Michael Hollinger’s play Ghost-Writer, receiving its regional premier at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, surely had some great tech behind it last night, including especially Matthew Callahan’s sound design. Everything was a little bit of perfect, deliberate and deliberative, yet finally I left feeling unsatisfied.
Archive | Writing
The Dance of Anger
Just finished reading Theresa Rebeck’s Spike Heels, a play that really knocked my socks off for being so funny, satisfying, and irritating at the same time. She rewrote the Pygmalion myth–not Shaw necessarily, nor My Fair Lady, but a thing all her own, and a beautiful one. (I reckon this is what artists do, isn’t it? I’m sure trying.) While I found Rebeck’s introduction a little disingenuous, I accept the premise that she’s a playwright who happens to be a woman rather than a feminist who uses plays to effect sociopolitical ends.
Plays God, from Whom All Blessings Flow
Well, if there really is a full-time position for the god of playwrighting, it would have to be a job-share arrangement between Melpomene (for tragedy) and Thalia (for comedy). This odd couple sometimes needs an interlocutor–someone deft enough to sound the depths of the long period yet familiar with the iconoclastic bent. Comedy and tragedy, as categories independent of genre, remain historically relevant and emotionally powerful…but these days there is more intercourse between them than there was, I think, in ancient Greece. It’s probably healthy. Oddly, you hear the expression “dark comedy” much more often than “light tragedy,” which goes to show that there’s work yet to be done.
Which brings me to my first full-length play, The Whistler. I recently brought it to a more settled state that I can share with Cincinnati theatre folks in a couple weeks through the good offices of Tim Waldrip, an acting coach and director there who invited me to come see his production of the play that made John Malkovich famous. I hope to have a table reading of The Whistler while I’m in Ohio; at any rate there’s a dinner in the offing with some very talented actors, teachers, and at least one well-established playwright. I’m reading or watching everything I can get my hands on by the folks who will be around that table. Continue Reading →
iPray, UUPray, we all pray (sort of)
One of my goals this year is to practice theatrical collaboration, and to that end my loosely knit group of actors called the Ubuntu Players has used improv to develop a three-minute comedy about the uses of prayer for our Unitarian Universalist fellowship. Continue Reading →
One of the world’s newest plays
At the Dramatists’ Playground in Greensboro last weekend, we created a play called Camelot Club where Arthur is an African-American ball-boy who beats the tennis pro, inheriting his job; Morgan LeFay, whose family founded the club, works her dark magic through her Twitter followers (and her old money); Guinevere’s a nouveau riches naïf who wants to learn to, um, swing; and Lancelot is a visiting tennis player longing to return to the pro circuit after recovering from an injury. He says he just wants to be wherever the best tennis is being played and hence is drawn to Arthur’s court–but the truth, as Morgan quickly surmises, is that he needs a sponsor, someone with money… Continue Reading →