Slow Falling Bird reading at the Irish Rep

If you’re in New York and wondering what to do on a rainy Friday afternoon, come to my reading at the Irish Rep! 3pm, Friday October 30th, 2 West 22nd Street, 2nd Floor

 

Will Ferrel’s health insurance video

OK, everyone has already posted this.. but that’s because it’s really good!

And, while we’re at it, there’s also this which is even funnier: (No. 37… yep, that’s a big number.)

Coming from a country with a public option (we call it, er, Medicare) I can attest that most people actually quite like it. It’s not very exciting and dramatic or character-forming to be able to break a tooth without risking bankruptcy and eviction, but there you have it. People get used to it. All sorts of people, mostly not left-wing politically active types. Although I’ve always wondered about librarians… and bus drivers… and nannies…

 

Sleep

I’m at MacDowell, such a beautiful artists’ colony. So far, I’ve slept the most incredible amount. Combination of fresh air, quiet (REALLY quiet), no internet in my studio, did I mention quiet…. and arriving after a busy and tiring visit to London and a summer cold. I am amazed that I can sleep 9 hours a night AND nap during the day… hopefully soon I’ll bounce into gear and actually write something.

 

Virtual Performance Factory, cont’d.

I am having the best time as a writer I’ve had for ages, figuring out the puzzle-ring that’s my part of the collaborative project, the Virtual Performance Factory. Curated and directed by Joseph Megel as part of the CHAT Festival (Collaborations in Art and Technology) at UNC Chapel Hill, we’re a team of writers creating “rooms” which combine live performance and virtual/ game elements. The game design will be created by Icarus, a Chapel Hill based video game production company.

The brief has challenged me to think about several things:
1. interactivity: how to make the experience something that involves the audience. As individuals? As a group? As fictions within the world of the performance?

2. use of media. My commonest complaint about often-dazzling new media work is the shallowness of content and “illustrative” functions of video, projection etc. So the question for me has been: what world am I making where these virtual elements are integral to the story?
As it turns out— a Limbo between live and virtual selves severed by traumatic memory in a returned veteran’s haunted Underpass.

As well as these wonderful formal challenges, given the sorry trajectory of Development Hell which most of us peon playwrights wade through en route to production, it’s also been a great joy to write something that I KNOW will be designed and produced. I write something and people talk about how to make it happen on screen, in the room… It’s like hearing music aloud again after hours of silently looking at dots on a stave.

 

Landscape of the theater

I finally read John Guare’s play, Landscape of the Body. I loved it–a dream of flesh and song made of “what if . . .” and grounded in a gritty time in his city. (I was curious because someone told me that my writing reminded them of his… Ah, I said sagely—then decided I’d better catch up!)

However I note the following about this play, to measure the distance between 1977 and 2009’s production landscape:
1. It has a cast of 11
2. In the preface, the author wrote this:
“I finished the play. I wrote the title page. I wrote a page dedicating it to Adele. I was exhausted. I was thirsty. I put the phone back on the hook. Bill finished reading the play a few pages after I finished typing. He said, “I’ll produce it.” “When?” “It’s May. Let’s do it in July.”

 

Trojan Barbie in print

Theatre Forum, Issue 35 includes my play Trojan Barbie, with accompanying article by Robert Scanlan, along with other interesting fare such as Kirby Malone’s “Silence and Darkness: A Live Movie for the Cellphone Age”.  Malone and White have been working for years at George Mason Univeristy to produce “live movies”– a form of live performance that incorporates film, video projection and virtual elements.

 

Guardian piece on female playwrights

Finally–from Max Stafford-Clark, writing in the Guardian– an intelligent and thoughtful piece about gender and playwriting. 
Looking for the next bright young female playwright? | Max Stafford-Clark | Stage | guardian.co.uk.
Notable in this piece and absent from recent American articles is a sense of history–he points out the many excellent female writers (in the UK) who have been breathlessly sensationalized as “the next hot young thing” and then discarded and forgotten.

I’m so glad to read this. The breathy American valorization of the “hot new thing” which infects every level of the theatre, not just the media, is another obstacle on the formidably difficult path of building a body of work and a career in the theatre. It’s product oriented, not art-oriented, and certainly not artist-oriented. If everyone constantly demands world premieres from 22 year olds (for “workshops” or perhaps one world premiere, then the scrap heap) the theatre will look like, well— what it does. Callow, shallow and undercooked in the “development” fringes, and hoary, old and conservative in the regional dinosaurs.

 

London visit

In a couple of weeks I’m off to London for a workshop at RADA of my play WEIGHTLESS (nice production pics on the website). In a bit of fast footwork, I’ll be exactly exchanging travel dates with wonderful Aussie playwright Ben Ellis who now lives in London– his blog is here. He’ll be in Melbourne with a show opening as I hold his place open in London.

 

What is it?

Is it a play? Or an arrangement of windows all looking in towards an invisible object? I want patterns of light in my mind to turn into sound. I want to hurl the damn thing across the room. I want to write the inside of a train that turns into the world, under pressure of human darkness. I want to be ten again and in the rapture and self-forgetfulness of writing my first novel– AND drawing the pictures!

Why should it be a play just because I think “I write plays”? There’s something in there that needs more air, needs to move. I feel like an itchy exploding caterpillar inside its tight cocoon. I feel like this a lot lately— that the shape of what I’m doing is too small and I need to bust the mold. There’s an ignition switch just out of reach… I know it… right now I can’t find it.

It doesn’t help to measure the work of writing against the likely outcome. But that’s a coward’s detachment tactic.

 

My website is up!

And it’s here: