Cowan Palace: Eating More Feelings

This week Ashley picks up from an earlier blog about eating her feelings and writing about it.

By the time you read this, I’ll be off on my honeymoon getting sunburn and probably eating too much at a complimentary buffet. But hey, that could be appropriate given I’m here writing about food again!

A few weeks ago, I shared some of the difficulty I was facing while working on my Olympians piece, Charybdis (or: Charlene’s Hungry). Don’t remember? Well you can reread it here: https://sftheaterpub.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/cowan-palace-lets-eat-our-feelings-and-write-about-it/

Oh, and I lied about the food poisoning part. Well, kinda. It was really “morning sickness” but I certainly felt (and still feel) that many foods have been poisoned for me throughout this pregnancy and that my entire relationship with food has changed.

But let’s get back to my play for now. In my previous blog, I mentioned that in order to finish my draft, I would force myself to attend an Overeaters Anonymous Meeting as it’s the setting to my piece. And boy, did I!

I should mention that I’ve had a pretty rough time with feeling nauseated throughout the past several weeks. And one of the things that helps balance it is snacking. Constantly. Even when eating is the last thing I want to do, if I can get myself to consume something, it’ll often help. Well, on this particular day, a few Saturdays back, I was suffering through some sickness. But knowing my time was running out to attend a meeting, I couldn’t back out. So I hopped on two buses and commuted an hour to the Sunset.

When I got there, I stood outside the building too nervous to go in; why hadn’t I thought about this earlier? What was I going to say if they wanted me to talk? Would I be honest? Should I try to be a character and put on an act? I let the minutes pass by while I attempted to get my story straight.

Since I’m a terrible liar (as Ashley Cowan; give me a character to play and I will confidently lie my face off!) I decided to just be as honest as possible without having to give too much of true self away.

I walked in and through a bigger meeting space to get to a smaller room. There, I saw five other women waiting patiently. The mood was quiet and thoughtful. Which immediately made me tense. We opened with the Serenity Prayer and then all the new people were asked to introduce themselves. I quickly decided against a fake name and went with my own when asked.

Next, we were informed that this was a “literature meeting” which meant we’d spend the majority of the meeting reading from a book, each of us taking turns to read a paragraph at a time. We were also told that the material we would be reading from was actually from Alcoholics Anonymous and that when we saw AA written, we should say “OA” so we could adapt it for our purposes.

Already, OA was starting to seem like a forgotten stepchild in an anonymous world. And I have to admit, I didn’t get a lot out of the readings. A lot of the material did not translate well for our needs and it just made the meeting feel sad.

Afterwards though, came the segment on sharing your experiences. I waited silently and shyly for others to speak. Those that chose to open up all came from different perspectives, which as an observer, was fascinating. Their stories were varied and their relationship with food ranged as well. After one woman spoke about being pregnant and having a difficult time managing the snacking required to fight her nausea in a healthy manner, I was inspired to speak up, if only to tell her she wasn’t the alone.

And though my voice was shaking a bit, I told them the truth. That this whole year, I’ve been struggling with food. From planning my wedding and calculating every calorie to trying to find peace with feeling like all that work is being undone as you gain weight to support another growing body. Food has been both my hero and my monster.

Which is certainly lending itself to my writing. But, working on this play has also brought back a lot of feelings from my childhood, when I really struggled with my body image. And maybe part of me is already fearing that I’m bringing a daughter into a world that can be quite cruel and that there’s a chance she may have to fight her own demons.

Growing up, I had always been a strong swimmer and spent my evenings doing laps with the swim team. There was both a threat and a safety involved in that. On one hand, I had to be in a bathing suit in front of my peers. That made me incredibly self conscious. On the other hand, there’s this beautiful weightlessness you feel when you’re swimming and I was actually really good at it. Needless to say, I’ve always been drawn to water so this Greek myth was even more of a personal pull.

After completing another draft of my script, I recently fell asleep and had a dream I was at a pool with beautiful people in attendance when a kid came up to me and said, “I bet you wish you were surrounded by people that look more like… you.” He was very judgmental and cruel in tone. I desperately started trying to defend myself to this small child saying, “I’m doing the best I can! And I’m pregnant!” but he just laughed.

The water, the critical feelings, the anger, the pain of it all just came rushing back. And I realized that this subject really may have been a bigger bite than I could chew. What that means for the piece is that while I have a completed draft of it, I’m realizing the story that came out ended up being bigger than a short. There’s more I want to say there, more I think I have to say at some point if I allow myself to keep swimming in it, but that time isn’t now.

This is not to suggest that I hope you skip the reading of it on November 22! The play is a beginning, a piece of more to come, but I’m happy to have a start and something to share. Heavily influenced by the meeting I attended and my own food demons, I hope you’ll be there in the audience to hear this take on Charybdis along with two other Greek monster tales.

Until then, see as many Olympians plays as you can! And be kind to yourselves. Because the truth is, if that insecure kid you may have been years ago could see you now, I’m sure they’d be pretty happy and proud of who you’ve become.

The 2014 Olympians festival will play 12 nights, November 5-22, Wednesday through Saturday, at the EXIT Theatre in San Francisco (156 Eddy Street). Tickets are $10.00 at the door, and can be purchased starting at 7:30 the night of the show.

Cowan Palace: My Nightmare Audition

Ashley and her friends sit around the Theater Pub campfire and tell tales of horror…ible auditions.

Comedy Month continues here with the Theater Pub gang where we’re all about laughing at our errors! And since I love dishing out tales of my own awkward struggles in this theatrical world (remember when I wrote this blog?) I thought it’d be fun to dedicate this week’s entry to nightmare auditions!

Thanks to some Facebook pals, I managed to get a few great tales. But if you too have an audition horror story, please feel free to leave it in the comments section! Let this be a time to celebrate our mistakes and laugh about them together! Besides, when I used to try and sneak-read Cosmo in study hall, my favorite section was always the embarrassing stories. And some of these stories are sexy too – two of them involve boobs! But first, here’s mine:

I’ve had a lot of bad auditions. Luckily, I’ve had a few good ones too but eesh, some of the bad were just awful. The one that comes to mind first when I think of “nightmare audition” was my audition for URTA (University Resident Theatre Association) my senior year of college.

New England was experiencing a brutal winter that year and I was in tech week for my senior project, acting in The Fox, a play by Allan Miller based on D.H. Lawrence’s novella by the same name. I was getting ready to begin my final semester of college and I was absolutely freaking out. Beyond terrified. So I thought, hey, maybe I can hide in grad school for a few years while I figure things out! Genius! But, ugh, I don’t want to go into more debt, I’m gonna need a school to pay for me to go there. Cool! I’ll audition for URTA, where I’ll get seen by schools all over the country and then go wherever I get in, even if it’s in rural Alabama.

That was my big plan. So my cast mate, Dave and I boarded a train surrounded in four feet of snow to head to New York City for a few hours before having to rush back to Rhode Island to finish getting our play ready.

We arrived around 1am to our college budget friendly hotel and woke around 5am to prepare for our early call. I wore a cream colored sweater and a conventional black skirt because the URTA Suggestions Guide mentioned that auditioning actors looked good in light colored tops and dark bottoms.

We got to the fancy hotel where auditions were taking place to check in and I discovered the “headshot” I brought with me (which was just an enlarged passport picture I got the day before from Walgreens) had fallen into the snow and had been ruined beyond repair. I sucked it up though and was given my audition time. (My one proud moment of the day was being placed in the time slot with the auditioners with the highest GPAs – holla, theatre nerd alert!)

Finally, it was my turn. I faked some confidence and walked into the room with a smile, my plain skirt swishing behind! I started my Moliere monologue and then blanked. Like just the worst blank in the entire world. I even asked the panel of viewers what I should do and they were boggled. They looked pained for me. Finally, I just started in on my second monologue from The Rainmaker. I completed it. But it was nothing special. After that, in a daze, I walked out of the room feeling like the entire world was collapsing in on me. I had just ruined my future. I was lost in a cloud of despair when I passed Dave. He asked me how it went and I shook my head unable to even cry. “I need to go.” I told him and I wished him luck on his audition.

Then I walked out of the fancy hotel into foreign streets. I was unfamiliar with New York City and had only been there a handful of times on school trips as a kid. It was freezing and my shoes were soaked with snow. But I walked trying to put back the shattered pieces of my dreams until Dave called me.

“I lost it,” he said, “I just blanked.”

I hurried to meet him and within seconds of looking at each other like we wanted to cry, we were laughing. We were two idiot kids with no business being at that audition. We weren’t prepared, we just wanted the safety of a place to hide in a bit longer before having to try and make it in the real world.

We immediately sought to find solace in pizza. I didn’t yet know the type of magical healing powers found in New York pizza, but let me say, it can cure many woes. And while we sat shoveling feelings and slices into our faces, I caught the eye of a man outside. He entered the restaurant and sat down at a table near to us. He kept staring at me, which I assumed was probably thanks to my smart outfit, but after a few minutes he approached us. I was prepared to hear him ask us for money but he did not. Instead, he showed me something he had been working on while sitting in the corner. It was a drawing of a crowd. All different types of people standing tall and gazing out from the page. That’s when I saw it. I was there. He pointed to the sketched version of me and said in broken English, “I wanted to draw you too.”

Dave and me acting in The Fox. While we did not get a single callback for any of the URTA schools, we did get an A on our senior project!

Suddenly, through some very kind and thoughtful strokes (homegirl looked way prettier than the snow soaked Ashley looked that day), was a new me standing beside other New Yorkers. That’s the moment I knew I was going to move to NYC after I graduated. Perhaps I needed someone else to see me there, who knows, but that’s exactly what I did. The man quietly walked away and we finished our pizza. Simple movements that forever changed my life.

Dave and I moved to NYC together a few months later and ate a whole lot more pizza. And both of us auditioned for a play together right away… we got in it… only to learn it was an anti abortion play… ah, but I’ll save that story for another time. The lesson here is that nightmare auditions are going to happen to even the best of us but there’s always something to take away from them, even if it’s just being able to laugh at yourself for being an idiot. Who else would be stupid enough to put themselves through so much rejection and heartbreak? We need each other to commiserate with, to celebrate with, and to keep encouraging each other to laugh. So in honor of that idea, here are some tales of audition horror from some of my fellow actors and friends!

Dave Collins (the guy from my story!):

So, I’m not sure if this is my worst audition story or my worst audition story from LA but either way it was pretty awful.

I was called in for this Danica Patrick commercial and thought I was just going to be one of three or four guys basically drooling over this beautiful race-car driver. This is what I came in prepared to do, not a very big stretch. This was not the case. I get into the room in front of the casting director and she proceeds to tell me that the joke of this commercial is that they want to show three dudes watching a clip of this beautiful woman showering and then pan to a dude’s naked chest… that these idiots somehow mistake for hers… Then, the camera would slowly go back up to the dude’s face. What?!! So the casting director asks me to take my shirt off and squeeze my very masculine, hairy, breasts together to try and put one over on these unsuspecting dbags. It was weird, humiliating, and I did it. And I didn’t get the part. I guess my male breasts weren’t feminine enough. Gross. I need to go shower now.

Shay Wisniewski:

I moved to New York about 3 months ago and was ready to hit the ground running with auditions. So I went to a call for Peer Gynt by Ibson, it’s one of his lesser known plays. I headed to Brooklyn for one of my first auditions. I show up and start filling out my audition form. Pretty standard. They even asked how we felt about nudity on stage. At this point in my life, I felt I could show off my breast if needed for a show. No big deal. Also, I told myself I wouldn’t turn anything down since I’m new to the city. So in I went.

In the room was an older man. White hair and a pony tail, along with his daughter who was handling the music in the show. They had me sing, improvise some dancing, do a monologue. Things were going great. I even get a callback which was even better than the audition. Full of viewpoints and group movement work, Meisner technique. Everything was right up my alley. He sits us down at the end of the callback and says, “so, I want to clarify the nudity aspect of the show. I love women, I love sex and I think both are very important things in a man’s life. Mothers, lovers, sister and so on. So at the end of the play, I want the main guy, to be breastfed by all the women on stage.”

…

Oh, I’m sorry. That’s not nudity, that’s porn.

And one of the guys in the audition group even went up to the director afterwards to let him know he was okay with the nudity in the show. Of course you are! You’d be getting a titty parade in your mouth! Sucking on multiple breasts is way better than having some strange adult man breast feed when you aren’t even dating.

I ended up getting cast. No, I didn’t take it. I couldn’t have something like that show up on YouTube one day when I’m famous. Whenever that is. Oh, and it paid zero dollars. So, no, you will not be seeing my breast feeding premiere this fall in New York.

Alex Harris:

You know what? When I saw your post on Facebook I immediately thought of a TERRIBLE one I had on Wednesday! Have you ever had an audition where, like, you read what they wanted, you knew what they wanted, and then when you go in there, you do absolutely everything you’re not supposed to? Well, that was me at this commercial audition, yikes bikes!! I walked in and the taping happens right in the audition waiting area so while you’re auditioning, you’re being watched by the other girls who are there (BIG HELP TO THE NERVES). And I just like had a lapse of where I was. I did exaggerated expressions like I was on stage or doing improv, instead of understated looks and reactions for simple commercial shots, oh it is awful Ashley. Awful.

Natalie Ashodian:

I once auditioned a woman for the very serious part of a Planned Parenthood nurse. A woman (in her 50’s or older, mind you!) showed up in a sexy nurse uniform. You know, Halloween costume 1940’s pin up style nurse. Needless to say, please don’t over-do character auditions. Unless the show is, you know, inherently campy.

Lea Gulino:

My last on-camera audition in LA – a 3rd callback for a Visa ad and the 3rd time I put everything I had into bleating like a goat…

Christi Chew:

He said, “Well now we know you can sing. Can you do it again, but crawl around like a cat?” It wasn’t CATS.

Do you have an audition horror story to share? Come join the party and leave it in the comments section!

Higher Education: The Battle Royale – Creative Vs. Critic

Barbara Jwanouskos on a Saturday… because now that school’s out, it’s always Saturday. Plus we just plain forgot to run her column yesterday.

Grades were due today for my graduating students so it was a scramble to the finish line as always as I read seven 41-60 page plays that served as the culmination of their work in my Advanced Playwriting class. It’s interesting reflecting on the structure of that class and thinking to myself, what I would do if given another chance to teach this course? And, what would I, as a student taking this class, want to get out of it?

I read an interesting article by Mike DiMartino, one of the co-creators and executive producers of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “The Legend of Korra” – both fantastic shows that I’m captivated by. DiMartino talks about elements of story and creativity on his blog. The subject most recently was on “Your Inner Creative vs. Your Inner Critic”. The idea being that the creative side of building a new project is freeform, loose, and expansive in its ideas whereas the critical side shapes, orders, and prioritizes what should take precedence. DiMartino points out that both are needed in order to create something, but that too much will kill a project. He then poses the questions:

In your life and work (whatever you consider your work to be), do you tend to be more creative or critical? Is there a way to bring more of one or the other into your process?

I thought about teaching Advanced Playwriting because as I grade I see the creative, but respond with the critical. As I read, I’m thinking about what is it that is still unclear in the script? Did a something that was set-up pay off reasonably well? And do I ever get lost in the story – in a good way – where I’m simply enjoying how the events unfold before me?

It’s interesting to read my students’ writing and then also to look over their feedback on the course evaluations. I asked if given more time, what would you like to have gone over in depth? Many of the respondents said that they would have liked to learn more about types of story structures, which is really interesting. In class, we spent a lot of time doing generative exercises that in my mind were core to what I felt I could offer people who wanted to take their writing to another level. It can be hard sometimes to get out of a prescribed way of thinking of things. As a student learning a new skill, I like to play with my new toys a bit and get comfortable using them before I’m ready to start learning the nuts and bolts of why they work the way they do, but everyone is different.

I was fortunate enough to have intelligent, engaging students who all have a talent for writing. Earlier today, when I told someone that I’m graduating on Sunday, she observed that Carnegie Mellon is odd in that it is well known for its technology programs as well as its entertainment/arts programs. The two are usually very disparate at other schools. Part of me wonders whether the students’ want for a more academic, structured approach added to a future rendition of this class was out of our desire to satiate the critical side of ourselves with rules and order that make sense. I can understand and appreciate that desire, but I also wonder if having the lexicon of lots of different creative tricks arms them for times when writer’s block looms.

There’s a part of me that can’t really say which one may be “right” because its imbedded in how I approach art and frankly, life in general. If the class is about the creation process as a whole, then maybe there is no real beginning or end. The “final” play that they submitted, in many ways is a first or second draft for many of them. I had no designs that in an elective course that I’d be able to do much more than that, but I did want them all to push towards finishing at least a couple of projects.

For me, the battle between the critic and the creative are really more of a conversation. The creative side starts it off, then the critic molds what is most interesting, then the creative fleshes it out, the critic refines and so on. I don’t think the two need to be adversarial, but they both have distinct functions that are both needed to ultimately get to the finished product.

When talking about ways to bring one side into the other, I think that’s where you end up having to play little games with yourself in order to progress. For instance, when wrapped up in idea generation, it can be easy to become expansive to where you’re somehow completely off the map, but that’s when you bring that critical side in with the map that limits where it is that you can go.

For DiMartino and “Legend of Korra”, the writers are working within the framework of the show and characters that have been established, which is helpful in reducing down the amount of ideas that are viable. One of my favorite writing exercises is simply a free write of whatever comes to mind – Julie Cameron calls it “Morning Pages”, Naomi Iizuka calls it “swimming”, others call it “free association writing”. There are variations, but you basically write whatever pops in your head continuously – stories, character ideas, to do lists, feelings, etc. The trick is that it’s timed and most instructors I know encourage their students to set aside that writing for a couple of days or weeks (or forever) before looking at it again.

In terms of putting the creative into the critical, it’s doing just the opposite – it’s looking at a limit or a barrier and finding a way to subvert it. Another favorite writing exercise Rob Handel likes to give us, is to write the play that you hate. I’ve heard variations on this with regard to scenes, “write what wouldn’t happen next”. For me, this exercise responds to the brain’s attempt to shut down the creative and start evaluating, “well, this wouldn’t happen, he doesn’t even have a horse to get to the next town over. He hates horses!” Then, it turns it into a tool to be used and ultimately it might reveal something interesting. Perhaps a new relationship or a more interesting conflict. Who knows!

Oscillating between the creative and critical side is ultimately what helps us find an end point, whether temporary or permanent. It’s all part of the process that cycles through birth to death to rebirth over and over again.

What other tricks or exercises do you use in your creative or critical processes? Share with us! Because sharing means caring. 😉