Script Evaluation 101 @ SF Theater Pub Blog

Another week, another Theater Pub column. This week, my topic is "Script Evaluation 101" -- the basic questions, rubrics, and biases that I use when I'm evaluating play scripts. Read my column and you, too, can become just as qualified as I am to judge new plays!

Or, if you disagree with the sweeping generalizations, unsubstantiated opinions, and blatant prejudices that I use to evaluate scripts, why don't you tell me your rules for evaluating plays, and we can hash it out in the comments?

"Wendy and the Lost Boys": Wasserstein's stranger-than-fiction life

If you're an American female playwright, particularly one who went to a Seven Sisters college, you're going to have to grapple with the legacy of Wendy Wasserstein. We all have our literary forebears that we do battle with in that "Anxiety of Influence" kind of way, and Wasserstein is one of mine. Not the only one, certainly. But Uncommon Women and Others was a big, big influence on me when I was writing Pleiades, and I wrote a college term paper on The Heidi Chronicles. And Wasserstein is the archetypal Baby Boomer female playwright, and I am a daughter of Boomers, so in some sense, it's like she is my mother...

As such, I had wanted to read Julie Salamon's biography of Wasserstein, Wendy and the Lost Boys, ever since it came out two years ago. But I was also hesitant: I read reviews stating that the biography made Wasserstein out to be a sadder and more complicated woman than she ever let on. Is this what it meant to be a female artist? (Must a female artist suffer?) Would reading the book just depress me? I knew that Wasserstein never found romantic love, and I too was suffering bad luck in my love life, and in my more cynical moments I'd repeat to myself, "Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe, and Wendy Wasserstein died alone."

Maybe I finally allowed myself to read Wendy and the Lost Boys this month because I am secure and happy in a relationship, so the story of a romantically-frustrated female playwright now has less power to trigger my neuroses. Anyway, here's my Goodreads review of the biography.

  Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein by Julie Salamon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Wendy and the Lost Boys" is a fascinating biography that ferrets out some of the secrets and sorrows that Wendy Wasserstein hid beneath her giggly, lovably self-deprecating public persona. In some respects, Wasserstein was a typical Baby Boomer woman, breaking the glass ceiling in the '70s, giving up her bohemian roots and becoming part of the Establishment during the '80s and '90s, etc. In other respects, she was completely atypical. Her parents, siblings, friendships, and romantic relationships were all far more complicated than she ever revealed to the public, either in her plays (which were often semi-autobiographical) or her magazine essays.

Julie Salamon tells this story capably, bringing to life the vivid "cast of characters" that made up Wendy's world. Many of Wasserstein's famous friends, such as Christopher Durang and André Bishop, spoke to Salamon and provided valuable insights. (Dishiest piece of gossip: around the time "The Heidi Chronicles" was on Broadway, Wendy had a lengthy affair with Terrence McNally -- though McNally was gay, and had formerly been Edward Albee's boyfriend!)

Salamon's writing shows some signs of fatigue in the later chapters of the book -- lots of one-sentence paragraphs, things like that. Nevertheless, the final chapters are surprisingly suspenseful, as Wendy has a "mystery" baby and then a "mystery" illness, all within the last six years of her too-short life. Her secretiveness about the pregnancy and about her baby's father is mirrored by her secretiveness about the lymphoma that killed her. If this were a play, you might not believe it -- but this is Wendy's uncommon life.

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Shitstirring (lots of it) @ SF Theater Pub Blog

What happens when two verbose, overeducated people who always want to have the last word start to argue about the ethics of stirring shit up, our responsibilities to ourselves and to our fellow humans, and the best way to live in an imperfect world?

You get me and Stuart Bousel, my editor at the Theater Pub blog, going head-to-head in the comments section for several rounds.

The argument started when I used my Theater Pub column this week to quibble with some aspects of Stuart's earlier piece "In Defense of Stirring Shit Up." Then he responded in the comments section to quibble with some of my points, etc. It got very heady and somewhat heated, but I am proud of what I wrote, and I think it's worth reading.

Go over there and enter the fray... if you dare.

Goodreads and less-good ones

Popping in to say that I joined Goodreads a couple of weeks ago, at my boyfriend's urging. I always keep lists of everything I read (which reminds me, I never posted my 2012 list on my blog) -- so why not do it using Goodreads' interface, and get exposed to new books I might like via Goodreads' fancy book-recommending algorithm?

Posting reviews of what I'm reading on Goodreads also feels more comfortable, somehow, then posting them here on marissabidilla. When I write a blog post here, I feel like it needs to be a well-researched, well-organized piece of writing that makes a clear and interesting argument. You (the reader of my blog) aren't interested in just hearing my random thoughts about whatever book I happen to be reading, I think... so my post needs some other justification for existing beyond "I felt like writing a book review." As a result, I can't remember the last time I wrote a book review on marissabidilla.

Whereas, when I write a review on Goodreads, the "why" of the review is self-evident ("because I just finished reading this book, and this website wants me to rate and review it"). And I don't need to worry about making my review a perfect piece of writing, since it is just one of dozens or hundreds of reviews on the site. I can simply write 250 or so words about the book, listing some of my thoughts and attempting to justify the star rating I gave to it.

My first Goodreads review is for Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub, a book I wanted to read as soon as I heard about it. Unfortunately, I didn't think it lived up to the hype.

Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I picked up this book because I enjoy classic movies and wanted to read a novelist's take on Hollywood in the 1940s, but Emma Straub seems more interested in her protagonist's domestic life than in her film career. The novel goes into great detail about Laura Lamont's (née Elsa Emerson) small-town childhood, her marriages, and her children, even to the point of rehashing the same themes and emotions over and over. (Regarding Laura's troubled son, Junior, on page 292 we learn that "Hearing his name from someone else's mouth felt like a hole through Laura's lung," and ten pages later, "Sometimes he looked so much like his father that it poked a hole straight through Laura's heart.") Meanwhile, the novel is comparatively silent on subjects like Laura's filmography, her professional relationships, or the actual extent of her talent as an actress.

The novel follows Laura into the 1950s, '60s, and beyond -- decades during which various tragedies strike her family, and she loses her fame and beauty. For much of the book, she is a lost and melancholy woman (I lost count of the number of times she weeps). While this makes emotional sense for the character, pages and pages of a woman wallowing in grief and regret doesn't always make for compelling reading. I also thought there was a rather off-putting subtext of "being a woman, a wife, and a mother, means a life of suffering and sorrow."

I had hoped that this novel would offer me vivid characters, snappy dialogue, and/or sweeping emotional climaxes, which are some of the things I love best about 1940s movies, but I was unfortunately disappointed.



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(What do you think? Should I keep cross-posting my reviews from Goodreads onto marissabidilla?)

Confessions of a Copy-Editor @ SF Theater Pub Blog

One reason that postings here have been so intermittent is that I've been busy this summer copy-editing two anthologies of plays:

• the Bay One Acts anthology, which will be available for sale in the lobby and is also a reward for our Kickstarter donors. A $25 donation gets you a ticket to the festival AND a copy of the anthology. Such a deal!
• Heavenly Bodies, an anthology of plays from the 2011 Olympians Festival, including my own Pleiades. Needless to say, I'm really excited about this one, and will post more details (publication date, etc.) as I have them.

And, for my latest Theater Pub column, I decided to write about my adventures as a copy-editor of play anthologies. Read all about it!

I've spent so much time copy-editing lately that it affects the way I see the world. I've become ever more conscious of typos in the things I read for pleasure. Moreover, after I read that New York Times article about new research indicating that Shakespeare wrote some 325 lines of The Spanish Tragedy, my takeaway was "Just think, if copy-editors had existed in Jacobean England, we wouldn't have this proof." (The text of these lines is riddled with errors and misprints, but the researcher thinks that most of them came about because the printers had trouble reading Shakespeare's messy handwriting.) So perhaps I shouldn't beat myself up if an occasional typo slips into the books I edit? Writers' typos and errors are unique, personal signatures; and as a copy-editor, you develop a very intimate relationship with the text.

And two different friends recently sent me that Onion article about "4 Copy Editors Killed in Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence." Thing is, though, I'm a freelancer. I have no stylebook. I make my own rules. I'm an outlaw gunslinger, and it's a lonely world.

The Obscure Sorrow of Turning 26

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."
—Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

I turned 26 last month. This, I'd thought, was not a particularly remarkable birthday to celebrate—turning 25, a quarter century, is what gets all of the hoopla. Yet in recent weeks, I've seen several references to the idea that one's twenty-sixth birthday marks the end of foolish youthful hedonism.

There's this humor piece on The Hairpin, "Thank You So Much For Being With Me to Celebrate My Twenty-Five-and-Twelve-Month Birthday," by Julia Meltzer:

As a twenty-five-and-twelve-month-old, it is completely appropriate that I spend Saturday nights locked in my apartment with the five of you and two boxes of Franzia playing Settlers of Catan, Drinking Rules Edition. Max and Joe, I still think that longest road trade was sketchy! No but seriously, when I turn twenty-six that will all be over. I will start going to casual dinners at sophisticated restaurants with friends I haven’t seen in soooooo long, having One or Two Cocktails, and heading home to watch an independent film with my serious boyfriend before knocking off a quick journal entry and falling asleep in a haze of contentment. 

(As many 26-year-olds do, I alternate between the "watching indie films with my serious boyfriend" phase of my life and the "drunken Settlers of Catan" phase. Nonetheless, I relate to what Meltzer is saying about the gap between our real lives and our ideal lives. It's one of my favorite subjects.)

Then there's this, from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Midsummer, n. A feast celebrated on the day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires as a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they’ve barely taken root—and the point at which the days will begin to feel shorter as they pass, until even the pollen in the air reminds you of the coming snow.

(Are you familiar with The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows? I only just discovered it, but it is the best. It puts words to all the secret aches and regrets and doubts that characterize life as a sensitive soul in the 21st century, yet so often go unacknowledged. The kinds of delicate, poignant, but universal emotions that I want to write plays about.)

Maybe this is just confirmation bias, turning 26 and then suddenly becoming more aware of/interested in other writers who talk about this.

Or maybe it's that I was born into a huge cohort of Internet-equipped, navel-gazing youths, all full of So Many Feelings, all convinced that we're the first people ever to feel this way, and compelled to share our uneasy angst with the world. We're attending our five-year college reunions, and listening to the new Vampire Weekend album, and watching things like Frances Ha and Girls that speak to the anxieties of our generation; and we link to Buzzfeed articles about "growing up in the '90s" and wallow in nostalgia for a childhood that suddenly feels so far away; and I'm amazed that we don't all melt into one quivering blob of jelly, overwhelmed by the weight of all these obscure sorrows.

(Nota bene: I originally typed "quivering blog of jelly." A Freudian slip.)

And when the more practical voice in your head speaks up to tell you that nostalgia is a foolish waste of time, that your life is actually going pretty well, that you have no reason to castigate yourself for being an "irresponsible youth" because you're a type-A perfectionist who's had maybe two hours of true irresponsibility in your entire life... well, it can be tempting to wish that that voice would just shut up, even though it speaks the truth. Angst and nostalgia are so seductive, and it seems like it'd be so beautiful to stand with everyone else, in confusion and misery, and feel All the Feelings.

As a matter of fact, today is my five-year anniversary of moving to San Francisco. I love it here, and I also realize that during these five years I have matured, ridding myself of many of the self-delusions and false beliefs that held me back, and generally becoming a much happier, better-adjusted person. I'm more outgoing and confident; I have a better understanding of others' motivations, as well as my own. In many respects, I feel like I lead a charmed life (for which I try to cultivate gratitude). This anniversary should be cause for a (responsible) celebration! Yet my joy is tempered with a sense of "Okay, Marissa, you've had five years as an aimless flâneur; now it's time to get down to business, figure out what you want out of life, purge yourself of everything extraneous, and for God's sake, start saving for retirement! You are going to need to push yourself a lot more in the next five years in order to accomplish everything you want to do in your twenties."

In the first blog post I ever wrote after moving here, I quoted Angels in America: "Heaven is a city Much Like San Francisco."

And now, five years on, I'm saying to myself, "The Great Work begins."

And here's another question: now that I am 26, am I too old to refer to myself as a girl? My blog header calls me "a girl with an answer for some things and a question for most things," and in my Twitter bio I'm a "would-be girl-about-town," but at what point does that word start to become ridiculous when applied to a grown, adult woman?

What Makes a Play a "Marissa Skudlarek Play"? And Other Thoughts on Personal Branding

In my latest piece for San Francisco Theater Pub's blog, "Branding Upon the Brain," I contemplate the pros and cons of branding yourself as a writer. Is branding a means of identifying and promoting your strengths, or is it a distraction? Does branding yourself mean pigeonholing and caricaturing yourself?

(Does asking all these questions make me sound like Carrie Bradshaw?)

This piece ties in rather well with this marissabidilla post from 2010, "What kind of plays do you write?" Funny: in the older post, I wrote, "Being a young writer, I am fortunate that I can hedge and say 'Well, I feel like I'm still learning, and finding my voice.' But I don't have too many more years in which I can get away with this." How right I was. It's three years later, and I feel like I have passed the point where I can just smile winsomely and say "I think I'm still finding my voice."

After my post went up on the Theater Pub site, I received a very kind and thoughtful Facebook message from a friend who wished to comment on it in a non-public way. While I respect my friend's desire for anonymity, I also really liked what s/he had to say, and I don't want the message to get lost in the depths of Facebook. And when someone tells you something really smart about your own work, I think you have the right to post it on your blog. This is what my friend wrote:

Your work as I know it has a strong brand and a strong feeling to it, from the pregnant lady drinking a beer to the '40s movie star, and it's related not to how you tell your stories (place, time, style) per se, but to what you tell stories about. At least so far, I would say your work is marked by an obsessive exploration of how social expectations prevent selfless connections between people. I see that in almost all your plays: the war between the selfish and the innocent, or maybe between the selfless and the cruel, sometimes between those tendencies within one person, set in a terrain of social/historical confines, looking at how these absurd or arcane social norms are a breeding ground for cruelty and frustration. It doesn't mean you can't try something new and keep growing, but that particular subject matter seems to matter to you in most of your plays, and there's nothing wrong with being pretty sure about what matters to you!

I love it when other people can explain me to myself. Seriously, this is explains so much about my body of work, both its flaws and its virtues. (When writing about "the war between the selfish and the innocent," you have to be careful not to tip over into melodrama, hyperbole, or gratuitous cruelty.) It explains why I am so proud of Pleiades and why feel, somehow, like only I could have written it. It explains why I write so many plays that take place in different eras — the deeper purpose that historical fiction serves for me as a writer. Heck, even the first play I ever wrote, Deus ex Machina, was about greedy, selfish television producers versus an innocent teenage girl, and the absurdities of peer pressure and media influence.

And it's odd, isn't it? I say I don't want to brand myself because I don't want to constrain myself — yet my brand, it seems, is writing about people who feel constrained, and therefore dissatisfied and unhappy.

Also: in my Theater Pub column, I make reference to my participation in the ATLAS Program for Playwrights, a career development initiative. In July, at the ATLAS Playwrights' Showcase, I spoke a little bit about my work and read the first five minutes of my play Beer Theory (which is definitely about "looking at how absurd social norms can breed cruelty and frustration," oh boy). Local actor Don Hardwick attended the showcase and recently wrote it up on his blog. Thanks, Don!