The Real World – Theater Edition: An Interview with Savannah Reich

Barbara Jwanouskos interviews Savannah Reich about her upcoming Bay Area production.

Savannah Reich is the type of playwright that when you read and hear and see her work, you’re like, “I want to do that! That’s so cool! Theater’s so cool!” I met her while in the second year of the MFA Dramatic Writing program at Carnegie Mellon University, headed by Rob Handel, and was blown away by her humor, theatricality, and the moving moments of human connection and confusion she creates within her writing. So, of course, I was very happy to learn that her play, Six Monsters, A Seven Monster Play was being produced by All Terrain Theater in the summer of 2015.

The show opens next Thursday, July 30th at 8:00 PM and runs on Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays until August 8th at the EXIT Theatre in downtown San Francisco. I had a chance to chat with Savannah about playwriting, the inspiration behind Six Monsters, and her creative impulses.

Savannah Reich, probably driving to California as we speak.

Babs: Very excited to interview you!

Savannah: Thank you! I am so excited to be interviewed!

Babs: To begin, could you tell me about your background? How did you get involved with theater and writing?

Savannah: I wrote my first play in the second grade. I’m not sure where I got the idea. My parents were both doing theater when I was a kid, as a prop-master and scenic artist at the Guthrie in Minneapolis, so I’m sure I had already seen plays? I am counting this as “my first play” because it was more elaborate than a show I did with friends in the basement or whatever- it had a typed script, which went through several drafts, and I think I forced my entire second grade class to be in it, although I don’t remember that part.

So as long as I can remember I had this incredibly specific compulsion to write plays. I briefly went to NYU for the undergraduate playwriting program, which I was not really prepared for at eighteen. I dropped out after a year and decided I would never write a play again- I was just going to be wild and free and be in punk bands and experience real life. But then I started writing plays again probably six months after that.

I recently found the script for my first play in a box at my parent’s house; it was about two witches who turn people into chickens and serve them to children at an orphanage, which actually sounds like something that I might be working on now.

Babs: How would you describe your style and what interests you?

Savannah: The way I’m thinking about it these days is that I am interested in taking inexplicable emotional processes and making them into something concrete and mechanical. I am obsessed with the Charlie Kaufman movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” because it does this so nicely- it takes this very gooey personal feeling, the grief about losing a shared past when you end a relationship, and makes it into this action story. It literally ends with a chase scene. So that’s a really nice way to create ways to talk about things that maybe don’t fall into the cultural shorthand.

More concretely, my plays tend to be removed from true-to-life situations- as Sarah Ruhl says, “my characters have no last names.” They are animals or ghosts or subhuman beasts. They tend to be suffering greatly in some neurotic, cyclical way and they all talk on rotary dial telephones.

Also, I am interested in structure because it is the essential relationship between the play and the audience, which for me is at least as interesting as the relationships between the characters.

Babs: I think Six Monsters, A Seven Monster Play has an interesting origin story – do you mind sharing and then how it developed from its inception?

Savannah: Yes! You were there! It was very early on in my first year at CMU, maybe the second or third week, and Rob Handel had us do a writing exercise that involved beginning a 60 page play at nine am and finishing it by midnight. The exercise was so great, but I feel like I don’t want to give it away in case he is going to do it again next year- part of what was great about it for me was the surprise. I had all these ideas for plays that had been percolating for a long time, and I was fussing over them and trying to make them “good”, and then we got this exercise that said, “Okay, forget about all those plays- here’s a prompt, now write this play. Write this play today.” It was totally liberating for me.

Before grad school, I had been writing plays and producing them myself, so I think that I had gotten into this trap of keeping my producer’s hat on while I was writing. I would think about making props affordable, stuff like that. It was dumb. This exercise broke me out of that. The original opening stage direction for “Six Monsters” was something like, “There are six audience members seated on a wooden cart. The wooden cart rolls through an infinite darkness.”

I also think I put a bunch of things that felt really vulnerable and revealing to me in this play, and maybe I wouldn’t have if I had been imagining that it would ever be performed. I write much better when I am able to convince myself that no one I know will ever see it.

After I finished the play, I co-produced a one night workshop performance of it with our fellow MFA writer Dan Giles, with him directing, me as the skeleton, and six amazing CMU undergrad acting students as the chorus, which I will get to brag about when they are all famous in like twenty-five minutes.

Babs: When I last saw this piece, you were actually performing in it as the Skeleton. How do you think performing/not performing in your own work influences how you see the play, what to develop/not develop next?

Savannah Reich as the Skeleton carrying Jeremy Hois as the Baby in the Pittsburgh performance workshop at the Irma Freeman Center for the Imagination directed by Dan Giles in February 2014.

Savannah: I’m not sure how I feel about this anymore! I am worrying about it a lot in a neurotic and cyclical way! I have performed in my own work a fair amount, and sometimes I think I don’t want to do it anymore, because probably it would be better with real actors who are good at acting. But then I recently saw the performance artist Dynasty Handbag in New York, and I love her, and I thought that maybe I should always perform my own work. Not that I am a performer like she is- I tend to be visibly thinking on stage in that way that playwrights do when they try to act- but I do think there is something special about seeing someone perform their own words, there is a kind of specificity to it.

But I’m not going to be a performance artist because I love actors so much. They are my favorite thing to look at, especially when they are in my plays being hilarious. It’s great to be a playwright because we get to see all these very attractive people pretending to be us, pretending to have our same anxieties about capitalism or intimacy or whatever, which feels deeply healing in some probably very messed up way. Also good collaboration makes the show better, of course. The actor can see a lot of things about the show that I can’t.

I don’t know that I learn anything much from being in my own plays. I played the part of the skeleton in the workshop mostly because it felt too personal to turn it over to an actor. But now I have a little more distance, and I’m so excited to see what Laura Peterson does with it.

Babs: In the San Francisco production, is there anything that you are most looking forward to seeing or experiencing?

Savannah: I was just talking about how much variability actors bring to the table but of course that’s also very much true of directors. I haven’t worked with Sydney Painter before, and seeing her take on the piece is probably what I’m the most excited about. I haven’t been in town for rehearsals yet, and I’m looking forward to seeing the ways that this crew has interpreted the show in different ways than I would have imagined.

Babs: Any advice for playwrights in creating new work or getting it produced?

Savannah: For me the simplest way to get your play produced is to do it yourself. It is only very recently that other people have wanted to produce my plays, and that is a new and exciting thing, but it’s important to me to always know that I can make my own work, and that I never need to get picked out of the pile or get the grant or win the contest to make my art.

Babs: Any shout-outs for shows, events, or other things going on around the Bay Area that you might check out while you’re here?

Savannah: If you come to Six Monsters; A Seven Monster Play you will also get to see a short play by the fabulous Tracy Held Potter called Texting. And we should probably all get on a plane to New York to see Dan Giles’ play How You Kiss Me is Not How I Like To Be Kissed at the New York Fringe Festival.

Also, this.

Learn more about Savannah Reich, her screenplays, plays, and upcoming artistic projects from her website, http://savannahreich.com/.

Theater Conservatory Confidential: The Break

Bay Area actor Eli Diamond continues his path through his first year at NYU, braving natural disaster, academic confrontations and artistic growth with equal aplomb. 

First off, I would like to apologize two weeks ago for the delay. In case the world did not notice, there may or may not have been a hurricane that devastated New York, specifically the area of New York that I call my home, and well… It was really really bad. We did not have school for the week, and we spent the time we would’ve spent at school searching for non-perishable goods, electricity, and, if all else failed, a hotel. Eventually, due to a major falling out with some friends, we did end up finding a hotel in the middle of Morningside Heights, though it may be more aptly described as a crack-den.

Nothing occupied the room except for a bed and a dresser, the nearest bathroom was about 7 or 8 doors away, and a piece of the door was lying on the floor. It, suffice to say, was not good. The three of us spent most of our time there watching television, trying to fight off the madness that unfortunately came with the territory. Dinners consisted of KFC and possibly Chipotle, if we were feeling fancy. Most stores were closed down, and the entire place had a sort of dead feel about it. The day after the Hurricane, the streets began to resemble the sub-par Will Smith film I Am Legend.

The worst part of the Hurricane and its aftermath had to be the stir-craziness. With nothing to do except talk, and watch TV on our computers, we quickly ran out of jokes, and ways to amuse each other. By the end of the Hurricane, we had all agreed not to speak to each other for the next two weeks, hoping that by that time, we could reinvigorate our friendship with a well needed shot of adrenaline.

When classes started again, I felt almost broken. I needed to go back home, I got very upset and irritable very easily. I started not going to some of my academics, and at one point lay in bed for almost 2 whole days. It escalated to the point where the head of my studio called me in and gave me a number for a shrink, saying “Hey, we’ve noticed something”. After a while, and some wonderful scene work with my friends Kane, Brigette, and Alex, I was able to get back into the flow of things.

On that same note though, it’s hard. I feel the need to return home now more than ever, and even though my parents came up for Thanksgiving, that does not quite compare to having my own bed, in a city where I can go visit my old friends, while I eat a home-cooked meal. And with only final scene day on the horizon, it looks like the only thing I need to kill right now is time.

Theater Conservatory Confidential: New York City and San Francisco: A Comparison.

Eli Diamond, having returned to New York after a brief visit home to the Bay Area, continues his musings about life as a newly enrolled theater major.

Prior to actually attending NYU, the main thing everyone told me about was the city, a lot of “You must be so excited!”, “I’d kill to live in New York!”, “The city’s gonna be so much fun!” Recognizing that this is only my second month of living in the city, I have only one thing to say about it: Meh.

You see, New York City has been described to me as having a very visceral “heartbeat”. You feel as though the city is alive, almost like some sort of organism. This is something I would agree with, but with a little footnote. The city has a heartbeat, but it’s not a healthy one. When asked to describe the feeling of the city, I tend to describe it as “It’s as if the entire city were late to work.” Everyone is always on a rush, you can always hear cars moving and speeding through the street, people don’t wait for traffic lights. No one’s really given the chance to chill.

Compare this to my hometown, San Francisco. San Francisco is a brilliant place for someone who just wants to live. It has its quieter areas, like the Sunset or Golden Gate Park, but it also has most bustling city streets around Union Square and Downtown. No matter what you are feeling, odds are San Francisco has a place that gives you an outlet for that feeling. There are many days where I would just sit in Delores Park with a journal, and just write. They say I could do that in Washington Square Park here, but it’s not the same. No one’s just sitting and relaxing, people are constantly charging through, searching for their next class. It’s not only tiring, it’s depressing.

I returned to San Francisco a couple of weeks ago to visit my parents, my old friends, and my girlfriend, and although it’s been a while, I did certainly notice a change in myself. No matter where I was, or what I was doing, I felt stressed. Stressed that I was missing something, stressed that I was going to fuck up, stressed about the weirdest shit. It took me a while, but near the end of my visit, I was able to get back into the mindset I wanted. The mindset of someone who just wanted to breathe, and let life just flow over him. Perfect timing then, to jump right back into New York and have a bit of an emotional meltdown.

Not that the city is all bad, of course. There’s a lot to do and many, many wonderful people to meet, but, sometimes, I just think it’s important to take a step back and breathe.

Eli Diamond keeps learning to breathe (and maybe discovers the quieter neighborhoods of Manhattan are mostly at the top of the island), in the next installment of Theater Conservatory Confidential.

Theater Conservatory Confidential: Practical Aesthetics

NYU freshman Elijah Diamond continues to chronicle his first year away from the Bay Area, learning the tricks of the industry actor trade.

To put it bluntly, studio has ruined my social life. With nonstop classes from 8:30 to 6:30 on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, I have literally no time to do anything except wake up, eat, and sleep. The rest of my day, as you may expect, is devoted to the Studio. Most of “my friends”, the people I met during the first week, have all but dropped off the face of the earth save for two notable exceptions. They’ve been replaced, slowly but surely, by people from my studio, a ragtag group of people, most notable of which being my scene partner, Reina.

That’s right, I said “Scene partner”. Not even four weeks in and already I’m supposed to be performing two scenes. I hoped to have some interesting details on what it was like working on this scene in class, but unfortunately, our scenes been postponed til next Thursday. So if you want to hear interesting details on how Atlantic runs scene-work, or my scene, from Oleanna, you’re out of luck. For now however, I think it’s time for me to describe Practical Aesthetics, the technique Mamet runs.

Practical Aesthetics runs off of one key principle “Think before you act, so you can act before you think”. There are other anecdotes that influence the technique, such as “You are what you are, and that’s all you need to be”. Most of the technique revolves around you being the most “you” that you can be. The technique does not want you to give anything more than yourself; no faked emotions here. In order to fulfill both of these statements, the technique has four major steps.

Literal: What is the character literally doing in the scene? Figure out what he’s doing without any form of interpretation whatsoever. An example: in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, there’s a conversation about selling the flat which really represents the relationship. You would not talk about the relationship, just that they were talking about selling the flat.

Want: What does the the character want? What does the character desire? And what is his goal? This delves more into the subtext of the scene, and less on the literal.

Action: What is the essential nature of the scene to you? Note that we’ are not talking about the character anymore. The focus of the scene instead has turned to you as a person. Actions include “To put someone in their place”, “to wake someone up to reality”, etc. The only rules for the action is that it has to be something you want the other person to do, it has to be specific, and it has to have a “cap”, an endpoint.

As-if: Here’s where Practical Aesthetics really shines for me. You apply the action to your own life, find something that you want/need to do in your regular life, and use it to stir up your viscera to reach the emotional level you need to be at for the scene. The as-if helps make the scene spontaneous, helping to fight off any possible tedium that may eventually occur in the scene.

So yeah, that’s Practical Aesthetics, a technique created by David Mamet and William H. Macy. Hopefully next time, I’ll be able to tell you what it’s like to work on a scene in this environment.

Check back in two weeks for the latest on Elijah Diamond’s navigation of the Atlantic. Get it? 

Theater Conservatory Confidential: In The Beginning

Elijah Diamond reports on his first two weeks of classes at NYU.

College: the final frontier.

On September 4th, I began the non-party/crazy element of this adventure the only way I could: by being half asleep during a lecture from my studio. The lecture covered most of what I had already read that previous summer in The Practical Handbook for the Actor: the basis for Atlantic Acting School’s technique, referred to as “Practical Aesthetics”, was something I was all too familiar with. The two and a half hour lecture delivered to us served to only bore me and cause me to want to jump forward with my studies, hopefully by going straight away into scene work.

Unfortunately though, this did not seem to be the case, as instead of going into studio right away, I was forced to do my other courses. My first class, “Introduction to Theatre Studies”, promised to be challenging, incredibly interesting, and fun… so I decided to transfer out. It’s my first semester freshman year. I am way too busy trying to figure out what direction is which in New York to focus on the subtleties represented in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Later that day, I had “Writing the Essay: Art and the World”, a class in which I learned how to write essays, for the eighty-sixth time. So far, college classes were not what I expected, what with the emphasis being more on academia, and less on my art.

This changed quickly though on Thursday, my first legitimate day of studio. My classes in studio focus on all different aspects of Practical Aesthetics. The majority of my classes are physical work. Movement and Alignment are meant to make me more comfortable with my body, and also to help my posture, which, if any of you know me, is like a crazy straw. Alignment quickly became “Hey class, this is what’s wrong with your classmate Elijah’s body”, but I did not mind. The fact that the teacher decided to focus his attention on me meant that I’ll be getting more personal work done. So yay for that. Movement was more basic work outs, which made my body more sore than I expected. My arms still hurt from Tuesday, and that’s quite a feat, given my bulging biceps. (On the topic of my fitness, I’ve already gained my freshman 15, but that’s a tragic story for another day).

Voice and Speech have been very hand in hand so far this semester, with Voice being more concerned with breathing and tension, and Speech focusing more on phonetics. Both classes are incredibly fun and relaxing. The final two classes I have (besides Games, but Games does not count, because it’s Games) are Script Analysis and Performance Technique, which are focused intensely on teaching us the basics of Practical Aesthetics, and how to apply them to basic scenes. In Performance Technique, I was called upon to work one of the basic scenes, and discovered I have a slight emotional block that we are going to try to work through this year. In Script Analysis, we’ve been working more on the specifics of the scenes, one of the more… interesting ones we wrote as a class:

Aaron: This was our table.
Taylor: Do we really want this?
Aaron: It always seems to come back to this.
Taylor: Heads or Tails?
Aaron: You haven’t changed.
Taylor: Things aren’t always as they seem.

I feel myself becoming a better artist already.

Theater Conservatory Confidential: You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello!

Bay Area actor Eli Diamond continues his chronicle of his first year at NYU…

Leaving is always a hard thing to do.

It’s even harder when your flight gets canceled.

The day before I was supposed to leave, I said a warm, heartfelt goodbye to the most important people in my life. Unfortunately, the next day, my plane was canceled, leaving me with the most awkward of awkward days. That day was spent doing the one thing I was not expecting to do: hang out with my parents. Honestly, it was a much nicer time than I had expected, especially as I had ignored my parents most of the summer to hang out with my friends. We ate lunch together, watched television, and did all the things I was usually too busy to do. A few days later, after finally landing in New York, I finally said good-bye to them as I moved into my dorm.

Moving into my dorm was a relatively painless process, despite having 3 suitcases, two bags, and a microwave to carry up three flights of stairs. All in all, it took about a half-hour to move everything in, and another half-hour to unpack. My roommates all proved themselves to be incredibly nice people. One of them, Nathan, has helped me numerous times already on all sorts of fronts; unpacking, taking care of a few friends, waking up in time for orientation.

Orientation was, for lack of a better word, completely pointless. I wish I could lie and say I was thoroughly captivated and entertained, but instead, I was the guy sleeping with his head on a friend’s shoulder, constantly looking down at my phone to see if I had received any new texts. We tried to talk about an unappealing book, The Tiger’s Wife, but it got too dull for my group to even say anything. It was just a bunch of us, sitting in silence, checking our phones. However, during that meeting, I did make another good friend.

Actually, making friends has been surprisingly easy since coming to NYU. It seems that wherever I go, there are people willing to hang out. For example, last night, I hung out with my roommates for a bit, then I went across the hall and hung out with four people over there, only to have a couple of guys knock on their door and invite me to a Breaking Bad marathon a couple of doors over. Even today, while I was heading to lunch on my own, a couple of people who I never met before introduced themselves to me and invited me to sit at their table. So, even though I miss everyone from San Francisco (i.e. my parents, my girlfriend, my old high school compadres), it’s been wonderful to meet all these people.

Now, I just have to wait a week for class to begin. Tuesday, Sept. 4th cannot come soon enough.

Check in every other Friday to see how the prodigal son navigates his first year as a theater student.