The Off-Center

Wow, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Some inter-dust has collected here, and what meager readership I may have previously boasted has probably moved on to bigger, better, brighter blogs. But if you’re here, reading this words then… hello! I’ve missed you!

A lot has gone on between then and now, the most significant point being the completion of my first year of Graduate school. What a fabulous fucking year, I have to say. All told, I had the time of my life doing the things that I love and I hate the summer. I hate the summer, and I want it to be over so that I can go back to school and spend another year doing what I love. Also I hate heat, and people saying things like, “Go outside and enjoy the beautiful sunshine!” Fuck your sunshine, I like a crisp, cloudy autumn day more than anything.

Luckily, I have some exciting things coming up this summer, most notably a week at the O’Neill festival! A very close second will be my first trip to Asia with one of my best friends in the world to help her get settled and, as I’ve been saying, “skim off the top of her adventure.” I’m also participating in the MCC Fresh Plays festival, producing their reading series, which is really exciting because it’s such a phenomenal program — they give these high school kids a chance to write a play and have a real, professional theatrical experience. I would have killed for that kind of opportunity as a high schooler. Back then, I didn’t realize people were even really still writing original plays. I kind of figured Sondheim and Shakespeare were about it. (All right, no, not really, but still). That, plus part-time work has made for a bit of a light-weight summer.

But, you know me. I hate having too much down time. So, what have I been doing to keep myself busy aside from getting my Blood Elf Hunter to 80 and building up her PvP set? (To answer your question, yes, I do have sense enough to be embarrassed about that.) Well, I have exciting projects!

Yes!

For starters, I had a reading of my new play tonight (Rest in Peace, Jonah Dwyer) and it went very well. My boyfriend is my litmus test, for better or worse, to see if I have hit the mark or not. Turns out, this time, I did — though, yes, fine. The ending needs work. But I have ideas! I have ideas and I have a balls-out brilliant framework to put things in. I’m really excited to work on this play — I have a fabulous dramaturge on board and the director is interested as well, so that’s all shaping up nicely.

But I’m also writing a musical with my dear friend, Trystan! About what, you ask? Nikola Tesla. Yes, that Nikola Tesla. I will say nothing but this about it: it’s going to fucking rock.

I’m also working on a play about the Stanford Prison Experiment, though I’m finding that one a little more difficult to get into… I’ll get there, I just need to figre out how.

On a personal note (I do so hate to be too personal on the internet — livejournal taught me a series of valuable lessons) I have this photo to share:

Mike and I got kittens, and we’re completely in love with them. The black and white one is Callie (née Calamity Fluff) and the brown stripey one is Nublet (née N00b). They are the loveliest. Except they have gross butts that let out ridiculously large kittie-farts. Though… Mike could just be blaming his own stank on the babies…

Hmm.

June 1st, 2009 | Tags: kittens, RIPJD, theater | Category: personal, plays, theater | Leave a comment

I finished the first draft of a new play today, a play that I began working on early in the fall. It’s a little rushed, perhaps, needs a great deal of tweaking and could certainly use the insights of a dramaturge, but there it is — draft 1, 94 pages. I can’t wait to print it out and feel the warm weight of it in my hands and bring it home and say, “This is mine, I made it.”

My goals for the academic year are coming along nicely. Initially, I had planned/hoped to accomplish the following, on top of assigned work and writing exercises:
2 Full Length Plays (check!)
4 10-minute plays (check! and then some…)
1 Full Screenplay (Eh… ok, I’m about 30 pages in, so…)

The four ten-minute plays are completed pieces, and the two full-lengths are admirable first-drafts. Before the beginning of my second year as a graduate student I will have had 2 readings outside of school and 4 10-minute productions inside of school. Not too shabby.

Next year! Oh, but next year I will have two productions of 2 full length plays! Psychomachia will be mounted in November and another play will be produced at Columbia (probably Rest In Peace, Jonah Dwyer).

Today has been a pretty successful day. I received a fellowship (I am the 2009-2010 recipient of the Liberace Fellowship, which is a fellowship that can only be described as Fab, complete with glitter and a red feather boa.) got word about both productions for next year and finished a play. Pretty good, I’d say.

Which is probably why I’m brain dead and should go to sleep. I desire yoga, but my eyes won’t stay open…

Oh, P.S.: Check me out on Tumblr: jennyjanuary.tumblr.com. It’s not a real blog-type-blog. I have fully integrated it with my twitter account, and now it’s what I call a dropbox for beautiful things. A little internet scrapbook, if you will. But you don’t have to.

April 27th, 2009 | Tags: fever dream | Category: personal, writing | Leave a comment

April 10th and 11th @ 8PM - 4 short plays by 4 up-and-coming Columbia playwrights!

Schapiro Studio - 615W. 115th Street @ Broadway

My play i am the girl with the spun gold hair is being performed, and I am really looking forward to it. Something truly remarkable happened with this tiny, weird little play. It began as just this bizarre little thing I wanted to do, and turned into a really stunning piece of theater. My director (Jess Smith) and cast (Shelley Virginia and Dave Droxler) are amazing and have brought so much into it — they have made it better than I ever could have conceived it to be. I am still worried that the public-at-large will look at it and not get it, but it doesn’t matter, because we created something beautiful, the 4 of us.

Plus, I shouldn’t worry. I had, for so long, been known as the writer that didn’t assume her audience was idiotic. I think it’d be nice to stay that way.

April 10th, 2009 | Tags: i am the girl with the spun gold hair | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

I thought I fell in love for the first time in the third grade with a boy named [redacted]. He used to sing the boy parts in Phantom of the Opera, and I got to be his Christine. His family went hunting in Africa and we played hide-and-seek in a room full of stuffed exotic animals — full-sized bears, a tiger, deer, all manner of foul — and even in his own house, he always let me find him. He gave me a necklace with a star on it for my birthday that year. That is when I frst started to love little stars.

Then there was [redacted], whose brain I wanted to crawl inside of just to look around. There was no real lust there, even as a high-schooler with hormones raging. I just wanted him to talk to me about eastern philosophy and literature and computer science. I wanted to be close to him the way his guy friends got to be close to him. I wanted him to let me read his journals. I wanted him to tell me secrets. Sometimes he did and I count myself blessed that he has remained, to this day, a very dear friend to me. There was always real love there, as it turns out. It was just the kind of love that develops between friends, born of profound respect and admiration.

I actually fell in love for the first time with a boy named [redacted]. Against all odds and despite all logical rationale to the contrary, I fell completely in love with someone I had never met. It’s so silly, looking back on it now, and yet when we finally did meet, I knew it wasn’t make-believe from deep inside the heart of a lonely teenager. We met telling stories to one another, huge, uncommon, romantic stories and we built them together and loved each other building them. I have never talked to anyone on the phone as much as I talked to him. We spent normal sleep-cycles talking, we fell asleep talking, we woke up talking. He knew me better than anyone had ever known me. I fell in love with someone wanting to hear even my mundane stories; he made me a story-teller. We were the best versions of ourselves when we were together. That’s a beautiful fucking thing.

Then there was [redacted], whom I loved without knowing it. She was, and continues to be, a powerful source of inspiration for me. We were driving once to her house in Holly, and it was pitch dark out, but she turned off her headlights and said, “Look”, and in front of us were a hundred glittering lights — she turned orange construction posts into something amazing. And that’s the power she had, to turn anything at all into something beautiful. I really wish, above all else, that I could be more like her. I love her still and wish I got to see her more often so that she could teach me that kind of selfless generosity.

At 17, there was [redacted] who taught me more about the act of love in one brief, bookended summer than anyone else ever has. After what had happened to me the previous year, he drew me out of my closed-off shell and told me that it was a wonderful thing, to be touched.

Ah, [redacted]. The one that got away. I hope we get to see each other again some day, because I got that message. The one that said that I was the one that got away, too.

And now there is M., who I will not write about here, because he knows, and I know. I’m just happy that he’s home now, asleep in the room next to mine.

So why the long personal history? Because I find it very difficult to write about love and tonight I have been working on a love scene. As a woman, I didn’t want to get… I don’t know… caught up in love stories? I’m not sure why, but I resisted them. And now I don’t know how to portray it, because so much of it was felt with the vital intensity of a teenager. And the love I have now I still don’t understand or know how to traverse.

April 5th, 2009 | Tags: love, love scenes, personal, writing | Category: personal, writing | Leave a comment

i. You’re so money, and you don’t even know it. Vegas was totally kick-ass. My reservations were stupid and unfounded and born of stress and lack of sleep and were put at bay the minute I stepped off the plane and into that big, glittering sand box. I made some wonderful new friends, with whom I hope to keep in touch, and drank, ate and spent money too much and slept too much and stayed out too late and I highly recommend it. You can take a look at the photos here. You should go, right now, book a trip. It’s a cold necessity, the care with which we live our daily lives. It’s nice to throw that caution to the wind a bit and say, “So what if I conned them out of free tickets to Cirque de Soliel?” or “So what if I’d rather flirt with this guy than my boyfriend?” or “So what if my drink is three times the size of my face?”

ii. You will die at the end of the play. Today, I caught a matinee of the Broadway production of Exit The King, starring Geoffrey Rush, Susan Sarandon and Lauren Ambrose. Written by Eugene Ionesco (father of the Theater of the Absurd), this play is about an aging king who is told it is time for him to die. He spends the two hours of the play railing against the onset of death and doing whatever he can to outrun or outwit the grim reaper. This play, Ionesco has said, was written to be a lesson in death: “I told myself that one could learn to die, that I could learn to die, that one can also help other people to die. This seems to me to be the most important thing we can do, since we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die. This play is an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying.”

Geoffrey Rush is a brilliant King Berenger I, who is able at once to make believable the crippling frailty of age and he boisterous vitality of youth, whose physical mastery is unparalleled amongst his co-stars. He is ridiculous and heart breaking, much like the final tone of the piece. I would have to say, however, that he so far outshines his fellow actors that there isn’t much to be said about them. Susan Sarandon is a beautiful, cold Queen Marguerite whose one note is maintained without flaw until the end, when she gives her complex, poetic final monologue. Lauren Ambrose, whom I have always loved, is very pretty and rather unconvincing as the second wife to the King, a wife who adores him. The supporting cast do their jobs well — they all do their jobs well — but only Rush’s performance was extraordinary.

All in all, the play dragged a little but was not without beauty of language, and it was fun to see my first fully-realized Ionesco play. I wouldn’t say it’s a must-see, but I think that theater-lovers and professionals would enjoy it.

iii. Blah. I’m moving on Friday. I hate moving. Hate. Wish me luck for a smooth transition.

March 18th, 2009 | Tags: exit the king, vegas | Category: personal, theater | Leave a comment

Here’s a bizarre secret: I wish I weren’t going on Vacation tonight. I wish I weren’t going on vacation and I wish I also didn’t have to stay home, these two contradictory wishes weighing equally in my brain. I hate that feeling, the feeling of wanting to be nowhere at all. I am completely displaced.

I am writing a play that is exploring the power of thought, the conscious and the subconscious mind, and the implied power of a potential collective unconscious. I read something somewhere I probably ought not to have been looking at and it made my heart jump into my throat, but I swallowed it back down again, and I did this because my brain is, actually, stronger than the leaping heart. Anyway, this play makes very bold statements that make me feel better about the constructs of the universe, such as — the afterlife will look like something familiar so that my limited mind can understand it which, perhaps obviously, also implicitly states the fact of an afterlife. It says God is nowhere to be found and God is all around you. It says that the most important thing a person can do is to understand his circumstances, that life does not end until you’ve understood all of it.

I sometimes wonder why I am the way I am, odd but shy, someone who thinks too much and too little of herself at exactly the same time. I want to ask new people to be friends with me without it sounding weird or desperate. Is it already sounding weird and desperate?

See, another issue I am trying to explore via my protagonist, Jonah, is the damaging effects of crippling insecurities, understanding why someone would treat you poorly and letting it transpire because you believe that is the way you deserve to be treated. This is my first real, finished full-length play with a male protagonist because I am getting stronger and my women are getting stronger, and I am still interested in a weaker person finding his strength because that moves me. Because isn’t it a wonderful thing, to be in control of a world where you get to help a weaker person find his strength? I think so.

I think I don’t want to go to Las Vegas because I fear I won’t fit in with all the people I am going to meet and that I already feel outside of things enough as it is. But I have decided that it doesn’t matter. I’m bringing my work with me and I will go to the spa and drink fancy drinks and go sit in a hot tub and then I can come back to my room where I can let myself smoke cigarettes in bed and I can help this weaker person be a stronger person.

“Writers, for better or worse, are Gods of their own universe: ‘It is so because I say it is so.’ And while it might be lonely in this particular heaven, I’ve got a terrific view.” - Neil Labute

March 11th, 2009 | Tags: introspection, jonah dwyer, vacation, writing | Category: personal, writing | Comments (1)

Note: There is no connection between title and content. I just fell, today, in the snow. And, incidentally, down the stairs.

So, I finished a draft of my new play Rest In Peace, Jonah Dwyer — it’s a royal mess, but I think it has a ton of potential to be a really fun, touching little play. It’s presently 82 pages long, I imagine it’ll hover somewhere around 90 when I rewrite it.

But one of my other plays, SQUALID (as referenced here) is just giving me problems. I go back and forth on it — some days it feels like it’s simply material that is in my way, and other times I find a real gem in the dark, perverted mess of the play that grabs my attention for a while. That is to say, I can neither finish it nor work on it. Excellent.

Anyway, I did what I always do when I want to be creative but have a language block: I played with photoshop, this time creating an image for my short play i am the girl with the spun gold hair, which will be produced at Columbia next month. It has been described in the following way: “If Beckett wrote a fairy tale, [i am the girl...] would be it.” Pretty neat, huh?

March 2nd, 2009 | Category: writing | Comments (2)

I’m in this class at Columbia called “Visiting Playwrights”, which is precisely what it sounds like… the class is specifically geared toward the theme of making a living as a writer. Here is a brief collection of some of the notes I’ve taken from some of our guests.

Adam Rapp (Red Light Winter, Finer Noble Gases, The L Word and other things):

“As a director, I am an audience advocate and a purporter of simplicity.”

“I feel that the greatest sin in the theater is boredom.”

“Scare yourself. Write what you’re afraid to write. Write what wakes you up at night.”

“Theater is a bear pit. It’s not for pithy arguments or clever conversation. It’s for ripping people apart.”

“After tablework, I read through the whole script and let my actors animte it in the space, divested of the responsibility of knowing the words. I never look up from the page.”

Stephen Adley Guirgis (Jesus Hopped the A Train, Our Lady of 121st Street, and others):

“Everyone who wants to do this finds their place in the business.”

In the early stages, you can exchange comfort for time. Luxury can be seductive but living at the minimum can keep you hungry.

“There is a best version of everything.”

“Never refuse a meeting and ALWAYS take the beverage.”

“Success has almost nothing to do with talent. There’s our talent, and then there’s what we get out of it.”

“Why does the writer get up in the morning — I also want to know what keeps him up at night.”

Diana Son (Stop Kiss, lots of Law and Order, The West Wing Season 1 and others):

TV writing is often the job or writing in someone else’s voice.

Does not recommend workin in a literary office so that there is less exposure to practical limitations.

Young Jean Lee (Church, and others):

“I decided not to wait for someone to say ‘yes’ to me — I went out and created it for myself.”

“I cast my shows before I have a script, and I cast based on intelligence, charisma and range.”

Young Jean asks herself what is the last play that she would ever want to write, and she makes herself write it.

“I always have the audience in mind.”

Ok, I thought I had a lot more notes than this, but looking back at it all, I’ve jotted down names of theater companies, grants and fellowships and contests and names of people that don’t make a whole lot of sense any more now that everything is out of context. But there you have it — what little I have from this class. Still, some interesting stuff. Not Albee or Sondheim, but interesting.

February 28th, 2009 | Tags: playwrights, tips and tricks, words from workers, writing | Category: How To, theater, writing | Comments (3)

i. Psychomachia — totally awesome! It was so exciting to watch such a profoundly talented cast work on my script.  I got a lot of really wonderful, inspiring (and flattering) feedback on it (”Wait, you’re how old?” being among my favorite.) It was such an honor to work with such a high caliber group of people, and it is my sincerest hope that we are able to move it forward into production. This experience has easily been the best that I’ve had in the theater, so thank you to Robin (my wonderful director), to my lovely cast and to everyone who came out to support me.

I didn’t have my camera with me, but my father did, so hopefully I will have some pictures to share in the near future. I also hope to announce a full production some time soon, though we didn’t have anyone immediately offer to pick it up… not sure what to do with it. I suppose shop it around a bit. It’s weird, it doesn’t feel like just my play any more, but I really like that. It’s safely in the hands of artists I trust. It’s fabulous.

ii. Uriel’s Garden — Carin White, my delightful director, pulled a giant God puppet out of the air, no small feat! The final presentation of my first round collaboration piece was on Monday, and it was so much fun to watch. Next round is starting to come together now that we’ve figured out our casting, and I have yet another short play in the works which I have just sent to a prospective director. What a busy little bee am I…

iii. Representation — So, I feel like I know what I am supposed to do before I get an agent, and after I’m being taught what I’m supposed to do after I get one, but no one is telling me how to actually go about getting one. I’ve gotten a couple of great suggestions: the first was to ask my teachers to suggest me to people. I wonder if this isn’t asking a bit much (or is that simply my self-consciousness talking?). Another suggestion was to try to land an internship in an agency. This, I think, is a totally solid suggestion — I just can’t afford to lose paid work hours to potentially work for free. The search for the paid internship is on. Oh fellow writers and theater people, do you have any other suggestions as to how to wrangle an agent, manager or producer? I’d like to get my work out there, and I got so lucky with Psychomachia, but we can’t ask actors with those kinds of resumes to do off-off Broadway for free. We need to pay them, and they need to be Off-Broadway. I have assembled an Off-Broadway team! (Well, Robin has, at least) And now I just need to get the backing! I need money! Oh, producers, how do I find you? These are the things I am not being taught.

This blog post has taken me all day to write, and it isn’t even very interesting. For that I apologize.

I have listened to Sweeney Todd, [title of show] and Spring Awakening all the way through. I have secretly played word association with a friend for the last hour and a half and I have looked at every submission opportunity in the UK that I could find. That’s what kind of day it’s been.

February 26th, 2009 | Tags: fantastically fabulous factoids | Category: How To | Leave a comment