Hi-Ho, the Glamorous Life: Saying “I Do” to Self-Production

Leave it to Marissa to find the tie-in between all the Big Days…. 

You’ve rented the venue, you’ve taken care of every detail, you’ve dealt with unexpected crises, and now the crowd is filing in, excited to witness the fruition of your plans…

Wait. Am I talking about planning a wedding — or producing a play?

Both of these things have been much on my mind of late. As my fellow Theater Pub bloggers Ashley Cowan and Will Leschber have reminded you, they’re getting married on June 20. Two days after I attend their wedding, I’ll be officiating at the wedding of two other dear friends, Rachel Sadler and Will Knox-Davies. (Their second date was at Theater Pub!) The day after that, rehearsals for my production of Pleiades start. It’s going to be a crazy weekend.

Doing the pre-production for Pleiades as Rachel and Ashley do the “pre-production” for their weddings has made me realize just how similar the two processes are. Here are what I see as the biggest parallels.

The proposal: It must be scary to ask someone to marry you. In this day and age, though, a marriage proposal is rarely a complete surprise — often the couple has discussed marriage before the official proposal takes place, and conventional wisdom says that you shouldn’t ask anyone to marry you unless you’re sure they’ll say yes. Asking Katja Rivera to direct Pleiades was scary, too — she was my first choice director, and I had no idea whether or not she’d say yes. I knew she liked the script, but would she want to direct it — devoting months of her life to my play, with very little compensation? Sure, it’s not a “till death do us part” commitment like marriage, but I still felt like I was asking a lot of her.

The venue: After Katja agreed to direct Pleiades, I knew that the next step would be to find and rent a theater. From there, lots of other things (e.g. our production schedule) would fall into place. We quickly learned that we had to be flexible. For a long time, I was attached to the idea of opening the show in July (Pleiades takes place over Fourth of July weekend, and my birthday is July 5), but theaters just didn’t seem to have July availability. We ended up booking the Phoenix Theatre for a four-week run in August, and are very happy with the way things ended up — but it meant that I had to get rid of some of my pet, preconceived notions. Similarly, the top wedding venues get booked months in advance, and the first step after the engagement takes place is to pick a date and book a venue. I assume that brides and grooms have to be flexible, too, when it comes to locations and venues.

The collaboration: Wedding planning can stress out a lot of couples. There are so many decisions to be made, and what happens when you and your sweetheart disagree about an important aspect of your wedding? You want a sophisticated evening wedding in the city — he wants a folksy outdoor wedding in the countryside. Does this mean the marriage is doomed? At the same time, collaborating and compromising during the wedding planning process can bring a couple closer together. And if you both agree on something without needing to argue about it — well, that just proves that you’re truly meant to be together, right? After Katja and I watched two nights of auditions, we were pleased to discover that we had very similar ideas of which actors we wanted to cast in which roles. Sometimes, writers and directors have very different conceptions of which actor is right for a role — and if that had happened with Pleiades, I think I would have experienced a soul-searching moment of “is this collaboration doomed?” Discovering that Katja and I had a similar perspective on the play and its characters, though, confirmed my belief that she’s the right person for me to work with on this project.

There are some big differences between producing a play and planning a wedding, of course. I envy my wedding-planning friends the fact that weddings are a bigger part of our culture than theater is — and thus, there are more resources, handbooks, websites, etc. available to engaged couples than to aspiring theater producers. Also, most wedding expenses are typically covered by the married couple and their families — but if you’re a self-producing playwright, there’s a stigma around putting your own money into the play, as well as a stigma around having Mommy and Daddy give you the money to produce a play. Both weddings and plays require smart budgeting, but theater requires fundraising to a much greater extent.

My mom tells me that after successfully planning her wedding on a short time frame (6 months from proposal to ceremony), she felt like she could do anything. The odd thing about planning a wedding, though, is that you really only get one shot at it — unless you plan to divorce and remarry someday, and who goes into a marriage thinking that it won’t last forever? Whereas, one of the things that’s sustaining me through the difficulties of producing Pleiades is the understanding that every lesson I learn, every mistake I make, will make producing the next play that much easier. And maybe, if I ever find myself in the position of planning a wedding, my theater-production experience will make that easier for me, too.

Marissa Skudlarek is a San Francisco-based playwright, producer, and arts writer. She sends all her love and best wishes to Ashley, Will, Rachel and Will as they get married this month — and wishes a happy 30th anniversary to her mom and dad. Find out more about Marissa’s play Pleiades at pleiadessf.wordpress.com. 

Hi-Ho, the Glamorous Life: A Nice Day for a White Wedding?

Buckle up, Marissa is referencing Billy Idol.

Over the weekend, I attended my cousin’s wedding outside of Philadelphia. After the church service and the lengthy reception, there were some ad hoc after-parties in the hotel where many of us were staying, and I found myself in a room with a bunch of my cousin’s friends from college. The atmosphere was very “frat party” and I only stayed for five minutes, but that was enough time for me to overhear an unexpectedly interesting conversation: “This is the whitest wedding I’ve ever been to,” said an Asian-American young man.

“No kidding,” said his friend, who, like everyone else in the room, was white. And they proceeded to try to count up how many wedding guests were people of color. They thought of about three (out of 150+ attendees).

Overhearing this conversation really made clear to me just how much racial diversity is an active topic of discussion, in a way that it wasn’t even five or ten years ago. When even a bunch of drunken, mostly-white bros are counting people of color and complaining that my big Catholic family wedding has too many white people at it, that’s when you know that this topic has hit the mainstream.

This is happening in regards to gender diversity, too; witness the outcry this week when the cast of the upcoming Star Wars sequel turned out to include only one new female character (as opposed to 6 new male characters). And I find myself preoccupied with these topics all the time: I submit statistics to Valerie Weak’s “Counting Actors” project; I make little tallies of male vs. female writers whenever the winners of a playwriting contest are announced; I see a show with an all-white cast, and wonder if they were truly the best people for the job, or if racism is at work.

But at the same time… I kind of hate myself for doing these things. It’s easy to count actors and easy to work up a sense of outrage; it is much harder to actually change things for the better. Especially because I happen to believe that a lack of diversity most often results from abstract, sociological, systemic reasons, rather than from individual acts of racism or prejudice. Sure, the ethnic composition of the guests at my cousin’s wedding did not mirror the ethnic composition of the United States as a whole… but what were the bride and groom supposed to do about that?

Furthermore, if I think about these things too much, I start brooding over unanswerable questions. Is it “okay” that the new Star Wars actors are mostly male, because two of those men (John Boyega and Oscar Isaac) are people of color? Is it “okay” for me to celebrate a theater season that has 50% male and 50% female writers, if all of those writers are white and come from privileged backgrounds? Is strict adherence to ethnic and gender diversity, to dismantling the old racist and patriarchal power structures, my top priority — and if it isn’t, does that make me a horrible person?

I think that it feels petty and mean-spirited to spend so much of my time counting actors and getting outraged; and then I think no, the petty, mean-spirited people are the ones who want things to remain status quo. I wish that we spent more time online discussing philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics rather than identity politics, and then I realize that that makes me sound like a stereotypical White Person, stuck up in an ivory tower. I realize that to say “I don’t want to spend so much time thinking about race” merely reveals my immense privilege: society might allow me to ignore the fact of my whiteness, but it will not allow a black person to ignore her blackness.

But still… I want to be positive and receptive to change, not embittered or resentful or willfully ignorant. So perhaps I should just say that I am grateful that even drunken bros are counting people of color — this kind of awareness might be the first step toward the systemic, society-wide changes that we need — and I look forward to seeing where things go from here. I hope that the conversation goes deeper — and that the world moves forward.

Marissa Skudlarek is a San Francisco-based playwright and arts writer. If you don’t mind hearing from yet another young, white, female voice, find her at marissabidilla.blogspot.com or on Twitter @MarissaSkud.