SF Olympians III on IndieGogo

We at San Francisco Olympians Festival are currently running an IndieGogo campaign to raise funds for the festival's third edition, coming this December. (Featuring my new play The Love Goddess as one of 24 original one-act plays inspired by Greek mythology.)  There are four days to go until the campaign concludes and I'm pleased to say that we're just $200 away from our goal!  But don't let that stop you, if you're moved to contribute: any additional money we earn will go to paying the festival's writers, directors, actors, and poster artists. I think I can speak for everyone working on the festival to say that we will be so grateful for any contribution. Once again, our IndieGogo campaign ends on Thursday, so please don't delay!

A $48 contribution, by the way, gets you a copy of Songs of Hestia, the new book of five plays from the 2010 Olympians Festival, and my debut as a published author. (I wrote the introduction.) The book is also available on Amazon.com if you'd prefer to get it that way -- or if you need to buy additional copies for your friends!

"Tenderloin" at Cutting Ball: Voices of a Neighborhood

The week that Tenderloin opened at Cutting Ball Theater, I published a column for San Francisco Theater Pub that could be seen as disparaging the Tenderloin neighborhood. (It was mostly about how having so many S.F. theaters in the Tenderloin puts our artform at a disadvantage, since it's hard to entice people to visit the neighborhood and it doesn't get good foot traffic.) The timing of my article vis-a-vis the opening of Tenderloin was purely coincidental and I hope that no one made the mistake of interpreting my piece as a veiled swipe at Cutting Ball. Nonetheless, you could say that I seemed to set myself up in opposition to their play. My article took the conventional bourgeois attitude toward the Tenderloin; Cutting Ball's play is designed to counteract this.

Tenderloin has been over a year in the making. Led by director and documentary-theater specialist Annie Elias, the six actors in the piece interviewed Tenderloin residents and other people with a connection to the neighborhood, then shaped the interviews into a theater piece. In the tradition of other documentary-theater artists such as Anna Deavere Smith, they worked to reproduce the exact phrasing, cadences, vocal tone and overall affect of the interviewees.

The result is absolutely stunning from a performance standpoint. MVPs include Tristan Cunningham, who portrays a sad-eyed homeless beatboxer, an irrepressibly cheerful Filipina motivational speaker, and a cynical street-cleaner; and Rebecca Frank, an actress in her mid-twenties who somehow manages to transform herself into 86-year-old Leroy Looper, the "Mayor of the Tenderloin." Meanwhile, David Sinaiko, a middle-aged man with gray hair, plays Leroy's doting wife Kathy. Michael Uy Kelly plays a transsexual waitress, a retired police officer, and a Tenderloin resident with a hilarious story about being asked to take care of a baby. Siobhan Marie Doherty excels at playing tenderhearted female characters (a young woman in an abusive relationship; a massage therapist who provides services to Tenderloin residents) while Leigh Shaw plays more authoritative or powerful women (an activist lawyer; a pastor at Glide Church).

I also found the piece interesting from a playwriting perspective. After all, none of it was conventionally written, but it was wrought out of dozens of interviews -- the speakers are often juxtaposed in interesting ways so that they seem to be in dialogue with one another. I found the structure of the piece effective overall. Moreover, these people speak in fascinating, idiosyncratic ways, which I see as encouragement to be bolder in my own writing. There are times when I'll write a line and then strike it out, saying, "No one would ever say that in real life -- it's too weird/too flowery/too nakedly emotional/etc."  But, it turns out that when you interview real-life people, they do say weird, flowery, emotional, expressive things. And of course, this heightened language works great on stage.

As for the political and thematic messages of Tenderloin? Clearly, the piece is designed to display often-overlooked aspects of the neighborhood -- the architectural heritage, the children who are growing up there (little kids on bouncy-balls and a bubbly high-school student both appear in the play), the many acts of kindness and compassion that take place on a daily basis. The piece also comes out against city policies that have turned the Tenderloin into a "containment zone" for the poor and downtrodden and the social services that cater to them. It used to be that halfway houses and soup kitchens were scattered around the city, but starting in the '70s, they became concentrated in the Tenderloin, amplifying the neighborhood's problems. I found this point especially striking and persuasive because it parallels what I said in my Theater Pub column. I believe San Francisco would benefit if its theaters were located in neighborhoods across the city, rather than just in the Tenderloin; and I can now see how the city would benefit if there were soup kitchens or drug-rehab clinics outside of the Tenderloin, too. Moreover, if the Tenderloin has become synonymous with "everything people don't want," and the majority of San Francisco theaters are located in the Tenderloin -- does this also mean that theater is something that "people don't want," that they'd rather not have in their neighborhood? Something to think about.

Yet at the same time, I felt like Tenderloin sometimes went a bit too far in trying to make us love the neighborhood. We hear from a young woman from Palo Alto who feels safe and welcome in the Tenderloin... but we don't hear from any women complaining about getting catcalled or stared at, which has frequently been my experience. (OK, the catcalling is usually mild, along the lines of "Hey beautiful, give me a smile" rather than anything disgustingly sexual. Nor have I ever had the sense I would be physically assaulted. Nonetheless, it's not exactly fun to walk past a dozen guys loitering on the sidewalk and staring at you.) I wish that that perspective had been represented somewhere in the patchwork of stories that make up Tenderloin.

At the beginning and end of the show, the actors portray what we might think of as "typical" Tenderloin denizens -- drunks, prostitutes, the homeless and mentally ill. In the final scene of the performance that I attended, actress Rebecca Frank (whom I know somewhat) was playing one of these characters. She spotted me in the audience, caught my eye, made some comment about how tall I am, came up the aisle, and asked me to give her a hug. I complied, but at the same time, I was all too well aware that I was hugging Rebecca, a nice young woman pretending to be a homeless drunk, rather than an actual homeless drunk. Which, I think, says something about the limitations of theater. Tenderloin certainly taught me a lot, introducing me to some fascinating real-life people as channeled through the skillful performances of six talented actors. Perhaps I empathize a bit more with the Tenderloin now. But I'm not going to embrace any homeless drunkards any time soon.

Tenderloin has been playing to sellout crowds and was just extended for 2 more weeks, June 14-24. Tickets here.

Image: Rebecca Frank and David Sinaiko as Leroy and Kathy Looper. Photo by Rob Melrose.

Ode to the Props Master

Here's "Ode to the Props Master," my other contribution to Theater Pub's "Odes of March" show celebrating all of the different people who make theater possible.

What would Hamlet be without a skull?
What would The Seagull be without a gull?
And Hedda Gabler’s famous for her pistols,
As Laura, for her menagerie of crystal.
For farce, you need a slapstick to cause mirth;
For Sam Shepard, a buried child to unearth.
The Angel of America needs her book,
And Captain You-Know-Who must wear a hook.
What would Willy Loman be without his cases?
Or Damn Yankees sans bats and balls and bases?
R and J without a dagger is a bore,
As is Titus without gushing blood and gore.
Othello needs the fatal handkerchief,
And ingénues their smelling salts to sniff.

The Props Master takes care of all these things --
Flowers and asses’ heads and fairies’ wings.
(These are the props that you need for Midsummer;
I say this for the benefit of newcomers.)
He scrounges, cadges, buys what can be bought,
Finds everything he can, and makes what he cannot;
Brews tea, which actors then pretend is whisky,
Since real booze on the stage is far too risky.
Or he’ll take paper and dye it in more tea
So it seems from another century.
‘Tis he who knows the source to get a sword,
And fifty nifty uses for cardboard.
He sees each object’s soul; and makes it fit in
With what the director’s staged and writer’s written.

And then he lays the props upon a table
And makes for each a designated label
And a space marked by lines of masking tape
Befitting each odd item’s size and shape.
And then the props master begs and implores:
“Do not move any prop – unless it’s yours!”

If only life were like this! If only we’d
Have someone else to find the things we need
And lay them neat and tidy on a table
For us to use, and thus our acts enable;
To see to every object, trinket, token;
Keep it in trim; repair it if it’s broken.
If only we could organize our things
And place them on a table in the wings!
O world edged by these masking-tape borders!
O props master, o paragon of order!

He gives us props; let us give props to him!
For this is the whole purpose of my hymn.
I praise him for his zeal and his proclivity
For mixing discipline and creativity.
Salute him then with twenty-one fake guns
And drink his health with tea – not Jameson!
--------------
NOTES:

• I chose to write the Ode to the Props Master because I thought it'd be fun to make rhymes about things (all of the different objects that the props master must find), mixed in with references to well-known plays and the props they require. Very quickly, I came up with the lines "What would Hamlet be without a skull? / What would The Seagull be without a gull?" and therefore, determined that the poem would need to be in heroic couplets.
• Heroic couplets are FUN to write. I can totally see how Alexander Pope churned out line after line of them.
• Only later did I realize that the form of the poem also suited the message I was trying to convey. Heroic couplets have a very orderly, neat and tidy feeling, and my poem is about how the props master keeps everything neat and organized. And then I felt very clever -- without even realizing it, I'd followed Sondheim's key principle of "content dictates form"!
• As with my Costume Designer ode, the demands of poetic form superseded my desire to invert traditional gender stereotypes. Thus, I used the singular masculine pronoun "he" at all times to refer to the Props Master.
• Surprisingly, I did not come up with the silly pun on "He gives us props; let us give props to him!" until very late in my process of writing the poem. This might be the most ridiculous line in the whole piece -- the semicolon adds to the ridiculousness, I think -- and thus it is my favorite.
• My original idea for staging this piece at the Theater Pub show involved having one person recite the poem while two Assistants pulled props out of bags as they were mentioned, tossed them around, and engaged in general tomfoolery. This had to be toned down a bit for the actual performance -- the Cafe Royale didn't want us throwing things around, and we were not able to source all of the props mentioned -- but the general idea remained. Neil Higgins recited the poem, while several of the other actors that night brought out prop pieces and eventually put them into a masking-tape grid. Unfortunately, I was seated behind a pillar and didn't get to see any of this (!) but it got a good reaction from the crowd. Especially the rubber chicken that we used for the "seagull" and the baby doll wrapped in rags that was the "buried child." (Dead animals: great for comedy!)

Ode to the Costume Designer

Hey, remember when I wrote two poems for San Francisco Theater Pub's show in March? I always meant to post the poems on my blog when the "Odes of March" project was over... so here, albeit belatedly, is "Ode to the Costume Designer."

Cinderella and others got dressed in their finery
By magic, by fairies, by sprites.
In theater, our fairy’s the costume designer; she
Makes clothes to enchant and delight.

Her taste is eccentric and never generic. Her
Knowledge of costume impresses.
And many an actor first gets into character
By wearing the right shoes or dresses.

She knows how to flatter your hips, breasts, or pelvis
By artfully adding some trim
And when a director hates actors in velvet
The costumer humors his whim.

Like one of the mice in The Tailor of Gloucester
She stays up all night sewing seams
She sheds not a tear for the sleep it will cost her
Making raiment of radiant dreams.

Clothes are not silly; a character’s fashions
Can show us the depths of his heart.
So let’s pay homage to the costumer’s passions,
Her talents, her efforts, her art.

------------------------------------
NOTES:

• I tried to be clever with the rhymes but I worry that some of them are a bit too precious ("finery" / "designer, she"). However, I will defend "Gloucester" / "cost her" till my dying day.
• I wrote stanza #4 first, and it's still my favorite -- not only for the "Gloucester" rhyme, but for the "raiment of radiant dreams" line.
• The rhyme on "Gloucester" and "cost her" also dictated that the costume designer in my poem is female. Which made me feel like I was reinforcing gender stereotypes, in a way that I would prefer to avoid, but my rhyme-snobbery won out over my feminism :-)
• The reference to the velvet-hating director is an in-joke about my friend Stuart.
• On performance night, this ode was performed by Aoife Davis as the costume designer, dressing Jessica Rudholm in a beautiful gown.

Hitting the Sweet Spot of the Nostalgia Cycle

It seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. [...] Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories.

--Adam Gopnik, "The Forty-Year Itch," The New Yorker, April 23, 2012

My play Pleiades is set in 1971. I didn't know about the forty-year nostalgia cycle when I was writing it, but I definitely felt that there was... something extra-resonant about writing about that era. It was a conscious effort to write a play about my mother's generation of women when they were my age: early twenties, not quite fully formed, finding their way. While I don't think that Pleiades betrays much genuine nostalgia for the early '70s (Gopnik's definition: the belief that an era "is not simply a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you") it does feel like we're coming to a time in our culture when we can reevaluate the '70s. When I was growing up in the '90s, my mother would dismiss the '70s as a decade of bad fashion, bad music, and bad faith. But I have to believe there's more to it than that.

Pleiades was my effort to write about my mother's generation as young women; The Rose of Youth, my '30s play, was about my grandmothers' generation. (Here's a post I wrote in 2007 discussing the parallels between Grandma's generation and my own.) Forty years in the past, and eighty years in the past. Yes, there's something to Gopnik's theory.

The new season of Mad Men prompted this New Yorker piece on nostalgia. Can I just say that the use of music in Mad Men is making me feel better about the way I used music in Pleiades? The play is bookended with two songs from a Judy Collins album, which set the mood and make thematic points, but I wondered if I was being too obvious and predictable. (Seven young women in 1971 -- of course they listen to Judy Collins!) But then I realized that Mad Men isn't always subtle in its musical cues either -- and it's not a problem. "Satisfaction" in Season 4, or "Tomorrow Never Knows" last Sunday, are iconic songs that suit the show, the themes, the characters. And I'm glad that they form part of the Mad Men sonic landscape -- that they've been deemed necessary and appropriate, rather than predictable and obvious.

Though I also appreciate how they mix iconic songs with more obscure ones -- I know a thing or two about yé-yé music, but I'd never heard "Zou Bisou Bisou" before it appeared in the Mad Men season premiere!

I do need to do a new draft of Pleiades, but Judy Collins won't get edited out.

Everything Amazing is Happening at Once

Hiya! I've been busy trying to make amazing things happen. And all of a sudden, they are! Let me tell you of them:

• Remember last summer when I wrote the first scene of a play and then Un-Scripted Theater improvised the rest of it?  It's happening again!  Un-Scripted is reprising their "Act One, Scene Two" improv format and once again I am included in the line-up of writers. My contribution this year is titled "The Curtailed Cavalier" -- that's right, it's a swashbuckling melodrama.  This one-night-only event (likely to contain romance, honor, intrigue, and improvised swordfighting) is taking place on Friday, May 11 at the Phoenix Theater in San Francisco. Tickets here. Facebook invite here.

• A BOOK I COPY-EDITED IS AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER ON AMAZON.COM! Sorry for shouting, but this is basically the coolest thing that has ever happened to me. Songs of Hestia: Five Plays from the 2010 San Francisco Olympians Festival is being published later this month and is currently available for pre-order. I copy-edited the book and wrote the introduction. The text of Amazon.com's "Book Description" is taken from my introduction! Contains plays by Nirmala Nataraj, Bennett Fisher, Stuart Eugene Bousel, Claire Rice, and Evelyn Jean Pine.

• The other book I copy-edited this year, the Bay One-Acts (BOA) Anthology, is available for purchase at the BOA Festival. Both books have covers designed by Cody Rishell and, with their similar color schemes, I must say that they would look fabulous next to one another on your bookshelf. Also remember to get your BOA tickets, and check out the playwright interviews that I did for the BOA website!

• In 2012, I have added lots of new titles to my resume -- copy-editor, dramaturg, and now columnist! I am writing a twice-monthly column, "Hi-Ho, the Glamorous Life," for the newly revamped San Francisco Theater Pub website. Two pieces are up so far: an introduction, and an exploration of the "Van Ness Avenue Problem." Want to know what that is? Best go read my column!

• With both of the books I copy-edited safely put to bed and at the printers', I can get back to planning my upcoming London and Paris trip. I think I NEED to see Henry V at the Globe Theater -- what could be more British, or more wonderful?

 So yes, I'm busy, but I've got amazing stuff going on. Follow me on Twitter (@MarissaSkud) so you don't miss any of it!

Highly-Anticipated Movie Reviews: "Damsels in Distress"

The latest in an occasional series comparing my anticipation of a movie with the post-viewing reality...



Title of movie: Damsels in Distress 

Reason(s) for anticipation: NEW WHIT STILLMAN MOVIE! His first in 14 years!

All right, technically speaking, I didn't wait a full 14 years for this film. I first saw a Stillman movie (Metropolitan) just two and a half years ago -- but it was love at first sight. Since then, I've discovered that several of my playwright friends are equally as enamored of Stillman's screenwriting as I am, and I even co-hosted a Metropolitan-viewing party earlier this year. (We ate deviled eggs, dressed up in 1980s prom gowns, and danced the cha-cha.) I was thrilled to learn that Stillman would have a new movie coming out and interested to see what kind of story he would tell about young women of my generation. And of course, with the release of this movie, I'm loving the renewed attention paid to Stillman's filmmaking and all of the new interviews with him that are being published.

The premise: At a third-rate private university, three female students -- ringleader Violet, imperious Rose, and dippy Heather -- are on a self-imposed mission to bring good cheer and old-fashioned sociability to the benighted student body. The girls befriend Lily, a transfer student, and include her in their schemes, such as tap-dancing lessons for depressed students and scented soap for stinky boys. (It is typical of Stillman's deadpan humor that none of the characters ever point out that all of the girls are named after flowers.) But their attempts to impose order on the world run up against a host of problems, mainly male ones: dumb and smelly frat boys or disreputable "playboy-operator types." Lily also turns out to be more skeptical, less tractable, than foreseen.

My reaction: Has Whit Stillman been reading my mind? How has he possibly put so many of my pet preoccupations into one film?  Here's a movie where the characters wear sundresses with full circle skirts, worship Fred Astaire, read "flit lit" (dandy literature like Waugh and Wilde), hang Paris maps on their walls, and use Truffaut's Stolen Kisses as a seduction technique.

So many of the movie's little details resonated with me in an almost spooky way. In an early scene, the girls are at a frat party, where the '90s song "Another Night" by The Real McCoy is playing. "Ooh, a golden oldie! I love these!" cries Violet. Now, I have a very powerful Proustian-terpsichorean reaction to "Another Night," because when I was in fifth grade, some friends and I made up a dance routine to that song for a gym class assignment. This is the closest I have ever come to trying to start a dance craze. (This was the year that the Macarena came out and I feel like the gym teacher's assignment, as well as my dance moves, were vaguely Macarena-inspired.) And, later in the movie, Violet reveals that her greatest ambition is to start a dance craze. Odd, right? Out of all of the '90s golden oldies that Stillman could have chosen, why did he pick "Another Night"?

And it went on from there: a joke (I won't spoil it) that will make me and my parents laugh for an entirely different reason than it will make everyone else laugh; a revelation that one of the principal characters is from Portland, Oregon (my home town)... Of course, because I enjoy Stillman's sensibility, I'd expected that I would enjoy Damsels in Distress. But I had not expected to feel like Whit Stillman had been reading my mind!

So, here's the conundrum. Damsels in Distress is an extremely strange movie: it's Stillman's broadest comedy, presenting lots of preposterous characters and situations with a straight face. Many reviews have remarked that it seems to be set in some kind of idiosyncratic fantasy world. It's utterly sui generis, and yet it felt like it had been made for me. It's not even that Damsels in Distress reflected my own college experience to any significant degree -- just that it's chock-full of the material signifiers and abstract themes that tend to preoccupy me.

And, furthermore, it's decidedly odd for me to feel this way about a movie made by a man my parents' age, and not, you know, by Lena Dunham.  On the other hand, I was quite pleased to be confirmed in my feeling (which I've had ever since watching Metropolitan) that I am a half-step away from being a Whit Stillman character myself.

So what does that mean, "a Whit Stillman character"? Perfectionists, idealists. People who believe and say utterly ridiculous things, but with great conviction and impeccable grammar. People who are concerned with the viability of virtuousness in the modern world. (I once said to a friend of mine in college, "I feel like I am on a constant quest for self-improvement." "Oh yes, me too," my friend replied, and I remember thinking No, it's not the same thing. Because she meant it in a New Age, spiritual-growth sense, and I meant it in an old-fashioned Protestant Work Ethic sense.) Stillman may gently mock his characters' more outlandish theories, but unlike so many other American filmmakers, he will not mock anyone for being too intellectual, too idealistic, too exacting. In a typical romantic comedy, Violet would be demonized as a prig in need of a comeuppance, but in Damsels, she's the heroine. Indeed, the movie could be subtitled "The Vindication of Violet." She gets the only guy in the movie who's worth having (no spoilers, but I will say that many American movies would demonize him, too), and gets to start her dance craze, the Sambola. The Sambola scene, shot in shades of red, gold, and black, might be the most visually lovely thing Stillman has ever filmed.



Violet is the sort of person who'd rather light a (scented) candle than curse the darkness. The movie's comedy arises from her failure to understand that some people just don't like candles, and from her tendency to singe her own fingers when lighting the match, but the point stands: she has an optimistic, generous, can-do spirit. I strive to be this way, and it seems like Whit Stillman does, too. If you read between the lines of interviews with him, you can tell that he doesn't like much modern cinema, but he's too much of a gentleman to go off on some curmudgeonly rant about "kids these days and their sex and violence." Rather (after fourteen years of struggling with matches that won't light), he's made the kind of film that he'd like to see. Which, as it turns out, is just the kind of film that I'd like to see. Anyone want to Sambola with me?