Everything Is Already Something Week 52: Plays By Women To Read Right Now

Allison Page, female playwright, sharing the love.

It’s Women’s History Month! Heyyyy, you guys, we have a month! Sometimes women write plays (WHAT?) and this is as good a time as any to pick one up and give it a good read. Here are some I have read, and some I’m gonna read:

THE BAT
by Mary Roberts Rinehart (and Avery Hopwood but for our purposes today it’s all about the MRR)

Mary Roberts Rinehart created this character called The Bat, who goes around…ya know, dressed as a bat — KILLING PEOPLE. Bob Kane later said that this character/story was an influence in the creation of Batman. Yeah, Batman has some roots in Broadway. And good old Christie-esque murder mystery melodramas. MRR is sometimes called the American Agatha Christie, even though MRR was already at it when Christie came on the scene. (I want to watch that smack down. Oh shit, I think I just had an idea for a play. Or a really specific pro-wrestling storyline.) Her first published works came out in 1906, and The Bat debuted in 1920. I just picked this one up and haven’t read it yet, but I have it next to me right now to absorb while sipping tea in a cardigan. Murder can be so quaint.

WATER BY THE SPOONFUL
by Quiara Alegría Hudes

I’m about to order this. So, look, ANOTHER thing I’m saying you should read that I haven’t read. Really, this list partially exists as a “I need to be better about reading stuff, too.” So I’m just putting my money where my mouth is on this one. Water By The Spoonful walked away with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012. pulitzer.org says of the play: “…an imaginative play about the search for meaning by a returning Iraq War veteran working in a sandwich shop in his hometown of Philadelphia.” (Thanks, Wikipedia!) Hudes herself grew up in Philadelphia. Her name may be familiar to you if you’re into musicals, because she wrote the book for In The Heights.

Quiara Alegria Hudes

WOMEN AT FOUR O’CLOCK
By Dawn Powell

This is a bizarre play, I’ll start with that. Reading it, you get the sense that Powell was dealing with some shit here. She wrote a fair amount of satirical novels, plays, and short stories skewering much about America during her lifetime, but Women at Four O’Clock feels different. It was written somewhere in the late 1920s. It’s got some of her edge, certainly, but there’s an intense fragility to the main character, who seems to be losing her grip on reality. It’s an experimental work, to be sure. There’s a particularly dreamy sequence on a bus (or a train…I can’t remember now) that I found rather unsettling. The play has never been produced (apart from some festival of her work a few years back, but I can’t seem to figure out if that was an actual production or a staged reading), and I would love to make it happen someday. I really respect her writing, and the vulnerability she was able to imbue this character with on the page. It’s dark, poetic, sad and fascinating. Which is all the more interesting to me because she was a quick-witted, funny writer —and then this thing emerged. (It seems the only way to get this play is in a book called Four Plays By Dawn Powell, which you can find in some libraries and on Amazon!)

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW
by Lorraine Hansberry

Probably best known as “That other play by Lorraine Hansberry. You know, not A Raisin In The Sun?” By most accounts, it seems to delve into important, hot topics of the time — the early 1960s — but maybe doesn’t wrap them all up together perfectly. But to be honest, I don’t always need that to happen. And I’m really interested to see how this one plays out. It’s on its way to my apartment now. Hansberry died in 1965 at the young age of 34. Who knows what other important issues she could have brought further into the light if she hadn’t been taken so early by pancreatic cancer? It’s certainly worth it to take a look at this other “lesser” work. I mean, to be lesser to A Raisin In The Sun is like…I mean, come on. IT’S A RAISIN IN THE SUN. One sentence description of the plot: “The play is a story about a man named Sidney, his pitfalls within his personal life, and struggles in Bohemian culture.”

THE FLICK
by Annie Baker

I just ordered this one. I haven’t read it yet but I’m excited about it. It’s probably one of the more well-known titles listed here, because it won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Obie Award for Playwriting. Pretty high praise, yeah? It’s set in a rundown movie theater and is about three movie ushers. It’s somehow both a small and a big play, in that it has a tiny cast but a running time of three hours. That’s pretty ballsy. I don’t know a lot of playwrights who would venture to write a three hour, three person play. It rather notoriously received complaints from theater patrons who were upset with the length of the play, which Annie then did not change at all because FUCK ‘EM, and it seems she was right based on all the awards.

THE WOMEN
by Clare Boothe Luce

Okay, I HAD TO. The Women gets a bad rap. Usually when that happens I wave my hands around and yell “YOU JUST DON’T GET IT!” because I have loved it for an awfully long time. It’s freakin’ satire. It’s Luce coming directly at the types of people she saw around her, and strongly detested. It’s an attack of emerging American women’s cultural ideals of the time. The pursuit of this perfect, Manhattan-ish existence — finding a husband who can take care of you so that every single thing you worry about is a trifling piece of bullshit. Real problems aren’t problems for you anymore because someone is paying for the food and lodging, so now you can pick fights with your friends and gossip about whose husband is cheating on whom with the woman at the perfume counter. I don’t know what other people think when they read it, watch it live, or see the movie, but I think it is 1) Hilarious and 2) Sometimes painfully true. I’ve heard the argument that the work itself doesn’t seem very pro-women. Yeah. I know. Ya know why? Because woman can be shitheels too. They can be awful and petty and obnoxious and cruel. And if I can’t laugh at those kinds of people, I’ll cry.

*Note: I prefer the original version of The Women. There’s an updated one from the 60s or something, with newer references and stuff, but the 1934 version is the one I like best. It’s a little harder to find but you can definitely get it in those old anthologies of plays at the library.

Allison Page is a writer/actor/director in the bay area. You can see her new play HILARITY, produced by DIVAfest at the EXIT Theatre, playing now through March 28th – where you can also buy a copy of the script and read it!

Everything Is Already Something Week 51: What Collaboration Does For Me

Allison Page, collaborating.

I used to be a loner. Picture a grouchy old bearded man in a sweater, hunkered down in an armchair, scribbling away on a stack of paper, occasionally shaking his fist at the sky. Possibly at some point he throws half a glass of bourbon in the face of his wife. That was me, but not a man with a beard. You know, but bearded on the INSIDE. Often, I think people have this idea of what a writer is and immediately they think of Ernest Hemingway. And that’s how you’re supposed to be a good writer, isn’t it? All the geniuses and masters toil away in their own well-crafted solitary confinement – crouched down in their pillow forts where all the pillows are barbed wire, and we tell ourselves that’s how you get to be a writer. That’s how you get to be an artist. AN ARTISTE. That suffering makes your art better is a long held idea. I admit to buying into that at some point. I think we all have – especially when young and impressionable. Anyone who caught the bug of wanting to write books or plays or poems (DEFINITELY POEMS) or to act or dance or paint or sculpt or…I don’t know, whatever you guys are doing – puppetry? Anyone who had that impulse at a young age probably started identifying their artistic heroes and began to define what they wanted to be by taking note of what created the artists they connected to most. That was a hell of a sentence.

Misery worked pretty well for Alanis. Teenage girls of the 90s, can ya feel me?

Let’s take young, pink-haired, angry Allison for example.

I’ve known I wanted to be an actor since I was probably 5 years old. At that age I was mostly inspired by cartoon characters – let’s be real, cartoons are fucking great. Actually, I remained inspired by cartoons for a while. Actually actually, I still am. I was the only little girl I knew who wanted to be The Genie from Aladdin instead of Jasmine. Animaniacs was a big deal in my life. I mean, it still is. It holds up. (Garfield and Friends does not. Don’t bother.) Once we start getting into the real people I looked up to, though, it doesn’t take long to start finding the darkness. (If we’re being honest The Genie isn’t actually that happy a character, he just deflects his sorrow with jokes. So I guess the darkness crept in even earlier than I thought.)

By the time I was 14, I was already very into old movies. Yes, I was very cool and popular (lies). It was at that age that I first watched a little movie called Der Blaue Engel, or The Blue Angel. It’s a little German tragicomedy about a teacher who falls in love with a cabaret performer. IT DOESN’T GO WELL. It ends with Emil Jannings dying while regretfully clutching the desk from which he used to teach before the succubus Marlene Dietrich ruined his life because he loved her so much that it turned him into a literal sad clown. SO FUN. And that’s the actual movie that made me want to be an actor. Isn’t that wild? Sorry, spoilers in case you haven’t had time to catch this movie since it came out in 1930. But really, it’s beautiful and cruel, you should see it. That was sort of a sidebar because I’m really talking about writers, but I was an actor first so there ya go. When I was 16 I decided I finally had a favorite play. It’s still my favorite play. What is it?

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Yikes.

Quite a choice for a teenage mind. But just because something is dark, does that necessarily mean it came from a person who is feeling dark? When you look at comedies, they certainly don’t necessarily come from people who are feeling fun and light. I’m meandering a little on the topic at hand. Let’s get back to it.

Here’s a sampling of some writerly heroes of mine:
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dawn Powell
Dorothy Parker
Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett
Clare Booth Luce
Robert Benchley

Go ahead and google how many of them were lonely writers and avid drinkers. Just as a sample group. Get ready to be sad!

Robert Benchley: absolutely hilarious and definitely died slowly of cirrhosis of the liver because he loved sad/alone drinking. YAYYYY.

I’m not saying I’m as gloomy as any of those people or that they were alcoholics because they were writers, but I think writing can breed loneliness or at least nudge it along. You so often do it alone. I mean, in the end you have to do it alone, right? You can’t have 20 fingers typing on your keyboard or writing with your pencil. Well, you could, but it would take forever. As much as I am alone when I write, I try to spend an equal amount of time either writing WITH other people – like, actually collaborating on something, or writing NEAR other people. I think if you’re in the business of writing about people, that it’s good to maintain connections to people as opposed to doing the opposite of that.

When I write sketch comedy, I do that in a super fun writers room scenario. There are something like 10 – 15 of us (some writers, some actors) throwing out ideas, talking about possibilities, and laughing really hard. It is AMAZING. It feels like magic should feel. So much so, that when I’m executing all those ideas, it still feels collaborative even when I’m alone. Weird, right?

Clearly that’s kind of specific to sketch. When you’re writing a novel, or a play, or whatever else you’re writing, you’re not always looking for that level of collaboration. But that doesn’t mean you have to stew alone all the time. I like to be alone together. I can sit and work on what I’m working on, and a friend can sit across from me or next to me at the table to my left, and we work in silence sipping coffee as long as we can, then turn to each other when we kind of can’t bear it for a minute. We’ll gossip about something, or talk about the trouble we’re having with a particular section, or even *gasp* read a bit we’re particularly proud of to the other person. Or if we’re really struggling, just talk about the coffee we’re drinking. Sometimes if I’m working on something particularly draining, chatter about coffee might be the most I’m able to think about. It’s been good for me, this process.

I want to be a good writer. I think I’m an okay one. I want to be good, but not at the expense of my grip on reality and connections to other people. I don’t need to be Fitzgerald or Parker or Powell, I just want to be the best writer I can be while not falling into the gloom. If that means I don’t go down in history, I’m okay with that. Since allowing myself the possibility of collaborating or writing alone together, everything seems like a little bit less of a struggle. I mean, geez, writing is already not so easy. If you can find a way to make it a little bit easier, I don’t see how that can be bad. I still have my grouchy-old-man-in-a-cardigan moments, but I have fewer of them. And there’s a nice space of happiness in between: the comfort of knowing that the person next to you is dealing with the same thing you are. Or, if you’re competitive, the knowledge that you may be kicking their ass in the number-of-pages-typed-in-a-day department.

I’m not going to say collaboration will kick your depression. What am I, a doctor? No. I’m not a doctor. Don’t ever let me tell you otherwise. But what I am saying is that while hell may be other people, it is also probably a lack of other people. We need each other a little bit. Maybe even just for an occasional reality check.

There isn’t one way to be a successful/good/happy writer. Just like there isn’t one way to be nearly anything. Don’t try to fit yourself into a dangerous mould. Make your own mould. Hell, BE the mould.

Me? I get by with a little help from my friends.

Not actually Allison’s friends, but let’s pretend.

Allison Page is a writer/actor/comedian. Her new play HILARITY, about a comedian struggling with alcoholism and jokes, is being produced by DIVAfest and has its world premiere at The EXIT Theatre in San Francisco. Previews start March 5th. Tickets at hilarity.bpt.me

Everything Is Already Something Week 24: Deadly Deadlines and the People Who Love Them

Allison Page is dancing as fast as she can.

Forgive me for the stream of consciousness-esque post – that’s just where I am, kids.

AHHHHHHHHHH! I’m being crushed beneath the weight of my own choices! I’m being lowered onto the fire of my own creation! The tips of my toes are touching the flames!…I have too many deadlines.

FIRE IS HOT

But I need the deadlines. I can’t function without them. I imagine there are people out there who can write without deadlines. Who just magically get things done “in their own time” except that, unlike me, “their own time” is a week from Thursday instead of three years from now.

I’ve set the hardest deadline for myself yet: I scheduled a first reading of one of my plays for January 26th. In case you haven’t noticed, or in case you’re reading this in the future (OR THE PAST) – that’s 12 days from now. I scheduled the reading last month, knowing I was already behind. But to be honest, if I gave myself more time…I don’t know that it would make any difference. I’m not a well-oiled machine without a deadline. With one, I know how much time I’ve got. I know how much needs to happen. Without one, I’m like a kid who has been sent outside to play and doesn’t come back home for 6 months because she followed a field of pretty daisies and took a nap in the sunlight every day. I wish I weren’t like that, but I am. At least I can recognize that and try to schedule myself against it. I don’t think that makes me a bad writer (If anything makes me a bad writer it’s probably all of my run-on sentences.) it just makes me the kind of writer that I am.

Oh boy. Not touching that one

We all work differently. And apparently I work better under the pressure of just having a cast show up to read something that isn’t done yet. Thankfully, most of them are friends of mine, and in the event that I bring in an unfinished script, I really don’t think they’ll give a shit. But hopefully that won’t happen. But if it does, I’ll feed them booze. And pizza.

Last night I finished the first act. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) There are only going to be two total, I’m not doing three. That just feels like the way this particular story breaks down. I’m sure there are opinions about that, but that’s what I’m going with currently. This whole play (OR THE HALF THAT EXISTS) is me doing things exactly how I want to do them anyway, so I’m really whole-hoggin’ it. That being said – I cannot work without an outline. There was a 6 page or so chunk that I was miserably stuck in. I just couldn’t figure out how one scene was going to go down. You know why? Because I decided I didn’t like that part of the outline. You might think “Well, Allison, why didn’t you just changed the outline?” and the answer is…I guess I thought I was James Dean or something. I tried to work it out in my head while looking at something that didn’t jive with what needed to happen. Eventually I changed the outline, after writing the damn scene several times and deleting it, and then it finally came together.

The worst part was the grind of that group of pages. Right after I got through them, I immediately wrote 10 more in the space of 45 minutes, when I had wasted two weeks on the previous 6. Isn’t that stupid? I’m inconsistent that way. Maybe everybody is to some extent. I bought “The Diaries of Dawn Powell” the other day. The earliest diaries are very short and say things like “Wrote a story today.” Or “Wrote a play today.” Or “Finished a novel today.” And those made me ill. Because they sound like they were so…easy. Then I got to the good bits last night. After I finished the first act, I celebrated by reading some more. I got to a portion where she had been working on a novel. She talked about how miserable it was and how she didn’t think she’d ever do it again once that one was finished – which isn’t what happened. She wrote a bunch more. It was the perfect book to buy with the struggle-y writing I’ve been doing lately. There are gem entries about how much she loves the play she wrote and thinks it’s the best thing she’s ever done, followed by an entry about how she let her playwright friend read it and he absolutely hated it. Then later someone else read it and loved it. It’s the truncated version of things so many playwrights and writers in general go through. It’s those bits that make you say “Oh, yeah, I’m not the only one dealing with this noise.”

The Diaries of Dawn Powell also contains about a million entries that include things like “Went to dinner. Very drunk.” my favorite being “Very drunk. Fell down stairs.” – that’s my kind of writer.

I recommend the book for people like me who might want the occasional dose of “I’M NOT ALONE!” or any playwright, really. It does a great job of capturing the feeling of creating a new work. Later on she apparently delves into what happens during a disastrous production of one of her plays – I personally can’t wait to get to that part. But, uh…I should probably be writing instead.

You can follow Allison on Twitter @allisonlynnpage where she promises to post quips about playwrighting. You can also see her onstage at SF Sketchfest on February 3rd.