It's a familiar image: that of a ladder or staircase leading upwards towards success. We see it in classroom inspirational posters as kids, in articles about advancement and "climbing the corporate ladder" as adults. We are taught and trained that the march towards progress is just that - a forward march in which you should ever be…

This, dear reader, is my final TheatreFace blog post. That is, my bi-monthly feature is coming to an end as I finally realized that I had too many proverbial balls in the air. Juggling said balls has been taking a toll on me and I’ve decided to stop spreading myself too thin.

I’ve truly enjoyed the thirty-six (this is thirty-seven) blog posts that TheatreFace has featured on my behalf, allowing me to navel gaze as well as highlight national conversations in our field.

I asked…

This week, I have a smorgasbord of random thoughts and observations. None of them make up an entire blog, so I thought I'd toss them all into the mix. (This may or may not be how I tend to cook food... to varying degrees of success.)

Always Follow Up

I've gotten to meet some awesome people over the course of my career thus far. From playwrights, to actors, to designers, I've…

“You should write a novel.” That was my co-worker out of the blue. “That play, that play of yours that won all those awards. Turn it into a novel.”

Hmmm…

I hadn’t thought about that.

I mean, as a playwright I think more about adapting other media into plays. For example, I’m currently working on a submission treatment to turn a piece of video journalism into a one act play. But I hadn’t thought about going the other direction, about taking one of my own plays and…

As a poet I very much understood that the acceptance of one of my poems for publication was very separate from whether or not the poem was any good. Knowing there are other deciding factors—the publication’s meta narrative, how poems flow from one to the next, interact with one another—allowed me to separate my emotions from the business of sending my work out into the world.

And I understood that it was a numbers game. The more I sent work out into the world, the higher the…

I’m a member of the writing forum Absolute Write. It’s a fantastic site that deals with a lot of different genres and styles of writing, gives advice on publishing, has some fantastic threads where you can share your work and get feedback. All in all, it’s a site I recommend.

In the playwriting part of the site, …

I ran into a theatre friend/artist (full disclosure: I won’t be naming names) recently and while we were talking about plays currently up on Bay Area stages my friend asked me if I had seen a play, a nationally known play, that’s come to town.

While they thought the play was good, they said watching it made them ponder that question you see in this post’s title:

Why is this a play?

As opposed to television or film.

They contended, and I agree (full disclosure:…

Recently I was asked by an actor friend who is a member of a theatre company that is pretty much legendary here in the Bay Area if I would be interested in writing something for their summer show. Nothing is firm (hence no names), but my actor friend wanted to introduce me to the individual who was coordinating/curating the show.

Knowing that this year I’m again in residency with AlterTheater and I’m going to be working on two…

“Without a plan, there's no attack. Without attack, no victory.” –One Crazy Summer

It’s true. That quote is from a cheesy 80s movie. But it’s also true that without any sort of plan you can’t chart a course for your action. And you need both a plan and action in order to make and measure your progress. As a playwright I’ve been using workplans for the past 2 years to help me chart my work for the year. And while I prepare my 2013 playwriting workplan I thought I’d add…

or, put in a slightly nicer way: “Perfect is the enemy of Good.”

In theater (and life), a constant drive and want to improve is important. We work hard to hone our craft, to become stronger performers, stronger writers, stronger designers. We rehearse hours and hours perfecting our show, we take classes and workshops to sharpen our skills, we spend long hours wrestling with cable and punching the stupid computer to get our light and sound designs…

A recent LA Times article contends that there’s a current trend in playwriting: shorter plays.

What’s a short play? Oh, about 90 minutes, usually without an intermission.

I have to smile at myself as I write this as almost all of my plays are about 90 minutes, the majority without intermission. Now, I didn’t intentionally decide to skirt the…

As a poet, every so often, I come across one of my early poems. I mean an early one. From like Jr. High. And I cringe. Shoulders say hello to ears. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a young poet’s first timid steps onto the page. Often because they (and when I say “they” I mean “I”) are mimicking. Mimicking what they’ve read and what they perceive to be poetry.

And I’ve seen this with other poets at the beginning of their career. It’s as if we all have to write through all those…

November isn’t just for mustaches, it’s also for NaPlWriMo—that’s National Playwriting Month for the uninitiated.

And I’ve been toying with the idea of jumping on the…

A little over ten years ago packed up several suitcases and some very large boxes, left everything I knew and moved half way across the country. Looking back on that decision I recognize that it was a brave thing to do, to come out to San Francisco completely alone. Granted, I left to pursue an MFA and study…

Many of us are familiar with the concept of a writers group, but how many of us have a writers support group?

Allow me to distinguish the two.

A writers group meets regularly in order to share their work with one another as a means of soliciting feedback. For playwrights these informal self-organized salons can be very useful tools that allow you to hear your work aloud.

A writers support group is a self-organizing cohort that comes together with the sole purpose of…

Has anyone ever considered copyrighting one of their plays under a Creative Commons License?

Now I’m not writing from a completely informed position here. Which means, I’m just beginning to educate myself about the Creative Commons Licenses out of curiosity. And I was wondering if anyone out there has considered putting one of their plays under such a license.

Don’t know what a Creative Commons License is? I’ll let…

There’s nothing like a deadline to light a fire under you.



I don’t do this on purpose. I mean, I don’t purposely avoid deadlines. They sometimes just sneak up on me. And yes, I know that while I was watching The Hunger Games this past weekend at the back of my mind was the thought: You…

Is predictability bad?

I wondered this when I read a recent 2AM Theatre blog post by former TheatreFace.com blogger Gwydion Suilebhan. While Gwydion’s post muses more on how the pace of global communications and technology have made it easier for spoilers to get out it made me think about predictability.

…

Over the last six weeks, I've had the pleasure of both seeing and being a part of numerous readings of new works while at the Orchard Project. From reading short excerpts and rough sketches of plays in their earliest stage of development, to reading plays a playwright has worked on for five+ years, I got to experience a plethora of works presented in the staged reading format.

Through this, I found acting for a reading is exciting and challenging in many ways I wasn't…