Filed under: art, Creative Process, dance, dreams, theatre, writing | Tags: choreographer, Drama Bookshop, friends, future gazing, good news, Mikhail Baryshnikov, playwright, Success Stories
On my way to go see a dance piece, I stopped off at the Drama Bookshop and noticed that they had a collection of plays written by my old friend. I figured I should buy it, since I have a goal to dedicate a shelf, nay, a bookcase, to the work of my friends. Also, I wanted to read the plays. Over the years, we’ve been less in touch so I haven’t managed to see everything or read everything.
In our twenties, we were very close. We talked on the phone many nights a week and we’d go out and wander the streets of New York, finding delicious tidbits to eat. We talked about our ambitions and our hopes. He dreamed of seeing his plays on Broadway and I wanted that dream for him too. It was a time of much angst and sometimes we’d both of us slip into hopelessness. You really have no idea what’s coming. I guess we never do.
Anyway – here we are in 2023 in the new Drama Bookshop and I’m buying a collection of his plays. It’s not the only work of his they have for sale, either. His plays take up about eight inches on the bookshelf. I take the book up to the cashier and she gets instantly excited about it. “I love his plays,” she says. And all I want to do is go back in time to some night when we were on the phone and my friend was so despondent and hopeless and I wish I could be like, “Hey, I’ve just come from the future, where I’m buying a collection of your plays at the Drama Bookshop. The cashier is delighted with my purchase and tells me how much she loves your plays. When I tell her you’re a friend of mine, she acts like I told her I was friends with Beyonce. You don’t know who that is yet because it’s the mid-90s – but trust me, a time traveler from 2023, this cashier is crazy for your work.”
When I left the Drama Bookshop, I went on to the dance show – a little ways down the road. The choreographer is a friend, though one I haven’t seen in at least a decade or two. From the back row of the house for these two world premiere dances, I can see Mikhail Baryshnikov settling in to his seat in the third row. Baryshnikov is here to see my friend’s work! This piece is at Baryshnikov’s art space so it’s highly probable that this is not my friend’s first encounter or interaction with Baryshnikov. It’s possible that this sort of thing has become normal to him. It’s not to me, though. I’m excited for him. Here, too, I want to go back in time and tell this sweet boy I knew decades ago what success awaits the man he will be in the future.
I mean, maybe me time traveling to tell stories about future success would spoil the surprise but I feel like a life in the arts is so full of uncertainty, a lot of us could do with a visit from a more successful future to just let us know that there’s a little bit of hope. And sometimes we could do with a little reminder of our milestones, as we sit in that future that doesn’t feel nearly as successful as it would seem to our younger selves.
We all have friends who have given up. We’ve all considered giving up ourselves. A little visitor from the future with good news would be really so sustaining. If a future me came to tell me a story like one of these, I’d be charged up for a long time.
But, of course, let’s say I did manage to time travel and tell my playwright friend the story of the cashier at the bookshop. Odds are he wouldn’t believe me, or believe I was from the future. But I guess the me back then could have just made something up on one of those days hope was in short supply. I could have claimed to be back with a message from the future and maybe a little faith would sneak in. I could try that now and I wouldn’t even have to get a time machine.
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Filed under: art, theatre, Visual Art, writing | Tags: art, Artist, playwright, residency, Visual Art, writing
The barista at one of my local coffee spots noticed I’d been gone awhile so when he asked, I told him I’d been in Crete at an artist’s residency. He’s from Cyprus so we had a good old chat about food and language and weather and then I went outside to drink my coffee and write.
Mid-write, a man walked up to me and said, “Did I overhear you say you were at an artist residency?” “Yes,” I said.
“Oh, what kind of artist are you?” he asked.
“I’m a playwright,” I said, which is, of course only part of the story but for the purpose of this artist residency I was at, it’s the simplest answer, so I told him “playwright.”
This man was visibly confused. Here he was, expecting me to say I’m a painter or a sculptor or even a printmaker or something like that but he has to re-program his brain to deal with the facts of the case. And I don’t know if this guy has a thing for visual artists so he’d come over to add one more to his collection or whatever but clearly he had some trouble understanding that a playwright might go to an artist residency in Crete. After a very long pause, he finally tried guessing – “Like, to study Greek plays or something?”
“No,” I said “I was working on a play that takes place in Crete.”
He nodded and walked away. Poor man, I seem to have broken his brain AND prevented him from adding another visual artist to his collection. Not a banner day for that guy.
But the experience did make me think about how narrow the borders of art can be for some people. Playwrights, to these sorts of people, aren’t artists and probably more broadly, writers of any other genre wouldn’t be either. Choreographers and dancers wouldn’t be on their list – neither would actors or directors. Musicians and composers would likely be a big nope for them. Filmmakers might qualify but only if they eschew narrative entirely. I have a feeling even a performance artist would not have met this guy’s criteria.
And I’m not sure quite what the connection is but I feel certain there is one between this narrow idea of what art might be, who an artist might be, and the general contempt our culture has for art in general.
One of my favorite thinkers/writers about arts issues is choreographer, Andrew Simonet. In his most recent email missive essay, he talked about the artist’s constant (and exhausting) need to prove our worth. He said most of us feel a need to justify our choice to become an artist because we feel how little the culture cares for us.
This is the foundational apology at the center of many artist lives: I’m so sorry I am called to make art. We apologize silently to loved ones, partners, employers, and families because art making holds little value in the world. How do we know that? Artists are constantly unpaid and underpaid.
Andrew Simonet
Thinking of artists as just the people who have things hanging in museums diminishes all of the rest of us – as well as those artists who have work hanging in museums!
Maybe there are a few who feel boosted up by the diminishment of the entirety of art but I think this narrow idea is good for no one.
Luckily, I’d just come from an artist residency where for two weeks no one questioned whether doing art was a good idea – so this guy’s dumb response to hearing I was at an artist residency rolled over me pretty fast but on another day, I might have taken it to heart. I might have fallen into a hole of “Plays aren’t real art” or, more likely in my case, making many 3 Am cases for why plays ARE real art and why can’t people understand that?
Yes, Mr. Eavesdropper, playwrights are also artists. Maybe go see a play, since you like listening to other people talk so much! And think about including a lot more arts in your thinking about art, howabout?
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Filed under: art, theatre, writing | Tags: archetype, Broadway, champagne, character, Fates and Furies, film, Lauren Groff, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, theatre, tropes
This book I’m reading is not the first book to do this, but it is the latest and it is enough of a trend that, when it happened in this book, I may have said, out loud, “Oh no, not this again.”
It’s this thing where novelists and screenwriters put a playwright in their piece. In these works, the playwright always becomes super successful and gets famous and rich and, I have to assume, receives all the accolades the writer dreams of, but in theatre form. My sense is that they do this because they don’t want to write about a writer too close to themselves. If they’re a novelist, the protagonist can’t be a novelist, that’s too close – and a playwright, they imagine, is like a novelist but more social and glamourous. A screenwriter imagines that a playwright is like a screenwriter but artier and nobler.
I’ve read and seen a lot of works with playwrights in them and the plays are ALWAYS a triumph within the narrative. They always end up with a hit. They are always on Broadway or the West End or featured at the National Theatre in London. It is tremendously easy to become a hot famous playwright in a novel or a movie. It seems to be a particularly sexy fantasy for other writers.
But I know a lot of playwrights. I even know a lot of very successful playwrights and I’m quite certain that while their lives are full and interesting, they are never nearly as glamorous as these other forms make them sound. Their paths to success are never simple. There is no overnight success for a playwright. It just doesn’t work like that. And there’s something so wild about the fantasy that it does. It doesn’t work like that for other writers, either, I’d imagine. You don’t just meet the right person at a party and instantly end up on the New York Times bestseller list. You don’t write your first film in a drunken stupor that weeks later is featured on screens across America.
But this story line is so common now, this one of a playwright catapulted to success, that it has started to feel like a trope. The trope within this trope that I often see recurring is the playwright revealing important things about himself and his personality through his work. We see scenes in his life repeated onstage, sometimes word for word. (I’m saying he and his because it is almost always a male playwright who is the subject of this work.) The novel or film includes whole swaths of the playwright’s plays so we can learn more about him. Or maybe so we can understand the Freudian echoes or Jungian archetypes operating beneath. Those “plays” almost always suck and they are almost always enormous hits in the story. Do bad plays become hits in real life? Yes. All the time. I’d even say most of the time when I’m feeling cynical. But these plays are not SUPPOSED to be bad in the book or movie. They’re supposed to be genius. And aside from being bad, they just don’t function well as plays. Like, they’re not theatrical or dramatic. Maybe every writer thinks they can write a play? I don’t know – but nothing makes me want to throw a book across the room like a novelist’s epic “brilliant” play in the middle of the story.
The book that made me think about this is Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. It is beautifully written and artfully constructed except for the theatre stuff. It’s an interesting mix, though, because some of it is spot on, theatrically speaking. She has the atmosphere of the field and the vibes of the location down. She has spent some time in theatres. She probably has some actor friends. But there are these moments where the story moves so dramatically away from the possible. The actor who gets drunk and writes a brilliant play (that is secretly punched up by his wife) and that play becomes an instant sensation and then another and another until they’ve got a country house in Connecticut or somewhere. It’s like this novelist knows what actors are like at a party but not how the economics of playwriting actually work in this era.
I was rolling my eyes at this instant success of this instant playwright (no development necessary for this wunderkind!) and then (slight spoiler) in the second half of the book, we learn that the instant hit was manipulated into position by the wife. She blackmails someone into asking and paying for a production at Playwrights Horizons and when no one comes to that production that she bribed into existence, she calls all their friends. But even this is improbable. Are theatres impervious to being bought? Nope. If someone offered them enough money, I have little doubt that arrangements might be made. But how would a criminal from Philadelphia know which theatre to put pressure on? How would he know who to throw his cash at? I feel like you’d at least need to know a TINY bit about the theatre business before you bought your way into it.
Also – I’ve tried to get all my friends to come out for things in New York City and that this wife could fill up an off–Broadway house on such short notice, with their friends, feels like some magical thinking. I think the author thinks this means the wife character cheated her way into helping her husband succeed – but having the skill to browbeat all your friends to come out for a show one night is probably actually what one needs to succeed. If you can get a couple hundred friends to come out and support you, you’re probably 75% there, as far as a theatre career is concerned.
So this little revelation certainly helps mediate the question raised by the sudden random success of the playwright earlier in the book – but it doesn’t explain how this sudden success turned into a celebrity style career. Even the most famous contemporary playwrights still struggle to have their work produced and very few of them are treated the way the one in this book is. I can’t think of one. (Not a living one, anyway.)
I am starting to find this trope very transparent. Every time I encounter a playwright in a work in another genre, I feel like I understand how they ended up there and why the author chose that particular profession for their protagonist. Maybe I’m hoping that the next person who wants to write a playwright will consider what tropes they’re falling into and either learn a lot more about the theatre world or choose a different profession for their protagonist. I do not blame this author (Lauren Groff) at all. The transposition of one kind of writer to another is very logical but it raised a lot of questions for me.
Is this book the story of this author’s life? I would never assume so – but then, the way she writes the playwright’s life as such a direct reflection of his life makes me think it must be. I actually think playwrights are less inclined than other writers to write autobiographically but you’d never know it from the way they’re depicted in fiction.
It’s like, it must be so nice to be a fictional playwright in a novel or a film! You never have to struggle with producers over your rights. You never have to talk to a theatre’s administrators about where they’re going to get the incentive money to put up your play. You never have to fight with directors over the way the show is going. You never have to cry in the greenroom about how the actors fundamentally misunderstood those lines. You just go to fancy parties, have fun artistic friends and drink nothing but champagne after shows! It’s a dream! Who wouldn’t want to be a playwright?!
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Filed under: Rejections, theatre, writing | Tags: festival, Millay, New Plays, playwright, rejection, residency
Let’s pretend we’re not in a global pandemic and just get back to some regular routines, shall we? It’s not as if my hot takes on the arts in the pandemic are really getting a lot of traction. Also, I’ve been racking up the rejections and it’s probably time to go ahead and get them on out of here so I don’t end up with the world’s longest rejection post. (This MAY be the world’s longest rejection post.) The rejections don’t stop, even when the rest of the world does. So here they are.
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Bay Area Playwrights Festival said, in their rejection, not to say anything about our “status” until May but I think once someone’s rejected my work, they lose the ability to control how I talk about it. If it’s an acceptance and they don’t want folks bragging about it, fine – but if I’ve been rejected, our relationship is over. It’s my timetable now.
Anyway – it was super weird rejection and you can tell they felt super weird about sending out rejections in the middle of a global crisis. I get it.
But one of the things that was super weird about this rejection was how there were sections that were clearly form letter that seemed to be doing double duty for both acceptances and rejections. (Hence, the “don’t tell anyone your status.”) There was a whole list of instructions for going back to find previous communications to clarify their process. (Hot tip. I don’t care about any administrative process. I assume it’s a variant on “We read plays and then choose the ones we like” and that is sufficient for me.)
Anyway – there was this line about finding my play “inspiring and challenging” – which, if that was really their response, is very nice – but in an otherwise form letter, it feels like they say that to all the girls and therefore has no meaning, actually.
The whole thing was a fascinating lengthy mess. I’m guessing they’re a bit floored by the living room-pocalypse and so aren’t quite up to their usual game? I don’t know. This is only the second time I’ve applied to this thing. And the second rejection.
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Orlando Shakespeare Festival does not want my Comedy of Errors prequel for their new play festival. Alas.
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To no one’s surprise, I did not receive a residency with Guild Hall. I do admire their alacrity in responding to their applications, though. I applied in December and heard from them in January.
Unlike Play Penn to which I applied in September and heard from in January. I swear, the longer I’m in this game, the more I long for all these places to just do a lottery. To just throw all the names in a hat and pull out a few to get the goodies they’re offering. All these elaborate evaluating methods they use tend to only yield the same old results – with the same familiar faces getting the treats. A straight lottery would be so much more democratic. Would there be some stinkers? Sure. But there are stinkers now. Big deal. Lottery lottery lottery!
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I’ve received the rejection from the O’Neill that I’ve known was coming since December. I find that I’m feeling a fair amount of rage around it. Not that I’ve been rejected – lord knows that has happened before – but by a little rumor I read in a playwrights group on-line. The rumor was that the O’Neill puts a little PS at the end of the rejection letter if they particularly like a play. The PS is a kind of extra encouragement, I suppose. One writer said she didn’t get one the year before but did get one this year so she felt the quality of her work must be improving. So, of course, I had to check to see if I had a P.S. on my most recent letter. I did not. So I guess they hated this play.
I’ll have to check what happened in previous years, but this whole proposition makes me furious. Really? There’s a little code within the rejection letters to indicate extra approval? As if this whole process weren’t infantilizing enough, there’s also a middle school code to find out if the place likes us or really really likes us?! (But still not enough to produce us.)
I don’t know if this rumor is true but the possibility that it is is enough to infuriate me.
Look, I’m in a two rejection household this year. Everyone in my apartment received a rejection notice from the O’Neill this week and the letters are practically identical despite being from two different programs. The letters were already ridiculous. There’s a line about the O’Neill not being the home for this show. It has the flavor of
“We’re rejecting you for your own good. The O’Neill just isn’t right for you or your play. We want a better home for you.”
Mmmm – hmmmm. It’s best for ME not to receive the goodies you have to offer. Sure. Yeah. And I’m also better off not winning the lottery. The jackpot won’t feel at home in my apartment so they decided to send it somewhere else.
It’s all so…icky. Like. You don’t want to give me your goodies – don’t give them to me. It’s not that difficult. We’re not inviting you. We didn’t select you. Your play didn’t make the cut. There are a million straightforward ways to handle these rejections that do the job without suggesting it’s not you, it’s me.
And if this PS rumor is really a thing? Oh boy. What a dick move that is. Especially for rejection letters to writers. I mean, if there is a population more inclined to look for hidden meaning on a page full of words, I don’t know who it would be. It feels diabolical to me that there might be hidden messages in these rejection letters.
What do they think the P.S. will do? Oh, they extra like a play and so they add a P.S. to the boilerplate rejection? Does the playwright then feel extra encouraged and thereby write a better play next time? The net result is the same. The extra line of encouragement only makes the writer who got the PS last time feel bad when they don’t get it the next. That writer in the group felt her work must have improved because she got the P.S. this year. Two years ago, my Medusa play made it to the semi-finals. The last two got nothing. Is my work getting worse? I don’t think so. Taking this stuff to heart is an exercise in heartbreak and will be bound to shake one’s self-esteem. The fact that the organization, which already has a lot of power over theatre writers, may be indulging in games with its rejection letter makes me never want to apply again.
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I was on a wait list for the Millay Colony – but I went ahead and applied for the next round as it seemed like the chances were slim that I’d get the wait list call. It’s a lighter experience applying for something when you’ve had a small yes from them.
But that yes (or maybe) did not come a second time. I was rejected from the last round at the Millay. The deadline comes around again now. I guess I better give it another shot.
I tried applying for some playwriting stuff that’s apparently a big deal but I never heard of before. They took a while to get back to me but like everyone else the Great Plains Theatre Conference and Ashland New Plays said no.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
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New Dramatists?
Of course they said no.
But they said it on paper, so that’s a nice change of pace!
*Wondering why I’m telling you about rejections? Read my initial post about this here and my patron’s idea about that here.
This post was brought to you by my generous patrons on Patreon.
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Filed under: art, Rejections, theatre, writing | Tags: actor, agents, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, famous people, Julie Taymor, Medusa, playwright, rejection, rocket, The National Theatre, writing
I started working on my Medusa play sometime around when I started my theatre company, which was close to 18 years ago. I abandoned the play after doing a reading of it but then picked it back up a few years ago when an actor, who’d read one of the parts that first time, asked after it. I don’t know if it had been a full decade at that point but the fact that it had stuck with him after so long made me feel like it was worth grappling with.
After much wrestling, I got the play into shape and did a reading in Brooklyn and after it, I felt like I still wasn’t sure if it was worth anything. One of my listeners pointed out that I might not really know what was actually there until I had the exact right actors. He suggested I think big.
I knew who I needed. As the person who gave the single best performance I have ever seen, I knew that hearing HER read it would tell me everything needed to know. I also knew that in order to have that happen, I needed to make the play good enough for her. I imagined her reading it as I was writing and the play got better.
I did another reading in Queens with a game group of lovely actors and I got even closer to what I thought the play wanted to be. All along I was thinking of this sort of lodestar of a performer and how to get it to her, how to connect with her, how to strategize for this play’s future.
As time went by, the play was selected as a semi-finalist for the O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference but went no further. All of my attempts to make a connection with my Medusa lodestar failed.
Then I saw that she’d be performing in a public park – so I printed out a copy and brought it with me in case I could be brave enough to give it to her. I was. I was brave enough and it was mortifying. Completely and totally mortifying. I don’t recommend this sort of experience to anyone. But – even though she wouldn’t take the stack of paper in the moment, she told me to send it to her agent. And believe me, it had been suggested to me to send it to her agent before but that information is not particularly easy for an outsider to find so the principal value in standing before the actual person was that I could ask her who her agent was. Then began the tricky task of finding her agent’s information. You realize, when diving in to this sort of world, that so much of it is designed to intimidate and keep you out. The world of agents is built to make it difficult to find them. There are services you can pay to simply get an email.
But with the support of a clever friend, I finally got to the agent. Also, with a lot of coaching from my clever friend, I did some finely crafted emailing to just get this play to the woman who had been its muse. After about a week of back and forth, it was, in fact sent to her.
Just getting that far felt like a great leap. It wasn’t just the labor of the week to get it to her – but the years of putting it on my list to figure out and all the attempts before. I launched the rocket into space.
Within days, the rocket fell to earth as I heard back that the play was not for her.
Strangely, given how intimidating the world around agents is, the rejection was one of the best I’ve received. It was succinct, clear and gentle. I wonder if that agents learn that skill because they never really want to give anyone a hard no. What if Julie Taymor suddenly decided to put my Medusa on at the National Theatre with a million dollar salary? Would my muse be interested then? She might. Or at least there might be another conversation to be had.
So weirdly, I find myself wishing other rejectors could be more like an actor’s agent. Reject us like you might have to make a million dollar deal with us next time – because you just never know.
Meanwhile, here I am watching my last real hope for this play float away. I know it makes no sense to set a bubble of hope on an actor’s interest but it was literally the only idea I had for the future of this play. I can’t produce it myself. It’s too big for the resources I can gather. It’s not the kind of show you can do at your local community playhouse.
So…this particular rejection hit me hard – even though I knew it was a long shot. It was the longest shot. And it’s going to take some time to gather the strength to build another rocket – or even just a wagon. It’s going to take some time to reassemble some hope. Maybe it’ll be another ten years. Or maybe never at all.
*Wondering why I’m telling you about rejections? Read my initial post about this here and my patron’s idea about that here.
This post was brought to you by my generous patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
You can find the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: Rejections | Tags: Accidental Rejection, playwright, rejection, residency, songwriter, woman, women
FEWW – The Leah Blackburn
I don’t know what to tell you about this award. I apply every year – because I am a woman and a playwright. But so does every other woman in the country. So…nope!
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Woman Arts
I submitted a song to the Woman Arts song contest. They were looking for a song to celebrate women and the current moment and my song was really more angry than celebrating so I’m not surprised I did not win.
But this is my first music based rejection in a while!
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Millay Rejection – always – again. Rejected again.
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In theory, the Women’s Project should be just the right situation for me. In practice, I’ve rarely been a fan of the work I’ve seen them do. I thought maybe the tide was turning when I saw one of my favorite artists there – someone they supported in a way she’d never been supported before. They produced a whole new work of hers there. I saw it twice.
So I thought – maybe it’s a whole new aesthetic now – maybe it’s worth applying for their thing – maybe, if they got Monica Bill Barnes, they’ll get me, too.
But they didn’t. Or don’t. Or I don’t know.
Anyway – it may, in fact, be business as usual over there. I’m pretty sure they also rejected another kick-ass feminist playwright I know – so it could be that they’re still pretty status quo-y over there.
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In other rejection news, I applied for this kind of intense residency in Tulsa. I didn’t particularly LONG to move to Tulsa for an extended period – but I do long for extended support and recognition so I would have been delighted to get it.
But apparently 700 other people also would have been delighted to get it because 700 people applied. We could all start a new town with that amount of people.
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Accidental Preemptory Rejection
Before I submitted my Comedy of Errors play to American Shakespeare Company for the Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries project, I went to their website, saw a whole different set of plays for the project and I promptly flipped out. I thought I’d missed the deadline for the Comedy of Errors play and I was distraught. So I started a Midsummer Night’s Dream play – because – a – I don’t know. I’m a sucker for punishment?
Anyway – I realized soon enough that I hadn’t missed the deadline for Comedy of Errors plays. I’d just stumbled upon the next round. So once I’d finished the Errors play (and various other projects) I returned to the Midsummer one. I was pushing my luck – but I figured I could do one last push before the deadline on August 5th. That was before I got on the website on August 1st and discovered that the deadline was actually August 1st. And the amount of work the play still needed was way way more than I could do in a couple of hours. And so I missed that deadline and wrote (most of) that Midsummer sequel in vain. I’ll still finish it – because you never know. But it is a bummer. I’m not sure how I got that deadline so wrong. But I did. Alas.
*Wondering why I’m telling you about rejections? Read my initial post about this here and my patron’s idea about that here.
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