wordplay The Newsletter of Young Playwrights Inc
August 2013
Congrats to the 2013 Advanced Playwriting Workshop! This spring, Young Playwrights Inc. proudly presented the 2013 Advanced Playwriting Workshop Reading Series. Over the course of seven months, the participants met weekly to do writing exercises, share and discuss their work, see Broadway shows, and ultimately rehearse and present 10 to 20 minute plays with a professional director and actors. The Reading Series showcased a wide range of genre and content, inspiring laughter and tears in the audience. Congrats to the writers on their fantastic work!
last holiday. Wit and ambivalence whirl around in this comedy about identity and relationships.
Listen by Rachel Alexandra Sobelsohn:
There may be something wrong with Neleh, and her mother Kim is struggling to get her husband to acknowledge it. Imaginative stage images drive this mature exploration of parenthood.
Untitled by Alinah Vision:
After a devastating loss, Melissa is left with the task
Generational Acceptance by Gabriella Rodriguez: of revealing a horrifying truth to her daughter. But Three generations of Puerto Rican women collide when Marta discovers her granddaughter has a boyfriend – who is too dark for the old woman’s taste. With surprising humor, this play exploraes racism, relationships, and forgiveness.
The Retrospectacle by Kalia Firester:
Joanne and Ed are having a typical night of omeletmaking and forgetfulness, until a mysterious salesman arrives with a special product: spectacles that make the wearer see the past objectively. This inventive and darkly comic play explores memory, deception, and marriage.
The Whole Package by Theresa Byrne:
In this poignant memory play, Meggie remembers her special connection with her dad, whose death leaves her struggling to find intimacy and comfort in her other relationships.
The Three Little Bears And The Young Mouse by India Kotis:
will she do it? This tragic story confronts grief in a complex mother-daughter relationship.
Andromache And Helen by Persephone Mozes:
Spare dialogue and verse poetry combine to present two noblewomen who plead their dire cases to the king. An urgent examination of relationships in a time of war, this drama builds to a chilling conclusion.
Unknown Feelings by Christaline Peters:
When President Vivian Hoffman’s daughter goes missing, she pulls out all the stops to find her – but she could never expect what she discovers. Parts family drama and parts madcap comedy build to a thriller spanning several continents.
Weekend Boy by Allison Snyder:
After Kara breaks up with Ben, she goes into a spiral of self-doubt and self-destruction, bringing along her best friend and her mom. Hilarity, insights, and heartache mix to explore intimacy and vulnerability.
After her estranged brother goes into a coma, Anna must make a crucial decision with his wife Maxine, who she barely knows. This moving and subtly poetic drama explores the processes of saying goodbye and healing.
All The World’s A Stage by Alexander Orandello:
The Not-Lesbians by Travis Amiel:
To apply for the 2014 APW, visit: www.youngplaywrights.org/advanced-playwritingworkshop
Ollie is transitioning from female to male – but now his ex- girlfriend wants him to be a girl again for one
Dr. Lawrence vows to avenge his prodigies, who were driven mad by a client with a particularly theatrical ailment. This meta-theatrical comedy questions the nature of performance and audience.
Playwriting as a Team Sport: My Experience in the Advanced Playwriting Workshop By Allison Snyder I have never been good at sports. However, I’ve always wanted to be on a team. The way teammates collaborate, support, challenge and love each other inspires me. Writing can be an isolating sport. However, participating in the Advanced Playwriting workshop this year gave me the chance to be on a team. Nick Gandiello and Kenny Finkle became my coaches. Classes on Tuesdays were “practice,” the other writers were my “teammates,” and our staged readings were the “big game.” Week after week my classmates and I continued to practice and our writing muscles got stronger. Witnessing the growth and evolution of my classmates’ work was exciting and enlightening. The Advanced Playwriting Workshop made me write because it had deadlines. This forced me to stop thinking about writing and actually start writing. Once I had written something, APW gave me feedback, support and insights, which stretched and improved my work. I was able to write freely and take risks because I had the safety net of being in an understanding and encouraging environment. And the learning process didn’t stop at the writing. A play is different from a novel or a short story in that it is meant to be performed. APW recognizes that and gave my writing an audience. The Advanced Playwriting workshop walked me through the entire process. From staring at a blank word document to creating characters to watching actors bring those characters to life, APW helped me make something out of nothing. It showed me the importance of teamwork and the power that theater has to break boundaries and help people connect. Allison’s play Weekend Boy, developed in the Advanced Playwriting Workshop, was a winner of the Write a Play! New York City Competition.
Save the Date! Coming Soon from Young Playwrights Inc. . . .
September 19 Advanced Playwriting Workshop Application Deadline for New Participants January 2 National Playwriting Competition Postmark Deadline January 13-16 Young Playwrights Conference Reading Series March 1 Write A Play! NYC Competition Postmark Deadline March 1 Urban Retreat Early Bird Application Postmark Deadline April/May Advanced Playwriting Workshop Reading Series May 1 Urban Retreat Final Application Postmark Deadline May National Competition Evaluations Mailed June Write A Play! NYC Competition Awards Ceremony
Learning From Rehearsals Nick Gandiello Interviews Max Posner The German word that most closely translates to the English “rehearsal” is “probe.” I like that: it implies an exploration – a search – rather than a series of repetitions. I got a chance to catch up with one of our alumni, Max Posner, and asked him about his experiences learning from work with directors and actors. From letting a character hold a play hostage to exploding juice boxes, he had a lot of wonderful things to say! Describe a moment/process in which actors, a director, or other collaborators helped illuminate or raise important questions about - a piece of your writing. In my play Snore, there is a character who comes on near the end of the play, and she only has one scene. The play is focused on this loud group of young people, and suddenly, near the end, there’s a middle aged woman holding court. This was confusing for many people (including me). It felt like the play diverted in a very strange way, and was taken hostage by this outside force. We did a workshop of the play last spring, and Didi O’Connell played the role. Didi somehow understood that her holding the play hostage provided a completely necessary relief from the people we had been spending time with. Instead of spending time eliminating her role, or making it fit, she made me realize that her purpose was not to fit, but to crack the play open and allow a new kind of perspective on what we had been trapped with thus far. An actor who gets it can show you what you didn’t realize you meant. I didn’t have the words to explain why she was in the play until Didi did it, and became the whole play. Describe a challenge you faced in rehearsal and how addressing it helped the play. I am going to respond to this one with a general thought about a break through I’ve had on how to be a playwright in a room with others (for me). Often, I write plays that occur at a slightly different pace than conversations in real life. I’m often writing characters who speak at a kind of mental speed, as if their brains were directly wired to their mouths and the audience could hear them as they sort through all the junk and excess to communicate. Sometimes, this kind of writing is not completely natural to an actor, or to a rehearsal process. Part of
working on my plays involved un-learning a handful of skills about how people behave, and allowing for alternate logics to take hold. When I first began working with actors and directors, I didn’t really know how to describe this myself, and I was shy to speak in rehearsal room. It’s odd being a playwright in certain rooms. Either you’re not sharing your honest opinions, or you’re inserting yourself into other people’s creative processes. I’ve come to realize that the goal is not to get along with everyone, the goal is not for everything to be smooth in process. I drive myself insane when I’m writing a play alone, because I am working through the nooks and the crannies, I am experiencing necessary frustration. Why shouldn’t a rehearsal process invite similar sorts of honesty and difficulty? When I realized that my job was to communicate with directors very openly, to express my uncertainties and to listen to theirs, things became much more interesting and involved. The goal is not for everything to be smooth, the goal is for the play to become fully textured and visceral to all involved (and it doesn’t have to be the same for each collaborator).
Describe a spontaneous or seemingly random event in rehearsal that ended up informing something in your writing. In my play The Famished, there’s a guy who is always devouring the leftovers in the office fridge, food that belonged to employees who were fired. When we did the play in Providence, we had various food items, and my friend Sam really went to town. He threw a grape 20 feet into the air and caught it in his mouth, then walked offstage with a straight face. When his character exploded in a climactic, stuttered outburst, he was holding a juicebox. In the heat of the moment, his fist squeezed around the box. Juice exploded all the way to the grid (like a geyser in Yellowstone). He clutched the box until the juice ran out, and we all knew his character was over as soon as the juice was gone. This made us laugh, of course. But then, we all sort of paused, and realized that these accidents were the soul of the play and of this man. They give physical expression to his frightening levels of bravado and desperation. They punctuated a world that was primarily driven by the aural rhythms of language. They were totally absurd, but also made us aware that we were all sitting in a room together, trying to walk out without juice on our jackets. Max Posner’s play The War on Safety was a winner of Young Playwrights Inc.’s 2007 National Playwriting Competition. His plays have been staged and developed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Page 73, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Clubbed Thumb, The Hangar Theatre, Curious Theatre Company and Production Workshop. Max was the 2012 P73 Playwriting Fellow. He is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and received the Weston Award for playwriting and the Heideman Award from Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. Max is a member of the Soho Rep. Writer/Director Lab and Ars Nova’s Playgroup. He is working on a commission from South Coast Rep. A graduate of Brown University, he studied with Erik Ehn, Lisa D’Amour and Paula Vogel. Max was born and raised in Denver and lives in Brooklyn. Young Playwrights Inc. sends best wishes to former Associate Director Amanda Junco, who is now on the marketing staff at Second Stage Theatre. We’ll miss her unique presence in our office, but look forward to continuing to work with the talented Ms. Junco as a director and mentor.
On the Future What a year this has been! We invited the first audiences into our new home for the readings of works by 14 members of our Advanced Playwriting Workshop. We saw two of our alums (Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin, nominees for Beasts of the Southern Wild) at the Academy Awards. We evaluated over 700 plays by writers eighteen and younger and selected seven writers who will continue to work on their plays with professional directors, dramaturgs, and actors in the Young Playwrights Conference in January 2014. And 1993 alum Carter Bays (cocreator of How I Met Your Mother) was elected to the Board of Directors. It has been a thrilling twelve months. This excitement comes from our unique position in the field – a professional theater for playwrights aged 18 and younger that rejects the misperception of young people as makers of ‘student art’. Instead, Young Playwrights Inc. provides the best possible first professional theater experience and offers a safe place – one where they are free to speak and to be heard – for new playwrights to find their voices. As a result, we have the privilege of discovering and supporting talented playwrights at the very beginning of their careers, sometimes before they even know that there is a career to be had. We then have the incredible joy of watching them go off and continue to create new work at other venues – every year showing a bit more of what alum Madeleine George refers to as slow world domination by Young Playwrights Inc. writers. We see our playwrights’ names – Janet Allard, Zakiyyah Alexander, Clarence Coo, Kit Steinkellner, Caroline V. McGraw – regularly in press releases issued by new play development projects around the country, and many of them have become mainstays at New York and regional theaters – Jonathan Marc Sherman, Rebecca Gilman, Kate Moira Ryan, Kenneth Lonergan, Noah Haidle, Jerome Hairston… and the list goes on. For the last three decades, Young Playwrights Inc. has been a sanctuary and creative home for thousands of young theater artists – a place where America’s newest playwrights are found and nurtured, where experienced directors, designers, and actors are reminded of the delight they felt when they first discovered the theater, and where a new generation is introduced to the art form at its best. Thank you for being part of the Young Playwrights Inc. family – we hope you share our excitement. Sheri Goldhirsch, Artistic Director
Statistics from the 2013 National Playwriting Competition! By Aliza Goldstein
January is a really magical time around the Young Playwrights Inc. office. Instead of the usual stack of utility bills , catalogs, and generous gifts from our donors, our mailbox starts to burst at the seams with envelope after envelope full of plays! Once everything was sorted and logged, we counted up 694 plays entered into our National Playwriting Competition. So, while our winners won’t be notified for a few more weeks, let’s count down some of the facts about this year’s competition!
We’d love to start seeing plays from playwrights in Maine, Vermont, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Alaska, and Hawaii! We know there are budding writers out there with some fascinating stories to tell so step up and send them in!
• This year, we received plays from 33 states and the District of Columbia, as well as from students on Osun Air Force Base in South Korea! Military families represent!
• The youngest entrant to this year’s competition was six years old when she submitted her play. So adorable!
• Playwrights submitted from Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin! • New York playwrights submitted 360 plays, the most of any state. Woot! • The states with the next highest three turnouts were Texas (36 plays), Virginia (32 plays), and Illinois and New Jersey (25 plays each). Nice work guys! • We’d like to make a special shout out to the lone playwrights from Wisconsin and Kansas for putting their states on the map! Keep them coming! • Compared to the 2012 competition when we received 528 plays, we received 166 more plays this year! Oof!
Moving on to facts about the playwrights themselves, you might be interested to know that:
• The birth year with the most entrants in this year’s competition is 1995 – 111 playwrights were born that year – was there something creative in the water? • In freak occurrence news: The oldest entrant and the youngest entrant in this year’s competition have the same birthday – January 11th – but twelve years apart, in 1994 and 2006 respectively. Weird, huh? • Roughly two-thirds of the playwrights who entered the competition were girls and onethird were boys. Thank you to everyone who submitted to the 2013 Young Playwrights Inc. National Playwriting Competition and helped make this year such a great success! We were hugely impressed by the talent demonstrated in the plays we received, and you’ll all be receiving your evaluations very soon! All of you are well on your ways to being fantastic playwrights. Next year’s deadline is January 2nd, 2014 – it’s never too early to start working on your next play!
Alumni Spotlight Caroline V. McGraw’s plays have been developed and produced all around the country, including Washington Ensemble Theater, the JAW Festival at Portland Center Stage, Naked Angels, and Rattlestick Playwright’s Theater. A recent alumna of the Yale School of Drama’s MFA playwriting program, she is the 2013 Page 73 Playwriting Fellow. www. carolinevmcgraw.com My play Trade was produced by Young Playwrights in their Festival in 2002, after winning one of the spots in the 2001 National Competition. I can say without hyperbole that this was one of the highlights of my life, and I don’t think anything is gonna knock it off its pedestal in my heart. The auditions, rehearsals, and run of the play are a pleasant whirlwind in my memory, but the moment in the process that sticks out is a conversation I had with Ruth McKee, the thenliterary manager (and current fantastic playwright). I had submitted a play called The Yeah Stereotype to the National Festival the year before I submitted Trade, and although it was not a winner, it was in the top 25. Ruth mentioned to me that David Henry Hwang, one of the judges, had loved that play, and, when I submitted Trade, talked about it again during finalist deliberations. You could have poured me into a juice glass. It wasn’t just that David Henry Hwang was a writer I was actually assigned to read in my undergrad courses. It was a sharp sense of having been heard, of having a conversation with someone before clapping eyes or ears on them. From then, I was keenly aware that I wasn’t writing for myself, or by myself. I was building two-way relationships with readers, directors, actors, and audiences, across time and geography. This year marks the fifteenth year I’ve been writing plays; that’s exactly half my life. For twelve of those years, I’ve had the support of Young Playwrights behind me. (Make no mistake, once a Young Playwrights playwright, always a Young Playwrights playwright.) Anniversaries that end in 0s or 5s often prompt contemplation, and I’ve never thought it’s a bad idea to reassess exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing, living where you’re living, why you love the people you love. When I tell people I’m a playwright (what an old fashioned sounding profession! I might as well be a chimney sweep!), they sometimes ask, simply, why? They mean, why...was I drawn to it, but simply why? is as good a question as any.
And the answer that I sometimes give, or abbreviate, is that I have to. It’s a compulsion. Like most compulsions, it is not pretty. Actually writing, the act itself, is very unpleasant. This is something I tell my students when I teach, and they often look very relieved; they thought it was just them. Your friends and family might think writing is fun and romantic, a gentle flow of creative energy that lends the skin a soft glow of external, palpable wisdom. In reality it feels like trying to breath underwater. I feel the same way about people who say they love writing as I do people who say they love going to the gym. They might not be lying, but they probably are. The reason I’m a playwright, why I’ve spent the last fifteen years making up people and things for them to say, is because the real fun starts after you write. That’s when the opportunity to listen, and be heard, begins. Plays are maps, and the workshops, readings, rehearsals, and productions are the journey. And as you go on in your career, you will start to meet people who have read your plays without you knowing, who you have had a conversation with and not left your house. This is exciting and a little uncomfortable. Young Playwrights Inc. greeted me practically on my arrival to New York, and I still feel a sense of calm and safety when I walk into the office. I have a few artistic homes, but Young Playwrights is the one that has known me the longest. I’m pretty sure they even have embarrassing photos of me, just like my homehome. Nothing makes me happier than knowing they are here, continuing to give young (and not-quite-asyoung-anymore) writers permission to be heard.
Happenings Lucy Alibar (YPF01) was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of Beasts of the Southern Wild, adapted from her play Juicy and Delicious. Her collaborator Benh Zeitlin (UR99) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for his work on the film. Josh Brown (YPC11) will produce his original play Monstrous in the fall, in collaboration with the NYU Drama Department. He is currently a seniors in NYU’s BFA Dramatic Writing program. Gina Femia’s (APW03)play Searching for Her advanced through three rounds of the Horse & Cart Play Offs and was voted Best in Show. Madeleine George (YPF93&94) will receive a production of her play The (Curious Case of The) Watson Intelligence at Playwrights Horizons, running from November 17th to December 29th. Aliza Goldstein (YPC10) graduated from NYU’S Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Dramatic Writing. Stephen Karam’s (YPC99) play Sons of the Prophet was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; the play also won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Danny Rothschild’s (YPC10) play The Empty Man was a winner of The Blank Theater’s Young Playwrights Festival and was produced in L.A. Halley Feiffer (YPF03) is performing in Atlantic Theater Company’s production of Ethan Coen’s Women Or Nothing. Previews begin August 18th and performances will run until October 6th. Lauren Gunderson’s (YPC02) play I and You will make its world premiere at Marin Theater Company, running from October 10th to November 3rd, 2013. Isaac Oliver (UR01) brought his show Intimacy Idiot to Single Carrot on Charles in Baltimore, MD. Intimacy Idiot will return to Ars Nova in NYC on September 6th and 7th. Michael Perlman (UR00) directed Creede Repertory Theatre’s production of Steven Levenson’s The Language of Trees. Earlier in the year, From White Plains, which Michael developed with Fault Line Theatre and directed, won a GLAAD Media Award for best New York Theatre: Off-Off Broadway. Deborah Yarchun (YPF06) was selected as one of The Playwrights’ Center’s 2013 Jerome Fellows; she will receive a year-long residency in Minnesota including workshops with professional dramaturgs, directors, and actors. Wondering what those codes mean? The numbers at the end are the year they participated in the program. Here’s a cheat-sheet: YPF: Young Playwrights Festival YPC: Young Playwrights Conference (formerly Writers Conference) APW: Advanced Playwriting Workshop UR: Urban Retreat
STAFF SHERI M. GOLDHIRSCH ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
NICK GANDIELLO LITERARY MANAGER WORDPLAY EDITOR
BOARD OF DIRECTORS STEPHEN SONDHEIM FOUNDER DAVID HENRY HWANG PRESIDENT CARTER BAYS TREASURER SHERI M. GOLDHIRSCH MURRAY HORWITZ JOHN MCNAMARA BARBARA WALLNER
Can’t place the playwright with the play? Visit the alumni section of our website for a full list of participants and their plays. www.youngplaywrights.org