writing.performance

I finally got round to reading some of the plays inside “Funny, Strange, Provocative“– an anthology of plays produced by Clubbed Thumb. I was entranced by The Typographer’s Dream (Adam Bock) and Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) (Sheila Callaghan). I’ll write more about this soon but the plays I’ve read in this anthology are by contemporary US playwrights–I mean really contemporary, not almost or recently dead– and share an economy of form and boldness of scope, as well as a humor based in the sad, lovely, strange, quixotic quality of actual life. In Sheila’s play, an apartment schemes to get itself cared for; in Adam’s, parallel lives touch through a meditation on various forms of record: mapping, type-setting, transcription.

I’m thrilled to be a part of the 2008-10 Women’s Project Lab in New York. Looks like a very cool bunch of women artists…

A.R.T blog entry on Trojan Barbie. . .

Interesting also to note that A.R.T.’s 2008-9 season, as Gideon Lester writes, is dominated by women writers and directors. I’m really looking forward to seeing the other shows as well as my own.

Meanwhile… this image captures something of the creepy half-life of dolls which is so central to Trojan Barbie. They witness and outlive us in their plastic fragility. Broken and repaired, they resemble war or accident victims. There’s something eerily forensic as well as reminiscent of childhood about them.

Two questions Erik asked us to contemplate at the end of our writing retreat (see previous post):
what have you asked of your writing?
and
what has your writing asked of you?

these strike me as very good questions. Maybe daily meditations on facing the page.
It isn’t my writing’s job to be clever or win awards or bolster my ego.
It isn’t my job to tell it to, or to know in advance where it might ask me to go.
It’s my job to be willing to go there, and listen.

I’m drunk and in love. (Well, in a lateral way…) Just spend 48 hours or a little less at the NACL (National American Cultural Laboratory) writing in Erik Ehn’s workshop... a cross between a playwriting bootcamp and a monk’s retreat wherein we all prayed for a play! I was so happy that it was a silent retreat. Being in the company of other writers but not having to engage the chatter-schmooze-who’s whooo’s brain was wonderful. As is the place, a lovely old house in the Catskills with a theater/ rehearsal space next door. The workshop was a great mix of silence and time with intervals of group focus where Erik would offer new prompts and exercises.

I have a new term for my writing battles: the “noontime devil”. (more…)

So, I’m about to get in my car and head off to upstate NY for playwriting boot-camp! Erik Ehn is running a weekend intensive, where we’ll all write a 40 page play in a weekend. Then lie about in exhausted stupor and swim in the lake or doze…. It’s one of the Pataphysics workshops run by the Flea theatre (NY). I’ll post about the boot-camp experience. Meanwhile I highly recommend the Pataphysics series.. they have folks like Mac Wellman and Jeff Jones teaching there, and the workshops are wonderful.