Acting in ShortLived Finals, August 3-5

Andrew Chung as Borkul the Orc and me as Elanil the Elf. Photo courtesy PianoFight.

Hey, remember how in mid-June, I was performing in the first weekend of PianoFight's audience-judged short play competition, ShortLived?

Well, the play I'm in—"All the Worlds are Stages" by Ruben Grijalva—won that round handily, so we're competing again in the finals this weekend! The whole team from June is coming back with dreams of glory: director Alejandro Emmanuel Torres and actors Andrew Chung, Tony Cirimele, and Danielle Doyle.

The championship-round performances, which feature the winning plays from all six weekends plus two "wild cards," are selling out fast. If they haven't all gone, you can get tickets here. Shows are Thursday through Saturday at 7 PM, with an additional Friday show at 9:30.

ShortLived has been getting some nice press, too—some of which uses the above production photo of me and Andrew:

• "ShortLived playwriting contest off to great start," by Leslie Katz for the San Francisco Examiner
• "At Bay Area's PianoFight, Anything Goes and Everyone Plays," by Sam Hurwitt for American Theatre (this means that I have now had my photo in American Theatre twice, once in a bedsheet toga and once in elf ears)

Acting in ShortLived round 1 at PianoFight, June 15-17

Last year, I participated in PianoFight's audience-judged theater competition ShortLived as a playwright... this year, for a change, I am acting in a ShortLived play!

For three performances, tonight through Saturday, I am playing a video-game elf in "All the Worlds are Stages" by Ruben Grijalva, directed by Alejandro Emmanuel Torres. The other actors in the show are Andrew Chung, Tony Cirimele, and Danielle Doyle. It is a very fun, fast-paced script with some nice twists to it, and for the first time ever, I have to do a bit of stage combat! (Credit to Kyle McReddie for teaching me and Andrew the fight choreography.)

Tickets for this weekend's edition of ShortLived are available here. (Note: show starts at 7 PM, so don't be late!) You'll see 6 new short plays and be asked to rank them. The top-ranked play from this week's batch will move on to compete in the grand-prize round in early August, with a shot at a $5000 prize.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's my lunch hour and I need to run out and get a green eyeliner pencil for my elf costume tonight.

Workshop Production of "You'll Not Feel the Drowning," April 13-22

My play You'll Not Feel the Drowning, an hourlong drama about life in an earthquake zone, the bleak beauty of the Oregon coast, and the giant squids that lurk in our hearts, has been in development with Custom Made Theatre's Undiscovered Works program for the last year. Custom Made is now granting it a 6-performance developmental workshop at the EXIT Theatre. I've been hard at work this month in a whirlwind rehearsal process, and we open tonight!

If you're in the Bay Area, I'd be honored if you can attend, especially as this script is still in development and we will be soliciting audience feedback. (There's a space for comments on the back of the playbill, and there'll be talk-backs after the Friday performances.) I'll be at all of the shows, too, so please feel free to say hello if you're there.

The details:

• Directed by Gabriel A. Ross, dramaturgy by Allie Moss, tech by Linda Huang
• Cast: Terry Bamberger as Susan, Maria Giere Marquis as Laura, and Jason W. Wong as Greg
• 6 performances: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at 8 PM, April 13-22
• All performances at the EXIT Studio, 156 Eddy Street in San Francisco, near the Powell BART/MUNI station
• Facebook event
• Tickets 

Hope to see you there!

I'll Always, Always Keep the Memory Of...

San Francisco Theater Pub, the scrappy little theater-in-a-bar that has done so much for me since it started in January 2010, is having its last-ever show tonight. And before it goes away for good, it's giving me the chance to fulfill one more dream: to stand on a cabaret stage in a vintage dress and sing a wistful ballad from the Great American Songbook.

Summing up everything that Theater Pub has meant to me would normally take thousands of words... but fortunately, the Gershwins wrote "They Can't Take That Away From Me" to say everything that needs to be said on occasions like this.

Tonight's show, including my contribution, will be a singalong of musical theater favorites. As always, admission is free and we'll pass a hat for donations; this time, though, we'll be donating all proceeds to the ACLU. ("My constitutional rights, no, no, they can't take that away from me?" Don't worry, I will be singing the original lyrics.)

The bittersweet fun starts at 8 PM at PianoFight (144 Taylor St, San Francisco).

Banner art by Cody Rishell.

"You'll Not Feel the Drowning": Upcoming Reading & Workshop

My play You'll Not Feel the Drowning, about how to go on living when there's a persistent sense of doom hanging over you, had developmental readings in May and September of this year as part of Custom Made Theatre's new-works program. I am honored to announce that Custom Made has been pleased with the script's progress and has chosen it for further development, including a workshop production!

First, though, another developmental reading of Drowning is happening tonight at 7 PM at the Gallery Cafe on Nob Hill. (the arts editors of the SF Chronicle named this as one of today's critic's picks!) See the Facebook invite for more details.

Then, I'll think about the feedback from tonight's audience, do another round of focused rewriting, and in mid-April of 2017, Drowning will have a 6-performance workshop production at the EXIT Theatre. It will be directed by Gabriel Ross, and Allie Moss will be the dramaturg.

More information about the April workshop forthcoming as I have it (and yes, I will make an effort to post event info with more than an hour to spare before it happens).

My Projects for 2016

For convenient reference, and by way of explaining why I don't have lots of time anymore for random blogging, I'm posting a list of the projects that I have coming up in 2016.

Major Projects

Juana, or the Greater Glory in the Loud & Unladylike Festival: This festival, which honors lesser-known historical women, has commissioned me to write a full-length play about Princess Juana: Spanish princess, member of the powerful Hapsburg family, and the only woman ever to become a Jesuit. I'm working hard on the initial draft and will be going on a writers' retreat with the other L&U folks this weekend. Once the script is in better shape, I also hope to write some blog posts geeking out about my historical research -- Spanish royal history is completely fascinating and not nearly well-known enough in this country. Besides, do you expect me to spend six weeks reading the writings of Ignatius of Loyola and just keep my thoughts to myself? Juana will have a public staged reading in mid-July, directed by Claire Rice: date TBD, but either July 14, 15, or 16.

You'll Not Feel the Drowning in Custom Made Theatre's Undiscovered Works program: San Francisco's Custom Made Theatre Co. has started a new-works development program and my script You'll Not Feel the Drowning (originally written for the 2015 Olympians Festival) was one of four plays selected for it! I was not expecting this to happen -- the draft that I submitted is a really odd length, 35 minutes, and more than with any play I've ever written, my feelings about this script shift from day to day. Still, I look forward to developing this piece in a focused, systematic way, until it becomes something that I truly love and no longer feel uncertain about. Drowning will have two developmental readings at the Gallery Café on Nob Hill, on May 14 and September 13, both directed by Gabe Ross.

Macaria in the SF Olympians Festival: For the sixth year in a row, I'll be writing a Greek-myth-inspired play for the Olympians Festival, which is happening in October this year. The theme of the 2016 festival is the Underworld (including, intriguingly, a week devoted to Egyptian mythology) and my subject is Macaria, Hades and Persephone's daughter, the Princess of the Underworld. You can read more about her, and my play, here. It will have a staged reading on October 14, along with readings of plays by Bridgette Dutta Portman and Elizabeth Flanagan.

It's a fun coincidence that I'm writing Juana and Macaria in the same year: both Juana and Macaria are rebellious teenage princesses of rich but death-haunted kingdoms, who dress in black and have fateful encounters with their possibly-crazy grandmothers. I can tell that these two scripts will influence one another in fruitful ways!

Other Projects

"The Dryad of Suburbia" in ShortLived 2016: This happened last weekend, and after four performances and a hard-fought battle, my play came in second -- 1908 points to 1969. And the winning play, "Goodsell, Good Life," by writer-performers Tommy Lazer and Suzil Von, featured funky dance moves and a fog machine -- I mean how could I be expected to win against that?

Pint-Sized Plays 2016 at SF Theater Pub: For the second year in a row, I am Tsarina (producer) of the Pint-Sized Plays, though this year I'm bringing on a Tsarevich (deputy producer) in the form of Alejandro Torres. Bay Area playwrights, the Pint-Sized script submission call should be posted on the Theater Pub blog next week. The performances for this will be August 22, 23, 29, and 30, in the PianoFight bar.

Arts journalism: I've been writing a column for the Theater Pub blog every two weeks for almost four years, and... well, it might be time for me to transition into a different role over there. Still, I credit this columnist gig with making me a much better writer, more comfortable with both personal essays and interviews/journalistic pieces, and in 2016 it looks like I will be doing some freelance arts journalism for higher-profile venues. Yes, I'm being vague on purpose, but All Will Be Revealed soon.

The Weekend Without a Summer: 2016 is a great year for British-literature nerds. Besides being the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, it's the 200th anniversary of the "Year Without a Summer," during which Mary Shelley got the idea for Frankenstein and the Romantic poets got up to some of their most characteristic shenanigans. Huge nerds that we are, my friend Stuart Bousel and I are planning a five-day celebration of the Romantic movement over Labor Day Weekend. It will be Gothic, it will be sublime, it will be mad & bad & dangerous to know.

Travel: With this busy year ahead of me, I'd assumed I wouldn't have time to take a vacation and would have to white-knuckle it till November, which was a depressing thought. (I spent much of February feeling lethargic and overwhelmed.) Then I reviewed my calendar, realized that if I played my cards right I could go away for two weeks in late April, and, with a much sunnier spirit, got to planning a vacation. NYC, Paris, and Oxford, here I come!

"Dryad of Suburbia" in Shortlived 2016 next weekend

"Dryad of Suburbia" poster by Cody Rishell.

I'm pleased to announce that my 10-minute play "The Dryad of Suburbia," originally commissioned by the San Francisco Olympians Festival in 2014, will receive a full production as part of PianoFight's Shortlived competition next weekend!

What should loving but stressed-out modern parents Tom and Heidi do when their young daughter starts claiming that she has a mystical connection to the oak tree in the yard? It's not easy to be a tree spirit in a suburban neighborhood that's blighted by both conformity and drought.

The world premiere of "The Dryad of Suburbia" is directed by James Nelson, featuring actors Leah Shesky and Raymond Hobbs. We had a dynamite first rehearsal last Monday (Leah and Ray even started improvising in character) and I look forward to seeing the finished product on Thursday, March 17.

Shortlived is the nation's largest audience-judged theater festival. As a newbie playwright in S.F., I attended nearly every round of the 2010 edition of Shortlived, met several great people who are still in my life today, and finally developed an intuitive sense of what makes for a good short play. (I have thoroughly romanticized this period of my life and wrote about it for the Theater Pub blog last year.) So I am excited to finally have a script of my own in the festival and a shot at the prize! I'm also glad that "The Dryad of Suburbia" isn't just sitting in a drawer anymore. It caused me a lot of stress while I was writing it -- I had to scrap my original idea for a dryad-themed play and write this one at the last minute -- but it got a great reception at the staged reading in 2014 and now it will have a future life.

There are 4 performances of "The Dryad of Suburbia," March 17 through 19 at 8 PM, plus March 19 at 5. Tickets here. Facebook event here. Come one, come all -- and vote early and vote often for "Dryad"!

Writing, Acting, and Directing in the 2015 Olympians Festival

2015 is my fifth year participating in the San Francisco Olympians Festival as a writer, but it is the first year I will be acting and directing for the festival as well!

We're advertising it with this Lisa Frank poster
because it's just too perfect.

On Wednesday, November 18, I am acting in the staged reading of Delphin: Christian Teen Dolphin-Sex Beach Party by Anthony Miller (directed by Colin Johnson). If you've ever wanted to hear me talk in a ridiculously thick French accent about having sex with a dolphin, THIS MAY BE YOUR ONLY CHANCE. The show is goofy as hell yet surprisingly sweet, and everyone in it is hilarious. And, I mean, I've always half-jokingly said that my goal in life is to be an intense French woman -- and now, thanks to the magic of theater, I get to do that for forty-five minutes. It's just that the thing I'm really intense about is dolphin-fucking.

"Tethys" poster specially drawn for the
Olympians Festival by Brett Grunig. I love
how dark and grim and rainy it is. I can
almost feel the cold seawater on my skin.

Then on Friday, November 20, I am directing a staged reading of my own Tethys, or You'll Not Feel the Drowning. It's a one-act play that draws upon my love for my home state of Oregon, its tenacious pioneer spirit and its beautifully bleak winter weather; as well as the terror that all Oregonians felt when they read that New Yorker article this summer about the possibility of a great Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. I've got a great cast -- Janice Wright as the formidable mayor of a small coastal town, Alan Coyne as a seismologist with bad news, and Kendra Webb as the schoolteacher who is caught between them -- and while my direction is pretty minimalist, I'm still learning a lot from the experience of directing my own work.

Both Delphin and Tethys are one-act plays, so they'll be paired with another one-act show in order to make a full evening of theater. I should also note that neither of these plays requires any prior knowledge of Greek mythology to enjoy! They explore some of the themes associated with the dolphin god Delphin and the deep sea goddess Tethys, but they don't actually re-tell a specific myth.

The Olympians Festival staged readings are at 8 PM at the EXIT Theatre (156 Eddy St, San Francisco). Tickets $12 online or $10 at the door.

August on the Theater Pub blog

Another month, another two columns.

In "A Monologue of One's Own," I wrote about the whirlwind experience of preparing to play Virginia Woolf in a monologue by playwright Jeremy Cole, part of an evening of pro-choice theater honoring NARAL. I was a replacement for an actress who'd had to drop out a week before the show, so there I was, still not really accustomed to thinking of myself as an actor, opening the show with an 8-minute monologue, portraying a real-life famous person with an accent not my own.

My performance was captured on video (credit: Paul Anderson) -- how do you think I did?


Then, this week, I wrote a something called "An Introvert's Guide to Theater" -- maybe the title is a little far-reaching for what it is, which is a piece about how I'm not anti-social, but I do get run-down after too much socialization. Which can be a disadvantage when you're a theater artist. There are probably more introverted theater people out there than anyone realizes, though, and it's a topic I'd like to explore more in future.

And (if you're reading this in time) come see the Pint-Sized Plays at Theater Pub! I didn't write or direct any of the shows this year, but I produced the whole evening: read all the submissions, selected the plays and directors, sent innumerable emails and put out a fair few fires. The result is a lot of fun and it's been drawing packed houses. We have 2 more performances, August 24 and 25.

I'd Like to Thank the Stucademy

Stuart Bousel wrote 5000 words last Monday explaining why he wasn't going to post his Stuart Excellence in Bay Area Theater Awards, a.k.a. SEBATAs, a.k.a. "Stueys," this year. So it was a surprise when, round midnight last night (trust Stuart to post his awards at the witching hour), a post went up on the Theater Pub blog announcing the 14 Stuey winners—including me!

My "Best Breakthrough" Stuey recognizes my successfully self-producing Pleiades last August. "I was blown away by how organized and focused Marissa was, how determined she was to do it as best she could even the first time out," Stuart wrote. "Marissa strategized and planned, gathered information, raised funds, and was just in general super smart about it all. Was anyone surprised? Not really. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take one more moment to tell her she did an amazing job. Everyone looking to produce a show in 2015: call Marissa. She knows what she’s doing."

Inspired by last night's Golden Globes and by Stuart's own honesty in always speaking what's on his mind, I wrote an acceptance speech and posted it to Facebook this morning.

In my dreams, this is what I'm wearing to accept my Stuey Award.
Marchesa, Fall 2014.

"And the 2014 Stuey for Best Breakthrough goes to... Marissa Skudlarek, Pleiades."

(Applause. I get up from my seat, glide to the podium. At least I'd like to think I glide. The last time I wore high heels and a long gown, at the TBA Awards, I tripped and fell halfway down a flight of stairs and bruised my ankle. [Fortunately, no one witnessed it.] My friend Maura said this made me the Bay Area Jennifer Lawrence and that made me feel a little better, 'cause who doesn't want to be JLaw, but it's been two months and my ankle is still slightly tender. But this is all a daydream in which I'm wearing a gown that probably costs as much as my whole production of Pleiades so yeah, I glide, OK?)

"Gentlemen and la—wait, the Stuey Awards committee consists of only one gentleman—I gratefully accept the Stuey for Best Breakthrough. Of course, I think it’s kind of funny that in the citation for the award, I am praised for, basically, being a perfectionist and having my shit together—wait, can I say ‘shit’ here, or will I get bleeped?—when I often feel like my perfectionism is detrimental and that I don’t have my shit together at all. Like Stuart says, awards are kind of weird. And there’s a certain existential terror, too, in the idea of ‘Oh my God, if I’ve broken through, now I have to keep doing this.’ But honestly, all neurosis aside, I agree with our illustrious host and one-man awards committee that the Internet has gotten kind of awful recently, full of criticism and judgment and not the good kind of criticism and judgment, the place where you can always, always find someone who’ll tell you why you’re doing it wrong. And in a tough environment, in a tough year, I am genuinely touched that someone is willing to say in public that he thinks I’m basically headed in the right direction. That many of us in this room are headed in the right direction. And maybe this thought, and this award, will help me pick myself up faster in moments when I’m bogged down by neurosis and self-doubt. And in the meantime, yes, if you want to talk about best practices for self-producing, drop me a line and we’ll plan a coffee date. Awards have only as much power as we give them, but if this award can make me more personally hopeful or result in more knowledge about self-production being circulated in our community, then its power will be harnessed to a good cause. Thank you again."

(And I glide offstage.)

A couple of thoughts that I'd like to add tonight:

It's a little odd to get this award from Stuart, because his theater company, No Nude Men, was the nominal producer of Pleiades. It wasn't a financial arrangement. Instead, Stuart granted me the prestige of the NNM brand, with its 10+ years of history in the Bay Area; we had a few producer-y chats over coffee; and he let me text/email him with Silly Newbie Producer Questions as they came up. So I feel like a lot of my achievements as a producer simply involved asking good questions and listening to the advice of someone who's produced indie theater here for over a decade. Maybe that's rarer than it seems (Stuart would know), and maybe it's also a bit nepotistic. Fear of appearing nepotistic or biased, in fact, was one of the reasons that Stuart almost didn't post his awards this year. But hey, they are his awards, this is show business, and both he and I are people who overanalyze our actions, so who am I to quibble?

One thing I haven't overanalyzed, though, is the experience of producing Pleiades. Right after it closed, I became overwhelmed by a health crisis and a breakup, in quick succession. So I didn't really get a chance to take pride in my achievement, or to sort out my feelings about the show separately from everything else that was happening in my life. The wounds from my surgery and my breakup have now healed, and I've integrated those events into my self-narrative—but I haven't fully integrated Pleiades. (I haven't even been able to bring myself to open the script on my computer and incorporate the tiny changes that I made in rehearsals.) So winning a Stuey, having my efforts recognized, feels like an anchor, grounding me more firmly in sanity, reality, accomplishment. Yes. I wrote and produced a play. People noticed. And I shouldn't allow anything else to overshadow that.

Happy Holidays from THE DESK SET

The rumors are true: I'm going to be appearing in a play next summer for the first time in years. I'll be playing the supporting role of Elsa and serving as Dance Captain in a production of the classic 1950s office comedy The Desk Set, by William Marchant. The production will be directed by Stuart Bousel, produced by No Nude Men, and presented at the EXIT Theatre in San Francisco.

Above is a photo of the full cast (I'm standing, second from the right). The Desk Set takes place around Christmastime and though our production happens in July, we decided to start our promotional campaign early by doing a holiday-themed photo!

We also took photos of smaller groups of characters. Below are the four main women: Jeunee Simon as Sadel, Kitty Torres as Ruthie, Megan Briggs as Peg, Allison Page as Bunny.

Here I am with my fellow supporting women: Carina Lastimosa Salazar as Miss Warriner and Lisa Drostova as the Mysterious Lady. I am wearing one of my grandma's cocktail dresses from the '50s. It always amazes me that she had such a va-va-voom dress (there is a nude-colored fabric lining underneath the black lace, and the illusion is quite realistic in person) but Elsa is the office sexpot, so it's character-appropriate! Though also a little strange -- I have never played a sexpot or had to do a stage kiss before.

And here are our handsome gentlemen: Abhi Kris as Mr. Bennett, Andrew Calabrese as "Shirtsleeves," Nick Trengove as Abe, Alejandro Emmanuel Torres as Kenny, and Alan Coyne as Richard.

Randomly and bizarrely, we discovered that a teenage Barbra Streisand played my role, Elsa, in a summer stock production of The Desk Set just a few years after the original Broadway production. Here's a picture from the office-party scene of that production; Barbra is dancing, second from right.

And if you want to know the plot of Desk Set or what I think of it as a play, here's the review I wrote on Goodreads.

The Desk Set: A Comedy In Three Acts by William Marchant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For a mid-century, middlebrow comedy, The Desk Set is kind of a bizarre play. On the one hand, it's loaded with 1950s kitsch: female employees running out of the office midday to buy party dresses at Bonwit's; jokes about philandering executives and sexpot secretaries; a rather un-PC joke about Mexicans. The main character is a super-smart, capable, acerbic woman named Bunny (something that really puzzled me when I saw the film version as a child -- how could the no-nonsense Katharine Hepburn play a woman with such a silly name?) who spends a bit too much time hoping that her boss/boyfriend, who's clearly not as awesome as she is, will put a ring on it.

On the other hand, The Desk Set is a play about four intelligent working women who fear that they are going to be replaced by a computer, which is a surprisingly modern problem. The depiction of Richard, the character who wants to install computers in the office, also feels perceptive about how "techies" behave: he's not a bad guy, but he's kind of single-minded and socially awkward. While the play has a happy ending that suggests that people and technology can coexist, 21st-century audiences may find it a little more poignant than originally intended. After all, the women in the play work for the research department of a broadcasting company, where their job is to do fact-checking and answer queries like "What are the names of Santa's reindeer?" (The play takes place around Christmas.) But these days, you can just pull out your iPhone and ask Siri.

All photos (except for the Streisand one) by Cody Rishell.

"The Dryad of Suburbia" - staged reading Nov. 5

2014 is my fourth year participating in the San Francisco Olympians Festival as a writer. My contribution this year is a 10-minute play, The Dryad of Suburbia, which is part of the festival's "Nymphs! Nymphs! Nymphs!" night on Wednesday, November 5.

(At least two people have already inquired whether there will be nudity on this evening. Highly unlikely, as it's a staged reading. But I'm pleased that the evening's title has done its job and grabbed people's attention.)

You can find out more about The Dryad of Suburbia on the festival's website. Yes, that page has changed since the last time I linked to it, back in January. Back then, I thought I was going to write a play about a Dryad encountering a Druid. I clung to that idea for months without writing a word -- because I was unable to hear my characters' voices. At the eleventh hour, I scrapped that idea and banged out The Dryad of Suburbia in a mad rush. I wrote about this experience in more detail for my Theater Pub column this week.

My new play is about a contemporary, suburban couple whose young daughter has become convinced that she is a "tree spirit." When I was writing it, I had no idea that Cody Rishell, the poster artist for Nymph Night, was designing a suite of posters that show little girls playing with their nymph friends! It's like we were tuned into the same wavelength. The Dryads poster (above) is astoundingly perfect -- I am a very happy playwright! You can check out all of the Nymph posters on Cody's website.

The reading of The Dryad of Suburbia will be directed by Valerie Fachman and feature actors Colleen Egan and Nick Trengove. The other "Nymphs!" playwrights are Sam Bertken, Leah Halper, Sam Hurwitt, Carol Lashof, Bridgette Dutta Portman, Jennifer Lynne Roberts, and Siyu Song.

It's all happening at 8 PM on November 5 at EXIT Theatre in San Francisco's scenic Tenderloin. RSVP to the Facebook event here. Tickets $10 at the door.

PLEIADES: Website, Indiegogo, and Our First Blurb!

Finally, an explanation for why it's been so quiet around here recently:

I've been readying my play, Pleiades, for its world premiere production at the Phoenix Theater in San Francisco -- and serving as its lead producer. We started rehearsals last week and will open on August 7 for a four-week run. Katja Rivera is directing, we have a wonderful cast of 9 young actors, and you can find out much more about the show at pleiadessf.wordpress.com.

We've also been running an Indiegogo funding campaign. With four days left to go, we're closing in on our goal (83%) but are still looking for a few more contributions to push us over the top! If you've appreciated my work in the past and want to support independent, female-driven theater in the Bay Area, please consider making a contribution. $35 will score you my eternal gratitude AND a reserved seat at the show!

(And I don't mean to be manipulative, but Saturday is my birthday, and it would make me very happy to wake up on that day to a fully funded Indiegogo campaign, so...)


Fundraising pressures aside, the production process is going well, and we just received our first press attention! Lily Janiak listed Pleiades as an Editor's Pick in the July/August issue of Theatre Bay Area magazine, calling the play "the love child of Jane Austen and Wendy Wasserstein." (I'll take it!)

  

I'll try to be better about keeping you informed about Pleiades-related news in the weeks to come.

"If I’m a grilled cheese sandwich, she’s duck confit"

At the end of 2013, in an epic meeting over sangria at the marvelous Cafe Flore, we Theater Pub bloggers stopped feeling like individual wordsmiths rushing to meet column deadlines, and started to feel like we were a Thing. A tribe. A collective. To cement our newfound camaraderie and celebrate a very successful year for the blog, we agreed that our last post of the year should highlight the best writing of 2013, both on our blog and on the Internet at large.

I had the honor of writing in praise of Will Leschber, one of the newer Theater Pub bloggers, who writes about the connections between theater and cinema. I also singled out a Howlround piece by local theater critic Lily "Lightning Rod" Janiak as my other must-read piece of theater-related writing from 2013.

And I received this lovely write-up about my own work from Allison Page. Each time I read it, I still glow a little inside and then vow to try to live up to this praise:

Marissa Skudlarek and I communicate differently, but we think about a lot of the same things. If I’m a grilled cheese sandwich, she’s duck confit. She has the ability to say things that I know I’m also feeling, but haven’t brought myself to express properly without the use of a lot of F-bombs and references to Murder, She Wrote. Generally speaking, I like to accentuate the positive rather than wallow in a pool of the negative, so when her article “You’re Doing It Wrong, You’re Doing It Wrong” (technically the second half of a two-part article. The first one is also worth reading, but the second really drove it home for me). The internet, and the world, can be a dark and dismal place. Some days it feels like there’s nothing to be happy about; nothing that’s going right. In a world that seeks to find the worst in everything, Marissa seeks out the subtle nuances of her theatrical experiences, and of the world around her. It’s refreshing and thoughtful, and a big reason I love reading her posts. Not everyone is doing it right wrong. I like to think Marissa is striving to do it right; for women in general and for herself.

Go to the Theater Pub blog to read the whole piece, including my paragraphs in praise of Will and Lily, and many other encomia. There is also a pretty great photo of me sitting on a dinosaur while wearing a '60s sheath dress and holding a parasol.

And if I may say so, the Theater Pub blog has been seriously killing it in the New Year, so if you have any interest in independent theater (whether you live in the Bay Area or not), you should bookmark it and visit it regularly. I am honored to be part of this collective of smart, thoughtful, honest, curious, and yes, positive writers.

And P.S. I think a grilled cheese sandwich with duck confit sounds like the best thing ever.

New Links and Mentions for the New Year

Out with the old, in with the new! A fine motto, but I still have a lot of end-of-2013 business to catch up on. (In general, I want to be better about blogging relevant links, rather than just posting them on Twitter or Facebook, since a blog is a less ephemeral, more easily searchable medium... Ten years ago, who ever thought there'd come a day when blogs would seem like islands of permanence and stability in a sea of online ephemera?)

Anyway, here are a few links to some recent posts from friends and acquaintances in the San Francisco theater community that I wanted to preserve:

• At the end of his massive end-of-2013 post, my friend Charles Lewis III published his list of favorite quotes of the year – I'm proud to say that I'm the only person who had two of her quotes make Charles' list!
• For the Theater Pub blog, Charles also wrote up a piece about the Pub's spinoff endeavor "Saturday Write Fever," a celebration of writing, acting, and randomly sparked creativity. I get a brief name-check in this article.
• After the 19 ATLAS participants completed Theater Bay Area's series of professional-development workshops for playwrights, Ignacio Zulueta interviewed me and several other participants about our experience. His article is now up on the TBA site.
• Again from the Theater Pub blog: Allison Page writes up a great piece encouraging playwrights to "produce it yo own self." I swear, it's like she's reading my mind (or maybe it's just that she and I had a conversation about this very issue in December). It's also worth reading the Storify of HowlRound's recent Twitter conversation on self-producing, if Allison's piece has inspired you to try it out.

See my play "Horny" at SF Theater Pub on Monday, May 20

My latest short play, "Horny," will have a one-night-only performance in San Francisco on Monday, as part of The Pub From Another World.

It's a play about sex and unicorns. Obviously. What happens when you're a young woman who really, really wants to have sex with your boyfriend... but, if you lose your virginity, you can never touch your pet unicorn again?

The Pub From Another World is an evening of eight sci-fi, fantasy, and horror short plays, produced by Sunil Patel. In addition to my unicorn play, there's plays about psychos, superheroes, time travelers, and mad scientists. Plus a play by four-year-old Audrey Kessinger that went viral on BoingBoing.

It should be a really fun evening and I suggest getting there early, as it's bound to get crowded. The performance is at 8 PM at the Cafe Royale, 800 Post St. (at Leavenworth).

"Horny" is directed by Meg O'Connor and will feature actors Sam Bertken and Olivia Youngers. Making out. Lots of making out.

Image: "Young Woman with Unicorn" by Raphael.

The Bicoastal Playwright-Producer-Translator

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that my play Pleiades was selected by the Atlantic Stage Co. in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for their New Voices Play Festival. At this very moment, 1:30 PM on the East Coast), the staged reading of Pleiades is beginning in South Carolina...

...and I can't be there, because I am at the Cafe Royale in San Francisco in my capacity as the producer of San Francisco Theater Pub's April show, my new translation of Orphée. (OK, fine, I wrote this blog post in advance and have timed it to go up on Sunday morning.)

Tech rehearsal for Orphée on one coast, a staged reading of Pleiades on the other. Weekends like this don't come along very often.

And it should be no surprise that this beautiful song has been stuck in my head all week: "South Carolina" by Tennis:

Cocteau Times Two @ SF Theater Pub Blog

I have not one, but two posts on SF Theater Pub's blog this week, because my production of Jean Cocteau's Orphée is happening there on Monday night, April 15!

First, Stuart conducted an email interview with me about translating and producing Orphée. I got to discuss why I decided to translate Orphée in the first place, why it's such a crazy play, my other favorite adaptations of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and additional fun topics. I really had a good time doing the interview -- it's so much easier to write when you have someone else asking you questions or giving you prompts!

Then, in my column this week, I noted that Cocteau disowned his first two books of poetry, and used that as the jumping-off point for a discussion of whether it's healthy for artists to disown work that they made when they were younger. I also mention my recent experience directing the staged reading of The Rose of Youth, which I wrote five years ago. (I'll never disown that play, but there are certain passages that now strike me as embarrassingly bad.) The comments to this post, on the blog and on Facebook, mostly involve my friends confessing the embarrassing things they wrote or directed when they were teenagers -- and now I wish I could read these works in all of their awful, naive, teenage glory. Don't disdain your younger self! Embrace her!

Upcoming: "The Rose of Youth," "Orphée," "Pleiades"

 Apologies for the lack of posting, but 2013 is turning out to be busier than I anticipated. I spent much of this afternoon in a coffee shop, revising my translation of Jean Cocteau's Orphée in preparation for its staged reading at Theater Pub on April 15. The sunlight streamed through the beveled edge of the coffee shop's glass door, casting rainbows on my computer screen and making me think of the glass panes of Heurtebise, the guardian angel-glazier character in Orphée.

It's slightly odd to return to my translation of Orphée after I first translated it two years ago. The initial translation project might be one of my favorite bits of writing I've ever done, though, just because I accomplished it in such a stress-free, orderly fashion. Every night, I would translate one page of the script, and in a little over a month (it's not a long play) I had a finished translation. Instead of making me insane, it actually made me feel saner and smarter. Though I don't like admitting it to myself, I need routines and patterns. Maybe I should do more translations; maybe I should just be better at setting aside a dedicated time to write.

Moreover, because it's a translation, I feel less of an emotional connection to the writing than I usually do, so it isn't too difficult to go back and revise it. Often, what I write is intimately linked to my emotional state at the time, so revisiting a work years later means I must make an effort to remember my mindset when I first wrote it. With Orphée, though, returning to the work does not mean dredging up the past, because I've always viewed the work rather objectively.

Perhaps one theme of 2013 is seeing artistic projects come to fruition years after I first conceived them. I decided in 2010 to translate Orphée, worked on the translation in early 2011, and only now am I actually getting to present it publicly.

Furthermore, I have my staged reading of The Rose of Youth coming up in less than two weeks, on March 29. And, as I've said before, I wrote that play during the 2007-2008 school year, saw it as the culmination to a great four years studying drama at Vassar, and never expected anything more to come of it. But here I am, five years later, directing a staged reading of it.

I also wanted to announce something else exciting that I have coming up this spring. Atlantic Stage, a theater company in Myrtle Beach, SC, will present a staged reading of my play Pleiades on the second weekend of April, as part of their New Voices PlayFest! (I wrote Pleiades in 2011, if you're counting.) This marks the first time my work will be seen in the South, and makes Pleiades one of the many San Francisco Olympians Festival plays that have gone on to have a continued life. And I kind of love that the play, which takes place in the Hamptons, will be performed in a different East Coast beach town. I practically danced around my room when I learned that Atlantic Stage had selected my play, and I hope to have more information soon. Unfortunately, I can't jet off to Myrtle Beach to see the reading -- I could really use a beach vacation after the busy month I've been having!

Image: Jarvis Cocker, holding a French dictionary. Yeah, one reason I wrote this post is to have an excuse to use this picture.

"Rose of Youth" Staged Reading on March 29

Mark your calendars, 'cause I have exciting news! My full-length play, The Rose of Youth, will be presented in a staged reading at the EXIT Theatre in San Francisco on March 29.

If you're a longtime reader of my blog, you might recognize that play title — though I haven't mentioned it, or thought about it, in years. The Rose of Youth was my senior thesis play at Vassar. I wrote it in fall 2007, and it received a production as part of the Drama Department's Dynamo Theater Lab project in spring 2008.

And after that incredible experience, I honestly expected that I'd put the play in a drawer and forget about it. I had written it specifically for my college: it's a backstage drama about Vassar's 1934 production of Antony and Cleopatra. But its huge cast means that no professional or indie theater company would consider producing it, and even if cast size were no obstacle, I thought it was just too "Vassar" for anyone else to care about it.

Well, never say never. Or something like that. The Rose of Youth will be one of three staged readings on the last weekend of March, as part of a mini-festival of backstage comedies that we're calling "Behind the Curtain."

The festival came about when my friend Stuart Bousel posted on Facebook that he'd written a new backstage comedy about a theater company producing Arcadia. Another friend of ours, Meg O'Connor, congratulated Stuart and added that she'd written a backstage comedy as her senior thesis play in college. "How funny, Meg," I wrote in response, "I also wrote a backstage play as my senior thesis. We should trade."

But where my instinct is just to say to Meg "Let's read each other's scripts," Stuart's instinct is to say "Let's put on a festival!" (This is why we love him.) He secured the EXIT Theatre for the weekend of March 28-30, and now "Behind the Curtain" is happening. Meg's In the Wings is the Thursday show, and Stuart's Pastorella is Saturday. Here's the festival poster (by Cody Rishell):

So this is going to be a trip and a half. It will be so strange and wonderful to return to The Rose of Youth, five years and three thousand miles later. This also marks the first time that I'm directing my own work in God knows how long. I mean, having produced the play five years ago, I already know that the script works and I'm not planning to make any changes or revisions to it. All the same, I'm a little bit nervous about directing! I'll be the only person to blame if things go wrong!

Casting is still in progress, but so far, Patrick Barresi, Jan Carty Mash, Travis Howse, Theresa Miller, and Jonathon Brooks are lined up to appear.

Look for more updates as March 29 draws closer.