Brecht, Bombs, and Elm Trees: Lisel Mueller's "Triage" and Processing Tragedy

Lately I've been thinking a lot of Lisel Mueller's poem, "Triage," which I first read in an Illinois poetry class in college. "Bertolt Brecht lamented that he lived in an age when it was almost a crime to talk about trees," Mueller writes "because that meant being silent about so much evil." A German-born writer who emigrated to America at the beginning of WWII, her life bore witness to its share of historical tragedy.

When Your Privilege Begins to Hit Home

As the descendent of 1960s liberals, I was raised with the idea that it was important to fight injustice.  Often that means continually exposing myself to painful truths that can violently rattle my sense of self as I confront my own biases.  As I watch the horrific events unfold this summer in Gaza and Ferguson, Missouri, I am grateful to my friends and colleagues on social media who have shared their stories and insights to deepen and complicate my and perspective.  

And yet sometimes you have experiences that bring home certain societal truths and revelations about privilege more painfully than any Facebook post or Salon article possibly could.

Top Eleven TV Theme Songs Since 2000

TV theme songs are all the rage right now, as evidenced by the popularity of the Saturday Morning Slow Jams  (my favorite is still "Duck Tales").  A lot of it is nostalgia--kids who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s are now of the age when we're starting to feel like grownups, longing for 2D adventure cartoons based on Disney franchises from the 1940s in the same way our parents longed for vinyl.  As The Atlantic demonstrated last year, thinking the today's kids just don't get it or are missing out is an American tradition.

Playwrights in the (theatrical)House

A few months ago, my writing group, the Mission to (dit)Mars Propulsion Lab, started holding our biweekly meetings at The Secret Theatre.  For the five months before that, we had been meeting to share pages at organizer Don Nguyen's apartment, where we would sit around on couches and chairs drinking wine and munching on Pepperidge farm cookies.  Not only was it a beautiful apartment, but the informality of the setting created a safe space to take chances with our work.

But something shifted when we started meeting at The Secret Theatre.  See as a playwright, I rarely have regularly scheduled opportunities to be in theatre spaces as an artist.  When work on my stuff and send it out it's all done from the privacy of my bedroom (or coffeehouse/library), while directors get the community interaction through the audition process.  Even when my plays are performed,for budgetary reasons most of the initial rehearsals I attend are in peoples' apartments and the only time I usually spend time at the theatre is to attend the performance.  And it's hard not to feel like a bit of a guest at that point rather than a true Theatre Artist.

And though I was never the most confidant performer growing up, I used to relish the feeling of being in the theatre--the smell of sawdust in the shop, looking at production photos from previous shows, sneaking up to the catwalk and seeing old names written on the railings.  Just sitting around before and after rehearsals and experiencing the ebb and flow of the rhythm of the space through various production processes.  Encountering artists working on other shows and picking up not only on juicy gossip but also new opportunities (True story:  one time I overheard someone discussing how an actor dropped out of a production of The Emperor's New Clothes I had auditioned for but didn't make the cut.  I still wanted to be in the show, so when I learned of this new development I went to the auditions for Evita this director was holding and I threw myself at her feet.  She put me in The Emperor's New Clothes).

The Salon reading for my play Sex and Charitable Giving on May 19.    Photo by Don Nguyen

The couple first meetings at The Secret I felt this wonderful sense of calm and reassurance.  I wasn't just a guest or squatter at this theatre space like I somehow feel when bumming free wifi at the New Dramatists library or the Public Theatre lobby.  And unlike situations where I am sharing pages in a classroom, someone's apartment, or across the table at a coffee shop, I feel like these scenes may truly have a life outside of this circle of writers.  Knowing this, I start to take my own work more seriously.  Surrounded by the physical space of curtains, audience bleachers, and lighting elements, it's hard not to start thinking more visually.  To feel the play start to breathe and become a living thing.



On June 30, we'll be having a showcase at The Secret Theatre where we'll show excerpts of the plays we've been working on the past year.  After that, we go on a summer hiatus.  I'm already getting homesick.

The Feminine Playwright Mystique: Expanding My Knowledge of Women Dramatists

I have a confession to make:  when I am asked to name my favorite playwrights, very few women tend to make my top list. As someone who considers myself a feminist, this is completely unacceptable.

On My Own Terms: Finishing the Play

Last night on a Suburban Transit bus between New Brunswick and New York City, I finished my first full-length draft in three years.

And it felt amazing.

Arts and Inspiration: How I Spent the End of My Summer Vacation

Recently I was having a conversation with my good friend Ben, who was worried that he hadn't updated his blog in a few weeks.  He recently moved to Vietnam to teach English, and for about the first month he was putting out several posts a week.  Now that his teaching gig has begun he is more consumed with work, and he worries that by not posting, he is letting his readers down.  I said to him:  "Why do you keep a blog? So you can tell everyone about the awesome stuff you're doing, right?" He agreed.  "Well," I continued, "so if the reason you're not posting is is because you're to busy doing awesome things, then how could people be upset with you?"

So I haven't posted in a while, and it's because I've been doing some awesome stuff. Last weekend my show, Life Play, opened as part of the Act One: One Act Festival at the Secret Theatre.  While I've had several other productions over the last year, this is particularly significant because it's one of the first projects to be performed that I began after finishing grad school.  This shows me, hey, maybe I can totally do this without adult supervision.  I also had two weeks in August where I completed a short play each week--one that ended up being read last Wednesday in La Petite Morgue's Fresh Blood Series and another for submission to KNOW Theatre's Annual Playwrights and Artists Festival.  I'd love to get into the festival again (and maybe actually manage to see my play instead of getting caught in stupid New Jersey traffic), but more than anything it felt awesome to FINISH SOMETHING. There's also another recent bit of awesomeness I'm not sure I'm allowed to divulge right now, but it's safe to say that for the first time since I came to the New York City area two years ago, my theatre career is starting to take some sort of shape.  I'm not sure what shape it is exactly--trapezoid, oval, octagon?--but there is definitely some movement there.

In addition to my own plays, I've also been seeing some fantastic theatre thanks to a combination of well-connected friends, TDF and Dramatists Guild comps.  My brain will soon become monopolized by freshman writing, so I'm trying to fit in as much theatre-going as I can. In addition to Fresh Blood and the One Act Festival at the Secret Theatre, my playgoing last week ranged from Lee Blessing's A User's Guide to Hell, Featuring Bernie Madoff to The New Light Theatre Project's musical adaptation of the Oedipus cycle in Washington Square Park to a one-woman show about Harold Pinter's wife Vivien Merchant.  I've also been fortunate to get to bear witness two of the buzz-iest theatrical events of September, Mike Daisey's All the Faces of the Moon at The Public and Lucy Thurber's The Hill Town Plays, produced by Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre.  I don't mention these last plays to be braggy--it just I miss so much stuff on Broadway and Off-Broadway I sometimes feel like I'm not really taking advantage of all New York has to offer and when I read an article on NPR that discusses shows I've actually seen it feels great to be part of the national conversation again.

And though these shows and experiences have been wonderful, the most inspiring part has been they ways in which I've been able to connect and exchange ideas with other artists. At the Kennedy Center, Amy Attaway of the Actors Theatre of Louisville led a session meant to demystify the paralyzing fear we all have of networking.  "Always go out after the show," Amy advised, "and keep a drink in your hand and the crazy out of your eyes."  Sometimes that has meant Starbucks, sometimes it's  Yuenglings at Kettle of Fish post-show, and sometimes it's a chat before the show on the sidewalk because you have to be up for work stupid early and can't stay out past 10 p.m.  And sometimes it's a late night Facebook chat with kick-ass artist I'm just getting to know better where we bear our souls about our creative insecurities and spur each other on to reach higher and dig deeper.

In July I posted to Facebook a quote from the immortal Harold Clurman on creative frustration: "The theatre cannot solve its problems alone.  Perhaps our complaints are only another manifestation of that impatience which is a symptom of American youthfulness.  We hope to accomplish everything more rapidly than life will permit."

Remain patient.  Have faith.  And for heaven's sake, keep swimming.