SHAZAM!

Adam Szymkowicz has posted 300 interviews with playwrights, but this may be the best one yet: Anna Moench. Her advice: 

Get a news site to email you all the articles about some random country every day for a year. Become an armchair expert on something. It will probably start to show in your writing. Or even better, you may end up at some horrible party where some insufferable person is talking out of their ass about North Korea or whatever and you can be like "SHAZAM! I know everything there is to know about North Korea, fool!" That has never happened to me, but I haven't given up hope.

write about big things

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Write all the time. Write about big things. A hundred years from now no one will give a damn about conversations you overheard about the 7 train in New York City. 


—Adam Szymokowicz interviews Carnegie Mellon alum James McManus (includes shout-out to 13P member Lucy Thurber) 

In which I propose a moratorium.

Followers of this blog know that I consider Adam Szymkowicz's blog essential reading. However, reading an interview with a different playwright every single day, answering generally the same questions, makes we wonder about the question "What kind of theatre excites you?" It seems many of the interviewees (smart writers, all of them!) feel their answer must include some variation on "I get bored by plays that are just TV dramas or sitcoms put on stage."

Is it time for a moratorium on this particular complaint? Better: let it be allowed, but only if the speaker is willing to name names. Who are these evil playwrights shrinking our stages into TV screens? Let us out them and destroy them!

Dan LeFranc vs. works of modest creativity, ambition, and temperament

via Adam's blog:

I’m not interested in imagination for imagination’s sake—I’m interested in the way it relates to our most visceral needs and desires. Imagination with blood, sweat, tears, heart, humor, and teeth. Not the whimsical variety. The Hamlet variety. The Fefu and Her Friends, Buried Child, Glass Menagerie variety.

Quite frankly, imagination of this kind is at a premium in the American theater. Works of powerful imaginative and visceral force are often dismissed in favor of the comfortable and familiar—works of modest creativity, ambition, and temperament.

Actor, meet playwright.

For actors who are wondering how prepare auditions for new plays and looking to build relationships with new playwrights, Packawallop Productions offers a one-day workshop.

How to be Brett Neveu

Via Adam's blog. I admire Brett's work and his seriousness; all the more so because I knew him before he was serious.

Q:  What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A:  Self produce. That's pretty much how I started. In the back of a bar with a suitcase full of puppets or working with an actor friend using a slide projector for lights and then playing to three or four people. I didn't wait until somebody would eventually produce a full-length play. I wrote something small. Something shoe-string producible and did it myself. Then I saw shows at theatres (as well as sent out press releases) and invited folks to come.

So, I guess to distill my advice: do shows and see shows and let people know you exist. Make an audience and meet a community. Do both and do good.

Peter Parnell on writing for TV: "These are not necessarily bad things."

From Adam's always essential blog.

Q:  Besides having plays on and off Broadway and in large regional theaters, you have worked extensively in TV drama. How does one navigate between the two worlds and how do you find time to do both?

A:  When I was starting out as a playwright, there was still a bit of a stigma attached to writing for TV. I didn’t actually work on a TV script until Aaron Sorkin and John Wells invited me to be a part of The West Wing in 1999. By that time, more and more playwrights were becoming involved in both being on staff and in writing pilots. Now, I think we’ve entered a kind of new golden age in writing for TV, and cable shows especially are finding provocative, exciting ways to tell stories. And it’s important for a playwright to learn the techniques of TV writing, if only to make a living while you’re working on your next play. I find the forms quite different, but that may be more because of the kinds of plays I write. Writing for TV is a job, and highly collaborative, and you’re often not the final arbiter of what gets on the screen (including your credit). But, you learn how to work quickly when you need to, and how to solve creative problems quickly, and you can get paid nicely for your time. These are not necessarily bad things.

Madeleine George's "Precious Little" coming to Pittsburgh's City Theatre

Our final three plays represent bold new work by some of the hottest talents of the American stage" says Tracy Brigden, City Theatre's artistic director.

City Theatre fills final open slots in 2010-11 season

madeleinegeorge.com

Madeleine on Adam's blog