report from Carrboro: Best of 10x10 (is great) (thanks, audience)

I got to see performances of the Best of 10x10 on both Saturday and Sunday and am grateful that I could come here.  (Thanks to ArtsCenter for travel and lodging!)  They've put together what may be one of the best evenings of ten-minute plays I've seen.  If you follow which writers get their work done in short play festivals, you wouldn't be surprised, because the writers included: Mike Folie, Mark Harvey Levine, Babs Linsday, Matt Casarino, Chris Lockheardt, and Doug Reed--all of whom have work that appears regularly across the country.  (It's almost impossible to find a short play festival without a play by Mark Harvey in it.)

The plays tended to be comedies (Matt's play, Green Eggs and Mamet, made me weep with laughter), which made me a little nervous about my play, Ship of Fools, which is an odd drama drama/puzzle about two women stuck in a lifeboat, who entertain each other by pretending to be other people (spoiler: the boat sinks in the end).  Sometimes an audience gets up so much momentum for laughing and having a good time, that they don't have patience for a short play which requires a bit of untangling during the short time it's on stage.

Both nights I saw the play, the audience was large--the venue holds 350, and it was sold out Saturday and close to sold out Sunday at 3pm.  I repeat--they sold probably close to 300 tickets for a 3pm Sunday show of ten-minute plays.)  They were definitely having a good time, thanks to good scripts and very strong performances.  I was worried my play might get swept away.

But it didn't.  (huge relief)  For a couple reasons:  First--strong performances.  The two actresses Jillian Holmquist and Jenny Wales, completely committed to the play and the game they were playing, and gave us a sense of what they were doing, despite only having a bare stage with two chairs.

Also, the sound/music design and performance helped channel the audience momentum and shifted the mood.  Nathan Logan, who designed the music/sound, also performed live on stage during the scene shifts throughout the entire performance--singing and playing electric guitar and keyboard.  I love having live music on stage, and he really knew how to be an unobtrusive presence during the plays (he was onstage the whole time), and then could really play during the shifts to get the audience where it needed to go.  For the lead in to Ship of Fools, he sang a haunting a cappella version of "Sailing" which was initially written and performed by the Sutherland Brothers in 1972--you can listen to it here--and made famous by Rod Stewart.  It worked perfectly.  (Nathan's version of it is still stuck in my head.)

The last factor was the audience itself.  The ArtsCenter 10x10 audience was incredibly engaged.  They were lively and there to have fun, but it was also clear that they loved being there (this wasn't attended out of obligation), they had a relationship with the theatre and the performers, and they wanted to pay attention.  As a playwright, I go to productions for lots of reasons (for fun, to see scripts in production, see good performances, to be moved, tickled, etc.), and one of those reasons is to be with audiences.  They vary as much, night-to-night, as performances.  Maybe more.  I think about audiences a lot--what makes them tick, how they will respond.  As a playwright, maybe I'm a bit of a conniseur of audiences.  I'm always looking for the right match between text, performance, and audience.  That's where the magic of theatre really comes together.

Here at 10x10, they have a kick-ass audience, and it was a treat to be part of it for two nights.

After the show, I talked to several people who said they loved Ship of Fools, and especially that it was a play that made them work, and that it moved them emotionally.  That's pretty much exactly what I wanted.  Very nice.

Thanks to Jeri Lynn Schulke, artistic director, for putting the evening together, to Lyden Harris for starting the festival and keeping it going for so long, to both Lynden and Emily Ranii, for producing my plays at 10x10 in the past.  They've really got a good thing going here.  And thanks to my director, Jerry Davis, and the entire production team for putting together a great show.

Here's a (somewhat blurry, sorry) photo of the audience waiting for the Best of Ten by Ten to start (and there's Nathan getting ready to play guitar).

Jasper Fforde (and yeah, maybe I'm a little full of crap)

Went to Brookline Booksmith (actually it was at the Coolidge Corner Cinema) for a reading by author Jasper Fforde, who has a new book, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels is just out. There were probably 150-200 people who paid $5 each to hear his one-hour talk, and then they all waited in line 45 minutes or so to get him to sign books. And he was great. Very funny, as you'd expect (demand) if you're Fforde fan. When you hear him talk (very fast), you can begin to understand how he's able to create his two series on such a consistent basis, and why people like them so much.

He had a great list of ten principles that he uses when writing (though I don't remember them well enough to quote them). He said a lot of useful things, but one that I really liked was that first he wrote his books (feeling completely unqualified to do so). Later, after they were published and he did book tours and answered people's various literary questions, he figured out what he'd actually done.

(This points to a potential problem with the way that new plays are developed, in that quite often full-length plays have readings, where there are talkback sessions with the audience, which are all fine and good. But the expectation is often that somehow the playwright will use these to "fix" problems with the play. But maybe (I'm not the first to mention this), theatres should work together with the playwright to produce the play in whatever way seems to make the most sense. And then, after the play is actually produced, the playwright can engage in pleasant Q&As and everyone can think about answers to the questions about what is happening and why.)

In my recent post about fame and fortune, I, of course, said that they don't really matter that much to me anymore. Which is mostly true. But I'm also a little full of crap. I tell you, I'd sure like to have people lined up around the block to hear me talk and buy my books. And I'd like to have them name city streets after characters in my books (like they've done in Swindon, the setting for the Thursday Next series), or host an annual Gabridge festival (there is apparently an annual Fforde FFestival in Swindon).

And I'd like to have it all happen and still come across as funny and witty and unspoiled as Jasper Fforde. He's clearly having a ball writing his books, and he seems tickled that so many of us enjoy them as much as he does.

While, as I pointed out in my previous post, it takes a lot of luck to have a successful book published, Jasper Fforde's success also shows how hard work and ingenuity can turn a few strokes of good luck (and a very clever book) into something far more.

Jasper's made a tremendous effort to connect with his fans. Just take a look at his web site--he clearly enjoys the interaction with the folks who read his books, and he gives them a lot of material to look at between releases. He sends out e-mails to his e-mail list about when he's going to make appearances on tour. And in person, he's so entertaining. He definitely gave me a valuable lesson about how to make a book reading into an event worth remembering. I've done a few (mostly for very small audiences) and I know I have a lot to learn. He's given me something to shoot for.

In some ways, the playwrights in the theatre blogosphere provide our fans (what few we have) with ways to hear from us on a regular basis. But much of what's written tends to be for other playwrights. I know theatre is different from novel writing--i.e. locally produced, rather than broadly sold--but it is important for us to keep thinking about ways to communicate with our audiences between shows. How can we use the web to provide additional info/material/value to those folks who see our plays and are interested? Some writers are making progress on this, but I know I have so much room to improve (...it all takes time, we're all short of time, I know, I know).

Anyway, here's hoping for a long line at my next reading (or production). And yours, too.

Odd Audience Reaction at Mike Daisey's Show (at the ART)

This weird thing happened at Mike Daisey's show.

I heard about it from Adam's blog, and now Malachy's has a video of this very weird audience response to Mike Daisey's monologue performance at the ART. A good chunk of the audience leaves, apparently in protest, though it's unclear why. (He uses the "f" word, but to be honest, the content that's on the video seems fairly mild.) On Mike's site, he says they were a Christian group (but I'm not sure how he knows this).

Mr. Daisey handles the whole thing extremely well (the protesters pour water on his desk and script on their way out). I don't know what I would have done. I wondered sometimes during the production of Pieces of Whitey, if we might get angry audience response (it's a comedy about race and well-meaning white people) (but that mostly seemed to happen from the critics) (and they were angry), but nothing every happened.

What's so weird is that this group leaves en masse, but when Mike tries to talk to them about what's happening, they don't answer him. And he's acting calmly and reasonably, really, considering the situation. It seems a strong violation of the unspoken audience/performer contract: he's doing his best to engage and entertain them, and in return expects an honest answer in return. You could say that their leaving is an honest response--they apparently hate it. Pouring out the water on his stuff shows that they really, really hate it. But, especially with the water, they don't take into account that he's a human being (one in a vulnerable position) with feelings. It's not like he was berating the audience or treating them disrespectfully. But they chose to disrupt his performance and the experience of the other members in the audience.

I'm especially disturbed that this happened here in Boston. I've always found audiences here polite, if a little reserved. I just don't get it.