More Liner Notes

After finishing my two most recent posts, I remembered that I had more liner notes-type supporting materials for those of you who are into such things. Check it:

• This here is a podcast interview I did with Ashlin Halfnight back in March, in conjunction with the publication of his play, Diving Normal, in Plays and Playwrights 2007. He is joined by Melanie Sylvan and Emily Long, co-founders of the theatre company they all run together, Electric Pear Productions.
• Kevin Doyle got his own podcast in July to discuss the jam-packed summer he had planned for his theatre company, Sponsored By Nobody. He is joined here by fellow SBN company members Paul Newport and Sean O’Hagan (both of whom appeared in The Position).
• For a different side of Kevin, check out his participation in this podcast roundtable discussion about audience development for indie theater companies. He joins Janet Zarecor from Impetuous Theater Group and Aviva Meyer from Stolen Chair Theatre Company, and they all have some interesting stuff to say.

Recommended Reading: The Position

I’ll be the first one to admit that I may not be totally objective when it comes to writer-director Kevin Doyle, considering that I was in a show of his earlier this summer. But I can say with certainty that I am a fan of his work. Doing a show with him is what led me to finally read his play, The Position, which NYTE published in Plays and Playwrights 2006. Kevin is an absurdist in the tradition of Ionesco and Vaclav Havel, two playwrights whose thematic and structural influences are all over his work: specific and sustained use of repetition, heightened physicality, an emphasis on both political and social issues, and a lot of humor. Another striking and important characteristic he shares with both authors is the ability to make the potentially esoteric absurdist genre accessible for general audiences without sacrificing any of its hallmarks. The Position is a perfect example of this.

Six men sit in the waiting room of a large corporation. They are all there for a job interview. Five of them look, sound, and act identical - a humorous but potent commentary on the soul-deadening uniformity of America’s cutthroat capitalist culture. The sixth one stands out like a sore thumb: his clothes are wrinkled, he looks disheveled, and he is frightened and unprepared. Welcome to The Position, in which Kevin slyly and gleefully skewers the unexamined conformity of modern life and asks the reader to look at how our creature comforts (and the values they subliminally instill in us) may not be as good for us as we think.

But this is absurdism, so this potentially heavy topic is tempered with “sight gags, physical comedy, and running jokes,” as The Boss points out in his introduction to PP06: “..the sensibility is much more contemporary, and so is the style, which brings in elements of New Vaudeville, postmodernism, and a substantial amount of really astute social satire.”

Amen, brother. Take, for instance, this exchange between the Second Man and the Sixth Man (none of the characters have actual names - just another way The Position emphasizes its main themes) in which Kevin underlines the polarities between the Sixth Man and everyone else in the play:

SIXTH MAN: What’s wrong with my tie?

SECOND MAN: I think you need to ask yourself the same question.

SIXTH MAN: I’m sorry I don’t understand.

SECOND MAN: Have you ever heard of a dry cleaner?

SIXTH MAN: I don’t understand the question.

SECOND MAN: Your clothes.

SIXTH MAN: What about them?

SECOND MAN: They look like you slept in them.

SIXTH MAN: How did you know?

SECOND MAN: You slept in your clothes?

SIXTH MAN: Are you psychic?

SECOND MAN: Why did you sleep in your clothes?

SIXTH MAN: So I could be on time.

SECOND MAN: Have you ever heard of an iron?

SIXTH MAN: The mineral?

Then there’s the Gesture Appendix at the back of the script, in which Kevin painstakingly outlines what he calls “a physical dialogue which communicates just as much as a verbal dialogue about the world of this waiting room…” Several of the men get a repertoire of 6-13 gestures each, to be done in sequence at specifically allotted times throughout the course of the play. The gestures include mundane things like, “Shakes left leg. Shakes right leg” (First Man), and later more outrageous stuff like, “Rises and performs the Robot Dance” (Third Man). All the while, Kevin maintains that the gestures “should remain quick and precise. No matter how outrageous, they are never truly acknowledged or discussed by the characters…”

All of this points to a confidence that is rare in young playwrights but that Kevin has in spades, as does The Position. This is a play that knows what it is, knows what it wants to be, and isn’t afraid of either. How else to describe a play that boldly opens with several pages of non-verbal stage directions for the actors to follow? That is unapologetically confident.

For more insight into Kevin and his ethos, check out this interview I did with him back in January, 2006. It reflects the kind of humor, thoughtfulness, and social fervency that can be found in his plays.

Recommended Reading: Diving Normal

So I’ve been doing some writing lately. No, not reviews - I’ve been making my first forays into playwriting. Who knows what’ll come of it, but it sure is fun. I’ve been writing some really crazy stuff (crazy, at least, for me) as my imagination has jumped on board this train and just taken over the controls. I look at some of it afterwards and just go, “Who wrote that? Because it sure wasn’t me.” I’m surprising myself daily with some of the stuff I’m coming up with. Let’s hear it for the ol’ subconscious, everybody!

To help me along this new adventure, I’ve decided to do some inspirational reading and look at other plays that are being written today - for insight into form, structure, and the topics that are on the minds of other writers. Thankfully, I have the perfect resource for such an endeavor sitting right on my bookshelf.

The complete set of Plays and Playwrights anthologies.  

Oh baby, what a treasure trove of inspiration these have been for me over the past few weeks! Because of that, I thought I’d start a series of posts highlighting some of the great plays I’ve been reading. Perhaps you will be encouraged to read them too.

I’d like to start with Diving Normal by Ashlin Halfnight, a playwright whose work I have come to admire greatly over the past couple of years. This play appeared in NYTE’s most recent anthology, Plays and Playwrights 2007, and it showcases one of the dominant characteristics of Ashlin’s writing: compassion. He genuinely likes all of his characters, regardless of their shortcomings, and never takes sides. He wants them all to win, yet remains cognizant of the necessity for conflict and the eventuality that someone will win out over another in some fashion. Diving Normal displays that inherent tension beautifully.

Because Ashlin doesn’t take sides he also doesn’t judge his characters, leaving that instead to the reader. Which is both nice and a little unnerving: nice, in that it allows the reader to make up their own mind about the characters and the play’s events; unnerving, in that it forces the reader to really confront their own feelings about the play’s themes without being told how or what to think. In the case of Diving Normal, those themes include friendship, loyalty, and sexual compulsion. The way Ashlin confines his three protagonists - Fulton, an everyman-type graphic novelist with a bright future; Gordon, his third wheel-ish next door neighbor who has a crush on Fulton’s girl; and Dana, a gritty young woman with secret carnal desires - to the play’s unit living room set and slowly-but-confidently reveals them to us free of subterfuge keeps one riveted.

Did I mention that Diving Normal is full of surprises? Oh yeah - that’s something else Ashlin is really good at. He keeps the reader alert by constantly pulling the rug out from under him or her. Just when you think you know where things are going, he subtly makes an unexpected (but fully earned) turn. This is especially true of the play’s final three scenes, in which Ashlin brings things to an emotionally roller-coaster conclusion. The Boss hit the nail right on the head in his introduction to PP07 when he called Diving Normal “perhaps the most blisteringly intimate” play in this collection.

For those of you who are into liner notes, check out this very candid interview I did with Ashlin back in February. He talks about the genesis of Diving Normal, as well as a number of other topics covering his plays, his career, and his multifaceted background. Very good stuff.