Writing to a Theme

An early rehearsal of "Our Daughter Katie."
From left to right: Actors Christie Emler and Mark Mesarch, Director Trey Martinez, and actor Eleanor Schmeichel.
 Not pictured: Actor Alaina Conner.

For a writer, a prompt or specific theme can feel like a nice springy board from which to launch into a short story, poem, or play. Sometimes, those prompted quick-writes transform over time into novels, poetry collections, and full length plays. If they do nothing more than sit, an incoherent mess, in a dusty of notebook in the writer’s basement, no matter. All writing is worthwhile to a writer in the same way that all exercise is to an athlete, or the practicing of scales is to a musician. It’s what we do in order to do what we do, if that makes sense.

I’ve met a lot of writing prompts in my journey as a writer, in classes, workshops, and the like. Usually, I attack them with gusto head on. I fear no writing prompt, and never met a one that could stump me. Until this past year, that is, when the Lincoln Theatre Alliance chose family as the theme of this year’s theatre season.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the theme of family. I love family. I have one myself. In fact, every play I’ve ever written, as well as both of my novels, involve family in and integral and indispensable way. I realized that no matter what I write, in some way, I am writing about family. But when Judy Hart, director of Angels Theatre Company, presented the theme of family to us members of Angels Playwriting Collective and requested that we write family-themed plays for the 2017 First Flight Festival, for me, the theme of family turned into the insurmountable wall called FAMILY!

By December of 2016, I was beginning to believe that I would have no play to submit to First Flight 2017. But in early December, my husband and I went down to Mission, Kansas to see a production of my ten minute play “Bernice’s Birthday.” (Those of you who attended First Flight last year may remember the production with Cecilia and John Burkhart, directed by Jan Bretz.) After the show, Bob and I were discussing and dissecting the other plays we had seen. One of the plays involved a man sitting on a park bench when a stranger walks up to him and pretends to be an old teammate from his high school football team. The first man pretends to remember the stranger, and in the end, the stranger poisons him with a cigarette. Analyzing that play got me to thinking. What if you upped the ante there? Instead of a stranger claiming to be an old friend, it’s a stranger claiming to be a family member? What if this stranger appeared, not on a park bench, but in your own house? And what if there were a real and corresponding family member still at home, and you had to choose between them? Now the play takes a turn for the surreal of course, but you can see how the stakes are upped in each case.

So I had my family play at last. I sat down in a cafe with my notebook and wrote it in one sitting. But don’t think with a play that that’s that. That is not that!

A Play is not like fiction. People read fiction, in the comfort of their homes, beaches, cafes etc. It has to be well-written, edited, rewritten, and on and on so that it’s good and they will like it, and not leave nasty reviews on Amazon. A play is different. It’s more like a structure that people climb all over and sometimes jump up and down on, and it has to be strong to hold up under all that abuse. This is where Angels Playwriting Collective and Angels Theatre Company’s First Fight Festival comes in. The process makes plays strong, so that when the director starts to work with actors in rehearsal, and ultimately, those actors walk out onto a stage and perform, the whole structure doesn’t collapse into a pile of debris and dust before the eager eyes of an audience.

This is my third time through this process, and as always, I am coming through it a better playwright. At our first table read of “Our Daughter Katie,” I received invaluable input that helped me to shape the play in such a way that the action and characters would be clear to an audience. After that first read through, I thought a lot about what I heard, and one night when I couldn’t sleep, I got up at 2:00 am and rewrote the play.

I attended three subsequent rehearsals of the play. At the first two, I was fascinated by the way the director, Trey Martinez, encouraged the actors to discover for themselves their own characters’ inner lives and impulses, and to surrender themselves to the unreal and unlikely plot elements. The third rehearsal I attended was the tech rehearsal. At that rehearsal, I felt completely jazzed up to see Trey’s inventive staging and direction. The commitment and playfulness of the actors, their presence in the moment, was a joy to watch. I cannot express enough my gratitude to Trey, and to actors Mark Mesarch, Christie Emler, Alaina Conner and Eleanor Schmeichel. And to my esteemed fellow playwrights of Angels Playwriting Collective, to producer Judy Hart and Angels Theatre Company, you keep me writing plays, and for that, I thank you!

  

A Playwright's Out of Body Experience

There is magic in the process of taking a play from the page to the stage; for a playwright, this process can feel like an out of body experience.

Timothy Scholl directs actors Cecilia Burkhart and John Burkhart in my ten-minute play Kitchen Garden. 

Back in 2011, my play Kitchen Garden began as a vague idea in my head, which became a conversation with my husband Bob during a long evening walk, and then morphed into a hastily scribbled first draft over a cappuccino in the Mill in College View. It went through various lengths and versions and then lay dormant for four years as nothing more than a computer file. I took a playwriting class, wrote more plays and saw them performed, but always wondered if there was a future for that first play. Then came Angels Playwriting Collective and the First Flight Festival, so I dusted off Kitchen Garden, tightened it into a ten-minute play with the astute feedback from my fellow Collective playwrights, and now am experiencing the magic of watching it make that leap from page to stage.

Cecilia Burkhart and John Burkhart rehearse my ten-minute play Kitchen Garden.

The out of body experience hits me during rehearsals as I watch my amazing director Timothy Scholl find subtext, character traits, motivations, and conflict that enrich the play so much beyond the written word. In succinct direction to the actors, he can communicate ideas that for me are so internalized that I can only get at them indirectly through dialogue. The actors, Cecilia and John Burkhart, inhabit my characters with a stunning familiarity, as if they were inside the characters’ heads, which translates to inside my head, a bit unnerving when you think about it. So watching a rehearsal of my own play is like watching the contents of my head take shape outside myself. Hopefully, I’ll get used to this strange phenomenon by opening night and be able to enjoy seeing my play on stage just like any other audience member, though I seriously doubt it. If you suspect that someone in the audience is having an out of body experience, that would be me.

More information about the Angels Theatre Company First Flight Festival at angelscompany.org.
Contact Brigid through her website at brigidamos.com.

Live Theatre in Nebraska City!

Getting ready to take a bow. Left to Right: Bob Hall, Brigid Amos, Paula Ray, Robin Buckallew, and Bob Graybosch.

"It's live theatre!"

The waiting audience burst out laughing as the staff continued to fiddle with the lights in the conference room, at one point plunging it into utter darkness. The observation came not from an actor but rather from an ebullient audience member. The live theatre had not, in fact started just yet.

Let me back up a bit and explain how we got to that point.

About a week before my husband and I were to leave for a family Christmas/ski vacation in Montana, I received an email from fellow Angels Playwriting Collective member Robin Buckallew saying that she was still looking to fill some roles in a reading of her one act play "Until They Forget". She also had some exciting news about the play: it had been chosen as one of three regional finalists in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre one-act competition. But that reading was to be in Minneapolis toward the end of January. The reading she needed to cast was to take place at the Lied Lodge & Conference Center in Nebraska City, Nebraska on Sunday January 4.

Robin is completing her MFA in Playwriting at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. "Until They Forget" is one of the plays that make up her thesis, and one of the graduation requirements of the program is a reading of an excerpt of a play. Hence the concern about finding actors. When my husband Bob Graybosch got home, I approached him about the idea of the two of us taking the roles. I assured him that it would just be a reading, i.e., sitting at a long table with our scripts open in front of us. At the most, perhaps standing at podiums. What was I thinking?

The reading was scheduled for 5:15 pm, and there was to opportunity to rehearse before convening at 1:30 pm in the timbered lobby of Lied Lodge. The other two actors arrived: Paula Ray, playwright, actress, and psychologist (also an Angels Playwriting Collective member) and her husband Bob Hall, playwright, actor, director, founder and artistic director of Flatwater Shakespeare Company, comic book creator, and artist. We were in great company, and that was reassuring. Robin introduced us to our director Michael Oatman, Playwright-in-Residence of Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio. We followed him into the conference room where we would rehearse, and after the first read through, Michael cordially dismissed the stage direction reader and announced that we would perform the play as a staged reading (i.e. still reading from the script, but up on our feet, moving around and carrying out the physical action of the play).

Michael is what I would call an "actor's director," and it was such an exciting experience to work with him. He is the type of director who can intuitively sense the potential in actors, and knows how to draw that potential out. My husband Bob has no stage experience (although he and I did once take an acting class with Sarah Imes Borden, and I thought he did quite well.) In a very direct, demanding, but kind way, Michael challenged Bob to find the character within himself, to loosen up, and to deliver some of his lines with confidence to the audience.

I should also say that we were very grateful to have theater veteran Bob Hall in the cast. It is always nice to have a really solid actor that leads the way and whose performance everyone else can latch onto! 

We moved into the big conference hall for one last run through, which brings us to the last minute light checks and other technical scuffling about. After very moving speeches by Charlene A. Donaghy, Robin's playwriting mentor, and by Robin herself, we launched into the performance. Although the play examines serious themes of life and death, there is a great deal of comedy in it, and the very engaged and appreciative audience laughed throughout. We received wonderful comments afterwards, as did Robin for her writing, and we all retired to the Timber Dining Room for a well-

deserved meal. (By the way, I also had a chocolate martini and my husband had a Guinness.)

An epilogue:

A few days after the staged reading, I was hanging up the slacks I wore that day. (In order to tell this story, I have to reveal a bit about my housekeeping habits.) Out of the pocket of the slacks fell a '63 Corvette. OK, that sounds weird, so let me back up again with a spoiler alert. At some point during the play, Bob Hall's character, Larry, pulls a toy '63 Corvette out of his pocket. My character, Andi, takes the car and plays with it for a while. I needed to get the car out of my hands, and it seemed natural to put it in my own pocket. Each time we ran through the play, I handed the car to Bob Hall to put into his pocket, but of course, after the performance, we ate dinner instead. I sent the car to Robin, and she will take it to Minneapolis for the reading there. That little '63 Corvette sure gets around!

Reading through the script. Left to Right: Bob Hall, Paula Ray, Brigid Amos, and Bob Graybosch.