Thought-provoking essay on theatre's ability/inability to shock

I thought this article was worth reading. Don't know that I agree with all particulars, but some excellent points are raised. It's also interesting to read the comments this article provoked...

Spring Submissions

SPRING SUBMISSIONS

Virtual Theatre ProjectBeginning March 1, 2008 VTP is accepting bold, passionate, innovative and compelling new work for the stage. We impose no restrictions as to theme, style or subject matter, but do want plays written specifically for the stage. • Winner receives a $2,000.00 cash award. • First and second runners-up receive cash awards of $1,000.00 and $500.00 • Up to seven honorable mentions will receive cash awards of $100.00 each.
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Estro Genius FestivalThe 10th annual Estrogenius Festival will be held in fall 2009. SHORT PLAYS accepted January 15 - March 2, 2009 LOOKING FOR EMPHASIS ON FEMALE ROLES AND THE FEMINE EXPERIENCE
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Actor's Theatre of CharlotteThe MFA Playwriting Award was created by Actor's Theatre of Charlotte to honor and encourage emerging playwrights of American Theatre.
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The Stone TheatrePURPOSE The Arthur W. Stone Playwriting Award was established in 2006 by the Stone Theatre at Louisiana Tech University. Arthur W. Stone was Director of Theatre at Louisiana Tech from 1947-1975. During his years of active service to theatre in Louisiana, “Papa” Stone was a strong advocate for playwrights and their art and craft. The award is designed to honor “Papa” as he celebrates his 100th birthday in 2007. It also intends to encourage and stimulate playwrights through the production of their work.
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The Bedlam Theatre TenFestBedlam Theatre is gearing up for another year of Community Collaborative Adventures. The Bedlam Community Ten Minute Play Festival started in 2002 and every year comprises up to two dozen original short works.
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Samuel French, IncOne of Manhattan’s most established play festivals, the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival fosters the work of early-career writers, giving them the exposure of publication and representation.

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The Sandy Spring Theatre GroupPlease send your original one-act plays by March 20 for consideration at the Cedar Lane Stage and Sandy Spring Theatre Group's 2009 summer one-act festivals.
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Hunger Artists Theatre Co.Hunger Artists Theatre Company is accepting scripts for its 10 minute play festival Beyond Convention 3. Scripts must be under ten minutes long and challenge normal theatre conventions.
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Radient Theatre ProductionsRadiant Theatre is seeking submissions for our 5th Annual Celebration of Women--Emergence 2008. We want plays written by woman playwrights of any age. The plays must have good women's parts and be empowering to women in some way. We are also seeking women directors and volunteers of any gender.
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Prize for PlaywrightingThe Larry Corse Prize for Playwriting was established in 2003 by Larry Corse, Professor Emeritus of Theatre and English at Clayton State University, to encourage the development and production of new works for the stage. The prize has been awarded four times and in each of these years the competition received more than 300 plays from around the world. For a list of previous winners, go to http://www.larrycorse.com.
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Princess Grace Foundation-USAThe Princess Grace Awards is a national program dedicated to identifying and assisting emerging theater, dance and film artists who are at the outset of their careers or at early stages of professional development. This mission is accomplished in playwriting through a residency program at New Dramatists, Inc. in New York City.
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Cheshire Comedy PublishingPlaywrights! Ever dream of seeing your play come alive? Hearing a crowd of people laugh at the joke you wrote? This is it... Get it here... Be the one chosen! Enter your most hilarious comedy plays for a chance at a $500 advance, being published, produced, and forever known as the winner of... The Funniest Play on Earth 2009!
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New PlayThe Chameleon Theatre Circle is looking for a few good scripts for our Tenth Annual New Play Contest. Each submitted script can be from one of the following categories: 10-Minute, One Act, Full Length, Musical or Theatre-for-Youth. EACH submissions MUST include the New Play Contest Entry Form, as well as three (3) copies of the script. The rolling submission deadline is May 4, 2009. Submissions received after May 4, 2009 will be entered into the Eleventh Annual New Play Contest. The Tenth Annual New Play Festival will be held in August, 2009.
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Award applicationThe John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award Competition fosters new playwrights and scripts through this important competition established by Molly Gassner, wife of theatre historian John Gassner. The Award was created in 1967 to honor the late John Gassner (1903-1967) for his lifetime dedication to all aspects of professional and academic theatre. Two cash prizes will be awarded: First Prize of $1000, and Second Prize of $500. The judges may withhold prizes if in their opinion no play merits the award. Only full-length scripits are accepted.
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The Seven SubmissionsFUSION Theatre Company announces our fourth annual Ten Minute New Play Festival The Seven: New Works Fest June 18-21, 2009 Last Summer FUSION presented our 3rd Annual New Ten Minute Play Festival, The Seven: Something Left Unsaid. An international call for entries introduced New Mexico audiences to world premieres of works chosen from hundreds of submissions from up and coming playwrights drawn from around the world. This summer, we're at it again. Our audience has spoken: on-line voting by FUSION Theatre Company patrons has produced this year's theme: That One Thing. Again this year, theatre management has agreed to provide a Jury Prize: a flight to lovely Albuquerque, NM to see your professionally produced play! (Jury comprised of nationally prominent theatre professionals and FUSION's own literary staff.)

State of the Art discussion

To my mind, there’s never a single factor that makes me think quel dommage! But there are numerous elements which, taken cumulatively, detract from a play’s potential. Here’s a few of them:
• Relying on lengthy or overly directive stage indications to get your readers to glimpse a dramatic vision that’s lacking in the dialogue.
• Slapping a dull title on your front page. Neil Simon may name a play The Dinner Party because people trust his brand. Most of us don’t have his cachet. Your title should intrigue us; it should make us wonder about the play without being obscure. If Cooking with Elvis was playing in your town, you’d probably go, right?
• Allowing the reader/audience to doubt that you’re in control of your story. You can do anything you want in formal terms—mess with time sequences, have five plots, prevent us from connecting the dots for three quarters of the play—so long as the audience senses that ultimately you are taking them someplace specific.
• And then there’s the contrary of the previous point—providing the audience with so much “clarity” that you’ve done all the work for them. If you let them get ahead of you in your story, they discover they have time on their hands. Trust me, they’ll use that time to critique the play.
• Making promises you don’t keep. Your opening scene will pose a problem, or present a conflict, or introduce characters who will soon be in conflict, right? Failure to get round to addressing that first thesis will leave your readers feeling cheated. It happens!
You also ask what new plays are doing right these days. By “right,” do you mean they’re getting produced? I’ll tell you what I notice in that regard. Subject matter is all over the map currently, but many plays have in common that they adeptly use stage space and they take advantage of their proximity to their audience. Two plays now doing well around the country that couldn’t be farther apart on the aesthetic spectrum are Jason Grote’s 1001, and Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure by Steven Dietz. The former is a heady political salmagundi and the latter is an outright just-for-fun romp. The first is highly presentational; the second observes the fourth wall convention. But both are canny about how they make use of the stage, and their highly entertained audiences come away feeling they had a genuine night in the theater, as opposed to the cinema or a re-run of Nip/Tuck.
I’m on the lookout for scripts that honor their contracts with their live audiences, and I think many other literary managers are, too.

— Mead

First of all, I bow to Mead for his clarity and exhaustiveness. He is right in these things (as in many, many others).
As for me, if I were to say what most plays are missing to “put them over the top,” I'd say it’s usually either:
• Confidence. Do what you want to with your play! Just teach me how to watch it. If you show me how to enter the world on your terms, I’ll follow. This follows on Mead’s advice—do what you want, but if you’re setting up a mystery story, let me know; if I’m following the interweave of a plot in the past and present, make sure the details are there, but then trust me to engage in the world as you spin it out. The kind of story you’re telling will be reflected in the way you’re telling it. So tell it deliberately and trust that I’m keeping pace.
• Ambition. By which I mean an intriguing balance of theatrical elements, be they character, theme or plot, or a particular linguistic flair or highly theatrical approach to the space and time of theater. Many of the fine-but-not-great plays I read focus on one of these elements without quite landing it with the specificity and subtlety to truly pull off, for instance, a character play that truly pays off on solely a character front. In my experience, the most interesting plays are working with great care on at least two of the three of the character/theme/plot trinity.
There are, of course, other ways to think about what makes a play multivalent and interesting, but the fact remains I like my plays multivalent and interesting. This doesn’t necessarily mean “experimental”; where Mead mentions Steven Dietz’s adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, I’ll champion George C. Wolfe’s adaptations of Zora Neale Hurston’s stories in Spunk as a play that’s smart and theatrical, complex but accessible.
It really is impossible to talk about plays in the abstract: They're wily creatures and specific onto unto themselves. I love theater because of its ease of transformation, so forgive all these generalities. Reflecting on the plays of the most recent Humana Festivals, I’d agree with Mead that many of the most interesting contemporary plays have a sense of the theatrical world in which they exist. This might mean exploiting the ways that theater can make metaphors tangible or connect ideas and people across time or culture. It may be the thrill of exploring the ways that showing an audience a character’s thought process can render a strange point of view shockingly familiar or bring an audience face-to-face with the movements of our own hearts we hadn’t quite articulated.
There are a thousand interesting ways to spend two hours, give or take, of my time. So be interesting, let me in on what you’re doing, and I’ll follow you any place you think is worthwhile.

—Adrien-Alice

I will put my weight behind a couple of points that Adrien-Alice and Mead have made about what compels me to want to produce a new play, just to give them added heft. And those points are: ambition, bravado, bravery.
When I think about the new plays I've read or seen that have thrilled me recently—and I think about Tom Stoppard's Rock-n-Roll, Deborah Stein's Wallflower, Carlos Murillo's Dark Play or Stories for Boys, Will Power's The Seven—the thrill comes from the deliciousness of the ride these plays take me on. All of these writers step up to the plate and take bold—sometimes infuriating, but always bold—positions about cultural movements or moments that they obviously feel a personal stake in but that have repurcussions for us all, and they do it... deliciously.
What do I mean by deliciously? I mean in a theatrically clever and immediate way with language that bites and roars and wears its heart on its sleeve spoken by characters whose actions throw them into a free fall, and I get to be there to watch where they land, knowing only that they're going to land somewhere drastically different from where they started.
As Adrien-Alice and Mead have said, this kind of authorial bravado can happen in any kind of play—comedy, drama, farce, poetic epic, slice-of-life, mystery, etc. It's not, for me, the style or the content that draws me to a play, but a sense that there is a brave, ambitious, wickedly confident mind at work.

— Elissa

"The Jolly Good Fellows" Head to New York

THE JOLLY GOOD FELLOWS, a new play by Steve Feffer, playwriting professor at Western Michigan University and Whole Art’s resident playwright, and Tucker Rafferty, artistic director of the Whole Art Theater, have written a new play, THE JOLLY GOOD FELLOWS, that will be produced in New York City, Friday, May 29th through Monday, June 1st at the Festival of Jewish Theater and Ideas being produced by New York’s Untitled Theatre Company #61 (http://www.untitledtheater.com/). THE JOLLY GOOD FELLOWS will perform at the 99 seat Mint Theatre, located at 43rd Street and 8th Avenue, in the heart of the city’s theatre district. Under the direction of Western Michigan University theatre professor Mark Liermann, who will direct the New York production, THE JOLLY GOOD FELLOWS was recently read as part of the Whole Art Theater’s second annual New Play Festival.

THE JOLLY GOOD FELLOWS is a fifty-minute play set in the 1890s that tells the story of David Green and Michael Harrigan, two actors that make their living performing a stereotypical “Jew” and “Irishman” in the grotesque ethnic performances that were popular in the concert saloons and variety theatres of the day.

A darkly comedic tale, THE JOLLY GOOD FELLOWS is based loosely on a pair of actors from the time, exploring how these two very different American immigrants enter into a contract of convenience to keep up with the changing times, and then later, the cost that such performances inflicts upon them personally and socially. The play also includes songs and sketches from the period.

Workshop Dates

February 2: Kris, Adam

February 9: Jason L., Tyler

February 16: Jason W., Jim, James

February 23: Karen, Mickey

March 9: Ben

March 16: Noah, Mikala

March 23: CC

The Jolly Good Fellows by Steve Feffer and Tucker Rafferty, Reading Saturday, January 17th, 7 PM

The Whole Art Theatre New Play Series will present a reading of the The Jolly Good Fellows by Steve Feffer and Tucker Rafferty at the Whole Art's Epic Theatre Center space (359 South Kalamazoo Mall) at 7 PM on Saturday, January 17th. The reading is free and will be followed by a talk-back with the playwrights and a reception.

The Jolly Good Fellows is a two character fifty minute play set in the 1890s that tells the story of David Green and Michael Harrigan, two actors that make their living performing a stereotypical “Jew” and “Irishman” in the grotesque ethnic performances that were popular in the concert saloons and variety theatres of the day. This darkly comedic tale, based loosely on two actors from the time and their "Jolly Good Fellow" sketches, explores how these two very different American immigrants enter into a contract of convenience to keep up with the changing times, and then later, the cost that such performances inflicts upon them personally and socially. The play also includes songs and sketches from the period. The Jolly Good Fellows has been entered into the Jewish Fringe Festival to be held in New York City in Spring 2009.

For information or reservations please contact the Whole Art Theatre at 269-345-7529 or www.wholeart.org.

January 5th, 8 PM Play Readings to Benefit WMU Kennedy Center/ACTF Playwrights

This Monday, January 5th at 8 PM, at the Whole Art Theatre Studio Space at 246 North Kalamazoo Mall, there will be a benefit play reading for the four graduate students from the Creative Writing Program that have been selected by the National Playwriting Program of the Kennedy Center's American College Theatre Festival to have their plays presented at the KC/ACTFs prestigious regional festival, being held this year in Saginaw, Michigan January 6 - 11. The plays were four of the thirteen total that were selected from over one hundred and fifty entries that were submitted in three categories: ten minutes, one acts and full lengths.

This will be a benefit for the playwrights to raise money in support of their trip to the festival. There will be a reading of each of the short plays and scenes from the full length, as well as Dionysian revelry. Admission to the event is free. A hat will be passed. Refreshments will be for sale. There may be a silent auction. The hat may be auctioned.

The plays and playwrights are:

MFA playwright Kris Peterson's play "Gun Metal Blue Bar" is one of the region's six ten minute plays. Additionally, Kris's play has been selected for a reading at the Mid-American Theatre Conference that will be held in March in Chicago. In Kris's play, Ricky's looking to get paid for a few weeks of hard work around Henry's racing pigeon lofts. However, one final gruesome act is separating Ricky from the money he needs to rescue his late father's cuff links from the pawn shop.

MFA playwright Karen Wurl's "Now and At the Hour Of" and MFA playwright Jason Lenz's "The Switch Room" are two of the six one act plays. Karen's play was originally presented at WMU as part of FUSE ONE.

In Wurl's "Hour," a middle-aged woman revisits 1977, a motel room, and a lost love, in an attempt to recover a lost self.

In Jason's play, Gus and Sam have an important job to do: flip the large switch in the switch room, at the second specified to them by the government, with no knowledge of what is being set in motion by the ambiguous lever. The problem is that today Gus and Sam are beginning to question what the switch actually does once activated.

Recent Ph.D creative writing program graduate Christine Iaderosa's play The Sins of Kalamazoo is the sole full length play to be presented. Christine's play will be presented in a full production later this year at the Whole Art Theatre. The Sins of Kalamazoo is a loose adaptation of the Carl Sandburg poem with reminiscence of the lost past of Americana and the failed promise of yesteryear.

The plays will be presented at the festival and then responded to by a panel of theatre professionals that this year includes Aaron Carter from Chicago's Victory Gardens Theatre and Roger Hall, the Kennedy Center's National Playwriting Program Chair.

The Kennedy Center's American College Theatre Festival provides opportunities for over 18,000 theatre students and faculty throughout the country. English Department Professor Steve Feffer serves as the Vice Chair for the KCACTF III National Playwriting Program.

For more information please contact Dr. Steve Feffer at steve.feffer@wmich.edu.