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Naplwrimo 2009 Burst # 5: Reflections on Naplwrimo by Elizabeth Spreen.

Our final Rhino Burst for 2009 comes from Naplwrimo regular writer, playwright, dramaturg and Twitterer extraordinaire, Elizabeth Spreen... 
 
In another life I used to be a massage therapist. I specialized in sports massage and deep tissue work. Have you ever heard of those crazy endurance runs or bike rides? 100 miles through the Sierras or the Rockies. 500 Miles through Death Valley (training in August when you open the door of your hotel room at 5am and are burned by the heat). The Race Across America (a week to ride across the country on a bike)? I was often hired by athletes to crew for them on those sorts of events.  I loved it.
 
Which is also why I like NAPLWRIMO. Writing a play in 30 days isn't as physically challenging as riding a bike across America or running through the Rockies, but you experience a lot of the same emotions and yes, you sure could use a massage therapist with all the typing and staying up all night (if that's how you get it done). But there's also the incredible highs and lows and the feeling like you don't have it in you to finish. There's staying up late several nights in a row and getting to the point of talking to yourself the next day or hallucinating or crying hysterically or simply refusing to get back on the computer and type or pick up a pen and touch paper. Oh. Is that just me?
 
But there is also, perhaps most importantly, two things. Ok. Three things. First there's the commitment to write a play. November is the month that you get to put your work first and write. It's tough. Everyone has very real obligations - job, family, etc - but NAPLWRIMO creates a clearing - a real and a virtual space for you to write. Yeah. It's you who finds the time to put the words down one after another, page after page, and you who must negotiate that time with those with whom you share your life. Having that month is like finding an oasis in the desert. Okay. You're in the desert, but you've got food and supplies and you're writing a play. 
 
Next there's finish line. Those 75 pages. Your first draft. It's real and you can hold it and it's you who have made it manifest over the month. Hopefully you've stretched as an artist and you've been inspired by the work and the event. Crossing the finish line also means there are more plays in the world than there were 30 days ago. And I happen to think having those new plays out in the world contributes to the health of the theater. I also think that whether you finish or not, you've contributed to theater and to its ecology. You've worked on your play and you've learned, and hopefully you'll take that knowledge and you'll finish your play or you'll write a new one. Finding the theater comes not from doing the classics over and over again, but from having the audacity to bring life to new stories and new worlds, and maybe even finding new forms.
 
Finally, in between making the commitment and following through, there is the community that forms around the doing - the wrighting, if you will. And that also contributes to the health of the theater. Because so often we write alone. During this month, it's been you who've faced the blank screen or page. You've who've written your play. But you've also had a unique opportunity to connect with other playwrights from all over the world and to get help and inspiration when you needed it, and hopefully, you've asked. Because one of the things that's always drawn me to NAPLWRIMO is the generosity of the community and the willingness to help and commiserate and celebrate everyone's achievement. That's often hard to come by in the theater. But so plentiful here that I'm nourished by it for the entire year.
 

Elizabeth Spreen is a playwright, devisor, director, actor who is currently finishing her Masters thesis at San Jose State University. Works include This World Is Not My HomeFurious Angel, 611 SupremeNickel and Dimed. She was the winner of the  2007 Crane Award for Outstanding Dramatic Screenplay and of the 2002 Dean Goodman Choice Award for Original Writing.  She was also the founder and former joint artistic director of Paducah Mining Company, an award-winning San Francisco-based ensemble. Elizabeth writes for the following blogs: ghost light http://ghost-light.blogspot.com/ and Piefurcation http://piefurcation.blogspot.com/


 

 

Naplwrimo 2009 Burst #4: The Ways We Stop Ourselves by Sherry Kramer

I had a student come to me with last week with something that was troubling her. She thought that her play was no good because all the characters in it were too sweet—she was following her impulse to write about the down and out, about prostitutes and disenfranchised people, she had a story she wanted to tell, but the problem was that the characters who arrived to tell it with her were all kind and generous. Did I think this was all right? 

 

I told her that we go to the theater for the same reason that we fall in love—to see the world through another’s eyes. That’s what you bring as a playwright—your eyes, your way of seeing the world.  If you start second guessing that, if you start distrusting your vision—then there is very little point in writing your play. This playwright may someday write a play with venomous, dishonest characters—but not this one. And if she really wanted precedent for comfort, she could take it in the fact that for every 2 black-hearted streetwalkers in our art form, there are 3 hookers with a heart of gold. Her play doesn’t have to look like an edgy HBO series to create value and meaning. One of the things that we all forget sometimes is that innocence may very well be a pre-condition for creating art—that ability to experience wonder, that refusal to be jaded and consider anything known, or “old,” or fully understood—the innocent goes out into the world, into their art, looking for understanding. The jaded goes out looking for sensation. Your audience likes both, of course, but given the choice—their hunger for insight will trump sensation every time. 

I think that, in general, self-censoring is the soul killer. Now, I’m not suggesting that we should uncouple all our filters and just free associate page after page: someone said that what is written without effort is read without pleasure. (I’m pretty sure that’s not strictly true—we’ve all had whole scenes that just arrived like manna from heaven, and it’s scary how much better they are than the things we toil and sweat over—still, in general, if you don’t care about your work, it won’t be something that other people will care about, either.) So trust your vision. Trust it all the way to the end of your first draft. I’m also a believer in not showing your play to anyone, unless you have a really reliable first reader, until you make it to the end. You’re going someplace important. Picking up hitchhikers—and they encourage a detour here or there, right?—can be dangerous, just like our mothers have always said. 

The great thing about writing a play quickly is that it doesn’t give you a lot of time for self-censoring. One of the great and terrifying things about writing a play is that it’s not like a novel or short story or poem—theatre is a time bound art. It relies on the human beings, in real time, on stage and in the audience.  It begins and ends the way a breath goes in and out, and you must pack an entire world inside that breath, that simple in and out.  It happens, on stage and inside us. And to write it you have to get all the way to the end of that breath, before it’s gone. Before you have lost it. Sometimes that takes some running. And always, it takes belief. In yourself, in your vision. 

So rush headlong into your plays and don’t look back, drive like a New York City driver, break the speed limit, pick up hitchhikers if they don’t derail you, but remember that your vision is what you bring to the table, and if you start fitting it with too many pairs of corrective lenses too soon, the audience will end up seeing something they could see anyplace else. We deserve the chance to see the things that only you can see, the way you see them. 

And when you’ve written your first draft? Remember that rewriting is a different kind of magic. In Yeats’ famous poem “Among School Children”

How can we know the dancer from the dance

Started off as:

 It seems the dancer and the dance are one. But he would never have found his way to that lovely line, if he hadn’t started with the un-poetry of the original one. You will have plenty of time to bring on your inner Inspector General later.  But not now. Trust your impulses, and your audience will too.

Sherry Kramer's work has been seen at theaters across the country and abroad, including the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, InterAct Theatre, Yale Repertory Theater, Soho Rep, Ensemble Studio Theater, New York's Second Stage, The Woolly Mammoth, The Tokyo International Arts Festival, and The Theater of the First Amendment.  She is a recipient of N E A, New York Foundation for the Arts and McKnight Fellowships, the Weissberger Playwriting Award and a New York Drama League Award (WHAT A MAN WEIGHS), the L A Women in Theater New Play Award (THE WALL OF WATER), The Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (DAVID'S REDHAIRED DEATH), and a commission from A.S.K (THE MAD MASTER). Other plays include:  WHEN SOMETHING WONDERFUL ENDS, THINGS THAT BREAK, ABOUT SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, NAPOLEON’S CHINA (music theatre piece with Ann Haskell and Rebecca Newton), THE MASTER AND MARGARITA (music theatre adaptation with composer Margaret Pine), THE RELEASE OF A LIVE PERFORMANCE, PARTIAL OBJECTS, THE WORLD AT ABSOLUTE ZERO, HOLD FOR THREE, BEFORE AND AFTER, NANO AND NICKI IN BOCA RATON, THE LONG ARMS OF JUPITER, THE RULING PASSION, THE END OF RADIO, THE LAW MAKES EVENING FALL, and THE BAY OF FUNDY: An Adaptation of One Line from The Mayor of Casterbridge.  She was the first national member of New Dramatists, and teaches playwriting at Bennington College, and often in the MFA programs of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and the Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.

 

Naplwrimo 2009 Burst #3: 8 or 9 Things to Try by Mead Hunter

8 or 9 things to try with your playwriting this month, as long as you’re at it: 

  1. Be reckless. Give no thought to how a director or producer could ever produce what you’re writing. If your play calls for the galaxy to get sucked down a bathtub drain, how that will ever get realized on stage is just not your problem.

  1a.  Out there in the wide world are plenty of people to advise you against having 22 characters and five acts in a play that spans seven generations. Right now, you’re not writing for them. Run with the ball! 

 

  1. Getting something down on the page is the important thing. Don’t worry about elements like theme, motifs, etc. These will emerge gradually; you can always tease them out in subsequent drafts if you want.

 

  1. This is an old trick, but it really works:  as you fall asleep tonight, think of the place in your script where you stopped writing today and stage it in your mind. When you awake the next morning, you’ll know happens next.

 

  1. Hopefully you already do this, but:  once you’ve written a new scene, read all the dialogue aloud. Sometimes the characters will wind up telling you what they want to say.

 

  1. Once you have several scenes written, go back at look at each one. What if you truncated these scenes at the precise moment where each one achieved its dramatic purpose? How would that affect its linkage to the following scene?

 

  1. Writing a play in a month need not mean retreating to your comfort zone. See what happens if you don’t. If you tend to write large, constrain yourself to claustrophobic settings. If you’re usually more genteel, kill a few characters off. Surprise yourself.

 

  1. Remember the old Playwriting 101 exercise of cutting every other line to see what that tells you about your story? If you get stuck, this little stand-by can be a nice little jolt of discovery. Or annoyance. But that works, too.

 

  1. Above all:  have fun!

 _______________________________________________________________

 Mead Hunter has finally stopped shilling for regional theater and instead has hung out his own shingle:  SuperScript Editorial Services. Stop by any time...

 

Thank you Mead Hunter for  great tips as rhinos hit the half way mark of Naplwrimo 2009 !


 

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