Texas forever (or, how FNL got me through this year)

Despite my constant yammering about this show on Facebook and Twitter, I haven’t written about Friday Night Lights yet, because I don’t really know what to say about Friday Night Lights. I don’t have coherent words for how much this show worked its way into my heart. But I’m going to try, if anything in hopes that some random googler will come along and be convinced to watch it.

I started watching FNL near the end of the run of Paper Cranes, at the suggestion of some of my cast members. The sell was this; “It’s a show about football, but its not really about football”. They all insisted that it was right up my alley and that my writing style coincided with the aesthetic of the show. I was super skeptical going in. I’m not a big football fan, and honestly a show about Texas brought some not-so-great connotations to my mind (no offense to Texas, but what can I say, Dubya made me a little gunshy). However, more and more theater people kept telling me to watch it. It was on Netflix instant, so why not? On one of my rare nights off, my husband and I watched the pilot and were very intrigued. Any show that paralyzes its main hero in the very first episode is one that shows serious risk taking. We both thought the writing, acting and cinematography of the show were of a caliber not usually found on network TV. I found myself inextricably hooked by the third or fourth episode, mostly due to Coach and Tami Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, two of the most amazing actors I’ve seen on TV). The way that their marriage was portrayed was different than anything I’d seen on TV. Normally, TV marriages are embittered and loveless, cliché and sappy, or the type of marriage that reaffirms everyone’s worst fears about marriage (sexless, combative, joyless, flatulent, etc). Rarely do you get to see a couple as real and as true as the Taylors. You watch them screw up as often as you watch them succeed. Their fights aren’t the screaming histrionics of most TV fights; they are done in the hushed, hurt tones I recognize from my own arguments in my own marriage. From there I found myself deeply attached to most of the characters on the show in a way I haven’t been since Six Feet Under went off the air.

In thinking about it, part of the reason I connected with FNL so much is that I have never seen a show that has such an honest, rich emotional core. Most of all – I would argue that FNL has the most compelling and diverse group of female characters ever seen on television. From the “perfect” cheerleader Lyla Garrity to world-weary stripper Mindy Riggins, each woman on the show is well drawn and presented realistically. My only real gripes with the show were the Tyra/Landry narrative in Season 2, and the fact that everyone is ridiculously attractive to the point of hilarity (but that’s network for you). Oh, and that there is no way Tim Riggins is a teenager…but who cares. I mean, look at him.

I won’t spoiler anything major, but there is a ballsy decision made at the end of Season 3 that creates a wealth of new characters in Season 4. It’s a testament to the brilliance of Jason Katims (who, incidentally, wrote a few episodes of My So-Called Life, another show that makes me cry even thinking about it) that not only did I accept these new characters and the new situation, but I got attached to them, too. The show’s remarkable ability to convey strong characters and their deft handling of themes surrounding race, class, religion, abortion, feminism, and substance abuse never failed to amaze me. It was never preachy, never prescriptive, and startlingly real. There is an episode in Season 4 called “The Son”, and I can’t say much about it without spoilering it, except that Zach Gilford should have won an Emmy for his work as Matt Saracen and the writing is ridiculously good. There’s a speech at the very end of the episode that is so perfect it makes me green with envy even thinking about it.

The finale of the series was one of the most amazing hours of television I have ever watched. I cried buckets of tears and was just so moved and satisfied. When I finished the series, I went back to Episode 1 of Season 1 and started all over again. I have never done that with any series. Not even Six Feet Under. I am of the unpopular opinion that SFU’s finale – while gorgeous and emotional and moving as hell – was unabashedly sentimental in the way that the show itself never was. It didn’t follow the path of least resistance that the show had always taken, and it felt like a bit of a letdown to me. The finale of FNL (again, no spoilers!) was bittersweet. Some characters got good endings, some didn’t. Some characters just went on with life as it was, or slightly different. There were no heroes and there were no villains. It was a perfect ending in every single way. Jason Katims won the Emmy for it, and then Kyle Chandler won the Emmy for his portrayal of Coach Taylor. I’ve never been more excited watching an awards show in my life! I was cheering in my livingroom and even got a little verklempt. Maybe it sounds a little crazy, but seeing them win for this show gave me hope that good work does get rewarded in the end.

FNL came into my life at a difficult time. It helped me rebound from the closing of my show (which is always a letdown), and most recently helped me get through the depression of losing my job. My husband bought me the full series on DVD for Christmas, and its good to know that I can go back and visit my friends in Dillon whenever I want to. I aspire to write something as real and as special as any one of the best episodes of FNL. It will always be an inspiration to me, and for that I am grateful.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.

Day 1, 2012

The temptation to write a navel gazey New Year’s Eve post was almost irresistable.

Almost.

Instead, I write to you from the first morning of 2012, a New Year I am very pleased to see. Welcome, 2012. Don’t be a bitch, okay?

2011 was a…shall we say…CHALLENGING year for me. I’m going into 2012 not knowing much except that I’m really really glad 2011 is over. I’ve been sufficiently humbled and reminded that the life I’ve chosen for myself is a hard one, a long road of “almost but not quite”. I got laid off in October, which wasn’t fun, and any of you who have been through it know how hard it is. I’d worked for my former company for the better part of five years, and to work as hard as I did and then get shown the door was really hard for me. I know it really had nothing to do with me, but it was hard not to take it personally.

My play, PAPER CRANES, seems to have suffered last year from “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” syndrome. I had a beautiful production last spring that I continue to be crazy proud of, and I made wonderful friends in the process. We got really kind and lovely reviews for the most part, and people were very supportive. I was a finalist and semi-finalist for a bunch of cool stuff this year. I should feel proud of that. So why did it make me feel so awful? The last rejection phone call (yes, it got far enough for an actual human phone call) sent me into a tailspin of self-doubt. Did I bomb the interview? Do people not like me? What did I do wrong? I couldn’t focus on the fact that it was amazing I got to the final stages, I could only focus on the “we regret that we can’t offer you a spot”. Again, it probably had really not that much to do with me, but it was hard not to take it personally. Something in me cracked a bit and I spent the last two weeks of 2011 basically sitting around my house and watching Food Network. I’m struggling terribly with my new play (I’ve started it over again twice now and it’s still not done), and I don’t have a job. I don’t really have that much to look forward to. I felt like my inner artist had been kicked in the face and was now retreating in some place I could not reach her. So I stopped trying. My new play sits, still unfinished, on my desktop. It’s hard to write when you feel so crappy.

Last night, my husband and I watched a documentary called Bill Cunningham New York on Netflix Instant (oh, Netflix, what would I have done without you?). Bill Cunningham is the photographer behind On the Street, a New York Times column that shows what people are wearing on the streets of NYC. He also has a society column, where he photographs the fashion of people at parties. He is 80 years old and he rides a bike all over Manhattan taking photos of style, fashion, and people. He is a historian, mainly – his tiny monastic apartment is filled with file cabinets that contain every negative of every photo he’s ever taken. He has captured the pulse of fashion and the people of New York with his photos for 50 years. He is also an obsessive – food, sex, and music don’t interest him much. He only cares about showing up and doing the work. In rain, sleet, snow, cold, heat – it doesn’t matter – 80 year old Bill hops on his Schwinn and does his work. At one point, he was offered a great sum of money for one of his projects, and he turned it down, saying that as soon as you take money for your art, you lose your freedom. He won’t even take a free meal at a society gala, and was visibly uncomfortable when accepting an award from the French. His ethics are almost saintly. This really hit home for me. I’ve been thinking about success, and what defines success, and while money isn’t my #1 priority with regards to theater (and it would be pretty stupid if it were), I do think “gee, wouldn’t it be nice if I got paid like…ever?”. I think it’s because there is really no “end game” with a playwriting career. Your success is almost completely subjective. It’s easy to equate “end game” with “getting paid”. Our society doesn’t put much value on something you can’t put a price on, and even if you are super conscious of that, it’s really hard to get over that mindset. I was so moved by Bill and his commitment to his art and his passion that I was nearly in tears at times.

I have one goal this year – which is to show up and do the work. Bill Cunningham shows up and does the work every single day of his life, and has been richly rewarded in ways far more precious and amazing than money, accolades, or awards. 2012 will be the year where even if nothing happens career-wise, I will at least be able to say that I showed up and did the work, and I know the rewards will come. In some form or another. I need to be obsessed with my work and the things I want to say, the stories I want to tell. The rest is gravy. The rest is irrelevant.

new play, first play, and everything in between

Being unemployed, among other things, has given me a tremendous amount of time to think and write. Well, maybe a little more thinking than writing, but I am getting there. My new play, THE UNLIKELY ASCENT OF SYBIL STEVENS, is hurtling towards completion. I’m about 1/3 through Act 2 and my goal is to have that puppy done by the end of the year. I am so stoked to finally have a new full length nearing done. This one took forever and a half to gestate. I got the first ideas for SYBIL over a year ago and its only been the past 6 months or so that I’ve actually been able to write the damn thing. It is, to date, my longest play yet. This is intimidating in a world where the most successful plays seem to be about 80 minutes with no intermission. I am hoping it can find a place in the world once finished. I have a selection of it going up next month in Packawallop’s The Lounge Series, which will be taking place on 12/12 at 7 pm. More details coming soon! I’m also working on a video-based project with my friend and crazy talented actress Susan Louise O’Connor, so stay tuned for that as well!

One thing I’ve really loved is getting to spend a lot of time with my cats. They are so excited that I am home. Here I am snuggling the hell out of my girl cat, Bean.

Okay...maybe she's not THAT excited I'm home...

In many ways, this past month has left me rattled and yet I am feeling incredibly peaceful at the moment. It’s been nice to have time just for me, to indulge my inner artist. I’m getting enough sleep. I’m taking stock of my life over the past ten years and my body of work. The other day, I unearthed my “first” play, TUMBLING AFTER. While it isn’t technically my first play (my first play was one I wrote when I was fifteen that consisted of emo adolescent yearning and plagiarized Tori Amos lyrics), it is my first full length play. I wrote the first draft in 2004. I was 23 and I had just come off of what was unquestionably the shittiest year of my life. I was depressed. I had quit acting. Mike and I were having problems. Everything felt broken and I had no idea where my life was going. TUMBLING AFTER is about a young woman named Jill who meets the love of her life in a bar and they get married within a week of knowing each other. Her husband, Brad, is unaware that Jill actually has a severe form of bipolar disorder, and things go awry with their union. It is a very earnest, honest piece of work that I am still very proud of. I don’t think thirty year old me could write this play now. Seven years have gone by, and boy, have I changed! The piece is a bit sappy at times and a bit overemotional, but I think the base is strong. I am thinking of giving it a rewrite and producing it, but just for a short run (2 or 3 performances maybe in a small, affordable space). Or a reading. We’ll see!

Thanksgiving is upon us, and I think the thing I am most grateful for at present is time. I have never had this much time off in my whole life. My mom pointed out to be that I’ve been burning the candle at both ends since I was just a kid. It’s weird to stop and really be with myself. I feel like I’m getting to spend time with someone that I haven’t seen in a long time. Funny how we lose ourselves in the shuffle.

Autumn update!

The amazing red tree in front of my apartment complex - best part of Fall besides pumpkin beer!

Happy fall everyone! I hope (random Nor’easter aside) everyone is enjoying the gorgeous weather lately.

A few items on my end…

1. My good buddy and awesome playwright/director/actor Don Nguyen made a new website called Sad Playwright. It started off as sort of a little joke between Don and a few of us and kind of blew up into a vortex of AWESOME. Here is my entry.

2. As you will learn from my entry, I lost my job a few weeks ago. It sucked, but I am trying to keep perspective. I was lucky enough to ride out the 2008-9 wave gainfully employed, which put me ahead of a lot of folks. In the 4.5 years I worked there, I got to travel some (including a fantastic, unforgettable trip to Costa Rica) and I got two productions off the ground. I bought an apartment. I learned a lot and I have a marketable skill set that will hopefully lead me to a new place. I am scared but overall very optimistic. I miss my coworkers a whole lot though. I made some amazing friends there, and it makes me sad not to see them every day. I was very blessed to work with a really great group of people in my “cube farm”. I am attempting to stay on something resembling a sleep schedule and make sure I don’t start watching Kathie Lee and Hoda. Anyway…

3. The good thing about being unemployed is writing. I would like to say I have been stupendously productive, but that would be a lie. I am, however, getting it done bit by bit. I am currently finishing second half of my brand new full length, THE UNLIKELY ASCENT OF SYBIL STEVENS. And speaking of Don Nguyen and awesomeness…he is currently my director on the project! How much does that kick ass? A lot. Here is an interview on the Packawallop blog that will tell you all about it (I really need to get a new picture).

There’s hopefully going to be more to tell in the next month or two, but that’s all for now. I gotta go check LinkedIn and do some more submissions….

I am aging well

I turned thirty a few weeks ago. I’ve been meaning to write about it, but didn’t get around to it. It came and went. I had two parties (one a surprise, one by design) and some wonderful laughs and then, just like that, the day I’d been dreading was gone. It’s silly, but when I was younger, I had this “premonition” that I would die before I turned thirty. I realize now that “premonition” actually meant “I can’t actually imagine what my life will be like that far from now, so my stupid teenage brain is just going to romanticize some End Times for myself”. What can I say? I was reading a lot of Plath and Dickinson and I listened to depressing music all the time. It was the 90’s.

It is no secret that aging scares me. I have been pretty honest about it. Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook knew that turning 30 was a big deal for me. I’m terrified of dying; utterly, completely, totally fucking terrified. Even more than being scared of dying, I’m scared of getting old and I’m scared of my body betraying me. I’m scared of suffering and I’m scared of not being able to do things for myself. I’m also scared of being irrelevant. Turning thirty took all of these fears and stirred them up big time. Not because I think thirty is old (it’s not), but because it’s closer to being old than twenty is. It’s a landmark age. There are no more excuses, no more stalling; adulthood is here to stay. I think it’s different for women too. Mammograms start at 35. Fertility gets more complicated if you want to have kids. That glimmering hint of mortality you experience in your twenties hits you in the face like brass knuckles.

Then I actually turned thirty, and I weirdly stopped giving a shit about all of it.

I can honestly say that I like thirty year old me a hell of a lot better than I liked twenty year old me. Thirty year old me is much more confident and self-assured. Thirty year old me is able to be healthy and happy without throwing herself down the rabbit hole every five seconds. Thirty year old me doesn’t take shit from people. Thirty year old me tells those to fuck off who deserve to be told to fuck off. Thirty year old me is taking inventory and taking charge. I am a damn lucky woman. My twenties could have been a disaster if two or three things had gone differently. I am very happily married, gainfully employed, and have had some modest creative success. I am not complacent, not by any means, but I am no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop. I spent my first couple of decades constantly worried about everything. I don’t want to do that anymore.

For the first time in my life, I know who I am. It is an incredible feeling to recognize the woman looking back at me in the mirror. For my whole entire life, I have never known who I was. I only knew the person that people wanted me to be, the person people expected me to become. Part of the reason I am a writer is because I desperately wanted to know myself. Now that I know, my point of view feels much more tangible. I already see the results. My critical eye is much more keen. I am confident enough to cut an entire page of unnecessary dialogue. I don’t cling to lines I fell in love with or scenes that don’t work. I scrapped 40+ pages of a play and started over again, and in a weekend rewrote the whole thing. Twenty five year old Kari would never have done that, and thirty year old Kari has a hard drive full of awful shit that will never see the light of day because of it. I know when to say yes, when to say no, and how to do the right thing for myself. I suppose that’s called maturity. I suppose that’s called grace.

I look around at the theater world, and I see all these 22 year old wunderkinds getting all these huge prizes and accolades. This used to make me panicked, but now I am strangely optimistic about my future. It would not shock me in any way if my best work happened in my thirties, or even my forties. I am glad that I can leave the twenties behind with a renewed sense of purpose. There’s something comforting in thinking that my best work is still ahead of me.

Dar Williams has a great song called “I Am Aging Well”. I heard this song on my birthday and it hit me like a ton of bricks, especially this verse.

when i was fifteen, oh I knew it was over
the road to enchantment was not mine to take
’cause lower calf, upper arm should be half what they are
I was breaking the laws that the signmakers made

and all I could eat was the poisonous apple
and that’s not a story I was meant to survive
I was all out of choices, but the woman of voices
she turned round the corner with music around her
she gave me the language that keeps me alive

she said “I’m so glad you finally made it here,
with the things you know now, that only time could tell
Looking back, seeing far, landing right where we are
And oh, you’re aging, oh, and I am aging, oh, aren’t we aging well?

anniversary

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was on my way to the World Trade Center. I worked at a coffee shop as a waitress on the ground floor of 4 WTC, right between the two giants. I ate my breakfast in the plaza every morning before school (I studied theater at Pace University, a few blocks away). That fateful morning, I was supposed to be up and at ‘em early to go get my paycheck and chit chat about picking up some extra shifts, as I was woefully low on cash. I’d just moved into a shitty railroad apartment in Brooklyn and was finding it hard to make ends meet.

I overslept. I’d like to say it was “fate”, except I overslept an awful lot when I was that age. My laziness was my salvation, when normally it is my undoing.

I was nineteen years old, six days shy of my twentieth birthday. I was wearing a red Playboy bunny shirt (classy), my favorite jeans, powder blue Sketchers, and a bandana. I was in an uncharacteristically good mood. I got to the train and the subway wasn’t running. A woman told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. People were crying. I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I thought some idiot in a Cessna had forgotten to pull up on his stick. When I got out of the subway station, I saw a huge ball of fire in the sky and lots of smoke. I later realized I saw the second plane hit, since you could see the tippy top of the towers from where I lived.

I started crying.

I called my mom.

We all know how it went down. I was lucky. I was in Brooklyn, safe but scared, with two kittens and (thank god) several bottles of wine. I had no idea if my friends, classmates, and professors were alive or dead. I was able to talk to people on the phone. A really nice police officer walked me to the bodega, where I bought two packs of Marlboro Lights and smoked every last one of them. I was alone all day until my roommate finally came home, also safe but scared, at 6 pm. He’d had to walk back to Gowanus from the UN. I finally heard from my Pace friends, one by one. My friend Diana had wound up at some stranger’s house. All she did on the phone was scream and cry. My friends all survived, but they’d gone through stuff that a lot of them still can’t talk about. A lot of them lived in my old dorm, where I’d lived for two years, which was a half a block from the south tower. They ran from the collapsing building, not daring to look behind them. Still, though, we were all lucky.

My coworkers were also okay. Some had injuries from falling glass. One guy had to get 56 stitches on his shoulder. They all had to run through the plaza to safety, dodging falling debris, fire, and people. One of my coworkers was nearly hit by a falling body. He started working at another branch of the restaurant with me a few months later. When he told me the story of what he saw, he had to excuse himself to vomit.

We started school again less than two weeks later. I will never forget seeing the wreckage for the first time. I came up out of the subway and walked down Broadway as far as they’d let me. I could not believe what I was seeing. If you never saw it, you cannot imagine what it looked like. The smell was beyond description. I still can’t get it out of my nose. I came home with that smell on my clothes for months. I walked with my friend to her dorm near the Towers and helped her get some stuff out of there to bring to her new dorm. The apartment – the same one I had lived in my freshman year – was covered in thick dust. Some of the windows were broken and there were papers scattered on the floor. The apartment, which used to be dark from the shadows of the buildings, was now bathed in golden beams of sunlight. The shafts of light sparkled with dust, that ubiquitous dust we all breathed in for god knows how long (and is going to give us god-knows-what kind of cancer later on). It was ghostly, eerie. I felt like I’d wandered into some post-apocalyptic science fiction film. None of it ever seemed entirely real. Hyper-real, if anything.

It was hard. It’s still hard. I didn’t lose anyone, but so many did.

I don’t know if it was coincidence, but that semester was when I started writing again after not writing for a very long time. I went back to dealing with life the only way I knew how. I wrote a play that semester, and that’s when my playwriting career really began. It’s funny how it took such a huge thing to make me realize where I was supposed to be all along. I suppose the simplest things are the hardest to find in life, and it takes big moments to reveal small truths. Life would be easier if that weren’t true.

Ten years later, all I can say is that I hate everything that we have become because of it, and it is because of that I do not want to assign the event more weight than it should have. That is not meant to minimize the deaths, the heartbreak, or the terror we all felt; it was, as Jon Stewart called it, an “unendurable pain”. Those things are heavy and terrible and those are the things we will never ever entirely heal from, as a city or as a country. What I do not want to do is make more of the tragedy than it is, to elevate it in the grand scheme of tragedies that have happened before and since. Yes, three thousand people died. Yes, we had the shit scared out of us. Yes, there’s still a missing spot on the New York City skyline that I stare at whenever I see it, in the same way you stare at a wayward mole on someone’s upper lip, that way of not wanting to look at it but being unable to see anything else. However, the world spins regardless. Many have died since, in terrible ways not fit for waking imagination, and many will die after. People have decided to embrace racism, nationalism, and fascism. The dark underside of America has shown itself to more formidable than I could have imagined. There will continue to be hatred and violence and war. There will continue to be organized religion, and so long as that blight on modern civilization still exists, there will be bloodshed in the name of Jesus Christ, Allah, Yahweh, Xenu, Zeus, whatever deity we dare to give a name.

None of it makes any sense; what came before it, the event itself, and what’s happened after. The only solace I take from that terrible time is the brief moment where New Yorkers came together and rallied, and many musicians, actors and public figures stepped up to encourage and soothe a scared, tired city.

A week or so after 9/11, Tori Amos (one of my favorite musicians) went on David Letterman and performed her cover of “Time” by Tom Waits. This performance moved Dave to tears, and it moved me as well. It was a moment of grace and poignancy in a week of utter madness for which I will always be grateful. I actually met Tori that same week at a signing at the now-defunct Virgin Megastore in Union Square, and she was so very kind to me at a moment where I needed kindness. I waited in line for hours and hours, during which time I saw a group of men verbally harass a Muslim woman in the street; a harbinger of things to come. When it was my turn, I went up to Tori and immediately burst into tears, the CD I brought for her to sign shaking in my hands. I had lost my job, my city was burning, and all seemed lost. She took both my hands and looked straight into my eyes and said, “New Yorkers are so, so strong, and you are too, and you’re going to be okay”.

She was right.

I will share that performance with you now, and let this be my conclusion – art, in all its many forms, is a salve for all wounds. It is not frivolous like Sarah Palin would like us to believe (if I didn’t hate her so much, I’d feel sorry for her for being so empty). It is life. It is essential. It is all things beautiful about being human. It’s a comfort to know that we will continue to create – to make things out of sounds and words and colors and textiles and clay and rock and paper and steel – even when things come crashing down.

Application fatigue, or, I hate artistic statements

This is a picture of me trying to write an artistic statement.

Seriously. I have a giant mental block about it.

I’ve been submitting my plays to various competitions and writers groups for the past six or seven years now. You would think by now this would be a total piece of cake. It’s not. In fact, it seems to only get harder for me as time goes on. It is a terrible, Sisyphean struggle every single time. I approach these statements with dread, consternation and a general sick feeling in my stomach. Every time I think I got the hang of it, I read back my statement and cringe. Inevitably, I write something that reads like one of those dreaded five paragraph essays from high school and college. It always feels clunky, overwritten, and false. Worse, they sometimes feel impersonal. I try to imbue my sense of humor into the statements and give them a conversational feel, but I don’t want to come off as crude or unprofessional. I don’t know who is going to be reading it, and I know that tone can be difficult to construe from written statements.

I tried getting drunk and writing an artistic statement once. I thought it might censor my inner critic and make me more open to being loose with the form. You know that saying about not getting drunk and writing emails? I can assure this also applies to statements.

What’s worse is that I have submitted my latest play to about 20 different places so far, and counting. In that space of time, I have had to write six different artistic statements based on the different parameters of each org. While I appreciate the need for the organizations to get a feel for why the playwright wants to be a part of their group specifically, it is really difficult to come up with six different statements. I have spent more time lately writing statements and completing applications than writing actual plays. I know this is par for the course, but I feel fatigued nonetheless. I am running out of new things to say about my work. I also find it challenging (not in a good way) to distill what makes me tick as a playwright into a short paragraph. I can blab on forever about why I am in theater, but getting the essence of it feels impossible.

Application writing, despite being frustrating, is a good exercise for me. It forces me to stop and really think about what it is I am doing, where I am in my career, and where I want to go. I know this part of the process is vitally important as far as people getting to know me and my work. I just wish I could get a better handle on it.

Does anyone else have problems writing artistic statements? If so, what do you find the most challenging? If you are someone who has to read them on a fairly regular basis, what do you feel is important in a statement? What are things you hate to see in a statement?

How Zach Braff brought about some self-examination

The other day, on Twitter, Josh Conkel linked to this piece in the HuffPo about Zach Braff’s new play that just opened, calling it the (I shit you not) “defining play of our generation”. The entire “”"review”"”, if you can call it that, sounded like the scribbles on a Lisa Frank notebook of a 12 year old girl with a Zach Braff poster hanging on her wall. If the review had been accompanied by the initials of the reviewer and Braff inside a heart, I would not have been surprised. I’m not judging being a fangirl, for the record. I fangirl over stuff on the regular. I’ve actually not wanted to post about my newfound obsession with Friday Night Lights because I think you’d all be genuinely convinced I’d lost my mind and that I might pack my shit and move to Texas. My husband might worry that I like Tim Riggins more than him (I don’t, but god dammit, Taylor Kitsch is gorgeous). However, I wouldn’t go publish fanwank under the guise of being professional, nor would I go talking about a piece of art as being “definitive”. The tone of the puff piece was more infuriating than the fact that Zach Braff has a production Off-Broadway.

Let me get the self awareness out of the way; I definitely turned into a catty bitch for a hot minute over this Braff thing. It honestly made me want to toss my hands in the air and give up. Playwrights on Twitter and Facebook felt similarly. That, coupled with the fact that Jesse Eisenberg has a production at Rattlestick, is enough to make this emerging playwright feel kind of hopeless. We all got a little bit nasty about it. I did recall later in the day that Zach Braff wrote Garden State and I really didn’t hate it except for the ending, so maybe his play is awesome sauce and I’m just being a snarky brat. I’m sure its fine. I’m sure its entertaining and funny and palatable and all those good things. So, why did I want to break shit when I read that piece (other than the fact that more Straight White Guys got productions)?

I think where all the bile came from is the fact that Hollywood, more and more, has infiltrated the ranks. It’s one thing on Broadway. We all know that Brooke Shields is going to sell a ticket faster than an unknown, and sometimes the Hollywood folks are damn good on stage and its fun to see them transition from film. Everyone I know says Daniel Radcliffe is outstanding in How to Succeed. There are plenty of film actors who are outstanding stage actors, but it is sad that they get the opportunities before other stage actors who bust their butts auditioning. As time went on, we started seeing those celeb names go into Off-Broadway marquees as well. Now, not only do celebs want to act in Off-Broadway plays; they want to write the damn things too.

Here’s the problem – there are a lot more opportunities for actors than there are for playwrights. Rattlestick produces, what, 4 plays a season? That’s four playwrights who get a show there. That is not a lot of writers. Jesse Eisenberg can be all “Hey! I wrote a play!” and then probably made one or two phone calls to get the ball rolling. I know, I know; that’s the way the world works. Welcome to America, KBQ. It’s just hard not to feel frustrated by it. Even if his play is good (I have heard that it is), he didn’t have to struggle for that show. Paper Cranes took a full year of my time and nearly $10K of my own money. I didn’t write that play in business class on my way to the Oscars. I didn’t get it Off-Broadway. My production team, my actors and I gave it our all for 16 performances. I am grateful for it and I am really happy with how it went, but I and most of the writers I know would give a kidney to have a show at Rattlestick. Seeing a celeb get what seems to be automatically produced represents one less opportunity for us in an industry with so few slots for writers as it is. It is disheartening, and what’s worse is that there’s no real way to counteract this sort of thing. Theaters have to pay the bills. If a big name Oscar nominee shows up with financial backing and a guaranteed successful box, how are the theaters supposed to say no to that? And how are we, the emerging playwrights, to compete with Hollywood money? We can’t.

All this aside, I need to work on not automatically trashing the Hollywood folk. I shouldn’t be bitter or catty to other artists, especially when I haven’t seen either of their plays. Jealousy is an ugly thing, and I work very hard at curbing it. I’m human and don’t always succeed, but I should try harder. I know what a labor of love it is to write a play. Even under the most ideal circumstances, it is a difficult thing to do. Productions are also a labor of love and I know all the hard work that goes into getting a play on its feet. If I really want to see the glass as half full, I think of this; if one person who normally wouldn’t see a play goes to the theater because Braff or Eisenberg are involved, well, at least they’re not seeing Mamma Mia. Things could always be worse.

ETA: Second Stage, the theater producing Braff’s Play, is trying to buy the Helen Hayes. I WONDER WHERE THEY GOT THE MONEY??

summertime, and the livin’ is stinky

It’s 104 degrees in NYC. I know that living here thirteen (!) years probably means I have experienced a day this hot, but honestly I do not remember it. I was terrified upon walking to get a corporate salad today that I would burst directly into flames. My flats got stuck in the asphalt; Madison Avenue is melting.

I think my least favorite thing about New York in the summer is the smell. Sure, NYC is always a little fragrant, and I don’t even mind it most of the time, but when it’s this hot, things get pretty bad. The subway stations are bathed in a rich soup of sweat, hobostank (you know, that completely unmistakeable yet impossible to describe stench that comes from our plentiful homeless, poor stinky souls), gasoline, asphalt, piss, garbage and burnt out train brakes. What is merely annoying becomes deeply horrifying. It’s beyond gross, beyond dry heaving. It is something you must ENDURE, you learn what the word endure means as your train that normally comes every 5 minutes rolls in 22 minutes later. There is nothing sweeter than the blast of air conditioning that comes from those shiny train doors, until you realize you’re sharing that air with about a hundred stinky, sweaty, similarly miserable folks all the way back to Queens.

Then, you go out to an air conditioned bar and drink cocktails, preferably ones that involve a blender and/or mint. Then you go back to your apartment and pass the fuck out, hopefully in air conditioning. If you don’t have air conditioning, you take a cold shower before passing the fuck out, your head enveloped by a damp towel, probably not wearing any clothes. It’s not perfect, but at least it doesn’t stink.

It is in these conditions that, for whatever reason, I don’t write very much. I’ve gone back and looked over journals and blog entries from July/August, and it is always a stunningly unproductive time for me. Perhaps the heat completely saps my energy. Perhaps I spend too much time drinking aforementioned minty cocktails. Perhaps I am the opposite of a bear; my hibernation seems to be the summer.

It is because of this that I am trying to blog more. Maybe that’s the writing I’m meant to be doing now. Even if it sucks, at least it’s something.

the Bad Artist

Oh look. I have a blog! Let me post on it.

Over the past couple of months, I have been struggling mightily. This has been, by far, the most utterly crippling bout of writers block I have ever had. Granted, my life was nothing but PAPER CRANES for over a year. I gave, quite literally, all of myself to that show. After taking about a month to truly, truly let myself recover from what was a wonderful and wholly absorbing experience, I found myself feeling like I should get cracking on a new piece. I’d started something before we went into production and was feeling good about it. I’m also working on a musical with a friend of mine, so I did some work for that too. I wrote a couple of scenes and we had some meetings. I submitted PAPER CRANES to about thirty different things – from theatres to grants to writers groups to competitions. I got ten rejections pretty quickly.

Just like that, the well went dry. I can’t write. It’s not for lack of trying. Every word I put down is shit. I know that I need to have another draft of a play soon. I looked at my peers and I realized that, holy shit, I turn thirty next month and there are women writers running right past me.

I think that part of my problem is that I feel like a Bad Artist. All day, every day, on Twitter and Facebook, I read about all the things that Successful Writers Should Be Doing and how I am Not Doing Them Right and I go into a shame spiral.

I realize that this is stupid, and not only is it stupid, it is unproductive.

I am writing this missive to help me get unblocked.

I am not a Bad Artist because I took a break after my show was over. I was tired and creatively/mentally/physically tapped out and I needed to reconnect with my life.

I am not a Bad Artist because I have a day job and value having a financial leg to stand on.

I am not a Bad Artist because I’m not working harder to break into TV. I didn’t become a writer to work in TV. If it happens, it happens, but I’m not bad for not chasing it harder.

I am not a Bad Artist because I haven’t been able to churn out a full length every year. Some writers are incredibly prolific. They are fortunate. I am not one of those writers and I need to stop feeling upset with myself for it.

I am not a Bad Artist because I can’t see every play under the sun. I went to a ton of theater for a while, and it hit my schedule and my pocketbook hard.

I am not a Bad Artist because there are days when I don’t write. The days I don’t write are days that I spend doing things I like other than writing.

I am not a Bad Artist because I am not a part of a fancy writers group and I am not a Bad Artist because I don’t have (and might choose not to get) my MFA. I am not a Bad Artist because I refuse to live away from my spouse for three plus years to get a degree I’m not sure I want.

I am not a Bad Artist because my marriage and my family and my friends are often more important to me than my career.

I am not a Bad Artist because I often find novels and music more inspiring to my work than theater itself.

I am not a Bad Artist for not blogging this summer.

I am not a Bad Artist because I sometimes question if this is what I should be doing with my life. That questioning is essential. That questioning is vital.

I am not a Bad Artist because I wasn’t born with money.

I am not a Bad Artist because I am working class.

I am not a Bad Artist because my work is more emotional than it will ever be cerebral.

I am not a Bad Artist because I let a shitty, unkind review of my show bother me.

I am not a Bad Artist.

I am human. That’s all I can be. I have to remember this during the dry times. If I fail, I will fail on my own terms, but I am not going to pretend to be someone and something I am not because I am not following some prescribed path for playwrights. I think we could all stand to be a little kinder to each other and a little less prescriptive.

You are not Bad Artists either. We are all great and brave and maybe stupid for doing this, but we are not Bad. I am letting go of the shame. I am going to work a little harder at being less hard on myself.