What is happening here?!

If you've been watching this space (and I honestly feel bad if you have), you've probably been thinking, "Well, she usually takes a little break after the Marathon -- when everybody's feeling a little blogged-out -- but...what happened?" Or something like that.

Here's the deal: This blog, as it presently exists, is run on Blogger and has always operated separately from the BPT Web site. BPT's new(ish, now) Web site is built on the WordPress platform and soon -- very soon, we are told -- the site will include an integrated blog complete with the archive of everything you've seen here over the past (gulp) almost four years.

But it's taking some time.

Guess who's Cumming to dinner?

Look who ended up seated right next to guest of honor Alan Cumming at dinner on Monday night, when the award-winning actor/director/producer/activist was in town to speak about his life and career in Metcalf Hall. Cumming's papers are now part of the collection at BU's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. Willkommen!

The Jon Lipsky Play Anthology

You have just a few more days to contribute to the Kickstarter campaign for The Jon Lipsky Play Anthology, two volumes of work by the playwright and BU professor, who passed away last year. Lipsky’s plays appeared regularly in Boston Theater Marathons over the years, and a cycle of eight of the shorts – collectively known as Walking the Volcano – was produced at BPT in 2011.

Take a look at the Web site the Lipsky family has created as a resource for his writing, and definitely watch the video (above) that Lipsky’s son Jonah and collaborator Bill Barclay put together for the project's Kickstarter campaign – it will make you smile, guaranteed!

Alumni news, in brief:

Luchadore Cha Cha Picante in D.C. for Karen Zacarías' The Book Club Play...

Monica Bauer's My Occasion of Sin is a finalist for the Abingdon Theatre Company's Christopher Brian Wolk Playwriting Award... Urban Stages will also host a staged reading of the play on Nov. 21...

Myers’ ‘Snovi’ nominated for Student Oscar – see it tonight!

BIG congratulations to alum Jonathon Myers and the team behind the short film Snovi (which also includes director Reshad Kulenovic and producer Claire Wasserman, who are BU alums; and co-writer John Bernstein, director of BU's screenwriting program) -- the film has been nominated for a Student Academy Award in the Narrative category! The Student Academy Awards is an annual competition for college and university filmmakers. 

Snovi has been an official selection of the Tallinn Film Festival 2010, Cinequest Film Festival 2011, and The European Independent Film Festival (ECU) 2011. The film was also included in the Sarajevo Film Festival last summer, and Jonathon gave Playwrights’ Perspective an inside look at the film and its creation.

But the best news (for us, anyway) is that tonight we have the opportunity to see this acclaimed film for ourselves, in Room B05 of the Communications Building, 640 Commonwealth Ave. The event includes a post-screening discussion, and begins at 6:30 p.m. 

For more about this inspiring project, follow Team Snovi on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/snovifilm

...an entrance somewhere else

As we move into this first weekend of spring, it is important to note that those of us in the Boston area have the opportunity to celebrate the lives of two playwrights we lost this week in the best way possible -- by seeing productions of their work.

Jon Lipsky’s Living in Exile closes at Actors’ Shakespeare Project on Sunday, March 27. Click here for more information and tickets. [BPT's co-production (with the Boston Center for American Performance) of Lipsky's Walking the Volcano runs April 15-May 1.]

The Rimers of Eldritch, by Lanford Wilson, opened at Stoneham Theatre last night. Click here for tickets and additional information. Read Wilson’s obituary in The New York Times here.

“Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.”

                                         --Tom Stoppard

Jon Lipsky 1944-2011

Jon Lipsky, April 12, 1944-March 19, 2011

As a playwright and director, Jon Lipsky's work appeared at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New Plays, the American Repertory Theater, and other regional theaters. He was playwright-in-residence at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, TheaterWorks/Boston and Associate Artistic Director at the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard. 

His work includes: Living In Exile – a Retelling of the Iliad, The Survivor: a Cambodian Odyssey, and Maggie’s Riff, an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s Maggie Cassidy. 

In 2007 he won the Boston Critic’s Eliot Norton Award for Best Direction in a small company. His award-winning collaboration with jazz musician Stan Strickland, Coming Up For Air, was presented in 2008 at the Underground Railway Theater in Cambridge and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In the fall of 2008, he published a book about a theater of dreams called Dreaming Together (Larson Publications). 



Jon's full-length dream plays include Dreaming With an AIDS Patient and The Wild Place. An interconnected progression of short plays, Walking the Volcano premiered at the Vineyard Playhouse in 2008. Living in Exile was revived in 2010 at the Under The Radar Festival in New York's La Mama and in a separate production at the Actors’ Shakespeare Projects' Festival of plays this month. Jon was Professor of Acting and Playwriting at Boston University’s School of Theater.

Read more here

Q&A with Jonathon Myers

We recently shared the news that Snovi, a short film co-written by Jonathon was screened at the Sarajevo Film Festival last summer. As a follow-up, we thought it would be fun for Jonathon to expand on this unique experience.



The writer hard at work

There's a lot of BU energy around this film (co-screenwriter John Bernstein is the director of BU's screenwriting program, and producer Claire Wasserman is a BU alum as well). How did you all initially connect?

To answer this question and the next is really to describe the process from my perspective while giving due credit to the leader of that process.  All of the connections in this project are through another BU alumnus: the director, Reshad Kulenovic.  As the director (and essentially the director of production) he has always been the center of the entire project.  Reshad was in the MFA program in Film Production and I was taking screenwriting courses with Professor John Bernstein after my MFA in Playwriting.  Reshad and I became friends who participated in the writer/director cliché of having deep philosophical conversations over coffee at the Espresso Royale near BU Central.  It was a good combination; his focus on imagery and cinematic qualities connected with my focus on character, dialogue and story.  My play Little Red Hen was an ACTF regional finalist that came out of workshop days with the CFA.  When it was produced at BPT by the Useless Theatre Company in January of 2008, Reshad saw it and liked it.  John Bernstein suggested to both of us that we start collaborating as a writer/director combo.

We decided to enter a competitive event that challenged us to fully produce a 5 minute digital movie in one week.  Unfortunately, our schedules were tight and despite a ready script and some pre-production we need to shoot in two locations and fully edit a cut in less than three days.  I had to take up some Director of Photography duties at times and we had to work together seamlessly.  At one point -- about 50 hours into the process -- when together we had a total of around 2-3 hours of sleep, we questioned the project and considered giving up.  Thankfully, we persevered and completed the project on time.  The result had some issues, as one would expect with that schedule.  The sound in particular was rough, and ultimately that final product feels a little like a student film with better than average visual execution.   But I think we gained some respect for each others’ work ethic after that.  We vowed to work on another project again in the future.

Due to these experiences, I appreciated Reshad’s directing and he appreciated my writing.  That mutual admiration kept us connected.  I was always looking to contribute my writing to his projects and like a good director he was always looking for the good stories and writing.  Over the next year Reshad and I worked on a few different stories and I wrote multiple screenplay drafts and revisions for these shorts, ranging from incomplete drafts of a few pages to grossly overwritten drafts at around 40-45 pages.  Overall, I easily put out several hundred pages of writing and rewriting.  (My experiences of rewriting at BPT served me well.)  John Bernstein was mentoring, so he was reading the drafts and providing feedback about what wasn’t working and what needed to be rewritten.

4 Questions with Melinda Lopez

I asked Melinda a few questions about her experience as a teacher of playwriting.  Melinda teaches in Boston University's MFA in Playwriting offered at Boston Playwrights' Theatre. 


Can you give an example of something you experienced as a student in workshop that you try to avoid in your classrooms now?  Are you successful?

I once told a classmate that his play would be better if "someone died."  As a result now, I rarely speak at all in class. Actually, no-- but I try to focus on the world the writer has created, and how her choices are successful or unsuccessful in that world.



What playwriting exercise do you assign that often bears the most fruit?
Only write what your mother would enjoy. Better still, only write plays that win major national prizes. That way, you'll never be embarrassed or afraid.



What play / playwright do you most often recommend new playwrights read?  Why?
I recommend a lot of Mamet's plays because in form and action they are so tight. Adam Bok. Jose Rivera. Theresa Rebeck, always. Of course, Euripides. Rajiv Joseph is a new favorite.


What is the most difficult lesson to teach a playwright?
What matters most is what you think. Because someone else will always think it's better "if someone died."

3 Questions with Kate (on the MFA at BPT)

Less public than our productions but no less harrowing to our playwrights are our weekly workshops -- our classes taught (often on the set of our current shows) by playwrights Kate Snodgrass, Richard Schotter, Melinda Lopez and Ronan Noone.  And if you didn't know it:  Boston Playwrights' Theatre is Boston University's Playwriting MFA program.  I asked Kate Snodgrass a couple questions about her experience as a teacher of playwriting.   

Jake:  Can you give an example of something you experienced as a student in workshop that you try to avoid in your classrooms now?  Are you successful?

Kate: In a fiction workshop I was attending, the teacher laughed at one of the student's stories.  I don't laugh at any serious stab at playwriting--it's hard enough to write as it is.  And yes, I'm successful because I remember that student's face.

J: What play or playwright do you most often recommend new playwrights read?  Why?  

K: We're all different writers who gravitate to different rhythms, tones, worlds, and there's room for everyone in the theatre.  I wait until I understand what might encourage a particular student, and then I suggest a specific play or playwright s/he might gravitate toward.  There are playwrights with whom I think we ALL must be familiar, but...that's a different question.  (Okay.  Shakespeare, Buchner, Chekhov, O'Neill, Wilder, Beckett, Pinter, Churchill, Stoppard, LePage.  And some others.)

J: What is the most difficult lesson to teach a playwright?  

K: A point of view encompassing the three-dimensional space.