Mom. Playwright.

Today is my daughter’s 3rd birthday. In celebration, I’m gifting myself with a box of “some slack”. After 3 months plus of not blogging, I’ve decided to stop beating myself up and just get back to it.

So as I’m off to make the most of my daughter’s day, check out WSJ theater critic Terry Teachout’s thoughts on the debate-sparking, widely-publicized playwright gender bias study recently released by Emily Glassberg Sands, an economics student at Princeton University.

Read the rest of this entry »

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“I write for as many hours as I can carve out of a day, or until my sense of humor has utterly abandoned me. These days, since I’m currently on leave from my day job, that means I write during regular working hours, and then if I feel there’s something I didn’t get to that I don’t want to lose the thread of, I’ll work some more after my kids are asleep. I don’t make hard and fast rules, but the one thing I don’t like is to go for a couple of days without writing at all–it makes me unsettled.” 

–Melissa James Gibson, award-winning mom playwright, quoted in “The Craft” Front Matter of the March/April 2009 issue of The Dramatist

Thanks, Melissa. I needed to hear that.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a little while, you know I’ve been participating in a playwriting workshop over this past month. In the midst of what turned out to be unexpected and extreme circumstances with my husband being called to NY (we’ll be reunited this Saturday–yea!), I managed to learn much about myself as a mom and a writer through the creation of my 10-minute play, Emancipation Evacuation, that had a public reading this past Sunday evening. I’m still flying high over the positive reception it received, and I’m forever grateful to fab actors Jo Howarth, Megan Hayes and Theroun Patterson (find them on Facebook!) for giving voice to my words. What a gut-wrenching, educational process!

Having just come through this workshop experience, I was more than interested in the From the Desk of … column from Gary Garrison in the Sept/Oct 2008 education issue of The Dramatist. As mom playwrights, we don’t often have the luxury of time to take writing classes or participate in workshops. So if and when we make the decision to do so, it’s important that we choose wisely among the myriad of offerings out there for maximum return. I would invite you to get a copy of the journal to read completely the checklist advice Mr. Garrison offers, but here are the fundamental questions he suggests you get the answers to as the basis of your litmus test:

What is the real “what/why” of your studying?

Who is teaching?

How many students are in each class?

What is the tone of the workshop and how is it taught?

And, once you’re enrolled, is the class working for you?

Seemingly simple questions, but the depth comes in the subquestions they birth, and what you decide to do with the subsequent answers.

I’m now post-evaluating the workshop I just completed with Mr. Garrison’s questions. The answers are giving me valuable feedback to share with the facilitators. I believe it will be appreciated. I just love the serendipity of full circle moments.

Thanks, Gary!  And “Happy Getting Educated” to you, mom playwright!

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Listening to NPR’s Morning Edition while driving my son to school today, I was chilled by this report from Lourdes Garcia-Navarro on the work of the Iraqi Center for Children’s Culture in Baghdad. Following is an excerpt of the words that grabbed me, though I challenge you to actually click and listen to all that I heard here:

Back at the rehearsal, the play is ending. After the scene of the car bombing, a young girl comes on stage and draws a question mark.

Rusol Nawfal, 11, says her role is a simple one.

“I draw that [question mark] in order to ask why — why are my friends getting killed?” Nawfal says matter-of-factly. “This is a play, but it’s also reality because there are children playing on the streets and car bombs do kill them. We have not enjoyed our childhood. We stay at home and watch cartoons, if we have electricity. If we don’t have electricity, we either sleep or sit around the house.

She starts to cry and walks away. A teacher says her father has just been killed.

The rehearsal starts again, and Nawfal walks back on stage. The play poses the question, but gives the children no answers.

Regrettably, I don’t have the answers either. But I am reminded that art matters. Theatre matters. And the work of a playwright can serve as a salve for the writer, the actor(s), the audience and, dare I believe, a society.

I urge you to listen this report. Hug a child, be it your own or one close to you, and hold a high thought for what Michelle Obama passionately proposed last night during her Democratic National Convention keynote speech, “The world as it should be.”

Given our gifts and talents, what can we do to make it so?

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Friday?! Whew! Where does the week go?

This past Wednesday evening, I attended a private reading of Mountain Greenery by prolific playwright and fellow WTP affiliate Evan Guilford-Blake. It was a comic look at corporate America and self-discovery and made for a good evening of playwriting/theatre exchange. Watch for it…

When I got home, Hubby wanted to know all about the reading. As I shared, I got to thinking about how much easier it would have been had he joined me, as I prefer exchange to exposition.

But alas, this time around he was home with the children, so that I could have the benefit of going out and enjoying and learning from the evening. Go it solo, or go-it-together-and-do-the-sitter-scramble: this is the decision we make with every performance I look to attend.

And with my recent selection as an Alliance Reviewer for the 2008-2009 season, we’ve already pretty much exhausted our sitter resources (I’m delighted, though–don’t get me wrong).

With this in mind, I offer my kudos to Nightwood Theatre and American Repertory Theatre for implementing an idea whose time has come: offering babysitting services to patrons.

Now granted, I’m sure the market isn’t a giant one, but I’ll bet it’s one that will prove worth tapping.

Nightwood will be launching its onsite babysitting program this season, with select matinee shows. It offers the service free to donors and those with season passes. American Repertory also positions babysitting as a subscriber perk for its select Saturday matinee performances, at $10 per child per show.

If one of the theatres already on my “I Like Their Work” List offered babysitting as a benefit of their season subscription program, the scales would very likely tip in their favor to receive my membership dollars. It is my sincerest hope that this idea will catch on like wildfire. As it’s said, “The family that family that plays together stays together.”

Do you know of any other theatres, American or otherwise, that offer a childcare perk? Would you be enticed to become a season subscriber with this benefit?

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Today it was back to school in metro Atlanta. My son started pre-K, so I’m in an educational state of mind.

My family attended a children’s theatre performance this past weekend that I’m still trying to process, as far as how to share with the company’s powers-that-be how poor the experience was–constructively. I thought I’d do it here, as a blog post: Top 10 Tips for Successfully Engaging Young Patrons and their Parents at Your Show. But two days later I’m still having difficulty not coming off as snarky, and that is not my intention.

So I’ve tabled the idea and decided that I will just email the artistic director, as it was she who solicited our attendance in the first place. And lest you get the wrong impression, know that it wasn’t necessarily the show itself with which I took issue, but all the lacking supportive factors ’round it that prevented a pleasantly professional theatre outing.

Suffice to say that as I addressed my husband’s question of, “We drove all the way out here for that?!” on the ride home, I regretted not taking our children to see a closing weekend performance of Sleeping Beauty at the Center for Puppetry Arts instead, given the free tickets I’d been offered. I’d just wanted to give “the little guy” a chance–the same chance I’d want afforded to me as a fledgling playwright.

The thing is, we have to recognize opportunities to shine when they’re presented and seize them. Otherwise, the patron or production lost may be our own.

Class dismissed.

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Ow!!

Excuse me while I try to determine why my daughter, currently standing on my lap as I type one-handed, has just bitten my earlobe, under the guise of going in for a kiss. Should I be concerned, or just chalk it up to behavior to be expected of a toddler one week and 10 days into her “Terrble Twos”?!

Perhaps, ironically, she sensed I was about to lead you to this link, Butchering My Baby-A Parable, and decided that in case I had any literal ideas, she’d attack first.

No worries, Baby Girl–it’s just a clever metaphor from Kristoffer Diaz on the process of getting a play ready for stage. Now let’s go check Mommy’s ear and make sure there’s no permanent damage a la the infamous Tyson-Holyfield fight.

Has your “baby” ever been butchered? How did it leave you feeling?

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When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as child; but when I became a (wo)man, I put away childish things. I Corinthians 13:11

Inkubator, PlayPenn, the Cradle.

Funny how these words to me as a mom (when spelled correctly, not creatively) don’t seem so loaded. But as a playwright, I am intrigued by the point made that they are perhaps infantile and condescending when related to how new plays are regarded and developed. I’ve been chewing mightily on the read in yesterday’s Washington Post, “New Plays: The Coddling Can Be Constraining” written by Nelson Pressley.

As pointed out in the article, being a newbie to the playwriting world, I am interested in readings and workshops for my work.

However, having attended a number of play readings to support fellow playwrights, I know when my time comes, I will welcome other cooks into my kitchen, but be mindful to not let their contributions spoil the pot. There’s something to be said for taking things with a grain of salt–eating the fish and removing the bone…

Bottom line: as a playwright you’ll want to eventually be produced. You’ll want to leave your work open to the audience’s interpretation–in its produced form. Then everyone can have at it all they want.

I see both sides off the argument. Perhaps being a mom gives me the perspective that crawling is fine–in fact at 9 months old it’s a welcomed, celebrated feat. But if you’re still crawling at 4 years old and haven’t yet walked, there is cause for concern.

What do you think?

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