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

 

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.

 

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.

 

My website is up!

And it’s here:

 

Theater Has a Gender Bias? Do Tell – NYTimes.com

Well worth reading!  I went to this town hall meeting and it was well presented and thoughtful work.  Lots to think about in terms of the implications… especially the point that plays by women with women protagonists, are rated lower by artistic directors and are far less likely to be produced, than plays by either men or women with male protagonists.

This last doesn’t surprise me because our performance culture–driven by movies rather than plays–is overwhelmingly skewed towards male protagonists and the films young men want to see (starring some pumped-up version of themselves).  How could this profit-driven, movie-based model NOT affect the way people receive and program stories told in the theatre?

Theater Has a Gender Bias? Do Tell – NYTimes.com.

 

Bears…

…and wild turkeys, deer, buzzards, an eagle, toads, frogs, chipmunks. Thunderstorms then beautiful blue skies with brilliant clouds, tonight a clear sky with stars. I’m at the Millay Colony and it’s stunning. Here to write a draft of a new play, and after a week I realized the strange lumpy thing inside the piles of pages was a sort of two-headed creature that wanted to be two different plays. So now I have two small beginnings and think it’s time for a beer.

 

SIEVX Memorial Project

SIEVX Memorial Project.

Home grown Australian art response to the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Australian waters– sinking of an overloaded boat full of refugees whom the Coast Guard failed to rescue.

 

Theatre’s new stage | The Australian

Theatre’s new stage | The Australian.

Very thoughtful and cogent article by Alison Croggon on the shift towards an Australian theatre with more formal variation than what she calls “decadent naturalism”.  Particularly of note: the point that new kinds of work come out of different collaborative models.

 

Angel wrestling

I’m at the Millay Colony, a beautiful quiet artists’ colony in upstate New York. Today I saw and heard frogs, deer, and lots of trees and sky. Wild thyme and strawberries in the grass. On the door of the studio I’m in (where people carve their name after their stay) someone has written THIS ENORMOUS SIMPLICITY. And that’s about right. In the quiet lurks whatever you’ve brought with you–the fear and dark as well as the inspiration— and here you are to wrestle it into form.

In THE SATANIC VERSES there’s a wonderful section where a man, perhaps the Prophet (it’s a while since I read it) climbs up a mountain every day to wrestle in a cave with an angel. The angel always beats him to a pulp, and Rushdie writes (I’m paraphrasing) that the Prophet was never sure whether the angel had invented him, needing a sparring mate–or whether the angel was formed from the cord of longing emanating from the center of his own body. (In any case, the angel kicked ass).

Today, by those terms, I chickened out. I spent the day moving furniture and sharpening pencils while the angel crouched on the door-frame and mocked me for being too scared to step into the ring (“into the wring” I almost wrote. Or rote.) Tomorrow… I’ll dip my toe in. I will.

 

On the road

Tomorrow I’m headed to Millay Colony for three weeks to do some writing. And some staring into space and snoozing in the afternoon. This year has been the Year of the Suitcase. And I’m still terrible at packing!

One day I will live and work in the same city with my sweetheart and not constantly be on the train or getting a plane somewhere. I just planted tomatoes and now they will have to grow on their own til I get back in July.

Been missing music lately—playing it and writing it. The side of my brain that dreams and doodles really needs some time. Enough of being organized and efficient and goal-oriented for a while.