Estrogenius- Week One

Last week, I saw Week One (now closed) of Estrogenius at Manhatan Theatre Source. The range of plays, as always, interested me. I have seen other years of Estrogenius because my friend Cheryl Davis has had pieces in it several times. This year is its tenth anniversary.
The first play, Roar of the Crowd by Suzanne Lamberg, was very clever. It withheld just enough information to make its punch line pay off. It also reminded me of the endless arguments I've been in over what constitutes a ten-minute play versus a skit. This seemed pretty skit-like to me. Bette Siler's The Gift of the Maggie's is a take on O.Henry's The Gift of the Magi, but the adaptation does not match up on some pretty basic points of the original. It was certainly not a skit; it wasn't my brand of humor, but the audience laughed a lot. Junk Mail by Lynn Snyder was all over the place as a play, yet not clean enough to be a skit, but Anita Gonzalez's direction and the committed acting of Alana Jackler and Stephan Alan Wilson made it work. The last piece of the evening was Daniel Damiano's Enlightenment of Mrs. Cartwell, set during the Regency in Hyde Park. Conjures up Georgette Heyer novels, doesn't it? The plot of the play is Mrs. Cartwell overheard another woman say she had a big butt. Hilarity ensues.
My favorite, not surprisingly, was Elaine Romero's Revolutions. A play with genuine, deep emotion! That moved the audience! Set somewhere other than the contemporary US! I did wonder if it might be a longer play, since there's so much good stuff in it. I hesitate to give a complete plot summary (should you ever see it, I don't want to blow the ending), but it's about Pilar, a woman in a Latin American country, who goes to the General, looking for her missing son.

Geography

I have had nothing but good questions and good rehearsal reports back from Kristen Kos, the director of the reading of my play Geography In Charleston, South Carolina on Saturday. A link to an article from Charleston City Paper about the reading series is above. The reading part of the Greater Park Circle Play Fest at South of Broadway on Saturday at 6PM. My friend Elaine Romero was there for the reading of her play "Like Heaven" last Saturday, and had only good things to say.
The play is about a brother and sister, Katinka and Antal Medve, who escape from post-revolutionary Hungary and settle in New York City. It takes place in the course of the Monday after Easter, 1957.
You might think this is a strange subject for a play from a simple German girl from Cleveland, but there were actually a lot of Hungarians who'd left in 1956 living in Cleveland when I was growing up there. I was also enough to have a wonderful friend, the late, great photographer Sandor Acs, who told me many stories about growing up in Budapest during World War II, and what the revolution was like. His stories and others are the basis of the play. I'm only sorry he didn't live to see it.
Geography should run around 80 minutes, so it's not too late for dinner afterwards.
The two photographs above are from aworldtowin.net and britannica.com.

South of Broadway

My friend Elaine Romero and I both have plays in South of Broadway's fall reading series, Greater South Circle Play Fest (link above). The theatre is located in Charleston, South Carolina. The readings are each Saturday evening at 6PM. Elaine's play, Like Heaven, is tomorrow night. My play, Geography, is next Saturday. Strangely enough, they are both plays we worked on when we were Playwrights-in-Residence at the Inge Festival. And I know that I heard of the Greater South Circle Play Festival via the Inge's artistic director, Peter Ellenstein. Peter is very diligent about passing along opportunities to Inge alumni. Not to mention the fact that he's a mensch.
Geography is my second play about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It's set in my old neighborhood, Yorkville, which used to be heavily Hungarian and German. The play takes place in Carl Schurz Park on John Finley Walk on the Monday after Easter in 1957. It's about a brother and sister from Budapest who are adjusting to New York City, or not. The play is as much about the relationship between these two siblings as it is about Cold War history. To me, sibling relationships are not quite like any other, however much we may take them for granted.
The reading is directed by Kristen Kos, featuring Frank Ponce as Brown and Katie Holland as Katinka.

Ten-Minute Plays

I belong to three Yahoo! Groups for playwrights. Two of them don’t have much (other than porn and Cialis offers), but the third is pretty active- at least three posts a day, every day. Since I joined last spring, there have been two really spirited, passionate discussions, one about charging fees for playwriting contests. The most recent has revolved around a theatre that had been (and has since desisted) charging a $12 fee to submit a ten-minute play. Since dialogue is approximately a minute a page, that struck some people as excessive. But in the midst of this passionate debate, an ancillary topic came up, which is the value of ten-minute plays. One member wrote that ten-minute plays are for students, and useless for anyone else, certainly for professional playwrights.
I am not sure I would go quite that far. I think ten-minute plays are reflective of how our culture has changed since the 1950s, particularly through tv. The most visible proponent of the ten-minute play has been the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Every year, playwrights from all over the country submit their ten-minute masterpieces to ATL, where a handful are produced as part of the Humana Festival. For decades, ATL has published collections of the best ten-minute plays they’ve produced. I have used several of them in playwriting classes, if one of the goals of the class (which it often is) is to have each student complete a ten-minute play.
But the truth is, writing a good ten-minute play is quite difficult. It should have a beginning, a middle and an end. It shouldn’t be a comedy sketch. It shouldn’t be the first scene of a much longer work. (I myself am most guilty of the latter.) Out of the ATL collections, even the “Best of” anthologies, at least half don’t fulfill those three criteria. And many that do, aren’t really ten-minutes long. The former artistic director of ATL, Jon Jory, used to say that no ten-minute play is really ten minutes long.
On the other hand, for theatres, ten-minute plays can be a godsend. They bring in new audiences (the family and friends of the actors and the directors); they’re much faster to rehearse; it’s less daunting to put amateur actors in shorter, unsustained roles, so they save money by not paying salaries or stipends. And for audiences who aren’t used to going to the theatre, it’s less intimidating because it’s more like tv. You don’t like the first piece? That’s okay. Wait ten minutes and we’ll be on to the next one.
What’s most difficult (and off-putting) to me about ten-minute plays is that the form pretty much dictates content that’s either a shallow riff about something important, or a riff on something of little importance. My friend Elaine Romero wrote a ten-minute play about Susan Smith (the woman who killed her children) which is wonderful, but ten-minute plays of that level are very rare. I have written at least ten of them myself; three are coming out in anthologies published by Smith and Kraus this year.
Of course the other problem with ten-minute festivals is they have spawned ever-shorter plays- eight-minutes, five-minutes, even down to one-page (they certainly exist). I guess I wonder when they’ll shrink to two lines of dialogue. Or maybe just one word