Knowledge Workings Theater Company

Tag: #playwright

  • PLAYWRIGHTS PANEL ON SELF-PRODUCING

    T.J. Elliott

    SHORT(ISH) VERSION

    Read the detail below but click here to Sign up for a discussion on Playwright Self-Producing taking place 8:30 PM Wednesday September 25th after the 7PM performance of HONOR at 24 Bond Street at the Gene Frankel Theatre in Manhattan.

    There is absolutely NO requirement or expectation that prospective attendees of the session will attend the play beforehand. HONOR has a 7:00 PM curtain and a running time of 65 minutes; Therefore, any playwright is welcome to show up at 8:30PM just for this discussion on self-producing. There is NO fee for attending this playwright community gathering. If you wish to attend HONOR, go to our tickets site here and enter the discount code ‘playwright’ for $10 off the ticket price. 

    Our Panel

    Alinca Hamilton

    John Mark Lucas

    Claude Solnik

    Janani Sreenivasan

    LONGER CONTEXT-SETTING VERSION 

    Back in March, I began to publish online a series of brief essays, 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing drawing upon my own experience as a playwright doing that double duty on eight stagings (three via Zoom) since 2018. I wrote then that during that period as a number of theaters closed and festivals suspended solicitations that  “Finding ‘doom and gloom’ conversations at gatherings with playwrights was impossible to escape no matter what refreshments are served.” Given “that the current situation poses both novel and more frequent obstacles to production especially of new work”, I thought it a good idea to reflect publicly on lessons learned so far from self-producing. The response by readers was gratifying and affirming, which has led our company to sponsor a Wednesday September 25th session on self-producing for any interested playwrights in the NYC area. (Others from far-flung places are welcome to join us but this will be strictly an in-person event.)

    Since our production of HONOR runs at the Gene Frankel Theatre in Manhattan, we decided to hold the session on playwrights self-producing after one of the performances. Attendance discussion is FREE and there is absolutely NO requirement or expectation that prospective attendees of the session will attend the play beforehand. HONOR has a 7:00 PM curtain and a running time of 65 minutes; Therefore, any playwright is welcome to show up at 8:30 PM to participate in this session on self producing. If you do wish to attend the play first, that’s fine. Go to our tickets website and enter the discount code ‘PLAYWRIGHT’ to get $10 off your ticket price. 

    “If there’s no place to put on your play, you can’t learn to write a play, because you learn from the audience.”

    David Mamet

    Why are we doing this? Three reasons: 1) The playwright community that has nourished us is important and gatherings can make us stronger 2) We don’t know everything and we’d like to benefit from and yet also contribute to ‘the wisdom of [playwright] crowds’ 3) We keep coming back to a David Mamet insight: “If there’s no place to put on your play, you can’t learn to write a play, because you learn from the audience.”  

    Sooooooo……

    Sign up for a discussion on Playwright Self-Producing taking place 8:30 PM Wednesday September 26th after the 7PM performance of HONOR at the Gene Frankel Theatre at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan

     

  • Notes for Playwrighting # 2

    [An occasional series of playwrighting quotes]

    Read This When Writing Plays

    David Hare Courtesy Faber & Faber

    DAVID HARE

    David Hare influenced me greatly not only by his plays but through his superb little book, Acting Up, about his experience performing his one man show. One of the passages there turned into part of my own practice: telling the story again and again. Maintaining that grip on the storytelling aspect of a play can get slippery as we move through the writing. Consequently, following Hare’s (and Louis Malle’s) advice, at some point, I even write down the story because it identifies glitches, inconsistencies, and excesses just as you get the feeling when telling a story to friends or family that it’s too long or complicated.. Here is how Hare explained how he came to do this:

    “Louis (Malle) shared my fascination with techniques of storytelling. Once, we were meant to be working together on Damage, the film of Josephine Hart’s novel. But I came into the restaurant for supper usually dissatisfied with that morning’s read-through of the play of mine called Murmuring Judges. ‘It ought to bloody work,’ I said, ‘and it doesn’t.’ At once Louis asked me to tell him the story of the play. Together we sat for three hours, refining the narrative. Louis isolated every component of the story, and then put them all back together again in the right order. It was like watching a great car mechanic lay out the pieces of an engine on a clean white cloth before reassembling them. He did it for the sheer intellectual pleasure.… (After writing the synopsis of Damage) Every morning he would make me sit down under the vines and go back to the beginning of the story. He did it so many times that I thought I was going to go mad.”