I think it’s time to announce the line up for our From the Mouths of Babes festival!

• Babes in the Wood by Kate Hawkes (Prescott, AZ)
• Big Baby by Tiffany Antone (Prescott, AZ)
• Looking for a Miracle by Karen Murphy (Prescott, AZ)
• On Tuesday by Jennie Webb (Los Angeles, CA)
• Pop by Jen Huszcza (Los Angeles, CA) – Pop performed in Prescott, Swallow read in LA and Minneapolis
• She Says, She Says by Katherine James (Los Angeles, CA)
• Tastes Like Teen Sprit! by Sara Israel (Los Angeles, CA)
• Thomas by Rachael Brogan Flannery (Minneapolis, MN)
• Vampire Mouth by Shanee Edwards (Los Angeles, CA)

Each one of these plays is AWESOME and took on the  spirit of the fest in unique and exciting ways.  I absolutely cannot wait to see these plays in July!

So congratulations to each of our selected playwrights, and welcome to From the Mouths of Babes!

If the play is New – “How will we market a new play?!”

If the play is about women – “How will we convince men to buy tickets to this play about women?!”

If the play is dark/depressing/has a sad end – “How will we convince people to spend time watching a play that might leave them depressed?”

If the play is about non-caucasians – “Will our subscribers be able to relate to these non-caucasian human beings?”

And these questions are not asked out of bias or criticism of the material at hand – they are asked out of panic. The room might agree that the work being discussed is “important/entertaining as hell/genius as genius can be” but it is as though they have lost all faith in their audience’s ability to see in the play the same merit.  It is as though they have completely forgotten how to do their job as leaders to teach and inspire the audience to explore new worlds/perspectives.  They have spiraled downwards (sometimes in a matter of minutes) into helpless, panicked toddlers clinging to tried and true toys for comfort- Simon, Margulies, Albee, and other refreshingly “safe” white dude playwrights.

Everytime I am a part of this terrifying phenomenon, I feel like screaming “Why don’t you just grow a pair and push through this bullshit?!”  Because it is the Artistic Practitioner’s JOB to lead their audiences to new lands - to challenge them to explore new perspectives.  It is NOT our job to feed them the same tried and true applesauce that they’ve bought before just because it fills seats – a theatre company isn’t/nor should it aspire to be WalMart.

Which is why I get angry when I read articles like this one about the Guthrie – a theatre of national repute- where the artistic director responded to concerns over their all-white/all-male helmed season with this little gem:

“But one thing I want to be very clear about, tokenism is the worst thing you can do,” he said. “I employ people because of their talent, male or female. It is a very stern task to direct on a stage of our size, and I am responsible to the board for the shows we produce.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Dowling is insinuating of course that women/people of color are not talented enough to make the Guthrie “cut”.   But I’ve (and I’m sure you have as well) read a tremendous number of amazing plays by women/people of color.  I’ve seen amazingly talented female directors/directors of color…. because the truth is talent knows no gender or racial devide.  Dowling’s argument is an incredibly lazy and irresponsible one to make.

Unfortunately, he’s not the only one using such logic to validate what is essentially an administrative culture of fear – “If I take a ‘risk’ with my season, it may cost me ticket sales” and everyone who’s ever worked for a theatre company knows that a theatre’s box office is usually the one steering the ship.

Which leaves the sad saps on board blind to their own power and ability to steer that ship into even richer waters through innovation and leadership.

So what’s to be done about it?  Support the theatre companies that are forging ahead.  See “new” theatre.  Attend works by women/artists of colors.  Bring along your friends, talk about what you see/like/are excited by – in other words - accept and embrace your role as Audience Activist and start making a difference the only way theatre companies will feel – by impacting their bottom line.

Because the dirty little secret about that “Box Office” captain is that he’s US.

~Tiffany

And no matter the “binding”, complex, all-too-human factors inevitably take a front seat to the issues that brought everyone together in the first place;  Leaders will rise to positions of leadership, while most just shuffle along – sheeple unaware of (or uninterested in) their untapped collective power.  Some members will come on strong, and others with unwavering passivity… Intentions will be drafted, re-configured, and taken up in arms -for always there will be moments of contradiction amongst a community’s flock.

Always, there will be moments of momentum and drag, pulling at those who stand together… Always there will be chatter about what isn’t getting done, who isn’t making good choices… Always there will be change and opportunity to refocus.

And a good leader (of any community) will be able to tend to those moments of strife and (sometimes) furor… they will listen, they will lead, they will stay cool.  A good community will listen when the leader speaks reason, and challenge the leader to find reason when she/he has none.

Which is why what comes of community can be amazingly powerful – a group of people working towards a common goal… it’s part of what we bought into with “The American Dream” – that united we stand.  

And so we stand.

But community can also fracture and split into useless 2-man bands intent on sounding the drums amidst a cacophony of dissent if it’s not careful.

It can yield revolutions, change… it can evolve – if it’s focused.

There are a lot of theatrical evolutions happening right now (amidst all the other daily, more obvious upheaval) and it’s an opportunity for us as theatre practitioners to listen to one another, apply our knowledge, and create real change… to lay the groundwork for sustainable practice, thought, and longevity.

So I don’t cringe (too much) when I listen to conversations about where theatre is “going” – I listen, I pay attention, and I look for windows.  I try to find others who are also invigorated by the transformations happening around us, and I lay plans for action.

I’m getting ready to announce the From the Mouths of Babes line up – I’m excited by the women playwrights writing for the fest, the directors helming their work, and the countless other actors and audience members who will enjoy, bear witness to, and sustain the fest.

So, I know it’s just one step – one little festival (going up in three cities) but you see – the thing about community is that if you haven’t yet found one, you can get busy creating it.

Stay tuned for the From the Mouths of Babes play announcement!

I like writing short plays.

I know that’s like a carpenter saying she likes to hammer nails into wood or a pilot saying she likes the take-offs. It’s a pretty basic thing to say, but I do like working on short pieces.

I can try out ideas and bring them to completion—or not. Because I only have ten pages or less, I can’t have any fat on the play. Everything is important. Every line, gesture, costume, set, prop is important.

So where do my short plays come from?

For From the Mouths of Babes, I started with the topic itself. I let it tumble around in my head. From The Mouths of Babes. From The Mouths of Babes. From The Mouths of Babes.

Blow job!

Yes, that was the first thing that came into my head.

My internal critic yelled at me:

Jen! This play is going up in Prescott, Arizona! You promised Tiffany no sexy stuff! You could get run out of town.

I let my internal critic roll through all my fears and prejudices, then I wrote blow job on my paper.

The second thought was the song, “It Ain’t Me Babe” by Bob Dylan, but I thought about June Carter and Johnny Cash singing “it ain’t me babe, no, no, no, it ain’t me you’re looking for” at each other. Besides, it gave me an excuse to watch old Johnny Cash performances on youtube. Research!

My next thoughts were babes, babies, toddlers, children. When do adults behave like children? What are the audience expectations when they see adults onstage? In our civilized world, adults behave within certain parameters. What happens when those expectations fall away?

In the world of children, something ordinary can become extraordinary, but in the world of adults, something extraordinary can become bittersweet and painfully human. If I can get both working at the same time, I might just have something.

Or I could just write a play about a blow job. That’s one way to get a head.

I was so happy to see Tiffany on Saturday.  She’s endless inspiration, not to mention fun.  The theme of her next playwright’s festival is “From the Mouths of Babes” and I was really struggling for an idea suited to this theme.  Babes, babes.  Babies.  Funny things kids say?  Ah, I know!  I’ll write a play called “In the Mouths of Babes” that takes place on the set of a porno shoot.  But when it became about the “adult actors” wanting to have rules about using condoms and then organizing for a union to get health care, I gave it up.  Seemed a bit, well, not so much fun.

So instead of “babes” I focused on “mouths”.  I researched ancient dentistry and discovered something called “Waterloo Teeth“. Apparently, the battle at Waterloo decimated the French soldiers so much that teeth diggers retrieved enough teeth from the fallen young men to inspire an entire denture industry.  Real teeth were prized for dentures and of course, hard to come by until then.  It’s an interesting part of history, but not really a short play.  So I was stumped.  Again.

Then I read Patty Smith’s memoir, Just Kids and found it fascinating. She talks about her relationship with Sam Shepard and the play they wrote together, Cowboy Mouth.  It was performed one time by the two of them, then he left town.  I had read the play years ago, but wanted to read it again.  I found a copy at Barnes and Noble at the Grove and plucked it from the shelf, sat at a table and read it.  It’s pretty out there, but it was the 1970′s after all.  So using the play as inspiration, I decided to do my own homage to Cowboy Mouth, updating it for modern times.  Vampire Mouth is the result.  There will be a guitar. There will be drums.  Even a gong.  And one long, slow juicy BITE.

This is when life gets fun…

Scripts have already started coming in from some of our playwrights, and I’m SO excited to start reading them.  Stay tuned for posts from some of our playwrights and updates on locations, dates, and more

You sit.

You wait.

You cringe and chuckle and sweat.

And at the end of it all, you sit and listen to your fellow observers (though you are now center stage) – an exhibition to ask questions of, offer advice to, and seek story solace from… all in the hopes of helping you make the play better… all under the guise of shared responsibility to help you “develop” your script.

And if you’re lucky, you write enough of what is said down so that you can look at it later… when you’re alone… back in the comfort of your unobserved work space.  And you hope that it will somehow help you solve your act break SNAFU, a character aberration, or some other detail that’s been bothering you (or your readers).

You hope that anyone present with the ability to advance your career liked your play enough (or your comments/laugh/shoes enough – you’re not picky) to remember you and maybe invite you to play at their theatre somehow.  You hope that if this damn play gets read enough, the next theater that tells you they like it will do something more than just present it as a reading, because really, you’ve already put this play through 10 million (or 6) of those already and isn’t it about time someone started putting productions where their compliments are?

Because you’re a playwright.

And Playwriting is messy, public business.

And you can’t wait to get into a bigger, more public arena, with new actors and directors, where you are once again rendered helpless in the back of a (bigger) audience as the curtain rises…

Sweating even bigger bullets.

(Reposted from Tiffany’s blog, AwdsAndEnds.com)

We’re super excited and can’t wait to share more details – so stay tuned for more blogs by invited playwrights, as well as more details on the festival itself!

That “To Do” list pretty much lives on the perimeter of my almost daily thoughts anyway.

But here I am with the “New Years Eve” blog spot, and I feel like I have to comment on the occasion… I have to come up with something worth reading… don’t I?

So I was thinking about it from the writerly perspective- reevaluating this past year despite myself and I realized that although I won’t be making any resolutions (evil self-destructive little things, aren’t they?) I did learn some things this year that might be worth sharing here… Then I got to thinking that rather than sound off like a bombastic fool, I’d try to fashion these little thoughts into as straight forward and relevant language as possible…  I’ll leave it up to you whether or not I succeeded.

The Writer’s Annual (or hourly, depending on how often you need to remind yourself of them) list of 2012 Affirmations.

1. I will not beat myself up uneccessarily for: not writing enough/not getting the production/not schmoozing the right people at my agent’s son’s bar mitzvah/etc-reasons-to-artiscally-mangle-myself!  Or (at least) if I must abuse a gross personal misstep, I will try to make sure my fists are gloved before I self-flagellate, and I will treat myself to a stiff-stiff-delicious-something-alcoholic/or chocolate (or both) afterwards.
2. I will not waste my time writing plays that do not pass the “Who Gives a Shit” test.  I will be honest and constructive in my answering of this test when administered to an idea of mine.  If I’m not sure, I’ll gather some opinions, stew on it for at least a day, and then probably write it anyway/have to reread Affirmation #1 until the gloves can come off and I can hold a martini.
3. I will never underestimate life’s ability to pull me in new directions, and I will try like hell to be open to those new directions when life insists on dragging pulling me towards them.
4. I will let myself try new things (really this is just a restatement of #3) because if you only swim in familiar waters, you’ll never know how long you can hold your breath or what other amazing aquatic acrobatics you can accomplish… no matter how uninterested you may think you are in finding out.
5. I will reward myself when I deserve it (preferably with chocolate or new shoes… or maybe just chocolate because it’s cheaper)
6. I will work hard, play hard, take care of myself as best I can, try not to let the state of the world drag me down into an artistic abyss of depression, and I will always remember to scoop the cat litter, pick my socks up off the floor when there’s no longer floor to be seen, and otherwise try to resemble a happy functioning human being, even though I’ve chosen this impossible/wonderful/colorful/delightful/terrifying career… And when in doubt of any of these, I will reference #1 – #5 until the doubt has been run out of town.

May you each experience your own delightful New Year celebration (or lack thereof) and be merry, healthy, and bright in the new year(s) to come!

With Cheer,

Tiffany

(this article also posted on the LAFPI website)

Something bold and brand new.

Something brash and flavorful.

It’s the product of ambition and hope… and more than a little “Don’t tell me I can’t do something!” insanity.

And we can’t wait to share it with you…  in 2012!