Blogging Absence

The blog is currently silent.

But, the pages will be updated.

For anything current - please check there.

And, if you'd like to recommend a play to read, post it in the comments.

All the best to all.

-Kristen

We Play For The Gods

things have been busy.

click on these things to find out about this amazing Collaboration I have been working on:

 nytheatre review

 Brooklyn Rail Article

 WE PLAY FOR THE GODS

and come see it at the Cherry Lane before June 23rd.
  

LOCAL STORY on Indie Theater Now

Indie Theater Now has been creating an on-line collection of plays, and today LOCAL STORY is live on the site.

You can read it for a pittance. Then you can dream of tiny Betsy and learn the sort of local history that they don't teach in school.

Click Here to visit my page at Indie Theater Now

Deadlines

I have a post up over at the Coyote Commission Project Blog.

You should read it.

Here.

Excerpt from a new play...SACRIFICE

In case you missed the current issue of The Dramatist - which, I know, you may have, but you would have missed an excerpt of my play. And that would be too bad - so here is the excerpt.

The full play - will be coming soon to a reading or workshop or production near you, contact me if you want to make that happen sooner than later...


SACRIFICE takes place in South-East Iowa. Emmie's been brought from the city to her grandmother's struggling farm by her father, an un-employed truck driver.


4.

EMMIE (16) and MONTGOMERY (14) are target shooting with the rifle. Cans lined up along the fence posts.

EMMIE
Underneath the flat flat flat are downward holes. Mole hills. Filled with ugly. Filled with crazy. Filled with you kill us or we’ll kill you worse.

MONTGOMERY
How’d you get so smart?

EMMIE
I wouldn’t call it smart.

MONTGOMERY
What would you call it?

EMMIE
Wide-eyed and hungry.

MONTGOMERY
I don’t know these things.

EMMIE
You never had crazy in your house. You live with crazy in your house you might end up with the eyes you need to see what’s going on behind things. Under things.

MONTGOMERY
Teach me.

EMMIE
People only learn what they need to learn.

MONTGOMERY
Maybe.

EMMIE
You don’t think so?

EMMIE nails her target.

EMMIE
It’s how it is. You learn cause you need to figure things out to survive. Like if you’re stuck in a house with creepy old dudes wanting to teach you stuff. And most of them you figure out quick – don’t have anything you want to learn. You do anything you can to be away from them. But some of them – well, few and far between, but – some of them are just sad guys who know too much.

MONTGOMERY
I know about that.

EMMIE
You do not. There was this one guy, used to party with my mom. They call it a party but it’s no fun really. Anyways. He wanted to protest the missile silos. He’d camp out on the prairie. Just sit out there with a sign that said ‘no.’ Claimed he was there for a whole year. Some people would bring him food and visit with him, but mostly people threw shit at him and yelled.

MONTGOMERY
What’d he teach you?

EMMIE
Patience. C’mon. We need to practice.

MONTGOMERY
I didn’t get my turn.

EMMIE
You don’t need to know this – you’ve got other things to figure out.

MONTGOMERY
Like what?

EMMIE
Like how far you’ll go. Like whether you’re ready for what I’ve got planned.

MONTGOMERY
What do you have planned?

EMMIE
Figuring it out. So that guy right? Who sat in front of the silos?

MONTGOMERY
Yeah

EMMIE
Well nothing happened. They still built them. There are still missiles in the ground not far from here with their gyroscopes revolving ready to go. So he didn’t get what he wanted.

MONTGOMERY
They saw him.

EMMIE
As a lame ass loser. Somebody to kick who didn’t kick back.

MONTGOMERY
Emmie?

EMMIE
What?

MONTGOMERY
Who are you fighting against?

EMMIE
That’s what I need to figure out.

MONTGOMERY
Maybe it’s not like that – maybe there’s not really one person, or one thing to fight.

EMMIE
There’s gotta be.

MONTGOMERY
My mom says there isn’t. She says it’s all wrapped up together – fight down one thing and something else grows up.

EMMIE
Like the hydra.

MONTGOMERY
Uh - maybe -

EMMIE
Do they even teach you things here? The hydra. Hercules had to destroy this thing with like seven heads, but each time he cut one two grew in its place.

MONTGOMERY
What’d he do?

EMMIE
Killed it. With the help of his friend. He’d cut off a head and his friend would burn the neck so nothing would grow.

MONTGOMERY
So you need me.

EMMIE
Probably. Probably I do.

EMMIE considers MONTGOMERY for a moment. MONTGOMERY is nervous.

MONTGOMERY
What?

EMMIE
Well -

MONTGOMERY
What?

EMMIE
If there’s no one thing then you’ve got to find out everything you can about what there is, find the weak spots.

MONTGOMERY
My mom says it’s no good to fight.

EMMIE
What do you do then?

MONTGOMERY
Love. Pray. Mostly love. Mostly people need to be loved.

EMMIE
Easier to run.

MONTGOMERY
My mom says you gotta deal with yourself where ever you are. Gotta make where you are right. Running just makes you tired.

EMMIE
That’s a lie. Running makes your heart strong, makes your legs last forever. That’s the kind of thing you need these days. Your mom doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Not really.

EMMIE takes aim at the cans. Hits them all, one by one.

So I'm working on this collaborative project...

That is described quite finely on HowlRound from the Producers Perspective...

And through the year will also be described from the directors and the playwrights perspective.

We're in the thick of it now.

And its exhilarating.

Firsts

I'm also posting at the Coyote Commission Blog.

Writing about starting writing...

click here:

http://coyotecommissionprojectblog.blogspot.com/

it's a music & reading experience combined.

Dramatist Guild Fellows Event

September 19

NYC

Dramatist Guild Fellows Night of Excerpts
Playwright's Horizons

7pm

I'll be presenting a scene from THEN AND NOW

featuring:
Sarah Kate Jackson
Chris Kipiniak

directed by:
Kyle Ancowitz

These other talented folks will also be presenting work:
Masi Asare
Chisa Hutchinson
Anna Jacobs
Peter Lerman
Bill Nelson
Adam Overett
Ayanna Saulsberry
Ken Urban
Stefanie Zadravec

The evening is free and open to all and there is a reception after.

Angels Fall - by Lanford Wilson

Commissioned and presented by The New World Festival, Inc. in Miami Florida in 1982 and then moved intact to NYC in 1983 Angels Fall is a character driven 2-act play that takes place in an isolated mission in the northwest of New Mexico.

The characters assemble there - all except the parish priest on their way to somewhere different - because the roads are closed. Through the first act it is learned that there has been an accident at a near-by uranium mine, though then, as now, it's unclear who is being honest about the extent of the danger.

No, no, it sounds very minor. We're not that close. People all over the country are going to be terribly disappointed. They'd rather have a big gaudy cataclysm. They've been preparing themselves for years.

Each act is a single long scene. Each character carries their own story and these stories at times collide with others in the odd group - other times they burden only themselves. Themes of the divide between rural and urban america, between the university and the 'real' world, between the call to serve and the call to profit snake amidst the characters as they shelter in a tiny church under skies that may or may not be poisoned by radiation.

Reading the play I started listening to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska also released in 1982. There's something about this time - I was a kid then so my earliest memories are of watching the news from our green & orange canvas couch and trying to make sense of what rising unemployment meant, what was happening in DC with the rise of the homeless population, intercontinental ballistic missles and Reagan smiling reassuringly over all of it. Seems like the rifts and fractures that Wilson captures so elegantly in this sweet breath of a play have only grown over the years, into chasms and canyons so wide that we can barely see the other side.

Tiny lines such as,

I-40. Used to be Route 66. I think they do those things deliberately. Don't want us to get too attached to anything.

are slipped into the simple plot of individuals whose journeys are interrupted by the terrible, and common, disasters of the nuclear age, simply waiting together before they continue on into their disparate lives.

the four of us - Itamar Moses

I've been away from this. I've been reading, but mostly unpublished scripts. And I've been writing. And the teaching. That's also been happening. But, happily, I started reading plays just to read and the first one I picked up off the piles around the house was this. And dear oh dear am I glad I did. For the play - but also the afterward, which is right up there with the forwards that are included in many of Tennessee Williams collected plays.

The Four of Us is a two character play, David and Benjamin. It follows their friendship from their time at music camp as teens on through their twenties when they are both writers - a novelist and a playwright. It unfolds in nine scenes which move back and forth in time - in one scene different times for each character. Simply, the story is one character sells his first book and starts his professional life with acclaim and cash as the other works, finding some success later with a play written about his friend and their relationship.

I do try in these posts to give a nuts and bolts response. To withhold criticism and praise. There's plenty of that in the world and I'm interested in looking at how the play works, how it's laid out and how the story is told. To be primarily objective.

Being objective with this script is less about description and more about acknowledging the clean economy and simplicity at play in each scene which culminates in a perfect theatrical moment.

(and perhaps the subject matter and the perspective on writing and successes and friends and the frustrations of writing plays is all just hitting its target audience right here at this spot in my heart, but I'm guessing most readers of this blog may share a similar spot.)

My reading...

7pm
Monday.
April 18, 2011.
Julia Miles Theatre
424 W. 55th Street
N.Y.C.

You are invited to attend a reading of:


THE HEART IN YOUR CHEST
a dystopian romance


Written by
Kristen Palmer

Directed by
Julie Kline

Performed by
Bobby Moreno
Alfredo Narcisco
Chris Stack
Jelena Stupljanin
Sue Jean Kim
Travis York


“This man has no eyes - this man’s heart is broken - and you – you can’t stop us.”


Wine will be available.

RSVP to krispalmer@gmail.com.

We hope to see you there.

Space provided through The Women’s Project Lab.

Seascape with Sharks and Dancer - Don Nigro

A play with a long production history, Seascape with Sharks and Dancer was first done at the Theatre Barn at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1974. It went on to productions at the Denver Center Theatre (1982) and the Oregon Shakespearean Festival (1984). I wonder if plays are allowed to knock around for so long these days, if the original production date is noted and then the play tossed backwards because it is somehow magically stale. But that is a side question.

The play is for two actors, a man and a woman. It takes place in the living room of a beach house. The opening image is a woman, Tracy, wrapped in a towel on the couch, coming out of a dream into Ben's house. She's washed up onto shore and Ben has taken her in. Over the course of 2 acts, with 2 scenes in each act, a relationship evolves, is consummated, and deteriorates into an uncertain detente with a great deal of uncertainty on both sides.

The first scene is getting to know each other, uncovering some of where she might have come from. Tracy evades and tells stories that feel true but unreal. Ben care takes and coaxes her down, and puts up with a lot of abuse from her. By the end she comes to bed with him.

The second scene is the morning after, a relationship is negotiated - with barbs and hesitant offers. Names are exchanged and intimacies and their playing of house is underway.

Act Two opens two months later, same couch, Tracy is breaking the rules and has become a wearer of frumpy nightgowns instead of nothing under towels. Playing house has led to actual difficulties and the remainder of the play is these two flawed, un-moored characters navigating the uncharted waters of intimacy and vulnerability.

It's quite simple really. It's often ugly and occasionally beautiful.

This Playwright's To Do List

So, elsewhere on the web there have been assertions that playwrights are disconnected from their communities and the nuts and bolts of theater-making. This may be true in some cases, but not amongst the majority of playwrights that I know who work hard to develop and maintain collaborative relationships and embrace opportunities to make locale/company specific theater.

Thinking personally about what I'm up to...

~ Directing/Creating a play with young people at a local youth theater to teach them about all aspects of making theater through a specific project.

~ A commission with an Independent Theater I've collaborated with before.

~ Writing a play for a group of local teenagers to perform as their final senior project with a local youth theater.

~ A play about agricultural policy and the disappearing "middle" in America.

~ A play about delusions, theater and death.

~ A play about Emma Goldman, American Anarchist and Art-lover.

~ Participating in two writing groups and one theater-making group on a regular basis.

~ Teaching Artist work as it comes up.

~ reading scripts for an independent theater company, as a dramaturge for playwrights, and for myself to know what's going on out there on the page.

~ attending 4 - 10 performances a month.

~ a constant stream of applications, queries, updating and staying on the look out for opportunities for the plays already written to find their ways in the world.

And most recently wrote two site-specific plays for Independent Theater companies, attended rehearsals and collaborated with the actors and directors involved.

There are times I've been an actor, a director and a producer - as well as a light board op, sound op, stage manager, assistant stage manager, costume assistant, backstage crew, electrician, grant writer, publicist, etc. etc. But now the title of Playwright focuses my work for myself, and hopefully indicates to others that I create theater - on the page, in the room, and in front of an audience.

Phaedra - Racine, translated into English verse by Richard Wilbur

I am not a scholar of French Theatre, this might actually be my first reading of a classical French work, so please feel free to fill in my gaps and clarify my misunderstandings. My first question after reading this is what was Racine up to - writing this very Greek feeling play after Shakespeare and the Renaissance playwrights had opened up wildly divergent ways of telling a story? Is it an emulation of the Greeks, where this story originated? Or is it the type of play being written in this era? I’ll read more and find out.

Also, after reading this I saw that Adam Bock has a version of the story set in modern times, which I’d love to read next, and also Ted Hughes has a translation.

The story. Phaedra, wife of Theseus, is cursed with an unquenchable desire for her step-son Hippolytus. She resists her lust with every fiber of her being. Before the play opens she’s had him banished and removed from her sight. Theseus, a wandering hero and a philanderer, is off on another adventure and sends Phaedra to the country village where Hippolytus now resides. Phaedra withdraws from society and wastes away from the toxic mix of guilt and desire.

News is received that Theseus has been killed, during a romantic escapade perhaps, and a glimmer of possibility kindles in Phaedra’s mind. Perhaps she and Hippolytus can rule together, perhaps all will be well. But, as Phaedra declares her love to Hippolytus, he announces his love for the banished princess Aricia, whom he plans to make his queen. Phaedra is crushed, in suicidal despair. It turns out Theseus is not dead, he returns to find his house in disarray. To spare her mistress from torment, Phaedra’s servant devises a plan where they will accuse Hippolytus of accosting Phaedra with unwanted advances before he has a chance to humiliate Phaedra. Theseus is enraged, refuses to hear Hippolytus’s protestations of innocence and banishes him. He dies, Phaedra poisons herself and to make some amends for his rashness Theseus forgives Aricia the sins of her fathers and restores her to her rightful throne.

Over five acts through dialogue made up of declarative speeches and monologues delivered by characters to question their own motives and understandings of events, the story unfolds and moves inexorably towards its classically tragic conclusion. Reading it I found my own sense of the romantic to be so ingrained - and my sympathies so with Phaedra - that when Theseus was reported killed I celebrated with her, and believed in the possibility of these two young people to be brought together. This isn’t the outcome, instead, despite Phaedra’s attempts to resist temptation and manage her own impulses she cannot and they lead to her downfall.

New Design

Hello all,

So I'm re-doing this site to serve as a place to find information about my plays and projects - as well as other people's.

I am feeling pretty remedial at this, so please forward any suggestions or thoughts my way!

Thanks. And yes, I am also planning to get back to reading & writing about plays very soon. I had to take a break to get into my own work for a while.

Now I'm thinking I can handle both again.

Kristen

The Pain and The Itch - by Bruce Norris

Premiered at Steppenwolf then Playwrights Horizons, The Pain and The Itch is a satire of liberal suburbanites so focused on their correctness they don't perceive the rot in their own house.

It unfolds in two time periods. A present time, an afternoon in January and the past, the previous Thanksgiving evening. In the present parents Kelly and Clay are recounting the events of the previous Thanksgiving to Mr. Hadid. Their daughter, 4, wanders in and out and their baby cries occasionally. Kelly and Clay try to tell the story in the best possible light. The action fluidly shifts into that past moment. In addition to Kelly and Clay, Clay's mother Carol, and brother Cash are also present for the holiday meal. Cash has also brought his young, eastern european girlfriend.

In the first scene Mr. Hadid is visiting and Clay and Kelly play host. A tone is set, Kelly and Clay avoid getting to any point by talking about themselves - establishing their world-view (their 'type') - and more importantly a mystery is planted that isn't revealed until the final scene of the play. The incongruity of Mr. Hadid, an older man in a skull cap, a recent immigrant, in the suburban living room of these young parents who are prattling on, asks a question - and the rest of the play un-ravels the answer.

By moving between the two time periods there is the occasional relief from the claustrophobic thanksgiving meal this family is attempting to have. These scenes are pitched high, the conflict and animosity burbling up and the 'pain and itch' of the title growing, literally, more insistent. Before it is too much though the play leaps back to the present. The parents re-telling their side of the story and Mr. Hadid calming listening, quietly - non-judgmentally - taking in this young couple.

And the mystery unravels by the end. And really, the effect is more horrible than you were expecting. Satire indeed. And a condemnation of particularly strident attitudes.

The Typographer's Dream - by Adam Bock

Produced in NYC by Clubbed Thumb in 2003, The Typographer's Dream has three characters who speak directly to the audience (most of the time.) They talk about their jobs.

There is a Typographer, a Geographer, and a Stenographer.

There are 76 scenes, some very short, some not so short. They talk about their jobs, defining these three, specific lines of work. They talk about how their jobs have changed over the years. How they relate to their jobs, how much is work and how much is business. How much pressure they feel. How they fell in love with what they do - and fall out of it.

They encroach on one another, commenting on each others lives, on choices they should or should not make.

The language is precise. The rhythms of the play are specific. A casualness set out from the beginning lets this sneak up on you until by the end - the specific has begun to encompass the world and the reach of each of their experiences and perspectives, which may have seemed narrow at the outset, resonates with the weight of the changing world and particularly America's place in it.

Kissing The Floor - by Ellen McLaughlin

Published in the 2009 New York Theater Review, McLaughlin states in her introduction,

Kissing the Floor is the ninth play I've written that is directly inspired by a Greek text, and though it wanders farther from its source than any of my other work, it is still along the lines of a modern rendering of the Sophocles. I've always approached the adaptation of Greek plays aslant, privileging intuition over intellect and allowing the plays to disturb and disarm me before I make any moves to find my on way in.

She continues to provide a fascinating narrative of the process of thought, feeling and intuition that led her to the play. (I love introductions, I may be a playwright and reader of plays today because I poured devotedly over used bookstore finds of Tennessee Williams plays with his fabulous, heart-rending, poetic words to his readers tucked like a love letter into the books.)

In this re-telling the focus is on the children of Oedipus and Jocasta - dead before this play begins. The girls, Annie and Izzie, and the twin boys, Paul and Eddie. Izzie, becomes the guide through this world of the destroyed, broken family, she is the one who seems to have chosen life, despite the cursed pair who created her. Because she's chosen this, she tries to reach a hand out to Annie, who may, perhaps, also be able to let go of their origins and have a life of her own. Annie though, refuses.

Annie wants to stay by Paul, save what she can of her brother. Here, McLaughlin departs from the Greek original. She leaves the brother alive - and instead chooses to make him morally despicable in such a way that Annie's pure devotion to her brother, only because he is her brother, is less heroic and more a death-wish, a refutation of life.

Using a hypnotic, recurring childhood game, where Annie guides her siblings into imagined worlds, demanding them to describe what they see, McLaughlin takes us into the world of these grown children. Annie's quest to save and protect her brother - cursed and reviled for what he is, Izzy's attempts to bring her sister into the light, into the world of the living, Paul's inability or lack of interest in changing - no matter what his sister sacrifices, and a brief appearance by Eddie (the twin) who tells us the Oedipus and Jocasta story, set before the 1929 Wall St. Crash. His story comes mid-way through the play in the form of a 3 page monologue, it brings back the original horror of the old story which then colors the continued attempts of the siblings to achieve their goals, providing a context that elevates the stakes and darkens all possible outcomes.

The Long Christmas Ride Home (A Puppet Play with Actors) - by Paula Vogel

The Long Christmas Ride Home was first produced in 2003 in a co-production by The Long Wharf Theater and Trinity Rep, it moved to NYC later in the year.

In her introduction Vogel cites a misunderstanding of Bunraku puppet theatre as a starting point for this play, and the feeling of church pageants in church basements and community halls. As there are puppets, singing, and dancing in the play it makes sense to encourage a DIY ethic to theatres considering mounting a production - and it places it in a very specific realm for the reader.

The play can be performed by six actors. A male and female narrator, who give voice to the puppets and whose bodies provide visual reference points for the mother and father. The puppets, operated by actors, are the three children in the family. Additionally there is the Minister, who takes on other roles as needed.

It is Christmas. The family is in the car traveling to Christmas service at the Universal Unitarian Church. The internal thoughts of each family member are shared with us by the narrators who describe, take voices, and perform their own physical roles as mother and father. We learn the secrets, that aren't very secret. Particularly Dad's affair.

They arrive at church and pile into the service, there is singing, there are thoughts - the other woman is across the room, and the minister shares a slide show from his recent trip to Japan, Woodblock prints of the Floating World, an era in Japanese culture seeking to embrace the pleasure of the ephemeral flesh without guilt, to find beauty in the commonplace. The service concludes with a moment of spectacle - a Nativity Scene performed in dance and puppets.

The family travels to their Grandparents, where tensions bubble over while presents are given, a really wonderful scene. Each one more laden than the last. Finally a breaking point - Grandpa confronts Father about his philandering, calls him a "kike" and they lock arms to wrestle. The family bundles out of there and back into the car. There is a beautifully poetic visual moment leading from the youngest girls understanding of what happened at grandma's - and then, the moment that cracks everything open. Dad smacks mom across the face.

From here the play shatters. Each puppet child's thought at this moment is shared and then the puppeteer is broken from their child to become the adult. Each grown child hits a wall, each unique, each a line sketched from that moment, that Christmas -and each are saved by a breath from their sibling. The one who died young, the one who didn't grow older.

The Ghost of this one gets the penultimate moment, creating a folktale that could be as old as any story told in our culture, but beautifully was made right here in front of us. And then, Dancing, and the beauty of the commonplace. But before the play is done we are returned to the slap, and the moment after, and the family holding their breath as one, before they can start to breathe again.

Vogel's accumulation of images, ideas, and language that finds manifestation in character, dialogue, story, situation, spectacle, dance, music - every tool the theater has to offer is saturated in the play which is more than anything here on the page, and infuses every moment with it's animating breath.

Good Boys and True - by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

First produced by Steppenwolf in 2007, then in NYC at Second Stage Theater in 2008, Aguirre-Sacasa's play Good Boys and True is a play that works kindof like a funnel, or more precisely like a corkscrew sea shell (I'm sure there is a technical name for this) - you're going down a maze, it starts at a clear point and then opens further and further out implicating more and more in it's scope, but still keeping the main thing hidden in it's shell.

So. First Act, not broken into scenes, but rather just slipping from one place to another without a break - often using these shifts to nice effect to highlight how different characters are in different situations. We have Brandon, a clean-cut, football and basketball player giving a tour of his school, a private school outside of Washington DC. What a nice boy (we think). Then we have his mother (a doctor) and his coach meeting because coach found kids watching a video tape of a boy having sex with a girl, possibly forcing her, certainly she didn't know she was being filmed - the boy's face is not visible, but from the back - it could be Brandon. What a terrible boy (we think). Then we slip to the next scene between his mom and her sister (who teaches at a public school - on principle) and their discussion leaves us wondering - is he a nice boy? is he a terrible boy? Then he enters and mom confronts him. He says no way was it him And he got into Dartmouth on early decision. What a nice boy (we think again, and it's reassuring)

From here each scene builds further by the end of the first act we know the facts of the situation, but it is the truth of the situation that is dangled until the end. And in pursuit of that each scene brings in new questions often by revealing old secrets - the entitlement of the private school students, what students who are legacies are really inheriting - the violent stories of the past - the present, exalted positions of the perpetrators, the school culture and the wider privileged culture promoted by parents defending their children, pushing their children down a particularly narrow road. Tucked into scenes between Brandon and his best friend is the seed that holds the truth of this nasty situation.

In the second Act, we are introduced to the girl in question, lawyers and media are involved, and futures are at stake. The layers of bigger and bigger questions accumulate and widen the scope of the play's grasp. With the mother we follow the search for the truth and seek a moral stance - with Brandon we are further and further shut out as he shuts down, waiting for his father to come home, to understand and to make it all go away. The end is a little scene, breezy - a glimpse of teen-age awkwardness finding a friend to rest on, to trust. But this is a flashback and as we know, there's no path back after this.