New Play Blog

How do YOU define diversity? -- Participate in the LIVE EVENT! #newplay

by Amrita Mangus, Institute Fellow and Line-producer for the Defining Diversity convening

So, as evidenced by David's blog on diversity and the comments that followed, our minds have been filled with the topic of diversity in new play development from many angles: the state that it's in, the future of it, and the impact of diversity on both artists and audiences. If you're eager and curious to participate in the diversity conversation, here's your chance to have your voice heard and your mind enlightened!

On Saturday, December 5th, the American Voices New Plays Institute at Arena Stage in partnership with Georgetown University will host What Does Diversity Mean to You?: A Public Forum on Diversity in New Play Development. The public forum serves as the final event in our two-day long Defining Diversity convening and featuring multimedia presentations from Mark Russell (Artistic Director and Producer, Under the Radar Festival), Robert Levi (Documentary Filmmaker, NEA New Play Development Program), and Kamilah Forbes (The Hip Hop Theater Festival) and commentary from notable theater artists and administrators throughout the country (Scott Walters, Debra Cardona-DePeahul, Carlenne LaCosta, Claudia Alick, and Shishir Kurup to name a few . . . .it's a great group of people altogether). The forum will be moderated by Sandra Gibson, President and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.

Whether you're a local to the DC-metro area or tuning in from California or Hawai'i, you can participate in this exciting forum:

For the locals: What Does Diversity Mean to You?: A Public Forum of Diversity in New Play Development is free and open to the public will be held at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, December 5th at the Gonda Theater in Georgetown University. If you wish to attend, please RSVP to the Arena Stage box office at (202) 488-3300.

For the nation: Visit this page on Saturday, December 5th at 8:00 p.m. ET to participate in the LIVE BROADCAST of the public forum.  Tweet your questions/comments to the panelists by using the hashtag #newplay and watch yours and your fellow online participants' tweets get answered live! You can also participate in the LIVE BROADCAST on http://www.livestream.com/newplay by using your Twitter or Facebook account.

Interviews: "John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven", The Final Development Milestone

Cal Shakes / Octavio Solis / Word for Word's "John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven" is a Distinguished New Play Development Project that has just completed its fifth development workshop.  The world premiere will be opening CalShakes' 2010 mainstage season June 2 - June 27. Click here for the Cal Shakes' blog posts related to the project and Click here for a history of the development milestones.

The following interviews were conducted on Sunday just after the final public reading  --

Vijay Mathew:  How would you describe Word for Word's collaborative role in developing this project?

JoAnne Winter, Co-Artistic Director with Susan Harloe of Word for Word Performing Arts Company:

Vijay Mathew: What is Cal Shakes' "New Works / New Communites" program and how did you design the development process for "The Pastures of Heaven"?

Jonathan Moscone, Artistic Director of Cal Shakes:

Round 2: The Online Application System is now live!

Hey, New Play tribe-- the Second Round is now open for both Outstanding New Play and Distinguished New Play Development categories.

The deadline for filing your intent to apply is coming up quickly. The Intent needs to have both the organization and the playwright designated, so if you are thinking of applying and haven't yet had the discussions about the roles of each, do it soon!

You can access it here and start your Intent to Apply:

http://www.arenastage.org/npdp/

ANNOUNCEMENT: ROUND 2 of the NEA New Play Development Program hosted by Arena Stage

We're excited to announce the start of Round 2! 

There are a few adjustments from the first round to report, though the purpose and process are essentially unchanged.

We are starting the application process earlier in the year for Round 2 in order to help your overall planning and approach to other NEA grants and other opportunities for new work. 

We are also lengthening the duration of the application timeframe, freeing up a little more time for you to put together your application.  We hope to still be efficient in the selection process, but people felt they needed more notice to get their applications prepared for the first round, so we're opening the application process earlier.

Another significant change that you will notice in the application process is that in Round 2 we are going to be completely electronic in order to make it easier for you, more efficient for us, and much less wasteful for the planet.  Vijay will be standing by for questions or troubleshooting if you get stuck.

The guidelines, eligibility requirements, and the application questions are very similar to those in Round 1.  However, the selection process has grown in a positive way: before the Panels convene, we'll have at least five readers and screeners instead of three for every submission to the Program - which will involve more of the field in this process and get a wider range of opinion into the mix.

If you are applying in only one category, or not at all, and would like to participate in the process of selection as a reader or screener, e-mail us at npdpinfo@arenastage.org.

The Timeline:

December 18, 2009 - Intent Apply Due

January 29, 2010 - Application Due

June 13, 2010 - Public Announcement of Selections

June 15, 2010 - December 31, 2012:  Period of Project Support in Round 2

We'd like to encourage you to contact the playwrights that you will be collaborating with as soon as possible in order to find out which other projects of theirs are going to be submitted to the Program.  This will allow us to avoid any errors or confusion in the the Intents to Apply. A playwright can only appear once in each category, and in the first round we had multiple organizations submitting the same playwrights' names, which was awkward and uncomfortable for everyone involved as we disentangled the conflicts. 

If you would like your panel notes from Round 1, we'll be happy to send them to you. 

The Online Application System for Round 2 will be found here:  http://www.arenastage.org/npdp/  It's not quite live yet, but we wanted to get the news to you so you could start thinking about your strategy for applying.  We'll post again as soon as the system is open for business. In the mean time, you can view and download Round 2's Guidelines here.

Aditi Brennan Kapil Reaches the Last Development Milestone at the Lark

posted by Aditi Brennan Kapil

"Agnes Under the Big Top" by Aditi Brennan Kapil is a Distinguished New Play Development Project from the Lark Play Development Center (NYC) in consortium with Mixed Blood Theatre (MN), The Playwrights' Center (MN), InterAct Theatre Company (PA), and Fourthworld Theatre Projects (US/Bulgaria). It recently reached its fifth and last development milestone. 

A quick note on the past week at Lark before I settle down to think/blog in more depth about the past year and the various steps of the development journey.

I have to be honest and say that I arrived at Lark last week frustrated with myself, my play, and desperately needing to, by the end of the week, either fall back in love with it or ceremonially burn it. I spent the first 3 days writing like a crazy person, my actors never had the same script twice and in one instance hadn’t even read the rewrite they were handed at the top of rehearsal when I replaced it with a newer one an hour later. The first day I forgot to eat, so after that I started my writing days at a diner over breakfast- (Moonrock diner, eggs benedict, coffee, tall glass of orange juice, highly recommended!)  Liz and I talked one morning in Bulgaria about the difficulty of writing from a place of metaphor rather than a place of action. Writing from a place of metaphor you have endless avenues and threads you can pursue, and I feel like a pursued many many many of them this year. I must have written 20 plays in trying to find the one. And, for me at least, the only truly consistent thing I had to guide me was my own instinct, god forbid it have a bad day. ‘Does that feel like it belongs in the play’? ‘Does that feel like the play I want to write?’ Perfectly good material got chucked on the say-so of my instinct. Perfectly bad material stuck around for a really long time for the same reason. And the upshot was that after a year of ‘feeling’, I couldn’t see straight. So much material had come and gone, the play had been re-arranged so many times as I tried new entry points, new protagonists, new structures, that I honestly didn’t know if there was anything there.  

The greatest gift of the week at Lark, aside from dedicated time to just work with no distractions (this is a big deal for a playwright with a largish family), was the gift of collaborators who actively loved the play and could help me rediscover the reasons I set out to write it in the first place. You break something apart too many times, it gets hard to see how it can ever fit together again. Part of me wishes that all that breaking apart hadn’t been necessary, it would be nice to believe that the work could have sprung fully formed from my mind, in fact I’d still like to experience that some day so I’m not taking it out of the realm of possibility completely, but this particular play could not have found itself without being broken every which way first. It has too many layers, too many ideas, too many lives running through it or something, I don’t know, but I couldn’t think them all at once. And looking back, every single detour, however idiotic (there were some stupid ones) grew it in some way.  So, the good new is, after 3 days of brand new scripts, I sat at the end of rehearsal thinking that all the material was there, it just didn’t flow the way it was supposed to. Liz, and my lovely director Eric Ting, looked at me and said ‘so, what do you need?’

-I need you to help me rearrange the script, because I can’t see straight. Literally, rearrange it

We started at the table, then ended up on the floor, some scenes got split into halves and moved, others just relocated, I pretty just much sat back and watched them work from their instinct, because the issues now were structural, and not subject to my inspiration, and a director and dramaturg can do mad work on structure. We got stuck in the middle, so we skipped through to the end- great end, great beginning, stuck in the middle. I looked at the wad of paper I had in my hand for the middle, and I said ‘this is the rewrite’- the middle section needed its very own rewrite so it could take its place in the whole. Scary truth? It’s kind of easy to do the work when you know exactly what the job is. Makes you wonder what we’re doing the rest of the time, muddling around in the unknown. I rearranged the script over dinner, putting aside my ‘rewrite’ for morning at the diner. Had some beers at Valhalla (also highly recommended). Slept. Finished the draft the next morning. When we read it that afternoon I tweaked. More importantly, I liked it. I still liked it the next day. I know why I’m writing this play again. I know where it’s headed, and how it’s getting there. And the rest is deepening, discovering, little epiphanies. Watch, now I probably jinxed myself.

Interview: Amy Mueller of the Playwrights Foundation

Here is the sixth in a series of interviews devoted to people involved in the new play development sector. On Deck: Amy Mueller, Artistic Director of the Playwrights Foundation. Previous interviews include: Jason Loewith, Philip Himberg, Polly Carl, Todd London, Wendy C. Goldberg.

The Playwrights Foundation is now accepting scripts for the 2010 BAPF and their other programs through November 30th, 2009.

Vijay Mathew:  The Bay Area Playwrights Festival is the centerpiece of The Playwrights Foundation programs.  How would you describe its purpose for playwrights and for the new play development field?
  
Amy Mueller:  The Bay Area Playwrights Festival has been around for more than 32 years, and over those three decades we’ve established an excellent track record in our steadfast commitment to the discovery of and support for the work of writers who are as yet largely unknown. Writers like Sam Sheppard, Nilo Cruz, Maria Irene Fornes, David Henry Hwang, Claire Chafee, Liz Duffy Adams, Marcus Gardley and many, many others kick-started their national careers as a result of the BAPF.  In that way the Festival has played a key role in bringing new voices to the national stage, and in offering significant opportunities to (dare I use this word) “emerging writers” – okay, emergent, newish, just starting out, been writing for a long time but have not been seen much yet writers.  We also have an ardent, unwavering commitment to social and artistic pluralism.

Vijay Mathew:  What would make a successful festival experience for a playwright? 

Amy Mueller:  Well, I think there are quite a few factors, but for us, the most successful outcome is a writer getting a chance to really dig deeply into the work with top notch professional collaborators, artists who are attuned to the piece and with whom the individual writer can share an artistic bond. In that way playwrights have the opportunity to learn as much as possible about the piece as it is, and, if desired, advance it to a more finished stage of development – or work towards personally prescribed goals for the work. We work to set up an atmosphere where the playwrights are able enjoy focused time inside a process that works really well for them and that is largely directed by them. Although we have an approach to structuring the festival, we often work with each writer individually to shape the experience to their needs.  We also value the national visibility afforded by our festival – as well as the more concrete measure of a subsequent production of the work.

Vijay Mathew:  What is the structure of festival?  How was it developed and designed?  And how do you custom tailor it to the playwrights needs?

On Diversity: What's It To You?

by David Dower

This morning I caught up to these two posts about diversity. Here's Michael Kaiser. Here's Mission Paradox. I stumbled on them in the midst of putting the final planning touches on "Defining Diversity", the first convening of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage.

Early in my tenure as the founding Artistic Director of The Z Space Studio in San Francisco, a funder and friend told me that I was going to struggle to build the organization and my own place in the field because I had "no definable artistic aesthetic". She would come to programs produced by or developed at Z Space and one time she'd see a fully-staged short story, another time a solo show, another time a puppet opera, and sometimes a classically structured play. I countered that my personal aesthetic was that "theater is a big tent" and I wanted to foster its diversity. "How's anyone supposed to follow that?" she asked, gently but firmly. 

I know she was right about the struggling part-- lord knows I lived it. It was five years before anyone got paid. Fifteen years later, hardly anyone's making a living wage at it. It was hard to build the Board. Harder, still, to build the audience. We had (and Z still has) loyal fans of individual aspects of the aesthetic, particularly the Word for Word ensemble-- they of the fully staged short stories, represented in the NPDP by the collaboration with Octavio Solis and California Shakespeare Festival, which is itself a diverse mish mash of cultures, form, content, and audience! There was also a loyal fan base for each of the solo performers, especially my dear friend Josh Kornbluth, and always more producers willing to commit full productions of the classically structured plays we developed than the other forms incubating in the studio.

We stuck to our guns at Z, holding on to the notion of the "big tent", and the welcome mat is still out to multi-media 'happenings' like David Szlasa's "My Hot Lobotomy", the first plays (and first drafts) of Peter Sinn Nachtreib, Margo Hall's staging of James Baldwin's short story Sonny's Blues, and Cajun solo performer Anne Galjour's first foray into issues of class and culture in New England (You Can't Get There From Here).

Being open to diverse aesthetics meant we were working with other elements of diversity: cultural perspectives, class, age, sexual orientation-- you name it. The people and projects cover the waterfront to this day there. And I cherished that.