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This month we throw the spotlight on Sarasota. But first, a few notes from the West Florida Region. If you live in or visit West Florida, please visit our Facebook page and take our quick survey. Share your news, like Tampa playwright Mark Leib whose The FunnyThing Is, I Still Love This Place ran at StageWorks and composer Tom Sivak, who got a grant from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance for a staged reading of Sunshine City at the Palladium. In Sarasota, Arthur Keyser is still on fire with the publication of his plays in a volume entitled Short Plays by the Dozen. Meanwhile over at The Starlite Room on Cocoanut Avenue, Jo Morello has produced evenings of short plays by Nicole Cunningham, Ron Pantello, Irene L. Pynn, Jack Gilhooley and Larry Parr. I met Larry at the Sarasota Area Playwrights Society, which he lauded as “a valuable service, where we can get our plays read, listen to them, and get some feedback.” 

While lazing in sunny Sarasota, Larry Parr has had numerous productions across the country including an upcoming production in Del Ray Beach, FL. “Hi-Hat Hattie was my first play that I wrote 25 years ago, and it’s still being produced.” Invasion of Privacy just ran in Gainesville, FL, the actual setting of the play, about Florida author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling) and the lawsuit brought against her in 1946, after the publication of her nonfiction book, Cross Creek. The show was directed by daytime drama veteran, Judith Chapman, who will direct Sundew in CA. Shunned, about the Amish, has been produced in Utah and twice in North Carolina and His Eye is On the Sparrow, the story of Ethel Waters, opens next month in Fort Wayne, IN. “I’ve been extremely lucky with well over a hundred regional productions of my work,” said Parr.  

Jay Handelman is the Theatre Critic of the Sarasota Herald Tribune and the only person I know who said “When I grow up, I want to be a theatre critic!” So throughout high school and college, he had a plan! And he helped me to assess playwright opportunities and productions in Sarasota area. 

Florida Studio Theatre and Asolo Repertory Theatre are both Equity theatres, though Handelman says “Asolo has more lavish, big budget productions.” FST has five theatres, two cabarets, two main stages and a lab where their improv troupe performs and where it tests out original productions like Old Enough to Know Better about aging in Sarasota. They present three new cabarets each year including Inspired Lunacy, a musical comedy revue, and American Pie. FST also has a touring kids program called Write a Play engaging elementary and high schools and soliciting over six thousand plays from around the world. They produce two amalgam pieces: Under Six for kids up to sixth grade and Seven Up by older students. 

Asolo Repertory Theatre has the Mertz Theatre main stage at the FSU Center for the Performing Arts and the smaller Cook Theatre where the FSU/Asolo Conservatory performs. Asolo Rep does seven or eight show a year including new musicals as well as old classics. The upcoming season includes Livin’ on Love, Disgraced and All the Way, and an original musical about Josephine Baker. In recent seasons, Gordon Greenberg’s Luck Be A Lady and Mark Kudisch’s Baritones Unbound as well as Pulse, a dance show by Noah Racey, have had try-out runs at Asolo Rep. 

When the Conservatory is closed for the summer, the Banyan Theater sneaks into the Cook to do plays like Israel Horowitz’s My Old Lady and Jessica Dickey’s The Amish Project with Katherine Michelle Tanner, which was previously at American Stage in St. Petersburg. 

The West Coast Black Theatre Troupe’s Artistic Director Nate Jacobs creates a mix of original revues based on genres of music, periods of time or such famed artists as Marvin Gaye and Cab Calloway. This past season they also did plays including George C. Wolfe’s Spunk based on Zora Neale Hurston and Knock Me a Kiss by Charles Smith about WEB DuBois and his daughter. This upcoming season includes The Color Purple, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Driving Miss Daisy. 

Brand new on the professional scene in Sarasota is Urbanite Theatre, started by two recent graduates from the Asolo Conservatory. Brendan Ragan and Summer Dawn Wallace are Co-Artistic Directors. “Urbanite does plays that have never been done here and would probably never be done here without them,” says Handelman. They opened with Chicken Shop by Anna Jordan, then presented Reborning by Zayd Dohrn and most recently Isaac’s Eye by Lucas Hnath. 

The Sarasota area also has a plethora of robust community theatres that do five-seven shows yearly including Island Players, Manatee Players, Players Theatre, Venice Theatre, Lemon Bay Playhouse and Charlotte Players. The Players Theatre has a new play festival with five new plays read. Finally, there is an annual ten-minute play festival produced by Theatre Odyssey featuring the work of local playwrights. 

ddavis-thompson@dramatistsguild.com

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Why I joined the Guild, a list.

1. Because together we are stronger than we are alone.
2. Because I had a sub-standard contract from a small theater in Los Angeles which I will not name.
3. Because the guild gave me a free copy of a standard 99-seat theater Equity waiver contract that had appropriate terms for playwrights and I gave it to that small theater in Los Angeles.
4. Because I didn’t have an agent.
5. Because Paula Vogel told me to join.
6. Because I wanted to be a playwright.
7. Because Tina Howe told me to join.
8. Because I am interested in where social justice meets art.
9. Because I needed health insurance and I didn’t have a job in my twenties that would let me buy health insurance. Long ago before Obama, in those days before Obamacare, the Guild was a way to buy very nice health insurance through a third party called TEIGIT.
10. Because guilds are often good for workers.
11. Because the word “guild” reminds me of mystery plays and how the leather guild, the fisherman’s guild and the farming guild all worked together to put on medieval plays.
12. Because I lived in New York.
13. And then later, because I didn’t live in New York.
14. Because I got a card that said I was a dramatist to put in my wallet.
15. Because I longed to see plays but couldn’t afford to see them and I got discounts to see plays because of the card in my wallet.
16. Because I love being around other playwrights.
17. Because playwriting is an ancient ancient art form and we need to protect it.
18. Because no one took subsidiary rights from Euripides.
19. Because eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
20. Because together, we are stronger than we are alone.

So now that I am older and I have an agent and health care and all that, why do I stay in the Guild? A list.

1. Because together, we are stronger than we are alone.
2. Because our noble profession is still besieged by threats—threats to a living wage, threats to freedom of expression, threats to fruitful collaboration.
3. Because I want to help other playwrights who are starting out.
4. Because I love being around other playwrights.
5. Because single agents cannot by themselves negotiate fair precedents with large entities like licensing companies or all off-Broadway theaters—they need the help and participation of the Guild.
6. Because I want to help defend the freedom of playwrights to write about whatever they want to write about not only in New York but also in all the small hamlets of America.
7. Because I want the playwriting profession to continue being a place where the word has primacy.
8. Because when one sits at the executive Council meetings, one has the uncanny feeling that one is at an ancient tribunal of wise magicians at Hogwarts, and that one only has to listen carefully and eat a donut to accrue some of their hard-won wisdom.
9. Because I care deeply about gender equity and diversity in the profession.
10. Because you can break one stick at a time but you cannot break a bundle of twigs bound together by a string; and the Guild is a powerful string.

Reprinted from the January/February 2015 issue of The Dramatist. Illustration by Dan Romer.

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The Buffalo Infringement Festival, which celebrated its eighth year in 2013, is a wonderfully illustrative example of the constant creation and collaboration that defines the Buffalo theater scene. Though the Festival comprises art installations, dance, music, media, puppetry, and more, theater has always been an integral part of it. Nobody is turned away from Infringement and space and publicity are provided free to everyone – from Buffalo or not – which invites the wide range of low-to-no-budget experimentation that imbues Infringement with an exciting “what’s next?” appeal.

This year, three distinct “hits” emerged from Infringement’s theater offerings – all of them site-specific. The first, an absurdist take on Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, was performed on the third floor of the Dnipro Ukrainian Cultural Center, built in 1914 in a once thriving area of the city. “The landscape in which Chekhov wrote this play was one of great inequity and unrest, and occurs in the deep inhalation of an unraveling society just prior to the Russian revolution,” says director Megan Callahan. “Preservation and conservation are also strong themes in the piece, and one need only look out the window to see our own ravaged landscape.” Natural daylight intensifies this view through large open windows during Act I. For Act II, that light is gone (a beautiful, visceral metaphor), and the set is completely reconfigured to employ the video projections that producing company Torn Space is known for (I wrote about Torn Space’s Dan Shanahan, Buffalo’s “de facto king of site specific performance” in the 2012 November/December issue of The Dramatist). Though this work is not original, the interpretation certainly was, and the result was citywide Chekhovian fever and a series of sold-out shows.

Meanwhile, in the cavernous hallways of the former Pierce Arrow factory (which is fast becoming an incomparable arts venue, as it houses two theaters, a film collaborative, artists’ studios etc.), a drug deal was going bad. Click Chamber, the introspective and poetic analysis of six underworld figures, is the brainchild of playwright Justin Karcher and playwright/actor Aaron Krygier. A trapped dealer, a mob boss, a bloody victim of drug violence, the mob boss’s daughter, her poet lover, and the killer each told his or her side of the story – sometimes in verse – to frequently compelling result, even at this first exposure. “We are all inherently linked through two things: death and each other, which makes this some scrap of a human story,” says Krygier. The piece intrigued Infringement-goers who filled the audience night after night to plumb the depths of human despair (and to partake in some excellent home-baked goods for sale at the event).

Finally, in the parking lot across the street from the Pierce Arrow, Buffalo Car Plays – featuring world premiere plays by Jon Elston, Darryl Schneider, Steve Roylance, and me – played to capacity and then some for six nights. Adapting the concept from La Jolla Playhouse’s Car Plays, we staged four two-handers in four different cars, and rotated audiences through them in blocks of eight-to-twelve three times a night. Though I chose this venture for its perfect Infringement aesthetic – we needed only ourselves and our actors – I couldn’t have anticipated the excitement that it generated, or the word of mouth that had us turning people away as the run wound down. The enthusiasm was overwhelming: we were delivering something that nobody in town had ever seen or experienced (and giving my 85-year-old mother a great story to tell her friends). Even the actors – skeptical at first – delighted in the form, barely registering that they were performing their plays twelve times a night.

As producer – and, of course, as a playwright – generating this kind of response was thrilling, but what I enjoyed most is best shared by example. When reservations came in (and they were necessary), I often had singles that I matched up both to maximize audience and to ensure that everybody had a shared experience. One of these matchups was an eighteen-year-old girl who rarely goes to theater but had come to see a friend, and a mid-twenties actor. As I did with other ad hoc pairs, I introduced them at the start of the show and sent them off to the first car. At the third car, where one has to sit in the front and one in the back, I saw them playing rock, paper, scissors to determine who would sit where. In the brief time between being introduced and the third play, this intense and intimate theater experience had bonded them! And there, in miniature, in a parking lot, was the very reason theater exists. I will never forget it.

If you want to bring your show to Buffalo for next year’s Infringement Festival, I can’t wait to meet you!

dhoke@dramatistsguild.com

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Kathleen Cahill had not intended to be a playwright. Not originally, anyway. She set out to be a bookwriter/lyricist for musicals. She even got an MFA in Music Theatre from NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts.

Her produced musicals include Friendship of the Sea, Dakota Sky, and an opera, Clara. She is also listed as one of the top 25 songwriters in the Directory of Musical Theatre Writers.

In other words, she was following her path and doing well. Though she’s an impatient sort. “It takes so much time to write a musical,” she admitted.

Well, then, one thing led to another, and she ended up moving to Salt Lake City.

Why would a native New Englander move to the city of Saints? It had to do with children and the children of children. But the more important question is, how did the move affect her career, her work?

“When I came here, I liked what I was writing, and I felt freer,” said Kathleen. “I don’t know why.”

That’s hard for some people elsewhere to understand or believe. But there it is. In Salt Lake City, she felt freer.

That ebullience produced three rather ebullient plays: Charm, The Persian Quarter, and Course 86B in the Catalogue. Each of them premiered at Salt Lake Acting Company and then went on to productions in Florida, Texas, and Massachusetts. She also got an agent, a publisher, and the title of Resident Playwright at Salt Lake Acting Company; in addition, she also taught playwriting at the University of Utah and wrote lyrics for David Zabriskie’s Requiem.

Rather a successful time of it, here in the lap of Zion.

All this from a person who grew up in New England, went to school in New England, a person who wrote the introductions to the Masterpiece series on PBS for 30 years. You can hardly get more New England than that!

And yet here she is in Salt Lake City, in just about the reddest state in the nation, where there are Mormons, out-loud sexism and legislative idiocy.

That seems not to stop her. This fall her newest piece, Fatal Song, will be produced by Utah Opera. She calls it an opera/cabaret, for which she has brought together heroines from eleven operas. In a single night, the audience hears and sees the greatest music ever written for the human voice. All of them female voices. The piece promises to be both artistically inviting and politically revealing. “They do have to kill off the women,” says Kathleen, “let me count the ways!”

Is that not enough? Very well….

At this very minute, Kathleen is at work on a play called Cotton, about the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, where young immigrant girls wove cotton for the world, the raw material grown by slaves in the South.

It’s a helluvah good idea. Not often acknowledged in the North, or for that matter, anywhere else in this country.

Yes, Kathleen is political and out loud about it. She’s not red, not a Mormon, and she has little patience with legislative idiocy. Yet she’s freer here than anywhere else she has ever lived.

And that’s what’s up in the City of Saints, here on the shores of the Great Salt Lake!

jjensen@dramatistsguild.com

Kathleen Cahill

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As the new Regional Representative from Oregon, my timing couldn’t have been any better. After holding a great Town Hall meeting here in Portland, my next order of business was to attend the Dramatists Guild Conference in Chicago. I was fortunate to moderate a panel on Creating Character with Theresa Rebeck, Carol Hall, Charlayne Woodard and Rebecca Gilman. And then, if that wasn’t exciting enough, I interviewed George C. Wolfe one-on-one! What a privilege.

This article is supposed to be your introduction to me, give you a little piece of who I am and what I bring to the table. While it might be interesting to hear about the readings I’ve had for off-Broadway producers or the productions I’ve been fortunate enough to receive, I’d prefer to use this space to talk about how inspiring the Conference was and how hard the Dramatists Guild staff works for all of us.

In talking to people at the Conference, I was amazed to hear the stories of how individuals were served by one phone call to their Regional Rep or one interaction with the staff in New York. The home office has to juggle all kinds of members with all kinds of issues every day. No two situations are alike because no two playwrights are alike. Yet everyone I spoke to had their needs met with professionalism.

There are always things to complain about in life. But let’s remember to celebrate where we can. Let’s raise our glass to the staff of the Dramatists Guild and give them credit where credit is due.

The fact that I’ve joined forces with these remarkable people is an honor… and I’ll try to do my best to represent the dramatists of Oregon in the same way that I am represented by the staff of the Dramatists Guild.

fsanders@dramatistsguild.com

George C. Wolfe talking to Francesca Sanders at DG’s 2nd National Conference. Photo by @joeystocks.

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Philadelphia’s 1812 Productions began in 1997 with two long-time friends, Jennifer Childs and Peter Pryor, essentially getting together to make people laugh. Still cracking up audiences at Plays and Players mainstage, the sixteen-year-old company is the only production company in the region dedicated exclusively to comedy. 1812 offers a four-show season with at least one production being an original work.

While Pryor has moved on to become a Member Artist at Peoples Light & Theatre in Media, his co-founder Jennifer Childs remains at 1812, augmenting each season with a new piece from her pen or from a fellow Philadelphia artist. Childs’ original pieces began to percolate in the repertoire during the 2000 season and since then, at least one new work has been showcased each year.

Though Childs still sees herself as an actress and artistic director, she has definitively morphed into 1812’s chief writer. So, trying to pin her down is difficult.

“I’m a jack-of-all trades, yes. But 1812 is all about blowing up the boxes that categorize us. Frankly, I think it’s a Philadelphia thing. The true Philadelphia artist has many hyphens in the job description. I can’t think of another place where I’ve worked that had so many actors-improvisers-choreographers-writers-stage designers and so forth.”

Childs has a serious approach to writing funny. Particularly for the original and less sketch-ey work, she researches the material – sometimes exhaustively. Childs’ most recent comedy, It’s My Party, debuted in 2012 and began as a two-year project that involved hundreds of interviews.

“The point of the project was less about famous women and more about how women are funny in everyday life. As I asked all of these people to tell me the funny stories of their lives, what emerged was a very dark or very sad tale, but told with great humor. The punchline gave over to an attitude of ‘I’m saving my soul by laughing.’”

Childs’ affinity for humor comes directly from her great-grandfather, Bill Childs, who was a vaudeville performer during the golden age before moving into radio. The vaudeville forms permeate her plays and performances and often lead to significant collaborations.

Tony Braithwaite, the Artistic Director of Act 2 in Ambler, PA, co-wrote Let’s Pretend We’re Married with Childs and then after some success, created a “sequel” Let’s Pretend We’re Famous. The plays have been performed by 1812 Productions, Act 2, and the Montgomery Theatre.

Tony: “Jen and I had acted together in several plays before we found our material. But my great grand-dad was a vaudeville man too, so we just clicked. She’s the most fun I’ve had on stage.”

Let’s Pretend We’re Married is a comedic cabaret that explores the experience of marriage ties; the ones that bind and the ones that gag. Ba-dum-bum. The show includes the audience as a character and culminates in a Newlywed Game that uses involuntary members of the audience. 

Tony: “We landed on celebrity for the next one. Let’s Pretend We’re Famous riffs on Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes. While we do the show, we choose an ‘involunteer’ from the audience and put them through a cycle of stardom – obscurity, fame, overexposure, addiction, rock bottom. And the inevitable comeback.”

The next time Tony and Jen are together will be for 1812’s November/December show, a reprise of Childs’ first play, Big Time, a paean to vaudeville style.

Childs: “I have all of [Bill’s] sheet music and old joke books and that led me to write. So I sat in the Library of Congress for months, exhuming all these vintage bits to make the show. It was a little a bit of hubris that led me to first write, really. You set yourself a deadline and then you are forced to do it.” 

ttirney@dramatistsguild.com

Why I’m Scared of Dance, by Jennifer Childs, at 1812 Productions. Photo by Mark Garvin.