The newly created Bleecker Street Theatre Company officially launched April 5 with a reading of Murray Schisgal’s Playtime, featuring Rosie Perez, Peter Reigert and Chip Zien.  A benefit Tuesday, April 13, features Murray Schisgal, Israel Horovitz, Mario Fratti, Donna de Matteo, Quincy Long and Stephen Adly Guirgis discussing “The Playwrights Journey.” Tickets are still available.

There is a full line-up of presentations of plays in development, including new work by C.S. Drury, Bill Quigley, and David Loughlin – mates from H.B. Studios playwriting with Donna de Matteo. Peter Zinn, another H-B playwriting mate, is doing a great thing here, and it looks like serious and accomplished actors, playwrights, directors, teachers and other new play developers (Guirgis, beyond writing great plays – thought of “Little Flower of East Orange” when I saw Michael Shannon blow them away in ‘The Runaways’ – is now the artistic director of the Public’s LAByrinth).  It’s great to see Peter push this and the healthy collaboration between the new Bleecker Street Theatre Company and H-B Playwrights. Playwriting is a dangerous profession and you need all the muscle you can muster to slog through.

Bleecker Street Theatre Company is the non-profit resident company housed at The Theatres at 45 Bleecker – a premier off-Broadway venue located in the NoHo neighborhood of New York City.

BSTC evolved out of The Theatres at 45 Bleecker’s production of Rumspringa, which opened in February of 2009 with a successful extended run. BSTC was formed later that year and now workshops other new plays through its popular Monday Night Play Development Series with the goal of fostering more world premieres onto the Off-Broadway stage. The company is especially interested in plays that are easily adapted for film and new media with the belief that the stage is an effective forum to present new stories to members of the NYC film industry who regularly attend BSTC productions. In addition to new works, BSTC also presents classics and previously produced plays that speak to a new generation of theatre goers.

BSTC PRODUCERS
Peter Zinn, Artistic Director
Louis Salamone, Executive Director
Elle Sunman, Managing Director

website: http://www.thebleecker.com | See Playbill interview with artistic director Peter Zinn

CBS’s drama The Unit, about the lives of the highly trained members of a top-secret military division, was canceled last year, but a memo to its writing staff from its executive producer David Mamet has just surfaced online.  Here it is:

“TO THE WRITERS OF THE UNIT

GREETINGS.

AS WE LEARN HOW TO WRITE THIS SHOW, A RECURRING PROBLEM BECOMES CLEAR.

THE PROBLEM IS THIS: TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN DRAMA AND NON-DRAMA. LET ME BREAK-IT-DOWN-NOW.

EVERYONE IN CREATION IS SCREAMING AT US TO MAKE THE SHOW CLEAR. WE ARE TASKED WITH, IT SEEMS, CRAMMING A SHITLOAD OF INFORMATION INTO A LITTLE BIT OF TIME.

OUR FRIENDS. THE PENGUINS, THINK THAT WE, THEREFORE, ARE EMPLOYED TO COMMUNICATE INFORMATION — AND, SO, AT TIMES, IT SEEMS TO US.

BUT NOTE:THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.

QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE GOAL.

SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS.

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.

IF THE SCENE IS NOT DRAMATICALLY WRITTEN, IT WILL NOT BE DRAMATICALLY ACTED.

THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. YOU THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE EVERY SCENE IS DRAMATIC.

THIS MEANS ALL THE “LITTLE” EXPOSITIONAL SCENES OF TWO PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD. THIS BUSHWAH (AND WE ALL TEND TO WRITE IT ON THE FIRST DRAFT) IS LESS THAN USELESS, SHOULD IT FINALLY, GOD FORBID, GET FILMED.

IF THE SCENE BORES YOU WHEN YOU READ IT, REST ASSURED IT WILL BORE THE ACTORS, AND WILL, THEN, BORE THE AUDIENCE, AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE BACK IN THE BREADLINE.

SOMEONE HAS TO MAKE THE SCENE DRAMATIC. IT IS NOT THE ACTORS JOB (THE ACTORS JOB IS TO BE TRUTHFUL). IT IS NOT THE DIRECTORS JOB. HIS OR HER JOB IS TO FILM IT STRAIGHTFORWARDLY AND REMIND THE ACTORS TO TALK FAST. IT IS YOUR JOB.

EVERY SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. THAT MEANS: THE MAIN CHARACTER MUST HAVE A SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, PRESSING NEED WHICH IMPELS HIM OR HER TO SHOW UP IN THE SCENE.

THIS NEED IS WHY THEY CAME. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MET WILL LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE,TO FAILURE – THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS OVER. IT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE NEXT SCENE.

ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE PLOT.

ANY SCENE, THUS, WHICH DOES NOT BOTH ADVANCE THE PLOT, AND STANDALONE (THAT IS, DRAMATICALLY, BY ITSELF, ON ITS OWN MERITS) IS EITHER SUPERFLUOUS, OR INCORRECTLY WRITTEN.

YES BUT YES BUT YES BUT, YOU SAY: WHAT ABOUT THE NECESSITY OF WRITING IN ALL THAT “INFORMATION?”

AND I RESPOND “FIGURE IT OUT” ANY DICKHEAD WITH A BLUESUIT CAN BE (AND IS) TAUGHT TO SAY “MAKE IT CLEARER”, AND “I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT HIM”.

WHEN YOU’VE MADE IT SO CLEAR THAT EVEN THIS BLUESUITED PENGUIN IS HAPPY, BOTH YOU AND HE OR SHE WILL BE OUT OF A JOB.

THE JOB OF THE DRAMATIST IS TO MAKE THE AUDIENCE WONDER WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. NOT TO EXPLAIN TO THEM WHAT JUST HAPPENED, OR TO*SUGGEST* TO THEM WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

ANY DICKHEAD, AS ABOVE, CAN WRITE, “BUT, JIM, IF WE DON’T ASSASSINATE THE PRIME MINISTER IN THE NEXT SCENE, ALL EUROPE WILL BE ENGULFED IN FLAME”

WE ARE NOT GETTING PAID TO REALIZE THAT THE AUDIENCE NEEDS THIS INFORMATION TO UNDERSTAND THE NEXT SCENE, BUT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO WRITE THE SCENE BEFORE US SUCH THAT THE AUDIENCE WILL BE INTERESTED IN WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

YES BUT, YES BUT YES BUT YOU REITERATE.

AND I RESPOND FIGURE IT OUT.

HOW DOES ONE STRIKE THE BALANCE BETWEEN WITHHOLDING AND VOUCHSAFING INFORMATION? THAT IS THE ESSENTIAL TASK OF THE DRAMATIST. AND THE ABILITY TO DO THAT IS WHAT SEPARATES YOU FROM THE LESSER SPECIES IN THEIR BLUE SUITS.

FIGURE IT OUT.

START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE: THE SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. it must start because the hero HAS A PROBLEM, AND IT MUST CULMINATE WITH THE HERO FINDING HIM OR HERSELF EITHER THWARTED OR EDUCATED THAT ANOTHER WAY EXISTS.

LOOK AT YOUR LOG LINES. ANY LOGLINE READING “BOB AND SUE DISCUSS…” IS NOT DESCRIBING A DRAMATIC SCENE.

PLEASE NOTE THAT OUR OUTLINES ARE, GENERALLY, SPECTACULAR. THE DRAMA FLOWS OUT BETWEEN THE OUTLINE AND THE FIRST DRAFT.

THINK LIKE A FILMMAKER RATHER THAN A FUNCTIONARY, BECAUSE, IN TRUTH, YOU ARE MAKING THE FILM. WHAT YOU WRITE, THEY WILL SHOOT.

HERE ARE THE DANGER SIGNALS. ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

DO NOT WRITE A CROCK OF SHIT. WRITE A RIPPING THREE, FOUR, SEVEN MINUTE SCENE WHICH MOVES THE STORY ALONG, AND YOU CAN, VERY SOON, BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR AND HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU.

REMEMBER YOU ARE WRITING FOR A VISUAL MEDIUM. MOST TELEVISION WRITING, OURS INCLUDED, SOUNDS LIKE RADIO. THE CAMERA CAN DO THE EXPLAINING FOR YOU. LET IT. WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERS DOING -*LITERALLY*. WHAT ARE THEY HANDLING, WHAT ARE THEY READING. WHAT ARE THEY WATCHING ON TELEVISION, WHAT ARE THEY SEEING.

IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.

IF YOU DEPRIVE YOURSELF OF THE CRUTCH OF NARRATION, EXPOSITION,INDEED, OF SPEECH. YOU WILL BE FORGED TO WORK IN A NEW MEDIUM - TELLING THE STORY IN PICTURES (ALSO KNOWN AS SCREENWRITING)

THIS IS A NEW SKILL. NO ONE DOES IT NATURALLY. YOU CAN TRAIN YOURSELVES TO DO IT, BUT YOU NEED TO START.

I CLOSE WITH THE ONE THOUGHT: LOOK AT THE SCENE AND ASK YOURSELF “IS IT DRAMATIC? IS IT ESSENTIAL? DOES IT ADVANCE THE PLOT?

ANSWER TRUTHFULLY.

IF THE ANSWER IS “NO” WRITE IT AGAIN OR THROW IT OUT. IF YOU’VE GOT ANY QUESTIONS, CALL ME UP.

LOVE, DAVE MAMET
SANTA MONICA 19 OCTO 05

(IT IS NOT YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW THE ANSWERS, BUT IT IS YOUR, AND MY, RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW AND TO ASK THE RIGHT Questions OVER AND OVER. UNTIL IT BECOMES SECOND NATURE. I BELIEVE THEY ARE LISTED ABOVE.)”

From The Loop Online, a great source for emerging playwrights:

This is James Venhaus, long-time Loop-er and playwright. I wanted to let you know about something really cool that is happening with one of my plays that might be of interest to you and/or your readers. The Overtime Theatre in San Antonio is currently in rehearsals for my full-length play, “The Happy Couple”. The cast and I created a blog to document the rehearsal process, including script changes that happen when rehearsing a new play. The blog has not only been a tremendous marketing tool, but having everyone involved “journal” about their experience has been very revealing and helpful to rehearsals. You can check out the blog at: http://jamesvenhaus.net/wordpress/

On top of all that, the San Antonio Express-News has run a story about our blog. (You know you are in pretty good shape, PR-wise, when the local paper runs a story about your show and a story about the blog about your show!) Check it out at http://www.mysanantonio.com/entertainment/stage/Blog_helps_process_of_staging_a_play.html I’m thinking doing something like this for future shows, especially productions where I am lucky enough to be involved in the entire rehearsal process. I thought other Loopers might find it interesting.

Visit The Loop Online at: http://thelooponline.ning.com

It’s been said that he’s equal parts Hemingway and Beckett but to me Pinter is Alfred Hitchcock. Re-reading The Birthday Party- discovering it for the first time, previous readings were like skimming – the suspense, tension, uncertainty – like a rug is about to be pulled out and someone is about to crumple down and fracture. It’s like a car accident, you’re horrified but mesmerized. It’s where every moment the stakes are incredibly high and one or two sentences in the whole play reveal, rather hint, only hint, at what the real action is, what the possible objective can be. I am scared for the people in the play – but who is the perpetrator, or is it a macabre accident, that these people are in the room. Chekhov, in a way, not in the language – but characters who are always at the boiling point or about to get there, and can be pushed over, a fractured structure that doesn’t follow climax/resolution formula. I used to think that Chekhov gave me permission to throw a bunch of characters in a room and let them run around complaining – that’s what it took to write comedic tragedy. This is not reality, it’s a heightened prismatic interpretation of a dream that you throw on a stage, yet an invisible, taut string holds it together and it vibrates through the play. Pinter is brilliant like Eugene O’Neill for me because I can read both as literature, I don’t need to see them to appreciate the drama here. The words, spare, repetitive, or blown out like wind sails in O’Neill’s case, carry a compelling narrative.

Pinter wrote The Birthday Party in 1957, his first (or second) play.

Does Harold Pinter’s private life shed light on his plays? – Jan 13, 2010, The Guardian

The following is from Harold Pinter, Writing for the Theatre (1962)

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections.

When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

There can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.  ((Related: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. – (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II))

We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: ‘Failure of communication…’ and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rear-guard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

Each play was, for me, ‘a different kind of failure.’ And that fact, I suppose, sent me on to write the next one. 

From The New York Times today:

…. close relationships between playwrights and theaters are increasingly rare these days, and developing more of them is one of the chief recommendations of a new study of the state of the American play that the nonprofit Theater Development Fund published in book form in late December. Yet several obstacles stand in the way, according to the study, which also looked at playwrights’ struggle to make a living and which has set off a debate in some theater circles. See Playwrights’ Nurturing Is the Focus of a Study, NYT, 01/14/2010

Today I completed the first draft of a new full-length prnyc. How do you know when you complete the first draft? You reach a state of complete exhaustion and you cannot gone on. There is nowhere, in this milieu, beyond the last line. Life goes on beyond the play, as it inevitably will, as it must, just as life existed before the wisenheimer protagonist opened his mouth to piss off the bestial antagonist.

Of course, this is not the end of this process; in many ways only the beginning. Today it is a punctuation! Good enough to send off for feedback and the beginning of the process leading to the reading. How did this play begin?

A year ago I wrote a 10 min. play called WHITE NOISE; it played for eight performances at H-B Playwrights Theatre, Bank St, NYC, as part of “The Waiting Room” series.  In the play an over-zealous New York PR guys puts the moves on a crazed marketing exec in the waiting room of a therapists office. They test each other for 10 minutes and resolve to meet, after the PR guy rants about his horrible boss nicknamed The Beast.

What if that guy actually went to work the next morning? I asked myself, on my way to work one morning, as the bitterly cold wind whipped around Riverside Park. I used the 10 min. play as the the first Scene and built on that for a full length play. The Play was called PUBLIC RELATIONS and we went through two readings in Donna De Matteo’s playwriting class. At the end of that process I realized that:

• I had no idea what this play was about
• There were too many characters
• The action was too diffuse
• There was no climax
• I failed to establish the language and rhythm necessary to carry this play

I realized that as long as I was tethered to the 10 min play the full-length play would not be able to find its own life. So I:

• Deleted Scene 1; started at Scene 2
• Deleted 6 characters; pared down to 5
• Compressed action time frame to 48 hours
• Wrote the ending first, then the climax

In other words, I took Lee Blessing’s advice. Thanks Lee.

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It’s got five or six
people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people
have worked together a lot.  Michael J. Fox

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental.
It’s so much like life.  Arthur Miller

thanks to Nancy at nycplaywrights

I have used Bruce before in cold readings. He knows what he’s talking about and he always brings something active, something alive to the reading, no matter what the role. Thanks to Nancy McClernan at nyc playwrights for producing this video. What he’s saying: if you don’t get the reading you expect, don’t blame the actor. Look to the writing. Also – some actors can be great in the cold reading and bring nothing further to the performance, and the other way around. It’s a tricky business.

Last week I succumbed to a torturous and necessary ritual of playwriting called the reading. A ’reading’ in playwriting parlance means gathering  a bunch of actors to read your play, with a critical audience to give  feedback. This time it was at Donna De Matteo’s playwriting seminar at H-B Studio on Bank Street.  I consider this my ‘home group.’ Although the audience can be tough, they are never mean. The terror here is mostly self-inflicted. The class had heard pieces of THE CAREGIVERS before. This was the first time for a read-through of the entire 80-90 minute full-length.

There is a cadre, notably led by Nancy McClernan of NYC Playwrights, that believes the purest, most effective ‘feedback’ a playwright gets is from unfiltered audience reaction, not skewed and baggage-laden critique. Do they clap, laugh, glower, fall asleep, groan, fidget?  How is the audience, the ultimate arbiter of the value of a play, reacting? What else do you need to know?

I go the other way. I believe you need verbal feedback to get insight into your play. In fact, you should crave feedback as much as the infielder who wants the ball hit to him, no matter how wicked the hop (Sorry, I’m thinking Derek Jeter, the Yankees). Critique can be a hellish experience, full of extreme terror and psychic humiliation … but no pain, no gain. In the critique process you absorb pain, try to identify the most useful comments and dominantly espoused points of attack. What hurts most is usually the most useful. Lee Blessing is right (see Lee Blessing on Playwriting). It’s about causing discomfort, a play is a disturbance. If that whirlwind tension is not there, what do you have?

The goal of this process is a fully rounded play that is a complete experience, believable in its own world; a play that sets an expectation and achieves it, ready to get ‘on its feet,’ into production. So far, just a dream for me. Why?  Because everybody was ready for my reading – the actors, the class, me … except the protagonist. He didn”t show up. “It’s like having a party without the guest of honor. We kept waiting for him to show up” – one comment.  “You can’t write a protagonist who is inaccessible.” And then the unkindest cut – “Maybe your protagonist is too normal.”  Normal? Not that. They all loved the female lead – specific, quirky, believable, accessible. I spent the summer on her, digging into her history, psyche, culture, physicality, spiritualism. It was a huge accomplishment to ‘get’ her – but I forgot about him, the guy who is driving the action. Whose story is this anyway? Maybe it is really hers. Forget the protagonist? How stupid is that? That’s a hole so big you can drive a Hummer through it. There is always a period of self-flagellation that occurs after a critical reading. The reaction you want – the reaction all playwrights want  – perfect, don’t change a word, you don’t need to do anymore, let’s get it on the stage immediately – is really a fantasy. How many versions of Leaves of Grass are there? How many versions of Shakespeare’s plays?

I knew something was missing in the first three scenes, despite all the activity. I scribbled in my notebook: It’s Flat. Why is it flat? It’s in motion but it’s not moving anywhere . It’s not the actors – although good casting helps immensely. You can ‘hear’ flatness because actors don’t have the dramatic elements to work with. Actors develop and train by running great scenes, finding the truth in the words as they are acted in Death of a Salesman, Streetcar, Strindberg, Chekhov, et al.  Ultimately this has to be on a stage and experienced by an audience that is highly critical, moment to moment.

A credible reading, if it serves its purpose of improving the play and not as a destination unto itself, can shave months or years from the process. You never really know what your play is worth until you hear it read by actors, and hear it critiqued by playwrights and dramatists who, hopefully, are invested in your success.

Last year I did not have this perspective and readings were tougher. In the Playwriting Lab, Freehold Theatre in Seattle, summer, 2008, my first readings of pieces of THE CAREGIVERS felt like descending the gates of Hell into a sulfurous torture pit. To give voice to my terror, I wrote my raw feelings in a notebook as my play was being read. Here they are, as written IN CAPS:

• I WANT TO DIE.
• PLEASE MAKE THE PAIN STOP. I CAN’T TAKE IT.
• I WANT TO PUKE AND COMMIT HARI KARI AT THE SAME TIME
• I CAN’T WRITE. WHY DID I THINK I COULD WRITE? I HAVE TO STOP! SOMEBODY PLEASE STOP ME.
• WHO WROTE THIS CRAP. WHAT AN IDIOT.

And this is my favorite …

• IF I QUIETLY LEAVE, DO YOU THINK ANYBODY WILL NOTICE?

Yeah, but what’s underneath that? And underneath that. A great scene or play can be run through one of those checkout laser scans – every angle you look at it, it fits together, there is some logic, even if the world of the logic is invented, as it is in a play.