Marc Acito's Blog, page 4

Free Story Structure Class at NYU

Story structure seems to be the biggest hurdle for emerging writers. Luckily, I like to dissect stories the way some people like to pull apart old toasters and clocks. Because I'm nerdy that way. So I'll be teaching a free one-hour Introduction to Story Structure at the NYU Bookstore this coming Monday, September 26th at 6:30 pm.

I promise to be informative and entertaining. If not, I will give you back your hour, no questions asked.

Let your aspiring writer friends know.

NYU Bookstore
726 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

On the way to Portland airport...

...passed this guy. Seemed fitting. We want to bring Portland's weirdness with us to NY. After all, Portland was Williamsburg before Williamsburg was.

Moving Day

Never was a day more aptly named. The moving truck pulled up to our house in Portland, the one we moved into exactly 21 years ago tomorrow, and I felt my face spread into a face-wide smile as Floyd dissolved into tears. We looked like the masks of comedy and tragedy.



"You look just like a guy I used to work with," the mover said to Floyd. "He was a bad-ass dude." Floyd was just about to feel bad-ass when the mover added, "Yeah, then he hung himself."



(Movers Strong Like Bulls)



To say moving is a moving experience doesn't quite capture it. The packing alone requires therapy, each closet full of the Ghosts of Fuck-Ups Past. But the purge has been cleansing and cathartic.



I first wanted to leave Portland ten years ago on 9/11. I know it sounds counterintuitive to want to live in a city under siege, but I felt like something tragic had happened "at home" and I should have been there for it. Moreover, the more I heard Portlanders say how glad they were to be someplace safe, the more depressed I felt--that I had made a safe choice in my life, living in a city too irrelevant to be attacked.



I recognize how effed up that sounds, but that's how I felt.



It was former Oregonian columnist Margie Boule who convinced me to stay. "You haven't really experienced all that Portland has to offer," she said, and introduced us to one of the most original people I've ever met, Goody Cable, owner of the Rimsky-Korsakoffeehouse and the Sylvia Beach Hotel at the coast. Then How I Paid for Collegecame out and the world seemed to open up to us. Floyd became a docent at the Portland Art Museum, we both got involved with Live Wire Radio.



We immersed ourselves in Portland's creative community and opened our little house to it for a number of raucous dinner parties. Blogger Byron Beck told a rude guest to "shut the fuck up." Mayor Sam Adams ate several helpings of dessert. Rocker Storm Large first met Pink Martini's Thomas Lauderdale in our living room, and now she's touring with the band. We played Hillbilly Scrabble and Fake Porn Title Charades and made Man Soup by squeezing as many naked men as the hot tub would allow. Portland has been so nurturing to us - a moist, fertile place where just about anything can grow. But between the Hound of the Baskervilles climate and the Portlandia attitude toward ambition ("It's where young people go to retire!") I'm ready for a new adventure.



So we're off to New York, where I'm going to write for the theatre and Floyd's going to produce it. It's not a safe choice, but we were both emboldened by a recent New Yorker profile of Facebook COO Sheryl Stanburg in which we learned she had a sign put up in the headquarters reading "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"



Now we're literally sneaking out like thieves in the night--on a Jet Blue red-eye--which I suppose makes a Jet Purple eye. I know that decision has disappointed some of our friends, but the intensity of a big goodbye felt like more than we could handle. And we justify the choice with the knowledge that we're moving to a city everyone visits. In the past year I've been bi-coastal, our apartment has already been the Flophouse for Wayward Oregonians.



So here's the piano being loaded up - off to write Broadway musicals...

The (Gay Penguin) Book of Mormon

Mormon actress balances faith, support for gays, and theatre in world premiere of Birds of a Feather

"I was meant to be a Mormon and I was meant to be in the theatre," says actress Jjana Valentiner. "In the theatre, sexual orientation is a non-issue, so I find it strange when people won't accept others for who they are."

In an attempt to reconcile her personal beliefs with certain policies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints this Washington, DC-based actress turned to theatre. "I view theatre in the same way I view church, as a place where all should feel welcome to come together to grapple with important issues and discover what unites us. Ultimately, we're trying to figure out how to get along in a wonderfully large, complex family." She is one of four actors starring in The Hub Theatre's world premiere of Marc Acito's Birds of a Feather, which tells the true story of the gay penguins in the Central Park Zoo, the chick they raised and the controversial children's book they inspired. That book, And Tango Makes Three, has been among the American Library Association's most challenged books in America four years in a row.

But it was the LDS Church's backing of California's Proposition 8, which eliminated marriage rights to same-sex couples, that prompted Valentiner, a devout practicing Mormon, to point out: "People who want to restrict LGBT rights—including some within the Mormon community—often paint a picture of gays as immoral and ill-suited to be parents," Valentiner says, "But having been a persecuted people ourselves, we should never be the ones persecuting others." She is one of a growing number of practicing Mormons calling for greater compassion and change within the faith.

The play, which was workshopped at Portland Center Stage's JAW Playwrights' Festival in 2009, is being performed in Fairfax, Virginia, which borders Loudoun County, where in 2007, school superintendent Eugene Hatrick succumbed to community pressure and pulled copies of And Tango Makes Three from the shelves of 16 public school libraries. Hub Theatre's artistic director Helen Pafumi chose the play by award-winning author and NPR contributor Marc Acito in fulfillment of the theatre's mission of being the hub in a wheel that connects varied—and opposing—viewpoints.

"Love is a rare bird," Acito writes In Birds of a Feather, "…so if anyone is capable of toughing it out and raising their children without screwing them up too much - even if it's two gay penguins - shouldn't we be celebrating that achievement? Shouldn't we support them any way we can?"

The aptly named Valentiner agrees. "It baffles me that we continue to argue about this. I know the gay community, I embrace that community, and I'm a Mormon. When you love someone who is gay, it's no longer about an ideological debate, it's about families."

Birds of a Feather, by Marc Acito and directed by Shirley Serotsky, continues at The Hub Theatre through August 7. For performance information or to buy tickets, visit www.thehubtheatre.org. Photo credit: C. Stanley

NPR Sounds of Summer Series

I contributed a brief audio essay on teen drinking to this new series on NPR's All Things Considered about the Sounds of Summer.

Happy first unofficial day of season!

Focus on the Family Concedes it's Losing the Gay Marriage Battle

In an interview in the June 4, 2011 issue of World Magazine, Jim Daly, President and CEO of Focus on the Family, a leading funder of anti-gay attacks concentrated on denying same-sex couples the freedom to marry, declared that the opponents of equality are being repudiated by young people and have "probably lost" on marriage, stating:

We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if that's going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We've probably lost that.

In other words, those who say that gay marriage will only happen over their dead bodies are probably right.

The Odds of Getting Lucky with a New Musical

Brisa Trinchero of MakeMusicals.com and producer of the Festival of New Musicals at the Village Theatre in Isaquah, posted statistics on the odds of getting a new musical chosen. I geek out on stats, which is why I once spent an evening figuring out you're just as likely to fall over furniture and die as you are to get killed riding a bicycle.

Turns out you're more likely to have a stroke or get on a plane with a drunken pilot than get your work into a new musical festival. (Check out these delightfully weird stats.)

Her solution, with which I agree, is to cast a wide net by working on multiple projects and submitting a lot, which is why I'm currently working on five at once (three of which are listed here.) It's requiring discipline, stamina and focus, but I try to think of myself as an orchestra conductor, tracking multiple parts at once while working to keep it all together for a harmonious whole.

Of course, sometimes I feel like the overbooked Asian kid in The 25th Annual Putnam Valley Spelling Bee:

Take Me Back to Manhattan

It's official - I'm in NY for good. Or for bad, depending on what kind of trouble I get into.

Like the immigrant who's come to NY to find work in the rag trade, then sends for his wife in the babushka back in the shtetl, I've preceded Floyd here. He'll remain in Portland until our house sells, possibly staying longer depending on his work situation. When people at parties ask where I am, he likes to tell them we broke up, though he doesn't do it as much because it made a friend of ours burst into tears.

"If you two can't make it, there's no hope for love," he cried.

So we stay together for the sake of the friends.

At my suggestion, Floyd and I celebrated my last weekend in Portland (and the first sunny one all year) by taking a ride in farm country and deliberately getting lost. I was nervous the trip would be a bust, a metaphor for the foolhardy adventure upon which we've embarked. But we ended up at a buffalo ranch, where we saw beasts that look like something George Lucas dreamed up.

Then we ate them.

FYI: buffalo jerky - not a thing.

The move is bittersweet. Floyd and I escaped NY a lifetime ago, broken people in a city ravaged by AIDS. We had a westward adventure, stopping in Colorado before settling in Portland, a nurturing bastion of weirdness, a safe place, somewhere we could heal and grow. With 200 days of rain a year, you can grow a lot.

So I finally feel like I know what I want to do with my life: write musicals. Going from being a writer of books to a book writer combines everything I'm good at – story structure, dialogue, comedy, collaboration, music and dealing with pressure.

Here's what I'm working on.

For those of you who are fans of How I Paid for College and Attack of the Theater People, please know that despite the third installment in the Theater People book being orphaned at the aptly named Random House, I will make certain it sees the light of day.

In the meanwhile, I'm teaching novel writing and story structure at NYU (starting online May 23rd, then in person this fall) and am coaching and editing aspiring writers privately.

As soon as I'm done unpacking, I'll get back to blogging regularly about things theatrical, rather than blathering about myself. But I figured I better bring you all up to date first.

Getting Off on Oregon Ballet Theatre

In previewing Oregon Ballet Theatre's ecclectic program "Song and Dance," The Long Suffering Floyd wrote this for the Portland Mercury:

Oregon Ballet Theatre Artistic Director Christopher Stowell wants you to get off—on dance. When asked about the popularity of shows like "Dancing with the Stars" and "So You Think You Can Dance," he says, "I don't like the gossip or the drama, and I don't like the idea of competition within an art form, but I love that people are getting off on watching others move around."

Stowell put together a totally satisfying evening that incorporated square dancing (with a caller), hip-hop, yoga and men dancing to Cole Porter in 1930s underwear - wife beaters, boxers and garters. The mash-up allowed me to experience classical ballet through a new perspective without sacrificing the integrity of the form.

I'm all for mixing the highbrow and the lowbrow into what my Bastard Jones collaborator Amy Engelhardt and I call "the unibrow." But so often the hybrid is just excruciating, like when The Three Tenors revealed themselves to be the only singers on the planet who required sheet music to perform "Singin' in the Rain."



So I felt a carbonated happiness as I watched OBT's program succeed, because my own work seems to straddle opposing worlds - sometimes too weird for conventional people, while too conventional for weird people. Just today Portland Center Stage turned down my new play Tulip Mania for this year's JAW New Play Festival while informing me it's laugh-out-loud hilarious and commercial.

It reminds me of when my cousin Tim was premiering his show Zanna, Don't and a producer told him "the ending takes too long and feels rushed."

Then again, it also reminds me of this bumper sticker I saw recently:
Just because you're misunderstood doesn't mean you're a genius.

Center Stage at Portland Center Stage (and the Portland Art Museum)

Portland Center Stage Artistic Director Chris Coleman ain't fiddlin' around in his performance in Michael Hollinger's Opus, in which he plays the first violinist in a fractious string quartet.
I've known Chris for ten years. He directed the workshop of my play Birds of a Feather at PCS's JAW Playwrights Festival. We've hung out, gone to the beach. He even once heckled me while I was raising $20,000 for the theater, so he's damn lucky I didn't return the favor on his opening night.

Seeing him act for the first time was a revelation. First off, there was the immense relief that he didn't suck. Quite the opposite, he was fantastic--real, exposed, raw. It was a particularly brave performance for a public figure because the character can be such a jerk.

I'm immensely proud of him and look forward to seeing how it affects his directing of both plays and the theater itself. According to his blog, it's already given him new insights into both.

Working on more than one side of any equation really helps your understanding of your own discipline. Like Chris, I'm a product of the Carnegie-Mellon theater program, where studying acting and directing really informed my career as a writer. Being an opera singer gave me an education in 400 years of western history. And I know I'm a better writer because I teach.

That said, I seldom take center stage. I'd much rather write a musical than be in one. But I will tread the boards this Friday night for my last public appearance in Portland before moving to New York. I'm the emcee of Objectivity, a game show produced by my partner the Long-Suffering Floyd, to promote Object Stories, an innovative installation created PAM's education director Tina Olsen, in which regular people (and irregular, I suppose) bring their personal objects to the museum and record a commentary about them.

Here's the deeply moving one Floyd did, of which I could not be prouder, and not just because it makes me sound like a helluva guy.

Objectivity is one-night only this Friday. Admission to the museum is free, so seating will be limited. I'll be joined by a panel of Portland luminaries, including NY Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain, Mayor Sam Adams, Oregon Ballet Theatre's Christopher Stowell, Daria O'Neil Eliuk of The Buzz and Helen Raptis of AM Northwest.

Here's our groovy game show music, as performed by Gwen Verdon to the Bob Fosse choreography that inspired Beyonce's "Single Ladies."

Jeez, could I drop any more names?