Write write write

 

Bruce Ward posted this...and I like it.

My week in playwriting, illustrated. And set to music.

New Year's Resolutions

Writer's block = Mystery solved

"If you could just wear this neck brace..."

Need a quirky refresher course on raising dramatic stakes? Take in an episode of Prank My Mom – no kidding. Each piece of these pranks ratchets up the tension just a bit more until we arrive at a truly crazy situation...and it’s pretty good for a laugh, too. [I wonder if my mom would fall for the whole getting-arrested-for-solicitation-because-some-guy-in-a-car-hands-you-money-and-drives-away thing. Hmmm…]

Been busy writing

Birl Gehrl/The Life of a Writer

I’m a fan of Antony and the Johnsons. (If you’re not, check them out.) Since I “like” the group on Facebook, the other day I received a link to this moving performance of their song “Bird Gehrl” from the Paralympics Opening Ceremony last month:

 

Signs point to yes

The Dark Knight says...

Uh, thanks Batman.

Something aMUSEing

 

Don't know about you all, but this method tends to work pretty well for me. Sometimes.

Coming soon: Q&A with each of this year's MFA playwrights, as they prepare for our annual Ground Floor Reading Series, April 29-May 3.

Ira Glass, on being creative

I'm sure this video is familiar. This very reassuring piece of insight and advice cycles through the Twittersphere/Blogosphere/Whateversphere pretty regularly (as it should!), but I thought it would be a good thing to have a record of it here, for those moments when we need it.

This weekend, as I sit watching my new play in front of an audience for the first time, I will surely hear Ira Glass' wise words ringing in my ears, urging me to keep working to close the gap. In fact, let me go ahead and listen to this thing one more time...

Steve Barkhimer on the Adventurous Life

Steve Barkhimer

Revered Boston actor (currently appearing with fellow BPT alum Richard Snee in Alan Ayckbourn's Living Together at Gloucester Stage), director and alumni playwright Steven Barkhimer talks to us amid a hundred projects. We caught up with him on email. 

What are you working on now?
I’ve been enlisted to help create a set of shows, three of which previewed as workshop productions in April and May 2011. Ben Evett, who started the Actors Shakespeare Project, had an idea for a theatre event, a sort of mini-series, which would be neither a fixture like Shear Madness nor simply an open-ended soap-opera. The hope, of course, is to have a number of shows, each of which stands independently and is satisfying in itself, but would spark an interest in seeing the whole series.

I’m working, incrementally, on writing and re-writing several other plays, including one for which the Massachusetts Cultural Council kindly granted me an Artist Fellowship Award. That one is fancifully autobiographical; among the others are a historical drama in verse and song, one is more brooding American-mythic, another is science-as-performance-piece; another is an adaptation of ancient classic from India -- I'll spend six weeks of my summer in India, in fact, trying to enlist some reliable assistance on that.

I’m slated to appear in, and provide music for, a production of Twelfth Night for the Actors Shakespeare Project this fall and will direct The Merry Wives of Windsor for them in the winter. Very exciting.

Fight the funk *with* the funk

All the right elements: Earth, Wind & Fire

But you really didn’t think it would be possible for me to write about music without actually posting some music, right? (People who know me know better than that.)

As an addendum to the previous post, I think it is *certainly* worthy to note here that it is possible to fight the funk with the funk. Years ago, when I was at the Kennedy Center’s playwriting intensive, playwright Caleen Sinnette Jennings spent time with us, leading writing exercises and talking about “writer stuff”: Taking risks, how discomfort can lead to discovery, being careful not to judge our work too early in the process, etc. She also talked to us a little bit about writer’s block, and about writing as a whole body experience (one suggestion was to take a break from typing and write freehand instead). She was great.

My favorite piece of advice, though – and I wrote it down – was: “Remember, if all else fails, there’s nothing that Earth, Wind & Fire can’t cure.” 

And then we all danced to ‘September’ a la the Soul Train line. As long as I live, I will never, ever hear that song without remembering that day.

More than words/Give up the funk

I was in a funk the other week.

George Clinton, in his BPT hat

And I’m not talking about funk in a George Clinton sense or a James Brown kind of way. I am not making a sly reference to Earth, Wind & Fire. What I am talking about is a good old-fashioned, old-school bad mood. But more than just a mood, really – moods can change like the wind. This was lasting. And when it’s lasting, a dark mood such as this one can be officially classified as a funk. I had the funk. Who (or what) gave it to me?

I tried to blame it on a lot of things, like the Oscars (not enough interesting fashion missteps, super-predictable winners, boring acceptance speeches, and James Franco…ugh. My crush on him = SO over). I tried to blame it on the weather, but that didn’t work very well because we seemed to actually be through the worst of it. I also tried to pin it on the color of the wall in my study, the position of the moon, my neighbor’s cat, my other neighbor giving me the evil eye, the combined negative energy of all the scorpios on the planet, the fact that our house is located on the north side of the street... You know what I’m saying.

The truth was that I wasn’t writing well. And that’s because in order to write well, one must be able to actually…write.