How do you write a good 10-minute play?

Ten-minute plays are popular these days for basic economic reasons: they are relatively cheap to produce and if you do an evening of 10-minute plays you can count on a decent attendance because most writers will invite friends and family.

But that doesn't mean a ten-minute play can't be a great work of art. I will admit I've sat through 10-minute plays that felt like an hour. But why were they bad? What went wrong? Or more importantly, for the plays that do work - what went right?

Here is a guideline I first created for a show of 10-minute plays I produced in 2008 called 10 Min Playfest

* Does the play pull me in right away?
There are only 10 minutes - the play has to pull you in right from the start.

* Does the play surprise me?
If the play is about something I've heard a hundred times already, I'll be bored. Or if it unfolds in predictable ways, I will be bored.

* Does the play make me laugh or well up? Or both?
Art must have an emotional impact.

* Does the play have a dramatic struggle?
People sitting around bickering is not a dramatic struggle. So many people don't seem to understand that.

* Does the play have vivid characters in compelling situations?
People sitting around bickering is not a compelling situation. Especially if the characters are called "man" and "woman." If the playwright can't be bothered to come up with a name for a character, it's usually a sign that the character is as generic as the label. This is especially true of a 10-minute play where you really don't have time for generic supporting characters.

* Does the play show more than tell? "Show, don't tell" has been said a million times and yet maybe about 20% of all the people who write plays - including lionized, famous playwrights - seem to get this.

* Does the play blow my mind through sheer funky originality?
This is the Holy Grail of ten-minute plays. I've seen only a handful of ten-minute plays that have blown my mind.

Here are three 10-minute plays that I believe work very well:

* ALMOST WATERSHEDS by Micharne Cloughley
* LOVERBOY by Michael Jalbert
* SINGERS by Thom Weidlich

more...

After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all

Wow, interesting...

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.

more...

Lascivious yammering

I recently saw the first half of Sheila Callaghan’s play LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING. Luckily it was a comp - I was so bored by intermission I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting through any more of it, so I left. Why was I so bored? Because there was so much yakking about what the characters (or other people) did some other time, somewhere else. Those sounded like interesting times, I would have liked to have seen those times and places enacted. Instead what I saw on stage was a bunch of people mostly sitting around in a kitchen telling tales.

I was told by somebody who sat through the entire thing that I missed the best part – when Boy (actually a girl) plays a young August (the man in the play – an actual man), writing and editing aloud for the audience, his last letter to his mother.

Oh joy, watching somebody write AND edit a letter on stage. And this was a highlight. I guess the author wanted to mix things up a little - instead of yet another long-winded remembrance of things past - "did I ever tell you about the last letter I wrote to my mother?" - she has somebody else play somebody writing a letter - in the past - to a character not actually in the play. Ooh how cleverly distancing. As if the play needed any more distancing.

I’m not saying that an intrinsically undramatic scenario can never be made to work – I am a fan of the film “My Dinner with Andre” - but it’s pretty rare. Maybe if one of your characters is as personally fascinating as Andre Gregory – but none of the characters in LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING was that. They were mostly irritatingly inscrutable.

The NYTimes review says:

Ms. Callaghan spends an inordinate amount of time having Liza and August dance around each other and around August's pregnant young wife, Daphne, a willowy Greek beauty played with cool charisma by Elisabeth Waterston. Throwing in the married couple's psychosexual games with an androgynous teenager (Ronete Levenson) does little to clarify the relationship dynamics.

But if Callaghan didn't have the (utterly enervating) psychosexual games going on, then even the clueless people who like this play might realize how talky-talky and dull it actually is.

I was pretty disappointed in Callaghan - after the reviews I read about Callaghan's THAT PRETTY PRETTY I was very interested in her possibly pushing back against the angry young man play trope that has taken over NY theater. Well... maybe her next play. After all, if critics can give Adam Rapp many many chances (as I wrote about) why shouldn't Callaghan get them too?

Speaking of "My Dinner with Andre" it turns out the entire movie is available on YouTube.

Here is part one:

grown-up Pippi?

Very interesting piece in the NYTimes:

An old colleague of Mr. Larsson’s has said they once talked about how certain characters from children’s books would manage and behave if they were older. Mr. Larsson especially liked the idea of a grown-up Pippi, a dysfunctional girl, probably with attention deficit disorder, who would have had a hard time finding a place in society but would nonetheless take a firm hand in directing her own destiny. That musing led to the creation of Lisbeth Salander, the central character in Mr. Larsson’s trilogy.

I relate to this because one of the three plays I'm currently working on, CELIA, has a character that is my idea of what Tom Sawyer might be like when he grew up - and fell in love with his uncle's slave.

I always loved Pippi Longstocking - she was a fun super hero for girls long before the Power Puff Girls.

You gotta love the PPG theme song:



Fighting crime, trying to save the world, here they come just in time, the Power Puff Girls.

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie

Well it turns out that today is Mousiepalooza - an actual mouse got into my apartment and both cats were ecstatic. Neither of them has seen a mouse in at least 5 years.

I'm very happy it's gone since I did not look forward to the prospect of cleaning up mousie guts. Although they seemed to look at it as a toy rather than food. Mr. Fuzz kept catching it and carrying it around like a kitten, and then letting it go so they could chase it some more. Willow might have seen a mouse in her youth since she was semi-feral. Mr. Fuzz has never seen one I bet - the closest he's ever gotten to a mouse are the real-fur mousie toys that he always wants to play with.

This real mouse event might well be the happiest day of Mr. Fuzz's life. The most real prey he's gotten in the past is the occasional fly.

But nothing gold can stay, as I told Mr. Fuzz - I finally had to trap the mousie and let it go outside - I didn't have the heart to watch the cats kill it or even (gasp) kill it myself. I blame Robert Burns:

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

And that cranreuch cauld is a bitch!

Burns was quite a babe, and a ladies man - they were all about Burns at the Edinburgh Writers Museum which I visited a few years ago. You can see a plaque on Google maps right near the museum (between the Cashmere Factory Outlet and Heritage of Scotland on Haymarket St.) which reads:

In a House
on the East side of this Close
ROBERT BURNS
lived during his first visit
to Edinburgh 1780

Here is the cutie Robbie Burns



They were also big on Robert Louis Stevenson at the Writers Museum - here he is:



I know an actor who could totally play Stevenson if they made a movie about him. Pretty uncanny.

the pointlessness of Cringefest

Does anybody besides me find the concept of Cringefest utterly unnecessary? It bills itself as a festival of Bad Plays, Bad Musicals and Bad Films.

It is totally unnecessary because not only do bad plays get rave reviews all the time - they actually win awards! A play I saw a year or so ago, about zombies and women having hot flashes was a mess. So of course it won an IT Award.

Off-off Broadway is the worst for this kind of thing, but even Broadway is not immune - the 2003 Pulitzer went to ANNA IN THE TROPICS, a completely mediocre work.

No, with all the sincere garbage out there, I see no point at all in ironic garbage.

Buddy & Julia

The script is done and ready to go!

Steampunk and steamboats

One of the best aspects of Steampunk in my opinion, is that it encourages men to dress up in adorable quasi-Victorian clothing. I've been looking for an image to give to the costume designer for the production of my play CELIA - and I'm thinking waaaay in advance since I haven't finished writing the play yet but I don't care cause it's fun - as a model for the clothing style for the handsome young gentleman, Tom, in my play. I couldn't find anything very good until I stumbled on this excellent Steampunk Fashion site and found a whole page of men's fashions. And this is just about the perfect look for Tom:



Mmm. come to mama!

I see that Gentleman's Emporium, a web site I blogged about a couple of years ago, has branched out into Steampunk fashions.

Sam Clemens looks rather dapper in this photo taken around the same time that CELIA is set.


But his brother Henry was the real cutie of the family:



Poor Henry died from a steamboat explosion. Sam Clemens made the news, long before he was famous, in a description of his grief:

We witnessed one of the most affecting scenes at the Exchange yesterday that has ever been seen. The brother of Mr. Henry Clemens, second clerk of the Pennsylvania... arrived in the city yesterday afternoon, on the steamer A. T. Lacy. He hurried to the Exchange to see his brother, and on approaching the bedside of the wounded man, his feelings so much overcame him, at the scalded and emaciated form before him, that he sunk to the floor overpowered. There was scarcely a dry eye in the house; the poor sufferers shed tears at the sight. This brother had been pilot on the Pennsylvania, but fortunately for him, had remained in New Orleans when the boat started up.

Clemens wrote to his sister-in-law:

Long before this reaches you, my poor Henry, - my darling, my pride, my glory, my all, will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness. O, God! this is hard to bear...

MoDo rides again

I used to have much more to say about NYTimes op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd - part of my focus was on the fact that she was the only women op-ed columinst for the NYTimes out of 9 - but they got Gail Collins. And 2 women out of 9 is what passes for gender parity in a world still run by men.

So I slacked off the MoDo beat but could not help but notice her annoying ways today, when I saw her proclaim in her column:

Men, generally more favored by nature as they age, can be single at all ages.

Now you can understand why the old men who run things would favor the "it's nature" argument about the way our society runs, but you'd think MoDo would be less eager to promote such a view. But then again, I've always maintained that she got and keeps her job by sucking up to the old men who run the NYTimes, so it's not surprising that she would support their views.

That men are favored "by nature" as they age is such an obvious lie - unless you consider baldness to be a sign of nature's favor.

Viagra was not invented by "nature."

The fact that there was a double standard that said men could get with much younger women, but women could not get with much younger men is not the result of "nature" - it's the result of men running things to suit themselves. Only in the past 50 years have women even begun to get and keep their own money (and that's only in some parts of the world - in other parts of the world little girls are still sold in marriage to old men.)

Prior to the 1960s most women could not get work that paid well enough to support themselves, much less a husband too. Until the law changed the custom in which jobs were segregated by gender women had extremely limited career options. Limited career options was not the work of "nature."

The fact that women are increasingly LESS dependent on men and as a result of legal changes, and are choosing younger men more and more is not the result of an amazing 50-year evolutionary phenomenon - it's the economy, stupid!

MoDo is obsessed with women having it all - she thinks women can't have it all by "nature" which is why she always found Hillary Clinton to be so galling - Hillary was married to the POTUS - and IMO a pretty damn sexy guy - and yet still had a career as a lawyer - and now she's Secretary of State. This goes completely against MoDo's incredibly blinkered regressive unimaginative concept of how the world should be - or rather how things are in "nature."

But MoDo's new Kagan obsession proves that in MoDo's world, no woman can win. If you are like Hillary, she hates and envies you - if you are single like Kagan she has an op-ed pity party for your spinsterhood.

Aphrodisiac

Although Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" is their greatest song (and one of my favorite songs of all time) "Aphrodisiac" is great too. And it's so nice to see those styling punked out guys after spending a day with the financial services blueshirts.

Why do they dress so drab and conformist-like, those financial services men? My theory - they think if they look too stylish or interesting it will scare the money away.



But check it out - all these years I thought "I Want Candy" was a Bow Wow Wow original - but no, it was recorded by The Strangeloves in 1965. Watch them perform it - groovy.

putting aside for a moment the question of why a woman would choose to go to a strip club for her birthday...

Although the experience seems to have been so wrenching I doubt she'll do it again:

I told my boyfriend I wanted him to buy me a lap dance, and he obliged. I “picked” my candidate, although I don’t remember deliberating very much. She was young, young, young, couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20. And she was sweet, or she acted it. The lap dance was bizarre–I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t know why I thought I would. It seemed so strange to be just sitting there, doing nothing, while this person rubbed her body all over me. This young woman was gorgeous. She had long straight hair. Her makeup was perfectly applied. She was thin and looked like she worked out a lot. Her skin was incredibly soft. She smelled amazing. She made jokes and was complimentary to me.

When she was done, I asked her how much I owed. She smiled sweetly and said “Oh, it’s 10 dollars.”

I felt like I had been punched in the gut.

Later, as I cried my eyes out on the couch in my apartment and my boyfriend soothed me, I tried to make sense of it. Here was this incredibly beautiful woman, who did everything, everything that a woman was supposed to do to make herself appealing to men. She was thin, she was compliant, she was beautiful, she spent probably hours every day shaving and lotioning and applying makeup and picking out clothes and pouring what was surely substantial cashflow into maintaining her appearance. She was, in a word, perfect. And then, this perfect woman would go to work, and rub her impeccably maintained and beautiful body all over any patron, at his or her request, no matter whether she liked the person or not, for TEN FUCKING DOLLARS? I mean, TEN DOLLARS? Less than I would spend on a pair of shoes. Less than I would spend on a motherfucking hamburger.

I was able to buy access to this woman’s body and (very convincing) pretend affections for less than I would spend picking up a couple of last-minute things at the grocery store. It was worth almost nothing. Less than an oil change. Less than someone cutting my hair. Less than getting a decent tailor to hem a pair of pants. Less than a bouquet of roses.

And that’s the day that I realized we were all the victims of a sick joke. A despicable charade where so much is demanded of women, so much compliance and poking and prodding, so much effort to make ourselves beautiful and radiant and perfect, so much forcing of square pegs into round holes, just so we could meet it all, do it all, get close to the apex of perfection and still be worth nothing.

And she doesn't even know about the women actors out there who get naked for the gratification of creepy misogynist middle-aged douchebag filmmakers for abso-fucking-lutely free. She'd cry a goddam river over that.

oh these classy young men

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From Belle to Outlaw

My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst

Growing up in New England, I’d known about her life, or the romantic version of it — how she was a recluse, how she dressed in white — for years. And I’d read many of her nearly 1,800 poems. I was a bookish, verse-writing odd-fit kid with authority issues, looking for a hero. By a hero I mean someone you admire but, more than that, identify with and somehow want to be. In Dickinson I found what I was after. So it was a big experience for me to go to that house that day, and be where she had been.

As I’ve since learned, she’s a hero, or an object of fascination, to many people, which is why she periodically takes a star turn in culture, as she is doing now. She’s the subject of two books, a novel titled “The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson,” by Jerome Charyn, and a new biography by Lyndall Gordon, called “Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds,” due out next month. And through June 13 the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx has an elaborate exhibition devoted to her, with a re-creation of her Homestead garden, a selection of handwritten manuscripts and a marathon reading of her poems.

Google Maps tourism - Haworth

It's fun sometimes to tour around various places in the world via Google Maps, especially if you can't afford to actually travel anywhere. I decided to have a look at Haworth, where the Bronte sisters were from.

Although the Bronte Parsonage Museum is on the map, the Google photo truck did not go down Church Lane past the museum, so the best you can do is peek down Church Lane from the corner of Church and West.



That electric blue shape in the front of the photo is the cab of a truck. Modern cars look so out of place in these tiny quaint English towns. Here is The Black Bull, where Bramwell Bronte used to get his drink on.



There isn't huge amounts of Bronte references in the neighborhood, but there are a few, like Ye Olde Bronte Tea Room:



The Villette Coffee House



And - I'm not sure what they sell here, Eyres 'N' Graces.

MOTHER'S DAY - the finished video

This is good - I'm on track to finish one a month - the last one will be done in July.

amoureuse

98th sonnet

You were great! beep beep beep!

The fun of making movies at random locations in the city is you never know what's going to happen - I don't mean an actor using naughty language - that's guaranteed to happen - I'm talking about the random praise from strangers.

I'm doing another monologue for the NYCPlaywrights Monologue Project - this time it's Chris Shaw Swanson's MOTHER'S DAY starring Claire Warden, fresh off her triumphant ENGAGING SHAW run.

The New Dramatists doorway sure looks like it's a church.

J & B - the next level

Photo: GB and Charlotte (not Julia and Buddy)

Wow, I had a great reading of my new play JULIA AND BUDDY tonight - I think it's just about ready to roll out - probably in the Midtown International Theater Fest.

Daniel Genalo, who did great work this weekend in my NEW RULES was Buddy and he had great chemistry with NYCPlaywrights member Claire Warden as Julia. Claire is brilliant, as the NYTimes agrees. And also her British dialect is a huge plus - Received Pronunciation is her native mode and to American ears it makes her sound smart without having to belabor the intelligence issue.

During the feedback I was told that this version of the play - which I began a year ago - is MUCH better than previous versions, and I think I know why - I tried to shove heaping helpings of Schopenhauer down the audience's throat in other versions. But it's so obviously unnecessary with Claire - with her plummy mode of speaking, she sounds smart reading from the phone book.

BRONTESAURUS!!!!

Bronte action figures - oh my god this is SO AWESOME!!!

Boomerang book-throwing action!

I sure do want some of that "barrier-breaking feminist vision" power for myself.

More at Salon.

flowers

Sometimes you just want to look at pretty flowers.

Other times you want to learn flower facts

Then sometimes you want flower power.

New Rules clip

Alex is a 3.5 on the Richter scale

New Rules cast

Such a photogenic group - and they worked their asses off to get the tricky stunts and pratfalls in NEW RULES right - kudos!

The cast: Daniel Genalo, Amanda Thickpenny, Doug Rossi and Mike Durell (kneeling)

And now a word from the president

click here

more presidential cussing - yes that is actually Obama, from his audio book.

Pulitzer Prize for Drama 1918

The first Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded in 1918 to Jesse Lynch Williams for his play WHY MARRY? which can be read online here, although you are better off just reading the synopsis here because the plot description alone makes it clear that this is a total rip-off of the work of G. B. Shaw - at least all his plays about marriage and the "New Woman."

This explains why the play is never performed anymore - why do a Shaw-wannabe when you can do the real thing? I guess since Shaw wasn't eligible for the Pulitzer, not being American, they gave it to Williams in his stead.

I googled to see if critics of the time realized the total debt Williams owed to Shaw - I only found one review snippet so far, but Lawrence Gilman definitely got it:

We wish that Mr. Jesse Lynch Williams had not seen fit to disillusion us about Bernard Shaw when introducing to New York, with a journalistic preamble, his comedy Why Marry? One can understand Mr. Williams' anxiety to make quite clear and unmistakable to us the difference between his own outlook as a dramatist and the outlook of Mr. Shaw...

Yeah, Gilman was wise to the situation. Although it's funny to read him describe Shaw as being in his autumnal years, when Shaw, by dying at age 94 in 1950 outlived by decades Williams, who died in 1929 at age 58, and Gilman who died at 61 in 1939.

Best Shaw impersonation ever from Monty Python's "Oscar Wilde" sketch - also known as the "your majesty is like a stream of bat's piss" sketch. Terry Jones plays the Prince of Wales, John Cleese is James MacNeill Whistler, Graham Chapman is Oscar Wilde and Michael Palin is Shaw. Watching this sketch as a teenager was my first introduction to all four personages. So I always think of Shaw as blowing raspberries.



Shaw was a TOTAL ham. His comments about Mussolini are rather, ah... interesting.

ex-gay Christopher Hitchens

The misogynist semi-rightwinger Christopher Hitchens, in his forthcoming autobiography, explains why same-sex incidents are all but inevitable in an all-boys boarding school - unless you just aren't attractive enough to find a partner.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

a novel - interesting idea but I'm not sure how I feel about it.

I do rather like the cover though...



and now for more of why a nobody from Amherst MA still inspires such interest...

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee

some interesting thoughts about "Wild nights!"

Director Cary Fukunaga on the 'Darker Sides' of His Upcoming Jane Eyre

Is he daunted by remaking one of his favorite films? Not quite, Fukunaga said. "The Orson Welles-Joan Fontaine version was of an era. You wouldn't make a film like that anymore. I'm a stickler for raw authenticity, so I've spent a lot of time rereading the book and trying to feel out what Charlotte Bronte was feeling when she was writing it. That sort of spookiness that plagues the entire story... there's been something like 24 adaptations, and it's very rare that you see those sorts of darker sides. They treat it like it's just a period romance, and I think it's much more than that."

more JANE EYRE news here

My NYTimes comment

My comment in response to Kristof's defense of the so-called "real" Catholic Church.

NEW RULES production pix

More available at the NEW RULES web site

Emily D at the NY Botanical Garden

Emily Dickinson's Garden

I missed the advanced announcement for this show - it looks like the poetry marathon is currently underway. And damn, they are doing THE BELLE OF AMHERST this weekend and me with back to back rehearsals.

At least I'll make the final weekend:

Death, Bees, and Roses

June 12, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

Perennial Garden

Participate in a thematic reading of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Select some of your favorite Dickinson poems relating to death, bees, or roses and join in celebrating the life and works of this great American poet.

Well THAT should be a pretty easy task - find a Dickinson poem relating to BEES - as I've observed several times on this blog, the woman was an apimaniac!

---

more about the show

Co-presented with The Poetry Society of America

Friday, April 30–Sunday, June 13, 2010
Discover the gardener who became the poet.

Experience the life and works of one of America’s most treasured poets as never before.

* Her Garden: Tour her Victorian Homestead re-created in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory with tulips, lilacs, lilies, and more.

* Her Poetry: Stroll along garden paths and read some of Dickinson’s most famous works near the flowers that inspired them.

* Her Life: Be immersed in an interactive perspective through photographs, watercolors and books in a Gallery exhibition.

Special Celebrations

Enjoy poetry readings, live theater, gardening demonstrations, and more.

Kickoff weekend: April 30–May 2
Mother's Day weekend: May 8–9
Ballet and Poetry Weekend: May 15–16
My Emily Dickinson Poetry Series: May 11, 22; June 5, 12
Final weekend: June 12–13

---

THE murmur of a bee
A witchcraft yieldeth me.
If any ask me why,
'Twere easier to die
Than tell.

The red upon the hill
Taketh away my will;
If anybody sneer,
Take care, for God is here,
That's all.

The breaking of the day
Addeth to my degree;
If any ask me how,
Artist, who drew me so,
Must tell!

the gay Regency

Oh my yes - hot gay men in Regency period clothing - two hotties for the price of one - there's a publishing house Ava March devoted to it.

Let there be drums

Gene Krupa - "Sing Sing Sing"



Joe Morello - "Take Five"




Keith Moon - "Happy Jack"

Did He Like It?

Your simple guide to the most powerful reviewer on the planet.

Julia & Buddy

the first 10 pages.

Of course panic attacks are only amusing if you're not having one...

tiny tiny showbiz world

So it turns out that Daniel Genalo, the guy I cast as Alex in my upcoming production of NEW RULES was on the very same episode of 30 Rock that NYCPlaywrights member and Mergatroyd Productions' fave actor Nick Fondulis was - in fact, Daniel's character got the job that Nick's character, Jayden Michael Tyler did not get because, well, Jayden was crazy.

And Daniel was the robot guy because he does amazing dance work - watch his other amazing moves in his dance reel on Vimeo. Pretty fly for a straight white guy!

Speaking of Nick, it looks like he got a Hanes commercial.

New Rules web site

A very good rehearsal today. And the web site is mostly done. Yay.

They all applaud Alex, and each other

WORDSMITHS - another work inspired by people who did me wrong - because I'm such a badass I will get you back by writing a play about you. Move over, Russian mafia.

rehearsal-palooza

Rehearsals all weekend - for the NYCPlaywrights Fundraiser and NEW RULES - I have to do the web site ASAP!

Plus, of course this always happens - inspiration has struck and I have the entire plot of my play JULIA AND BUDDY worked out - and no time to write it down for the next 48 hours.

Regency a-go-go

Wow you have to hand it to the Oregon Regency Society, they are hardcore Regency-period-philiacs. They even manage to get men into it, and recently they provided this handy outfitting the Regency man post as a guide. It really makes me want to produce my JANE EYRE again, and damn the expenses, just to get some guys into Regency period clothing again - virtually every man looks better in the clothing of that period.

As Ralph Fiennes demonstrates.

Although really, he even looks good as a Nazi.

Sing it Jon Stewart!

I really didn't think Jon Stewart could top the "Union Appreciation Month" bit - and less than 2 weeks later he proves me wrong! The last 60 seconds of this clip is the most wondrous thing I've ever seen on TV.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Bernie Goldberg Fires Back
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Krugman and Maddow - yay!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The next PlayLab show - NEW RULES May 8 & 9

the script

GOOD WOMEN OF MORNINGSIDE production videos

It's funny, the responses I've gotten from this play - it seems that everybody has had experiences with mean girls, and this play reminds them how much bodily harm they'd like to do to mean girls.

more clips from the April 17 & 18 shows here

Me, Claudius

There's a great program available on youtube - I, Claudius A Television Epic which gives behind the scenes interviews - many years after I, Claudius was made - about that incredible classic series. It's hard to believe it was produced in the 1970s.

There is so much good stuff in the series, but all the bits with Derek Jacobi as Claudius and John Hurt as Caligula are absolute genius - as the clip below demonstrates.



More from genius John Hurt - including Caligula's wacky transvestite dance!

kiss off English Patient hatahs

On the one hand, I relate to Charles Isherwood's gripe about feeling like odd-man-out - I feel like that about 90% of all theater I see (with the necessary gender switch) - on the other hand I hate the obligatory "The English Patient" bashing because one character on Seinfeld didn't like the movie and felt left out. The wonder to me has always been not that one character on Seinfeld didn't like that movie - the wonder is that any of them DID like the movie. "The English Patient" is the opposite of Seinfeld - it's compassionate, deep, sincere, internationalist, tragic, sensual and very sexy - especially Ralph Fiennes - and fully deserved its accolades.

Sexist Art History from The Sexist

Every day I thank Athena for The Sexist - I have to put it on my blogroll soon.

In this not very recent post (I was reviewing their archives) Amanda Hess had some interesting things to say about the cluelessness of art historians - not getting that "The Proposition" is about some overly-facial-haired guy trying to get some embroderer to turn hoe for him. Ah yes - that takes me back to my days in art school.

But the best part of the post was one comment:

Can’t a guy buy some needlepoint in a dingy pub anymore?

It's funniest if you read the whole post and other comments first.

Rachel and Jon - together again

I think these two are the soul of American democracy

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rachel Maddow
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

NYCPlaywrights Spring Fundraiser

Production pix

GOOD WOMEN OF MORNINGSIDE production pix online...

Happy Dance of Evil

This is the song that the two "Good Women", Debbie-Lisa and Lisa-Jean dance to at the end of GOOD WOMEN OF MORNINGSIDE. I created it with GarageBand - it's mostly loops but I did the guitar line from scratch. A# is a bitch of a key.

Sonnet Roundup ~ year 2

Another year has gone by - that makes two years now since I wrote my first sonnet. My sonnets were mainly written as a form of therapy, and so most don't stand up very well as works of art, but a few of them do hold up pretty well, I believe.

First, the stats:

Total sonnets year 1
(2008-2009) - 50
Total sonnets year 2
(2009-2010) - 45
Grand total: 95

The Sonnet for Poetry Month #7 starts by referencing Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry" - and I remember I was feeling horribly wretched when I wrote this - but I tried to be philosophical by reminding myself of the absolute horrors that some people endure in their lives - like poor Harry Eastlack who had a bone disease - I describe some of his symptoms in my sonnet. The best part of the sonnet is the last line, which I think holds up quite well as an aphorism:

"Pain comes from love, as death from being born."

Communication Sonnet #4 probably is my most accessible poem because I name-dropped Emily Dickinson - well, her first name, but poetry lovers can guess who I'm talking about:

Are you thinking of me on this spring morn,
In Emily's neck of the woods? By trees
And meadows that she loved, where she was born,
Where she spent much time thinking about bees,
Apparently, and eccentricity
While decked out in white...

Dickinson wrote about 20 or 30 poems that mention bees. And I noticed that Dickinson really loved that ee sound in her poetry. So the last two lines of CS#4 end with that sound. I also alluded to Dickinson's poem XCVII, which reads in its entirety:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

I allude to it in the "it takes" bit - my poem ends:

Communication takes more than just me,
Such work needs two, in close proximity.

The very next sonnet, Communication Sonnet #5 I rather like too. It describes a dream I had, and gets at the tricky nature of love that you don't want. It takes me years to forget any guy I ever care about - I am the queen of the unwilling torch-carriers. I can sometimes will myself to stop consciously thinking about a guy I loved, but invariably, as soon as I succeed in doing that my unconscious gets back at me by making me have sexy, romantic dreams about the guy. Then I wake up full of anguish, regret and longing. The damn well least I can do is get a poem out of it.

Another fairly accessible poem I wrote is Dream Sonnet 2 - another literary allusion, this time Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights."

more Sonnet Roundup here

This may just be my favorite Daily Show segment...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Virginia's Confederate History Month & Griffin Mascot
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

PRICELESS MOMENTS:

It would be be hypocritical of me to complain about Virginia's Confederate holiday when our part of the country, the North, is marking "Union Victory" or "United States Victory Appreciation Month" celebrating our rich heritage of kicking the Confederacy's ass.

By the way, you can join in on the pride at home with our limited edition Beautiful Union Victory Appreciation Month chess set. So much detail, you can almost hear the asses being kicked!

Pick up our Union Appreciation Month collector's edition Money - commemorating the currency that Northerners gave black people for jobs that they did.

My personal favorite piece of Union Appreciation Month memorabilia, the "Murdered by a Union Soldier Slaveowner Lawn Jockey."

Sold on unionvictoryappreciationmonth.com/getoverityoulost145yearsago

Confederacy Tourism

I was just blogging the other day about how some people in the South romanticize the Confederacy, and two days later the Governor of Virginia illustrates my point nicely by declaring April "Confederate History Month."

NYTimes' Gail Collins wrote a very good column about it today:

Virginia has been making big leaps lately in the category of general craziness. We all remember the Legislature’s heroic work in passing a bill to protect Virginia citizens from having microchips planted in their bodies against their will. And that the sponsor said he was concerned the chips could be a “mark of the beast” that would be used by the Antichrist at the end of days.

Confederate History Month was promoted by former Gov. George Allen, who was fond of Confederate flag-décor and suffered from a sense of history so imperfect that he did not discover his mother was half-Jewish until he was 54. Allen’s proclamation celebrated the Civil War as “a four-year struggle for independence, sovereign rights and local government control,” with such cheer that you would really think the fight was all about zoning.

And I also enjoyed some of the readers' comments:

Don't worry, Southern deniers. We Northerners will take care of remembering the slavery. The only part of Confederate history you people need to remember is the unconditional surrender.

I don't care if the South keeps rising again, as long as it keeps losing.

The media and the South have tried to turn their justified loss into something heroic. It wasn't. It was the wealthy elite trying to preserve their slave-built privileges by misleading the common citizens and sending them to their death. Yes, those in the South who fought had courage. When we honor the Confederacy, however, we do not honor them. That's a deceit the South is now trying to peddle. Actually, we are tricked into honoring the foul stench of the of the slave-owning South and all its accompanying brutality, barbarity and inhumanity.

Although the Confederacy lost the war, it's always perplexed me as to why US military bases throughout the region are named after CSA generals, who were essentially traitors to their country. I guess that doesn't register with certain "patriots." Imagine their reaction if our post-WWII bases in Germany were called Fort Rommel or Fort Guderian...

When I lived in Virginia (and later, in North Carolina), it never failed to amaze me that people still flew Confederate battle flags on their porches and in their yards. They seemed at best to be celebrating the fact that they're losers, but at worst, they were giving a defiant finger to the rest of us who have moved on. The flag wavers are not classy folks, but down and outers resentful of their station in life and jealous of people whom they consider more fortunate. Their low self-esteem prints itself out as insolence, ignorance and blantant disregard for their fellow citizens.

I always thought that the real confederate flag was the white one that every southerner was waving at the end of the civil war.

Fighting to preserve slavery was morally equivalent to fighting to preserve pedophilia. (Which slavery often was.) Just because you choose to fight and die for a wicked cause doesn't glorify that cause. It simply points out the stupidity or moral corruption of the fighter. Just because great-great-granddaddy did it doesn't make it right.

As bad as it is to "forget" slavery, or gloss over it, the real objection to "celebrating" the Civil War is forgetting it was a civil war...the South declared war on the United States of America! Some patriots! Thousands of Americans, from the North and South, were killed as a result, including, sadly, President Abraham Lincoln. What is there to celebrate?

You can always count on a Libertarian to defend something on economic grounds:

Of course, in today's consciousness none can defend the institution of slavery, yet uncompensated emancipation of all slaves would have amounted to financial suicide for the southern economy and individual owners who had invested the equivalent of $200,000 per individual.

But for a true representation of the Confederacy lovers there's this cretin from South Carolina:

Notwithstanding the injustices of American slavery, it is hard to get your head around the idea that the best thing that ever happened to current day Afro-Americans was for their relatives to have been slaves in this country.

Or even better, how about Huey Gunner from Leichtfield KS

Your ancestors were rabid slavery abolitionists who assaulted the civilian population of The South for decades until The South became fed up and left The Union.

There is NOTHING that displays the through-the-looking-glass insanity of these freaks better than that.

The Catholic Church is truly an evil organization

I'm so glad I wised up and got out when I was 14 and started thinking for myself.

Katha Pollitt sums up the absolutely evil misogynist nature of this cannibalistic cult:

The moral authority granted the Catholic Church in the secular world is for me the most repellent aspect of the current crisis. In the succinct words of Jodi Jacobson, editor of RHRealityCheck.org, "Why is a pedophilia-ridden, pedophilia-hiding, child-abusing Church allowed to write laws controlling women's rights?" To which one might add: what gives a church in which celibacy is equated with holiness, in which males have almost all the power, the right to a place at the table where laws are made about women's bodies? The same institution that has dealt so indulgently with its ordained pedophiles had no problem excommunicating a Brazilian mother who sought an abortion for her 9-year-old daughter, raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather, or pushing for laws in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Chile banning abortion even to save the woman's life.

Anybody who is still a member of this loathsome organization is helping to promote evil. End of story.

Another monologue done

Another NYCPlaywrights Worldwide Monologue video complete - but I'm way behind schedule and have 3 more to do. Oy.

The Giant Tire Lady of South Jersey

When I was a driving instructor somewhere in the swamps of Jersey - South Jersey, to be exact - I used to drive by the Giant Tire Lady - the female counterpart to all the giant tire lumberjacks that can frequently be seen in front of tire stores.

I saw her again on Sunday after all those years. Although since I saw her last she's had a snazzy new paint job - dig that groovy star-pattern skirt!

Tom Sawyer, abolitionist

I have to admit, Tom Sawyer has been on my conscience for the past few years. I mean, I do stand behind what I said about him in my essay, which I wrote for a production of my play HUCK FINN - he was a jerk, and his appearance in Huck's story drove it right off the rails.

But Clemens loved him, and believed that the public loved Tom, which is why he put him in HUCK's story. But since Clemens' time, Tom's popularity has decreased while Huck's has increased. This web page makes a very good case for the decline in the popularity of Tom:

In the century since, Tom Sawyer has been the most frequently filmed of MT's books. It was filmed three times before Huck Finn was filmed at all, and Tom himself was the star of the second movie version of Huck's story (see below). The next century might tell a different story. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is still widely read, in part because it is so frequently taught in high schools, but based on my students' experience, most Americans born since 1975 mainly know Tom through Huck's novel, and know the plot of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer only through the Disney film that ends the list below. In another generation it might be time for Tom to say, "You don't know about me except you have read a book by the name of 'Huckleberry Finn.'"

And I saw the results myself - when I went to see Mark Twain's study - a glorified gazebo his sister-in-law had built for him in Elmira NY, there was one sign from the 1950s which announced that the study was where Mark Twain wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." But a much newer sign, posted closer to the study, said that it was where Twain wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"!

So I feel a little bad for Tom for his being eclipsed by Huck.

Now it looks like I'm going to rehabilitate him. I already turned Huck into an abolitionist in my play HUCK FINN - although Huck was already an abolitionist at heart, I just made it more explicit: I have been working on a play about a slave women in 1850s Missouri and she has a white boyfriend. At first his name was Robert, but he gradually developed a cocky, romantic, trickster personality and I realized he was basically Tom Sawyer, all grown up and in love with a beautiful slave. I changed my character's name to Tom Turner - I don't want to have him literally be Tom Sawyer, but I wanted to acknowledge the connection, and it is fun to think of my play, CELIA as a sequel to the Tom/Huck stories. Clemens himself wrote Tom sequels - Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective and both are very bad. Clemens really needed money at the time, but the world has wisely forgotten about those books.

My play was inspired by a court case Slave State of Missouri v. Celia a horrendous true story of a slave girl who was hanged for killing her master in self-defense when he attempted to rape her. It was determined that as property, she did not even have the right to self-defense.

I dealt with the horrors of slave rape, a little, in my HUCK FINN play. This was something that Clemens avoided completely in any of his books set in the antebellum South. Even in Puddinghead Wilson, he doesn't go into details about how Roxana - whom I borrowed for my HUCK play - came to be so light-skinned and how her child came to look so white that he could pass for white his entire life. In my play, Roxana's master, Jack Turner - whom I substituted for Tom Sawyer's kindly old uncle Silas from the Huck story - is clearly using her. Although she takes some pride in it because it does give her some advantages, to be a favorite of the master, it's clear how brutal the arrangement is.

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, after the King and the Duke sell Jim out, Huck goes to search for him, and just happens to be taken in by Tom Sawyer's aunt and uncle (he doesn't know who they are at first) who think he is Tom Sawyer, come for a pre-arranged visit. The aunt and uncle are slave holders, but kindly if ineffectual people, easily fooled by Tom and Huck. One of the slaves is a "yellow gal" - a light skinned slave, who is called a "hussy" by Aunt Sally. Clemens doesn't address this issue, but how did Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas come to have a light-skinned slave? Maybe Uncle Silas wasn't so innocent after all.

At the time the Tom and Huck stories were published, the Civil War was very recent history and many people who might buy the novels were once slave-owners. Clemens knew better than to portray slavery in all its brutality, especially the sexual concubinage of slave women - his audience would not have stood for it and his speaking tours would have been very poorly attended - except perhaps by an angry mob.

And there are people in the United States of America in the early twenty-first century who still romanticize and feel nostalgia for the antebellum South.

I think Roy Edroso of Alicublog described this kind of thing best in his remark about the right-wing blogger Confederate Yankee: "someone whose cognomen proudly celebrates treason in defense of slavery"

Good Women on stage - April 17 & 18

It was during my 2008 JANE EYRE production that I realized that I had stepped into a big nest of vipers.

And events that have occurred in the past two years have only confirmed my initial assessment of this group of people - or rather, the past two years have shown they are even worse shameless hypocrites, saboteurs, and vicious defamers than I initially realized, and on top of that, as I discovered in the past few weeks, misogynists.

I got two things out of the experience: a greater sense of caution born of a new and definite understanding of the incredible lack of personal integrity that exists across great swaths of the off-off Broadway community, and a batch of literary/theatrical works.

The work includes sonnets, a story, and several plays. The plays are HAPPILY MARRIED, YULE COUNTY, BUDDY & JULIA (a full-length that's only about 30% complete), WORDSMITHS and GOOD WOMEN OF MORNINGSIDE. GOOD WOMEN is the next one up for production.

But even though I think JANE was a beautiful production in spite of everything, and many people loved it, and I like my post-viper plays and some of the sonnets, I'd gladly turn back the clock and not do any of it at all if it meant I could go the rest of my life in blissful ignorance of the nest of vipers.

Hot Man in Regency Period Clothing of the Week - April 2, 2010 edition

Another portrait of a hot Regency man by Ingres.

stupid sexist New Yorker

I've been a New Yorker subscriber for fifteen years now, ever since I discovered it was a weekly periodical with some really good writing in it. The New Yorker is a bastion of the liberal and the literary. Women are also liberal and literary - more so than men are, even, according to various studies.

So you'd think the New Yorker wouldn't be sexist at all. But it is sexist. The first way it is sexist is its persistently lopsided male:female contributor ratio. Now this ratio is not uncommon - all prestige fields are dominated by men. In fact, some have argued and provided evidence for the possibility that any field that women come to dominate is automatically demoted, prestige-wise because it is felt to have become too polluted by girl cooties.

But the New Yorker, being the most liberal and literary publication around should be better than that.

The indispensible blog The Sexist has been having an awesome Man Madness tournament to determine which organizations in the D.C. area are most male-dominated. They don't include The New Yorker, so I did my own review.

I don't look at the New Yorker's org chart the way The Sexist does, but rather the contributor roster. Let's just look at a selection from 2010 at random - because I don't have all day - also I'm not counting the cartoonists as contributors although the gender ratio for cartoonists is probably even more skewed in the XY direction. Also not counted, "web only" content:

January 4, 2010
Contributors: 18
Female contributors: 3

January 18, 2010
Contributors: 19
Female contributors: 7

February 1, 2010
Contributors: 24
Female contributors: 9

February 8, 2010
Contributors: 21
Female contributors: 3

March 22, 2010
Contributors: 24
Female contributors: 3

April 5, 2010
Contributors: 22
Female contributors: 6

Note that not only did no issue have more female than male contributors, most of these issues didn't even come close to 50% female contributors.

To return to the cartoonists - not only are there more male cartoonists, but the New Yorker's legacy of sexism is even more obvious in its cartoons. Not just the obvious belief on the part of most of its cartoonists that male is the default gender (and of course our entire society runs on that belief) but every now and then you get the most crass regressive olde tyme bullshit - like the cartoon in this week's New Yorker:



The gal-pal sister blog of The Sexist, called Tiger Beatdown, examines the pernicious effects of that Mars-Venus propaganda in her review of (500) Days of Summer:

And that is where shit gets REAL complex. Because, like: I have been in the situation of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in this film. It’s a common situation. It’s not a fun situation, necessarily. It’s also not a situation which mandates going on a rant about “whores” in one’s place of work, but whatever. The thing is, I think I find it easier to maintain my high-mindedness and cool in those situations than another person might. Specifically, a person who is a dude. Despite the much-vaunted crazy clingy psycho bitchiness of my gender, I think it’s easier for me to be gracious in those situations precisely because I am a girl.

Because girls frankly expect this behavior from guys. We are told, continually and throughout our lives and in every major media outlet and dating guide, that Guys Are Just Like That. Or the vast majority of them, anyway. Guys want physical contact, girls want emotional contact, we’re told; therefore, if we make physical contact with a guy, we should not expect emotional contact to follow. Granted, to hope is not to expect, and the entire courting structure is basically designed to allow us to perform a semi-realistic risk analysis, but girls are still basically informed that this entire deal, this sex and/or dating deal, is a game of poker and you shouldn’t play unless you can afford to lose something, and you should be cautious with your bets.

Dudes, on the other hand, are apparently entirely unprepared for this. Girls want emotional contact, they’re told, and guys want physical contact; therefore, if they make emotional contact with a girl, they can reasonably expect it to be reciprocated. And when it’s not, it’s like gravity suddenly stopped working. This just isn’t how things go; it’s an outrage; she’s cold, evil, a monster. Or at least this is what I can uncover from the dudely works of Nathan Rabin and (500) Days of Summer. They’re playing the same game of poker as the rest of us, these guys, but they think it’s play money. Which means that when it’s time to pay up, that sucks extra-hard.

So, yes: (500) Days of Summer is a movie about a boy who acts like a girl and a girl who acts like a boy. But here’s why I’m not thrilled about this: If Zooey Deschanel were actually a boy, and in this situation, most people would not perceive her as the problem. She wouldn’t be a monster, a whore, a freak; she’d just be a dude. And she’d get to complain about the clingy psycho bitch she fucked who’s now, like, putting all this pressure on, that bitch is fucking CRAZY, she just hooked up with the girl, she didn’t buy her an engagement ring, etc. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt, were he an actual girl, would be getting some sympathy from his lady friends, true, but he would also be getting well-meaning lectures about how Dudes Are Like That, and what did he expect, and he needs to be more cautious about these things and not put out so easily, and has he ever read a book called “He’s Just Not That Into You?” He should read that book. He would be told, to be blunt, that he was the real problem in this situation.

So the verdict, in case you were wondering, is that if girls fall for boys, and those boys don’t fall for them, they are clingy bitches. And if girls don’t fall for boys, and those boys DO fall for them, they are heartless bitches. No matter how this situation goes, if there turns out to be an inequality of desire, you’re getting called a bitch.