Talk. Write. Show. Don't Preach! Writing for Young People

 

The first play I saw in a theater as a child had a princess in it. Much as I wanted to like it, I was soon bored. I had already been fascinated by movies like The Wizard of Oz, shown every year on Thanksgiving. Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West were far more fascinating.

Other movies, plays and stories drew me in with dinosaurs, ghosts, horses and adventures. I wasn’t a writer then, but I knew that certain stories were thrilling — and others, not so much.

Safe stories with plots that appeared to go wrong for a minute or two and then righted themselves, seemed fake in ways I couldn’t have explained at six or seven years old. I knew when something happened that seemed genuine — and that is always what I look for, since.

I've written a number of plays for children, and each theater has its own, fairly large audiences. Subjects ranged from historical to folk tale adaptations with hints of magic and fantasy to a young teen satire. I also wrote a three-book, middle-grade historical series about the Beat Generation in 1958.

I decided to set the Beat Street series in the 1950s because I thought Beats sparked what we later called the hippie era and a new way of looking at art. I didn’t always know I wanted to be an artist, but I had a feeling that artists were more like me than doctors, lawyers, or CEOs. And part of me knew that, as someone who loved making up stories, I was headed for a creative life.

Early on, I learned that telling a story to children is like telling any other story: we need to show, not tell; share, not preach, and most of all, create stories and plot lines to captivate readers and audiences, no matter how old or young they are. Yes, there are things we don't want to show to a three-year-old. At the same time, we don't want the three-year-old to be so bored she wanders off--or worse, falls asleep.

Read more here.

 

Why "The Last Five Years" is Still One of My Favorite Musicals

A young couple moves to New York together; he, to follow a writing career and she to become a professional actor. He succeeds beyond his wildest dreams, while she gets very little work and ultimately comes to see her career as a failure. As so often happens in such situations, the couple goes through a few years of angst and then breaks up.

This is the premise of The Last Five Years, one of my favorite musicals, which I only saw a few years ago and which is told with an impressively innovative structure. The lead character Cathy starts her story at the end, singing “Still Hurting” after the couple has broken up. As she works her way backwards, her husband Jamie tells his story more conventionally. They meet up once in the middle, during their wedding. 

So much for the tried-and-true rule that says we always need “a beginning, middle and end” in that order. This show proves we do not.

Read more on Medium. 

A Show about Home Made Me Curious About the Balkans War -- and a Costume Designer Named Boris

 

I think of him whenever I share this picture, though we never met; he created this sketch based solely on what two other cast members told him. His name was Boris (as you can see if you look closely at the picture). I had always wanted to know someone named Boris — so it was fun to find out he was designing a costume for me.

I had just been asked to join the cast of an ensemble workshop at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis. Called Bridge of Stones, it explored the concept of “home” for eight artists. What I liked most was how funny it turned out to be, with the kind of laughs that emerge from improvisation and imaginings.

At every rehearsal, a new story was formed from a personal recollection brought forth by one of the cast. We improvised stories and lines around the idea until a scene was created, and only then did we start to write it down. The more we worked together, the more we got to know each other — which helped a lot when I couldn’t attend the costume design interviews.

What I remember about Boris is that he was an intern at the theater, though I have no idea how he got there. The company’s artistic director and the co-creator who conceptualized the piece talked with Boris to help him sketch each of our characters. The co-creator told me they mentioned “long, red hair” and “storyteller” (or something like that), when they talked about me.

The result is the artwork you see.

Boris was from the country formerly known as Yugoslavia (now Serbia and Montenegro). He was in the U. S. during what is known as the Balkans war. For many years, Yugoslavia had been held together by its leader Tito (who was actually said to have been a “benevolent” and “popular” dictator, if there is such a thing). Once he died, the country fell apart.

Read more on Medium.

Her Theater Made Me a Better Playwright: Remembering Tanya Berezin

I don’t remember how I first became aware of Circle Repertory Company, but growing up in northern New Jersey, I got into New York City as much as I possibly could. In my twenties, I discovered a theater that would (cliché alert) change my life.

The first thing I did at Circle Rep was audition for a role, and I even remember the part I wanted — that of a Yugoslavian immigrant trying to reconcile her old life and her new one. The actors I auditioned with had astonishing concentration and made me feel as though we were already in the play. It was one of my favorite auditions, though I did not get a callback that day.

I did, however, leave the company thinking about how much I wanted to return. It wasn’t so much about being part of an established theater. It was about finding a theater where the kind of work they were doing matched the work I wanted to do.

As I stepped outside of 99 Seventh Avenue South, watching crowds of people avoiding other crowds as they do so well in New York, I made a pact with myself:

Some day, I will stand at the door of this theater, and be invited in to be a part of it.

Read more on Medium.

Photo by Martin de Arriba on Unsplash

Musical Chair

 

I talk a lot about stories and books in this blog--and much less about writing plays. Yet, if you asked me to describe myself, my first word would be "playwright."

Would I also say "musical playwright?" Likely not, but maybe I should.

The first play I wrote (ever) was a musical, and before that, I wrote songs with a composer/partner for a variety of rock bands. Like all bands, we had our problems, and when it seemed we were very close to breaking up, we did break up. The composer went on tour in a children's musical and I started auditioning for acting roles.

We decided to keep in touch by writing a musical--which was a little like  jumping on the back of a very slippery dinosaur and trying to ride. Fortunately, the composer and I had help from a musical theater company in New York. The play wasn't produced, but the workshop helped me figure out what you needed to write a musical. That included the same sense of character and dialogue you use for writing unmusical plays, a rhyming dictionary and complete and utter fearlessness.

I didn't think much about musical theater for many years after that, concentrating instead on writing plays. During the 2008 recession, I had the great good luck to work with Theater Latte Da as a grant writer. That brought me to an amazing theater group called Prosody.

Prosody was created by Composer and Music Director Denise Prosek, and though it's not active right now I can tell you it had a profound effect on me. The first time I saw the group's performance  was at a cabaret, where the authors and composers gathered to share their work. It was the first time I was actually present at the dawning of so many songs, on so many different subjects. It was also the first time I realized what songwriting could be.

That night, I decided I had to be a member of the group (or die). Luckily I didn't die, and even more luckily they let me in. Prosody taught me far more about writing musicals than I had time to learn when writing my first one-- so in that respect, I was lucky, once again.

I'm not going to say much more at this point, except to say I'm writing a musical with a composer these days. It's taking a while to get where we want to be, but that's okay. I have a feeling it will be worth it when we get there.