Unethical graphic

This is the graphic Matt designed for "Unethical" for CPT to use in its Big[BOX] brochure. Very cool, I think. I especially like that the stapler is red ... just like Milton's Swingline from "Office Space."

I spent part of this morning in a meeting discussing how my office has changed and will change in 2009. Employees laid off - frequently the wrong employees. Weird new projects started at the expense of established things we need to shore up. Questionable business decisions that honor the wrong people who exhibit the wrong motives. It makes me feel even better about writing my absurd little show. If even one person in the audience has ever been discounted or even mistreated and betrayed by their employers or coworkers, hopefully the identification they feel with the play and being able to laugh at it (provided my dialogue is actually funny) will be cathartic.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Prime reference #2

I sent the new draft of "Unethical" to Lisa and actors last night. Man, does it feel good to have that done!

As for "Prime," here is another favorite geek reference moment. This comes from Steph's opening monologue. I'm fond of this because I actually felt this way myself as a child. My guy friends and I would play and watch He-Man all the time ... there were only three girls in the show: one was evil (Evil-Lyn), one was a plot and personality non-entity (Teela), and one was a total wimp (see below). It was frustrating.

STEPH

But I guess most of all I want to be a sorceress. Now, I don't want to be a lame sorceress like the one in Castle Grey Skull. You know how she does, like, one magic spell, and then she totally gets all weak and tired and powerless? And she can't even leave Grey Skull or she loses her power and faints and falls down and acts stupid! I'm not going to be like that.

Strictly speaking, the sorceress could leave Grey Skull in the form of Zoar the falcon, but when you're fighting the evil forces of Skeletor, would you rather have someone who can wield earth-changing supernatural forces at your side or a screeching bird circling over your head? It's a no-brainer to me, but I left that point out of the script for the sake of brevity and the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with "Prime's" characters or plot.

Prime reference #1

"Optimus Prime for President" is filled with tons of geeky references. Periodically, I will post some of my favorites. Here's the first, which appropriately is about our eponymous hero. It's an excerpt from a scene in which Dr. Matt offers a "refresher course" on the Transformers origin story to Steph and Stuey, who merely thought the cartoon was cool, and to Sierra, who could care less:

MATT

Optimus had it (the Matrix) until he got killed by Megatron.

SIERRA

Again?

MATT

Again.

So, with Optimus dead, the Matrix of Leadership was passed to Ultra Magnus. And then this is where it all gets fuzzy in my memory. I think Optimus got temporarily reanimated to fight Unicron and got the Matrix back. I'm not really sure. That all happened during a time in my life when I was drifting away from Transformers and discovering girls.

Hooray!

I think I'm done with "Unethical" rewrites! I plowed through the script reading passages aloud to the dog last night while Matt and the Last Call boys were downstairs in my living room practicing their new song "I'm A Douchebag" and dancing to Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For A Hero." (Our lives aren't like other peoples.)

In retrospect, however, I'm concerned that I didn't actually change that much. I added just a little more to Tracey's first confrontation with Reed, making her more arrogant and less professional and making him meaner in response. Plus, now Barry walks in and observes some of the tension, which may be hokey. We'll see. I also trimmed and honed Nora and Zach's opening scene and did general sprucing up of rough patches of dialogue. But I didn't do anything new with Zach like I thought I would. There was nowhere else to put him, nothing else I felt compelled to make him say. It occurred to me that his growing distance from Nora over the course of the play is probably illustrated better by his absence and failure to return her calls than him coming in and having awkward conversations with her.

I'll reread this weekend to make sure, save that Final Draft doc as a PDF, and send it off to Lisa to distribute to actors. Hooray. It feels good to be done(ish). At least with this part.

Post for post's sake

I have been commanded to post a new blog entry by my bored and impatient office wonder twin Janet. (She's form of a really blunt dinosaur, and I'm shape of a wise-cracking ice cage. Together, we battle colleagues who fail to use verbs in their photo captions. Yes, Ellen and Arlene, I'm talking about you!)

Unfortunately for Janet, I don't have anything that fascinating to say.

Nothing new to report on my plays, but recently I've been able to see and read some stuff from other people's scripts. And it's helped me realize this about myself: I've really grown to dislike arty, weird stuff. In college, I thought anything experimental was cool. But now, I really hate symbolism. Perhaps that's too broad a statement. To clarify: I can't enjoy work that doesn't have some sort of relatable human emotion behind it. Using symbolic colors, props or movement to present an idea that makes a statement but has no feeling behind it ... well, it isn't my cup of tea.

I can appreciate a beautiful stage picture, a presentational aesthetic, performance artsy choices, etc. as an audience member. For example, last season when CPT did the Gao plays, there were moments in "The Other Shore" that I really connected with. It was all pretty non-literal, using ropes and movement and group speak and songs to tell an abstract tale. I didn't follow all of it (who did?), but I connected emotionally to moments where characters showed real pain or joy. So, I actually really enjoyed it. But I'm never going to write that kind of stuff. Never. And that's probably why, as my playwriting buddy Steve Maistros says, CPT likes us, but will never ask us to go steady.

What I feel compelled to write is a story about real people who talk about real things in a somewhat conversational way. My plays will never explore the abstract nature of dreams. They will never feature a Greek chorus of masked actors or multiple actors playing different facets of one character. And lord knows, I will never have a dressmaker's dummy on roller skates draped in an American flag as it rolls past an "olive drab" background to symbolize a man's troubled childhood. Because that's pretentious bullshit. Tell me a real story, please. It can be abstract and arty and focused on the visuals. I just need to care about the soul of the person or people at the center of your artistic statement.

Does anybody want some cake?

After Puppy Kindergarten last night, I sat down to work on "Unethical" rewrites, but instead managed to balance our account, pay bills, check email and update Facebook. The script remained untouched. I promised Lisa (and myself) I'd have the rehearsal-ready draft by the end of November, but so far I've only been successful at procrastinating.

The rewrites shouldn't be that intense, I just have to do them. In October, I had people over to read the script in my living room and give feedback. I was shocked at how smoothly the script read, considering I wrote it in a vacuum - alone, with almost no feedback and hearing very little out loud. The changes mostly involve smoothing out a few awkward bits of dialogue and clarifying a few moments. The biggest thing I have to tackle is Tracey. Tracey is a 22-year-old, fresh-from-college new employee at The Company. I had a very good handle on how I wanted her to sound and behave when I started, but a year later, her journey is the least well-defined. I need to increase the stakes of the trouble she gets into at the beginning of the play and sharpen the reasons she changes and the way those changes manifest.

I also want to spend a little time working on Zach, too. He's great in the beginning, and then he kind of fades to the back of the story in the middle. Sometimes I feel like he's little more than Nora's (the main character) love interest. But is that so bad? How many zillions of plays are there out there in which the female characters serve no purpose other than being "the girlfriend" or "the wife." Zach may be just "the boyfriend," but at least he goes through a journey and ultimately causes the final climactic moment of the play.

My favorite character - and the most popular character at the reading - is Barry, the somewhat annoying, overly friendly, awkward outsider IT guy who obsessively offers his coworkers cake. I created him as a throw-away comic relief and to vent some issues I was having with real people at work. And now he's developed into the most crafty, amusing and oddly relatable character in the play. His scene in the break room with Nora might be the one scene I don't touch in rewrites. Barry is the lynchpin of the play now for me ... even if he is the kind of guy who picks up chicks in the hands-free cellphone accessories aisle at Radio Shack.

Directors, casts and Jack's

This was the promo piece Matt (my husband) made for the staged reading of "Prime" last year.

As for the Fourth Wall production of "Prime," it sounds like the artistic team over there has settled on a director for the show. It's someone I've worked with before, so I'm excited. I don't want to post her name until I know she has officially accepted the job. I'm actually kind of surprised to have a woman directing. I don't know why, but my main collaborators and advice-givers on this script have always been male. I feel like it's a very male play - even though it's written by a woman and the primary character is a woman going through a lot of very womanly issues and emotions. I'm curious to see if a woman as director will uncover some new approaches to certain moments. As long as the Kevin-Jeremy fight scene remains fabulously ridiculous in its testosterone-fueled ineptness, then everything will be fine. (I love that scene! Stuart and Josh nailed it in the staged reading last year.)

I spent many years writing, abandoning and returning to rewrite "Prime." And a lot of music has influenced the script over that time. The current draft has a soundtrack in my head. It's the album "Everything in Transit" by Jack's Mannequin. If you want to work on the Fourth Wall production of "Prime," I highly suggest you check the album out. Particularly "Dark Blue," "Into the Airwaves" and "Rescued." (I just saw Jack's in concert at the Grog Shop this week, and it was an amazing show. Weird, though, to see tweens bopping around and "wooo"-ing for music that to me is so introspective and so accurate at describing what it feels like to be young and ill.)

In "Unethical" news, director Lisa Ortenzi and I had a production meeting this week, and she's close to finalizing a cast. (We need to have actor names to CPT by Nov. 21!) No time to audition, so we're just inviting people we know, some I've worked with and some I've never met who are Lisa's picks. I like the idea of bringing in "new blood" just to see if the script sounds any different in their mouths, than when interpreted by my usual gang down at the Dark Room play reading group.  It sounds like all our first choices are in, except one. So, who are we going to get to play Zach, the love interest? He needs to be early 30s, charming, a sort of goofy class clown type, but restrained enough to not come across like a freak to his office mates. The actor also has to not be invited to Derek's wedding, which is the same weekend as my show. I'm going to spend this weekend auditioning every actor I know in my head until I figure out who I want for my Zach.

Welcome to my blog

2009 is going to be a big year for me in terms of theater. Two of my original scripts - "Unethical" and "Optimus Prime for President" - are being produced in February and March. I thought I should chronicle my experiences bringing these two pieces from page to stage. Hopefully, someone out there will want to read this ... other than my husband (who will forget to check in for updates) and my mother (who likely won't be able to navigate her way to this url). 

UNETHICAL

My newest play will run Feb. 20-22 at Cleveland Public Theatre's James Levin Theatre as part of the Big[BOX] series of new works. Here is the brief description of the play I will be sending Mindy Herman to use in CPT's publicity: 

You can't live without this paycheck, so just keep your head down and get through the workday. But when The Company institutes a new Corporate Policy of Employee Ethics and Standards of Conduct, four co-workers suddenly find themselves at the center of office controversy. Following the strict policy means giving up your personal expression, but the consequences of breaking it could be severe. And office mates will find their relationships tested in ways they never imagined.

So yeah, it's a comedy. Sort of.

OPTIMUS PRIME FOR PRESIDENT

I started writing "Prime" years ago when I was recovering from surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my neck. I kept putting it aside and coming back to it, and over the years, the characters and stories evolved. It was performed (excellently) as a staged reading at last year's Little Box new plays series at CPT. Now it will be produced by Fourth Wall Productions March 20-April 4 at the Enterprise Center Building on E. 105th. Here's the description of that show:

On a summer night following a baseball game, six friends meet in their favorite bar for their usual night together. However, this night something is different. From unresolved feelings to longstanding resentments to a devastating secret, they all have something important to say to each other. But sometimes the truth is too hard to admit, and it's easier to talk about cartoons.

Also a comedy. Mostly.

Check back to find out how casting goes for "Unethical" and to help me slog through "final" rewrites of both plays!