Los Angeles.








Somehow, after decades in New York, I have come back west again for a bit. I am equally at home in both cities, though I miss certain kinds of New York nights, fresh snow, the first cold fall days, and the museums, particularly The Neue Gallerie and Café Sabarski (a place to write), and The Met, but LA has reclaimed a kind of freedom, and young artists have decamped for its eastern parts of town, as they are so much cheaper than most of New York including the far reaches of Brooklyn. I like it here, my husband – a born and bred Manhattanite does too - young writers are living here, and its helped that TV  has created opportunities for playwrights to actually give of themselves to the same extent that is required in writing a play. I mean, TV is now really ambitious. And as TV has changed, so has L.A.


Q:  What are you working on now:



A:  I am writing and Executive producing all of
Season Two of Ryan Murphy’s Feud, for
FX, along with my friend Ned Martel. The first season was about Joan Crawford
and Bette Davis, I was not involved, and this Feud is the one between Princess Diana and the entire Royal Family,
though principally with Prince Charles. A deeply flawed man. The scope is
somehow Shakespearian, in that the bitterness of the split between the two
dealt a kind of mortal blow to the entire institution of the British monarchy,
threatening it’s standing and its lofty altitude high above the British people,
something Diana deplored. The monarchy in many ways is a perfect construct of
conceptual art; it depends entirely on many suspensions of disbelief, on
placing importance on blood lines that go back hundreds of years. It depends on
a kind of uber-theatricality with castles and riches, vast holdings and the
dispensing of awards and favors, and any disruption in the highly ritualized
lives the royals lead, results in dark predictions that the time to do away
with the monarchy altogether is finally upon us. As a consequence, the public
nature of this feud was sort of like a public flaying for the Windsors. Diana
is such a vivid woman; compassionate, contradictory, impulsive, deeply
empathetic and generous, profoundly troubled and married when she was still a
child to a man whose ambivalence is positively Hamlet-esque.  He out Hamlets Hamlet. I am lost in happiness
working on it. I love them all, they are entirely human, heart-breaking,
oblivious, even well intentioned mostly though also, of course horrible in
equal measure – they’re like everyone I know, including me.







Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.



A:  My family moved first to Brazil
when I was seven, and then to South Africa during apartheid in 1972 when I was
ten. I only came back to the States at eighteen. My father worked for Carnation
Milk, which later was bought by the Swiss company, Nestle. A giant
multi-national entity. An octopus. He was a vice president. I grew up realizing
the corporate, oblique, obscured, giant organization perched as it was on the
Fortune 500, was a monolith. Run by men who took pride in milk and profits and
all the other stuff they made, pet-food and ice-cream and dog toys and
expansion, always.







Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?



A:  The theatre is
changing. Up at the Ojai Playwrights Conference this year, plays by women,
young people, young writers of color, more voices, not just people like me – no more plays by brittle gay playwrights
of a certain age like me  -  please God,
- we who said it all, we fucking said it! We need to go away. I am sort of aiming for a complete erasure of myself, so
that all is left is a ghost. The ghost of people like me.







Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?



A:  Playwrights: Albee,
Stoppard, Churchill, Wally Shawn, David Hare and John Guare. Mr. Pinter. People
who married craft to ideas that sailed out over the stage and into the
audience, people who write from both passion and intellectual perspective, who
dispense with the obvious, whose ambitions remain constant and huge throughout
their lives, playwrights who don’t give up. 
Those folks have never given up! 







Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?



A:  Keep your overhead low
and your ambitions impossibly high.  Don’t
get an undergraduate degree in theatre, for Christ’s sake, if you must get a
degree, get one in art history or the study of leeches and macro-economics.
Anything but plays. 




Also start a company with
your friends, and don’t look to the establishment to give you permission to
make plays. Fuck the gate keepers.




Embrace failure. It’s
the best way to learn. I never learn anything from the plays that work. Just
that it took a lot of work to make them work. 
But failures – crash sites – they teach you so much.  And sometimes the lesson is just ‘do it again
the same way but better.’


Q:  When not writing on a computer, what's your go-to paper and writing utensil? When on computer, what's your font?



A:  Font? Why is this even – never mind.




Courier final draft
is my font,  and I like these Kaweko
sport fountain pens with blue Japanese ink, and these Japanese thin-points felt
tips called Le Pen. I buy Smithson journals of various sizes and write and draw
stupid things in them, like lists of reasons to live or a drawing of a donkey
or doodles of Donald Trump. Lists of books to read. Nine arguments against
suicide, that sort of shit.


Q:  Plugs, please:



A:  Up at Ojai, at the playwrights’
conference, I saw thrilling, stunning exciting new plays; J.C Lee’s What You Are, and a new play by the
mesmerizing Sam Hunter, called Greater
Clements.  J.C. is a vivid, probing
and brave playwright with a voracious hunger for truth. He’s funny and dear as
well. The play deals in the end-stages of white privilege, working class
aspirations and race, all somewhere in the Central Valley of California; Didion
country. The reading of that play was terrifying, and left me exhilarated and
excited to see the piece mounted fully. Greater
Clements is about an abandoned mining town in rural Idaho, but its also is about
the same broken dreams that swirl around J.C.’s play. America is dying and
changing, evolving, killing, cannibalizing and resurrecting, a cruel place with
acts of kindness, an idealistic place whose idealism is at times simply the
reflex of a corpse. America as forest fire.  Sam is serious, questioning and something holy
lives in him, a kind of grace, coupled with agonizing empathy. Another younger
playwright, Korde Tuttle was inspired by the Sandra Bland case in Texas – an
African American woman who died in police custody after a routine traffic stop,
which was anything but. The play, Graveyard
shift, has a burning poetry to it, not earthbound or polemicist but odd and
terrifying, living in a place where reality no longer contains theatrical events.
I loved these plays in particular, as well as Will Arbery’s workshop production
of Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,
which also could not be bound by naturalism and seemed to be like a long
William Carlos Williams poem set to music, even as it explored jobs being lost
and free-floating anxiety destroying people’s lives and the collective
unconscious. These are plays that all explore end-stage capitalism and the
endless mystery of being human, and one should look out for them. Really. I
don’t know where those plays will live but they will live. These are playwrights who care about who and what we are, about why we are what we
are, they are generous, and steeped in agony and yearning, I loved their work.





Finally, a plug for
myself? My own Vicuna & The American Epilogue opens at The
Mosaic Theatre in Washington DC, in early November. It is a deeply flawed play, but an attempt at
understanding ‘conditions on the ground’ in our ghoulish political era, and to
project what the end-game of all this hell is. It’s a play about how we die by
the sword of our own complicity. I still live in apartheid era South Africa and
always will, despite wanting to feel like James Coburn in a Mercedes on the PCH
in Malibu. The PCH closes frequently due to landslides and earthquakes.




It will of course end
up in the Pacific.







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I Interview Playwrights Part 974: Brenton Lengel

Brenton Lengel

Hometown:  Naples, Italy

Current Town:  Manhattan, NYC

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  My two biggest projects at the moment are Afterall, a fantasy adventure through the afterlife that begins with the main character's death, and NPCs, a workplace comedy about the lives of Non-Player Characters in roleplaying games. I'm also in the early stages of a page-1 rewrite for an upcoming play called "No Gods, No Kings," which is set during the Spanish Civil War.

Q:  Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A:  When I was very young, my dad used to take me camping, which at the time meant setting up an old pup-tent in the backyard of our home in Allentown, PA. He'd tell me stories, usually about "The Cowboys and the Indians" or "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (which I didn't realize was a movie until I was like, thirty), and one night he told me about the Appalachian Trail, explaining that it was an unbroken two-thousand-mile footpath through the mountains that ran from Maine to Georgia. Right there in that tent, little four-year-old Brent declared that he'd hike it all one day, and some twenty years later, he did exactly that and then wrote the first play ever about the experience, which is called North to Maine and is probably my most famous work to date.

In a number of ways, that gets to the core of who I am. I have an adventurous streak in me, and I'm definitely a capital "R" Romantic with a number of high ideals and strange notions, and that doesn't always mesh well with mundane reality. Luckily I'm patient and stubborn enough to force these "airy nothings" into reality, and once I've done that, I write about it. I've been accused of being a "method writer" more than once, and I think that's as good a descriptor as any.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Theatre has a culture that is, at times, particularly snobbish and stifling. It's kind of a paradox because most of us grew up as nerds and outcasts and we think that theatre is a safe place for people to be different and to think differently, but I find that's often not the case. It's like theatre allows for a very select, very formulaic kind of weirdness, which leads to the big stages and companies reproducing the same tired old plays that they've been producing for fifty years, just with the words and the characters scrambled. Sure, they're penned by different authors, but when you consider the sheer breadth of creativity that can be done on a stage, it is staggering how many times we all wind up watching three to six characters savage each other around a couch for ninety minutes to an hour.

So I'd like to say I'd get rid of couches, but it's not really the couches' fault, and sometimes, despite the fact that it's being done for the umpteen-bajillionth time, sometimes - it's still a good play. So really, what I'd like to get rid of is that attitude, the attitude that plays are only about a certain type of thing and for a certain type of people. I think the more diversity we have, not just of identity but also of thought, the more relevant and interesting theatre will be as an art form.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Arthur Miller is probably my biggest influence; I love the way he writes, and the fact that he stood up to the House of Un-American Activities Committee is hugely inspiring and gets to the heart of what I think an artist should be--not just an entertainer but also someone who lives in the world and actively works to make it a better place. I like Eugene O'Neill for the same reason: he was a member of the IWW, the Wobblies - the same group Heather Heyer was marching with in Charlottesville before she was run down by that Nazi. Though I've never had occasion to see his work staged, Spanish playwright Fredrico Lorca is also a hero of mine; he was killed by the fascists at the start of his country's civil war for being gay and also an outspoken socialist. The fact that he did what he did and said what he said in a society as oppressive as 1930's Spain and in the face of all that darkness continued to create art is hugely inspiring - so yeah, for those three and for Lorca in particular, I'd use the term "hero" to describe them.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind that takes me somewhere else, and teaches me something new, and gets me to care for something or someone that I might have previously dismissed. I was in DC recently and I saw The Originalist at Arena Stage, which was a play about Antonin Scalia, who I'd previously seen as little more than a monster, to be completely honest. To see him posthumously humanized really touched me. Art is often an exercise in empathy and communication, and if a play can get me to feel compassion for someone whose death I may very well have celebrated...well, that's good art, and exciting theatre.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  The best thing you can do is put words on paper and then show them to people. Writing is a skill, and every time you do it, you get better. Don't worry if they aren't the right words, and don't worry that people won't like them. Even if your work is initially terrible--and it won't be, but if it is--well then, people are going to like it anyway, because a lot of us are terrible at a lot of things and that's human. That's a part of ourselves that is arguably the most worthy of love specifically because it's the part that we most often neglect. Have faith that who you are and what you have to say is valuable and interesting because, I guarantee you, it is. It's a very scary thing to put yourself out there and express yourself honestly, but the alternative is way worse than someone else not liking what they see. So if you have a story inside yourself, don't keep it hidden; share it. If you do that, you will be successful--maybe not in the way that you imagine, but I find that often times when all is said and done, imagination can fall short of reality.

Q:  You mentioned one of your biggest projects is with The Crüxshadows. What's it like collaborating with a rockstar?

A:  It's simultaneously one of the most amazing and annoying experiences I've ever had. Rogue is one of the smartest and hardest working artists I've ever met, and easily the most successful. I was a fan for years before I approached him with the project, and it's a miracle that he even responded to my email. The flipside of it is, he approaches writing a play or a novel or a screenplay in much the same way he approaches writing a song, so every word, every syllable, is of the utmost importance. When you consider just how many words and syllables there are in a script or a manuscript compared to lyrics in a song...well, the process is slow-going to say the least. Then again, I'm also the kid who decided he was going to hike the entire AT before he was even in the first grade, and then grew up to do it, so I'm uniquely suited to this sort of collaboration. It's super cool to meet your idols and find out they really are awesome people who think you're cool and talented too, and what's coming out of our work together is better than either of us could do on our own, so I'm really excited about it.

Q:  Any upcoming projects we should look out for?

A:  My 2012 play Snow White Zombie Apocalypse is being turned into a comic book as we speak. It'll be published by Scout Comics and illustrated by Dark Horse Alumnus Hyeondo Park. I'm about to launch a crowdfunding campaign for NPCs, which is being produced and directed by my good friend Levi Wilson of Maybe Sunshine and in association with my theatre company State of Play Productions Inc. Also, I have something VERY big on the horizon regarding Afterall, which will be announced at this year's Dragoncon, so keep an eye on that.

Finally, The Crüxshadows just released their newest song Singularities (Calling Heaven) I highly recommend people check that out, and if you like it, their new album AstroMythology is being released at Dragoncon and will be available to purchase soon!

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