writing.performance

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.

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.

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.

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.