Space Review

Okay, let’s try this blogging thing again.

So, I don’t know if anybody’s reading this, but I got literary internship at EST and I’m very happy with it. Sure, I’m mostly doing the same shitty stuff that needs to get done around a theatre but is too tedious for anybody with a title, the stuff I didn't want to do for free now that I'm out of college and did that stuff for three years already, but that’s okay. I really like the people, good theater, good atmosphere, it’s good to have some place to go, and to be around people who make this whole crazy profession seem less impossible.

Anyway, the real reason I’m writing this is because my new internship provides me with lovely comp tickets and tonight I partook in this one and only perk of my unpaid job. I saw Space Panorama at the Public, as part of their Under the Radar festival. I know I’m going out on a limb here, I know this statement could be challenged far and wide and inspire rioting in the streets but here it goes: best half-hour mimed solo show about the Apollo 11 mission... ever. I am not kidding.

Seriously though, I really liked it. And it really is a half-hour solo show about the Apollo 11 mission, and it really is mimed, with prerecorded narration and music, but still... mime. And it really is amazing. Really. It’s just a man in a black mock turtleneck standing behind a black cloth-draped table, moving his hands around and making faces. But it’s smart and funny, and actually tells the story of the moon landing, a story which has been told and visually represented in countless incredibly boring ways, but who would have thought, mime wasn’t one of them.

I want to describe it, but it's hard, I know that feebly imitating his gestures at my computer will not get my point across but I'm having some trouble fighting that urge. However, when I type phrases like "he was all the astronauts, and he was Kennedy one time" or "sometimes his head was the moon but sometimes it was his left hand" or "and his fingers, they where people sometimes, except once they where a whale" or "he made weather on the table", not only do I sound like a four year old trying to explain how TV works, but I also don't really capture it. It was good, it was like nothing I'd ever seen before, I'm really glad that I braved the cold, got lost, called 411, risked being black-balled for future comps at the Public theater and made it to the just in time for this weird, charming performance.

Let's try this again

Well, this seems like as good a time as any to return to the mundane and self-aggrandizing world of my blog. I suspect of these “I’m sorry, I’m bad, I’ll try to do better” entries outnumber the more legitimate daily motions type that were the blog’s purported purpose. So, no promises. well, no elaborate promises, I will try to blog at least twice a week from now on, so watch out Mondays and Thursdays. Yes I know today is Friday but committing to Friday seems like a guarantee of failure.

Anyway it’s been about a month and here are the plays I remember reading:
1. Travesties by Tom Stoppard
2. Happy Days by Samuel Beckett
3. Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett
4. Some other short later plays by Beckett
5. No. 11 (Blue and White) by Alexandra Cunningham
6. Anton in Show Business by Jane Martin
7. Back Story A dramatic anthology by a whole slew of writers
8. The Divine Fallacy Tina Howe
9. Standard Time Naomi Wallace
10. The Phone Plays 2000
11. Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage by Jane Martin
12. The Phone Plays 2001

I also applied to several internships and solicited letters of recommendation from teachers for some others. I have an interview with Ensemble Studio Theatre next week and one with Lark Play Development Center for the following week ( I shamelessly name dropped one of my friends on that one).

I saw a truly dreadful play yesterday. I knew I would hate it, but the tickets were so free, and I was told that the tech and the performances would be really good, and it was an opportunity to see my friends, so I went. The actual technology was impressive but it was only really artfully used twice in the two and a half hour production. The actors were probably talented, but the script was so bad that there was no way to be sure they could act, and the sound system was so loud and the music so laden with over-embellishment that they were constantly blowing their mikes and there was no way to be sure that they could sing. The costuming was impressive, except for the occasional moments of improperly secured boob (no emergencies but a couple close calls) which were very obvious from the upper mezzanine. At this point I feel obligated to inform you that the show was Dream Girls, the friend who lured me there with free tickets only to abandon me was Aryana (she works at the Apollo), and the friend who suffered by my side was Amanda. I also feel the need to mention that we go caught in the tide of people leaving the theatre and were forced to spend twenty minutes wandering Harlem in search of a bathroom before taking the the train to Grand Central for relief. After we parted I was so sleepy and the A train was so messed up that it took me over two hours to get home. I was not happy, but it’s better that I got out... I guess.

So I went to this group thing,

the one I talked about yesterday. And I’m not sure. I’ll go again and talk to the woman who runs it, I don’t exactly know what I’ll say to her. I should have talked to her today, but I just didn’t or couldn’t, I don’t know. They have my contact info. I gave notes which I shouldn’t have done because I was a visitor and didn’t really have the right, but it was good to be back in a workshop, I’d missed it and I couldn’t help myself.

All the writers were considerably older, the actors where either older men or women my age, the woman who ran it assured us that there were often more people. The work was kind of old. I think that's what I'm not sure about. I'm so used to being with writers my own age and my playwriting teachers of the last two years were in their early thirties and both pretty new wave. This work felt stodgy. The critiques were on point, the guy whose scene was pretentious and didn't have anything at stake was told so, as was the guy whose play was endless and actionless, and the one with two many characters to keep straight. It's not that I think I'm so great, or so avant gaurde, or so free from the shackles of exposition, that's not what I'm saying... it just felt wrong. It was good to be in a workshop again, it felt good to hear cold readings and feel insightful, but it didn't feel right. Their whole aesthetic just felt wrong to me, too expository, or naturalistic, too demanding of full sets, people who look related, and psychiatrists without prolems of their own. I heard parts of five plays; exactly one character swore, and it was a big deal in the play that she did. Maybe they deserve another chance, but I couldn't imagine bringing my work into that room.

So, I don't know, I just don't know if I should go back.

Plans for the incredibly near future

I spent some time looking for playwrights' opportunities in the city. There were some decent leads, I’ll do more with them. Anyway, tomorrow I’m going to go to a meeting of the NYCPlaywrights group. They meet every week, you have to submit work and be accepted, then you have to pay $60 for a five month membership which gives you free tickets and some perks but mostly it means that you can get your work read. The meetings are open so tomorrow (today, I guess) I’m going to go as a visitor and I'll apply if I like like the atmosphere. usually I wouldn’t talk about this until tomorrow but, in light of terminal issues with motivation, I thought it would be best to post about it now so I’ll feel obligated to attend. More info to come.

Ambivalent reading expirience: concluded

It seems I can’t get my act together until midnight these days and for that I apologize. I suspect that comes from the hope that more will be accomplished if I just wait, as if I’m not the one I’m waiting for.

I finished the Alexander Plays. I think that on the whole I liked them, or at least there were very few things that stuck out as problems and they made me think, which isn’t quite the same thing as liking something but it’s certainly not nothing. All four plays center around Suzanne Alexander who is fictional, at first I was determined not to look this up, to just view the plays as plays without getting bogged down in the historical stuff that usually makes me not like things. However, in one of the plays the main character referred to She Talks to Beethoven as her best known play, written about when her husband disappeared. I got incredibly, embarrassingly disoriented by this, I found myself talking (in my head) like every character at the climax a farce with identical twins, because, of course, that’s the name and subject of the fist play in this collection. So, the character was claiming to have written another play in the book, of which she was the lead, one in which she was not writing a play about herself and didn’t seem to be aware of the audience. I found it disorienting and started to wonder if she was a real person, or the author's name was a pseudonym, or what was going on, then I felt like I was being fucked with and then I felt stupid. So, I guess I’m not sure how I feel about that particular dramatic device, after all it did have an effect.

The other thing I want to talk about is how she used found text, or source material, or the public domain, or the classics or whatever you want to call it. This is one of those things you see sometimes, I guess it’s natural. Writers are intelligent, over-educated, romantically self involved people, of course they feel the need to draw literary and historical parallels that elevate and explain their characters. Kennedy does it well, in The Ohio State Murders she weaves Tess of the d'Urbervilles into the story of Suzanne Alexander as a young black student at the newly desecrated Ohio State who’s daughters are are murdered by the white professor who fathered them. In The Film Club, a monologue about her waiting for her husband after a second disappearance, during which it turns out that he was imprisoned and tortured, she incorporates Bram Stroker’s Dracula and Diop’s poetry. The Dramatic Circle covers the same time and adds the letters of Napoleon and Josephine to the mix. It’s a technique I’ve never been tempted to use, not because I don’t think it can be effective but because it’s not really in keeping with how I work or think. I’m not sure why I just made that personal but let’s move on. The effect is not heavy (it could easily have been heavy) but weighty, it gave this woman’s life a context, and a feeling of importance and belonging among the great tragic love stories. I think it worked mostly because we saw her looking to these texts consciously for comfort and guidance and the feeling that she wasn’t alone. I think it worked because it came from the character rather than being slapped on top by the writer.

All that said, I’m glad I read these plays but I just didn’t enjoy them. I guess enjoyment isn’t everything.

Ambivalent about plays

I read half of Adrienne Kennedy’s The Alexander Plays today (I know, yesterday, but cut me some slack; I just got home) and I’m not sure how I feel about them. I certainly respect what she’s doing but I don’t know that I like it. I’m not sure whether this was Sally’s recommendation or Jordan’s but I know I heard about it at school and I don’t know what I’m going to do when when run out of names to remember when I see them on library shelves. Anyway, She Talks to Beethoven incorporated the often problematic historical-figure-brings-wisdom-to-another-time trope, which I’m not such a big fan of. However the fact that he was sent by the main character’s husband to be with her during his disappearance, and that he was bond between them who they had argued about the morning he left, gave it some legitimate emotional weight. The other play, The Ohio State Murders, I haven’t finished so I shouldn’t really write about it, but I do appreciate the ambition of a play in the past tense and although I don’t know if I like it I think it uses memory more skillfully than most. Also it makes me suspect that Jordan Harrison was the one who recommended it because his play Doris to Darlene was pretty obviously influenced by it (I liked his better though).

Moving forwards/backwards

I applied for an internship at Ensemble Studio Theater today. It’s unpaid and I said I could work 30-40 hours. I just want to get involved again at this point and stuff like this is what makes the most sense. It’s one of the most respected new works theaters around, they run a writers group I was recently rejected from but would like to have another crack at next year, if I get it (and I think I might finally be over-qualified for something) I’ll be reading new works and maybe have an active role in development. This would be good for me. Not financially of course but, you know... something. And if I do something like this then it’ll be a lot easier for me to stomach getting a mindless part time job. When I came here I said that I was sick of working for nothing but a pat on the head, that I would get a job that was actually a job, but here I am, applying for internships, same when I was in school.

Some promises and some pretension

Okay. I need to be back. I need to really do this, commit to keeping up with my blog. Even if I don’t hit the deadlines I set for myself, even if I don’t get a job, no matter what, I need to start doing this again and I will. I am back, back to daily updates, back to thinking seriously and doing something theatre related five days a week. If on any day I fail to do something theatre related I will at least write about something theatre-y that’s on my mind. Even if it’s about how I feel about the format of published plays, musings on how many layers of black paint are on the average stage, the difference between “theatre” and “theater” or something else equally inane, I will post.

On that note, here’s something:
While I was on the train to return books to the library I read Beckett’s Happy Days. I read half of it really, then I sat in Bryant Park and read the other half. I hadn’t been reading my Beckett because it’s not easy, he gives you so much, such precise language, grammar, stage directions but really it’s nothing at all. I mean it’s amazing, but without information it can be hard to get a grip on something. Beckett is a master of essence (at least that’s what Albee said in his intro), he’s a master of making you feel something, or love, or hate, or pity a character without you ever knowing why. He makes you feel like you know a person without biography or history, without names really, he seems to posit that you can learn more about a person from hearing them describe a particularly good ham sandwich than you can from hearing them describe their father’s death, and it seems like he’s right. I can’t tell you what was beautiful about Happy Days but I know it was there, I know that play had something in it. I returned my copy of Beckett’s plays to the library, its better that way, it’s better for me to read them one at a time, not to be able to go back, not to be able to try to decode them. Meanwhile a copy of Waiting for Godot and a copy of Krapp’s Last Tape burn a hole in my bookshelf and become less magical every time I read them. It’s better for their lightness to be preserved and for me to remember that knowing everything is the worst way to understand something.

Learning stuff, and stuff

On Monday I went to a panel discussion at the Lucille Lortel, it was the Stella Adler Studio’s closing of their Harold Clurman festival, which I know absolutely nothing about. Enough names for you in that sentence? I wouldn’t have known about this discussion either except my friend Aryana had an extra ticket and her boyfriend would rather have chewed off his own foot than attend (former film major, no respect for the theatre). anyway, it was centered around a book I haven’t read (I read a review, does that count?) called The Necessity of Theatre, which, among other things, broadens the definition of theatre to include things like football games and weddings. Having not read the book I can’t be sure, but I think that the general idea is that theatre is anything that requires one group of people to watch another and feel something collectively. I guess that’s kind of beautiful but it doesn’t make me like or respect either football or weddings. Anyway, the other major thing that I think the book dealt with was what it means to be part of an audience and how watching as well as making drama makes us more human. I’m pretty sure the answer was something about empathy but they didn’t go into much detail about that.

So, the author Paul Woodruff was on the panel, but he’s a British philosophy professor who teaches somewhere in Texas and was barely allowed to speak. Also featured (a bit more prominently) were the director Anne Bogart (who I saw speak at Purchase and liked despite the fact that she directed the god-awful Charles Mee play Hotel Cassiopeia), Ben Cameron from the Doris Duke Foundation, Peter Meineck who translated several ancient Greek texts with Woodruff and I think does something else too, and the woman who head the acting program at NYU whose name I can’t readily find. They were theatre people (which is why they so easily upstaged a philosopher), they cared about the subject, they spoke well, and they loved the book.

The major themes that emerged where education, innovation, technology, funding, a changing of the guard and audience outreach. They talked about how audiences were dwindling, how in a time when people where consuming more entertainment than ever the theatre isn’t a part of their lives, how people feel closed out of theatre. They talked about technology in two senses and moved without warning between stage technology, rotating stages, projections, holograms which could open theatre up in incredible ways but needed to be used wisely so as not to strip a play of it’s humanity, and technology as enemy, the internet and TV that keep people at home and the phone calls and texts that haunt them even if they make it to the theater. Also, they talked about house lights and Anne Bogart called Stephen Spielburg a fascist, Wagner too, but that might be more literally accurate. Bogart also announced that “post-modernism is over”, which is frankly a relief. She seemed pretty relieved about it too, but she also thought it was on us (the young people) to come up with a name for the new thing. A couple of them, mostly Cameron, talked about how nobody believes in “art for art’s sake” anymore and that art need to prove it’s social value if it wants money (and art’s always hungry for money), which he says isn’t such a bad thing for art because it’s been lazy and self referential for too long. Needless to say he’s a funding guy. I don’t know how I feel about that point, I mean I guess I don’t think art or theatre should be a closed circle, viewed only by the people who consider themselves worthy of making it, but if you say that a play needs to promote diversity, or teach kids about STDs (have they changed it STIs, I can never keep it straight), or draw attention to a genocide, or to gay rights, than there’s no place for what I’m interested in. I know that my life experience is considered invalid and over played, that I’m upper-middle class, atheist, white, young, self-absorbed, that my vocabulary is not child-friendly, that my work is generally about how hard it is keep yourself breathing rather than about global warming, but... I don’t remember where I was going with this. Anyway, I don’t like it I don’t like the idea that good work (not that mine is) isn’t valuable enough to society, especially when so much that apparently has social value is such crap. Back to the discussion. The talked about how the current generation of artistic directors is retiring (the ones who where mentored by and took over directly from the people who the theaters are named after) and young directors won’t replace them unless they are allowed to take these institutions in their own directions. That means that turmoil with might mean interesting stuff.

All in all it was interesting and thought provoking, but it ended on a sour note (for me at least). An actor got up and asked the final question which was something like “how can we as actors experiment and express ourselves and connect with the audience and still respect the writer’s text”, okay the truth is that it was an actor question and I wasn’t totally paying attention, but the answer I heard, Paul Woodruff, the author of The Necessity of Theatre and translator of ancient texts said “screw the writer”.

News

I got rejected from Youngblood today, it’s not surprising and it was a nice e-mail (although I’m sure it’s to one everybody who isn’t good enough gets).

Bad News and Potentially Good News

I can’t write today, it’s a terrible start to my ambitious new plan but it is the result of circumstances beyond my control. See this plan was formed last Friday when I was unaware that my mom was coming down to the city today, and it was cemented Monday when, although I knew she was coming and wasn’t going to be here until 4PM, I did not know that I would have a job interview at noon today. Writing a ten minute play essentially requires me to set aside four hours of uninterrupted time (after three days of consideration), and I don’t just need to be physically at my computer for that time, I need to be mentally there(here). Even if I had gone to be early last night (I couldn't get to sleep until 4:30) and gotten up at 6 it would have been very difficult for me to keep my head in my work with my interview fast approaching. Afterwords I came back and only had about 2 and a half hours before I have to go out again. So, no writing. I’m doing the leg work though, researching, image inspirations, finding names, stuff like that and I’m going to drug myself with Nyquil tonight, go to sleep at a somewhat decent hour, set an alarm (which I never do), get up tomorrow and write this thing.

My interview went well: I really liked the guy I hope to be working for. I never do as well as I want to when it comes to “do you have any questions about our organization”, but other than that I think I made a good impression. I’m sure they talk to everybody like they already have the job (I mean, the conditional tense is such a pain in the ass to use) but was comforting to hear phrases like “you’ll be my right hand”, “we’ll call you Monday to come in for a trial and see how you fit in”, “I might need you to write grant proposals”. Also he told me to send him my script, which I’ll send along with my "thank you for meeting with me" e-mail. I know there's a whole system o thought about hand written thank yous but the theatre moves faster than the post office and I just can't afford to be that old fashioned. At present I’m cautiously optimistic but I’m sure that by Monday I’ll have worked myself down to certain of failure.

48 Hour Stoppard-over in Brooklyn

I missed yesterday but I’ve been reading at truly alarming rate so I have lots and lots of Stoppard to talk about.

I really liked The Real Inspector Hound: the play features two theater critics occupying seating block which mirrors the actual audience, and watching a truly awful murder mystery farce. The critics’ hushed discourse on the one’s professional rivalries and the other’s dalliances with ingenues weave into the play they’re watching until they are dragged into the story themselves. it’s really good.

After Marguerite was almost but not quite as good. It was a comedy about a couple and one of their (they were not in agreement as to whose) mother preparing to go out and being questioned by the police in their very odd living room. Like Hound it demonstrated Stoppard’s talent for farce, linguistic play and the accumulation of circumstances.

Dirty Linen was centered on a cabinet meeting at British Parliament about the improper sexual intrigues of MPs as reported by local papers. Nearly every person at the meeting had slept with the clerk. I didn’t really like it. It was kind of tedious, the language and characters of parliament were broadly drawn and didn’t seem to be as familiar to Stoppard as those of the theatre (for obvious reasons).

New-Found-Land was kind of unbearable.

So far I love Dogg’s Hamlet but I’m less than half way through it so I’ll reserve judgement.

Also, I have a job interview tomorrow for the personal assistant job I applied for on Tuesday.

Another Quick Update

So, I just applied for a job. Part time personal/office assistant to the Artistic Director of a non-profit. Eight dollars an hour, ten to twenty hours a week, just a hair over minimum wage is more than I’ve made for four years, actually it’s more than I’ve made ever. I may have implied that I’m slightly better with Excel than I actually am but other than that my cover letter was totally truthful and I hope he or she thinks my unusual background prepares me for administration as well as I claim it does. As an added challenge there was absolutely no information about who this company is, so it was really hard to tell them that I admire their work and want to be a part of it, which made the cover letter a little difficult to write. At least this job interviews Friday and probably hires by Monday so at least I’ll know fast that I’m not getting it.

Writers Read

Today was less ambitious but almost as high-minded as yesterday: it was another library day. I’m going old school this week: early Stoppard and Beckett. And although I promised Aubrey I’d read Arcadia, it’s going to have to wait a little longer because it hadn’t been returned to the library I went to (somebody owes 15 cents) and I was feeling sick and didn’t want to shlep all the way uptown. I was at the Jefferson Market Branch which is very pretty in a story book kind of way, the staircase is in a clock tower, it has non-religious stained glass, and there’s no way for the space to be economically used for books. I have no idea what this building used to be but there’s probably a plaque. It doesn’t seem possible that it was a market. Anyway I picked up The Real Inspector Hound and other plays by Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett Volume III: Dramatic Works (it’s part of a very handsome set). By next week I intend to be more enlightened. They’re both linguistic masters, possible the greatest of their respective times and it’s about time I educated myself further, plus I’m watching too much TV and becoming too preoccupied with motion, I need to get back to talk or else I won’t write. (Plus I really like what I wrote after reading Krapp’s Last Tape, even if it is two pages long and requires the hanging of three actresses.)

20 Minutes a Week

I wrote a ten minute play today. It wasn’t very good, but it’s good that I did it and it kicks off my new program which is tentatively titled “20 Minutes a Week”. The new plan is that I will write ten page (presumably ten minute) plays every Monday and Friday in response to a prompt to announced the Monday or Friday before. This means that independent of any work I do on existing scripts I’ll be producing 20 new minutes of stage time every week, which is what the name refers to. Prompts may be a phrase, an image, a single word, a quote, whatever I come up with (usually they will be completely random and chosen without any preconceived idea of what the play will be).

Today’s prompt: hothouse flower
Friday’s prompt: unmentionables

See, I’m having some trouble functioning without the structure of academia so I’m simulating it. What I’m trying to do is create both deadlines and consequences, the deadlines are self explanatory, but consequences come from the fact that because I’ve now committed to this in the blog people will know if I don’t follow through. I guess I could lie but that seems to contradict the spirit of the whole thing, so I won’t. Anyway that’s it, look for future non sequiturs in the coming weeks, tagged on to Monday and Friday posts.

More Excuses

Today I have much the same excuse as yesterday for not spending the day soaked up to the neck in theatre stew, except that I was painting my friend’s apartment instead o mine and it was much, much more work. It reminded me of being on build and made me miss theatre.
I know that builds are long and strenuous and messy, and rushed, and I never fail to miss a meal call and reach red alert hunger level, but I miss it. I miss painting, setting props, losing things, tech-ing during rehearsal, hating actors with a passion, being confused when I leave the building and see that it’s dark outside, or if we’ve really been working, see that it’s light. I actually like fourteen hour days at a theater, and I always have (even when I’ve complained about them) it feels like being part of the most important thing in the world, and I’ve never liked going home when there’s still work to do.
I’m still working on how to translate those feelings into something that will feed and house me, but I just wanted to share them.

Soapboxing

Okay, I didn’t accomplish anything theatre related today because I was pretty focused on painting my room but here’s a thing that I’m thinking about based on recent reading: I don’t like lecture plays.
There I said it. I just don’t. Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You is a possible exception, but even Sister Mary starts to grate before the other characters come in. It’s pretty self explanatory but I feel like I should clarify that a lecture play is a play dominated by a single person talking directly to the audience, acknowledging that they are an audience and educating them on some subject (personal, anecdotal or academic) in which the speaker is presumably an expert.
It doesn’t sound very interesting, does it? It’s not. I’m sick of it, I’m sick of people putting a short story into a character's mouth, giving them a prop to fiddle around with, having them flail around the stage a bit when the story gets dull, and calling it a play. There’s no change in these plays (change is what makes something like Ignatius an exception and really not a lecture play at all) the characters are never challenged in their ideas or their sincerity and that never grow or fail, they just are, they just talk, then we all just leave. I’m drawing a line in the sand. I’m saying that I don’t recognize that as drama. I dare anyone to tell me it is.

Some Reading, Some Griping

I read a play today. It was pretty good but I did not manage to get excited about it. It was from the same book I was reading yesterday and was called She Stoops to Comedy, I don’t have the book in front of me so I’m not sure but I think it was by David Greenspan. The play was about an actress (to be played by a man who is never to be in drag) who having recently broken up with her girlfriend disguises herself as a man and gets cast as Orlando in a production of As You Like It which stars her ex- as Rosalind. it’s kind of a farce, and kind of a backstage comedy, and kind of queer theatre piece, but really it’s about theatre conventions: fourth wall, soliloquy, cross dressing, cross casting, post-modern stagings of the classics, the looming specter of film, changes between drafts (there’s a character who is either an archeologist or a lighting designer depending on the scene and everyone is very open about the fact that this was change the writer considered mid-development and never really settled) et cetera. And in that way it was pretty entertaining, but there were a lot of inside jokes and although I knew almost half the references it was a bit tedious and a little preoccupied with being smart about theatre as artifice.

In an unrelated matter: backstagejobs.com is really poorly designed website. I spent about forty-five minutes today going through all twenty seven pages, every posting they have. I went through every job because their location sorter is apparently entirely ornamental. I’m sorry but I refuse to believe that there are no theatre job postings for New York, NY. On top of that there is no obvious logic to how the jobs are sorted, the site doesn’t include a posting date so I don’t really know what’s new and what’s old. All they have is an expiration date for the listing ,and many of those are actually set to after the jobs they advertise are finished (I know because there where a lot of jobs listed as “last minute” (which I think just means that the listing is about to expire, not that the companies are desperate) for shows that had August runs). They even have a setting where you can only view postings after a certain date but when I tried to use it it said there were no jobs posted in the last two months which I, being a frequent visiter know isn’t true. The truly maddening thing is that they know what people want in a job seach site, you can tell they know because they put it there. so you log on and everything looks great, then, slowly, you realize that it was all a lie.

Reaching

Deep breath.
I just sent out an application. It isn’t the kind of work I’ve been applying for up to now, but it would be really good for me if they decided against all odds to hire me. It’s a position as development assistant for this great downtown theater that focuses on the development of new work: a creative environment, new plays, great people to know, possibility of advancement within the organization. It’s a year long part time job that pays $10,000, which is about minimum wage but that’s really good for entry level in the arts. If I get it I’ll still have to get something supplementary, but that’s not unexpected.
I am, of course, totally under qualified. they want someone with a background in arts administration. I don’t have one of those so I wrote them a really sincere cover letter, which talked about how much I believe in their mission, admitted that I don’t have an administrative background and told them that I was a good writer and know how to talk to people. essentially my strategy was to make them like me, name drop my teacher whose reading I saw there, tell them I love them, and swear that I’ll try. All I can hope is that they find my earnestness interesting enough that they want to meet me. If I can get an interview I think I have a shot. They also wanted writing samples so I gave them two two page writing assignments from school (I didn’t know what exactly they wanted) one was a pretty negative review of Tracy Bersely’s production of Measure for Measure, and the other was about upward mobility in Manhattan Transfer. Because I didn’t know what they wanted I gave them evidence that i can think critically and form my own ideas and evidence that I can assess and speak coherently about a theatrical production. I hope that’s what they were looking for.

Bad Blogger

Okay, so I haven’t been posting. I could tell you that I’ve been busy reading a novel or two and a few plays, fighting various bureaucracies, being berated by strangers, getting drastic haircuts and smashing my head on river rocks. That’s all true but it’s not an excuse. The point of this blog was to post every week day and I’ve failed to do this. So: mea culpa, I’ll try to be better. The past two weeks have been incredibly weird but we’re looking forward and getting back theatre and self discipline... and to being a good blogger.

Today I read about half of Play: a Journal of Plays, Volume 3. It’s a very modern collection of (you guessed it) plays that was edited by two of my former teachers (Jordan Harrison and Sally Oswald) I really liked the first play, The Lincolnshire Poacher by David Bost: it was short, it had characters, it had a really interesting premise and real emotional weight. Also, all the dialogue was written in an invented short wave radio code. Very cool, very me, it was my kind of construction, my kind of resolution... I almost felt like I could have written this play, in the best possible way.
I’ve also read most of The Always/Never Her Trilogy by Lisa D’Amour and Katie Pearl, and I don’t like it nearly as much. What I will say is that these are less plays than assembly instructions for a theatrical experience and that’s totally valid but a lot less suited for the page. There are directions and dialogue like in any play but these are deconstructed, site specific pieces with built in gaps for a performer or director’s self expression. What i struggle with in this piece and pieces like it is the problem of emotional disconnect, they feature strange stories (told rather than directly dramatized) but the persistent visual weirdness and the speakers’ detachment distance the audience from the emotions of these stories. to be fair i have a feeling that the inherent coldness of stage directions was the real problem and in performance i might like these plays a lot. There really is nothing more painful than reading directions for interpretive dance... although I also kind of hate interpretive dance.

(It should be stated that this is my definition of interpretive dance: an unchoreographed, semi- or self-choreographed segment of movement, usually performed by a non-dancer, to fill in an emotional beat ill defined by text)

I also applied for a job: a costume apprenticeship at a mostly modern dress Shakespeare company that pays a stipend, I don’t know how much.