Askins: Blogging Bloodworks

Robert Askins:

That's not the real one is it.

My Mother married a man named Charles after my Father died.
They had known each other for a long time. We all went to the same church.
Charles' wife died slowly of cancer. My Father died quickly of heart disease.
They used to go out together. My Mother, My Father, Charles and his wife.
Charles and his wife adopted a child around the time I was born. The boy's name was John.
We played together.

This was all a million years ago. Now Charles is my step father, but really just my Mother's husband.
He helped me move once in college after he married my mother. We sat at a Burger King. He told me a story.
The story was about John.

That story is part of Wrench. It is not Wrench. Wrench is not that story.
The character's name is John. So there is that.

I just sent out the email for the play. Cheryl is Charles daughter by birth. She is John's older sister. She does my taxes.
We correspond through email. I sent her the spam by accident. I only realized it after I pressed send. I am now worried
about an email from her. An email that starts... "you have no right."

When I wrote Princes of Waco it started with a story about my friend Polar Bear. He fell in love with a girl we called NASCAR Jamie. All these names are true. I was worried then like I am now. By the time it got to the stage, nothing of that story remained, but when my Mother watched the play and saw the dead father's Rolex being bandied about she leaned over to my aunt and said:

"that's not the real one is it?"

So there is that.

Horton Foote wrote a play about his home town, Horton Foote wrote all his plays about his home town, but the first one he wrote was called Wharton Dance. Later he would change the name to Harrison. Later he would change all the names. But he did it once with all the names right. I listened to him talk a lot. He said it was important to change the names so people wouldn't be hurt.

Kerouac wanted to rewrite all the novels with one vocabulary of names so that these people he knew could be traced from novel to novel. So you could follow the one person who had so many different names. But not they're real names. Because they weren't themselves on the page. They were them passed through Kerouac but...

We know there is a one person. Don't we?

Shakespeare had a son who died named Hamnet.

We like to play the "who is it" game. Don't we.

But we don't wanna have the game played on us.

I just checked my email and Cheryl still hasn't sent me a message telling me I have no right.

I almost married a writer who wrote a play about our relationship. It made me so angry I almost broke up with her. We were in bed and I told her with closed eyes, "Some times I use the death of my father for sympathy." The line ended up in the play. When I heard it the first time all the air went out of me. So there's that.

I asked my roomate about it. She said:

"fuck'em its yer art"

but she's a narcissist.

I did it. I do it. I will do it again. It has hurt people. It does hurt people. It will hurt people again.

but...

I feel bad about it. Most of the time when somebody says something like that: "I feel bad about it." I say: "that and 2.50 gets you on the train."

This is what I do.
This how I live in the world
There is no malice in it.
I will get better about it.
I may figure out how to do it without hurting anyone.
I don't know if I will.

i am sorry.

that and 2.50 gets you on the train.

Rob's Bloodworks reading (the final one of the series, folks) of Wrench (directed by Dylan McCullough) is next Wednesday, 7/1. 7 PM. @ Seaport.
And stick around after the reading--we're throwing an end of the season party.

Link:Blogging BLOODWORKS ~ Tonight!

Patrick Link:

“Well, you could always teach.”

People often say this to me. I’m not sure if it’s true, though. The thought of me addressing a class of eager kids ready to learn about the world terrifies me. It terrifies me so much I wrote a play about it. It’s called Dismissal and will be read tonight @Bloodworks.

Here’s my fear about teaching: that I would treat it like a show. I’d be like “Come to English class, we’ll have some laughs, tell some stories and if I can get you to care about a few books then great, but come primarily to have a good time.”

Maybe this isn’t the worst approach to teaching, but to me it seems like if you do this for too long it will come back to haunt you. Or at least that’s my fear. That I’d be so preoccupied with keeping my students entertained I wouldn’t adequately prepare them for the dangers surrounding them in the world—or even in the classroom. And that’s what Dismissal is about.

It’s about other things too: security, expression, career ambition and artistic failure.

And speaking of artistic failure, did I mention I have a reading tonight?

Patrick's Bloodworks reading of Dismissal (directed by Jordan Young; featuring Scott Sowers, Helen Coxe, Jake Aron, Patricia Randell, and Daniel Ziskie) is tonight at @Seaport @ 7 PM. Free of charge.

Conkel: Blogging Bloodworks

Joshua Conkel:

The idea for my play, I Wanna Destroy You, came from my December brunch piece, although they couldn’t be more different. The brunch piece, A Super Shiny Precious Thing, is a quiet (for me, anyway) and sweet ten-minute play about a desperately poor gay couple in Brooklyn who suddenly realize they want to get married.

The only commonality it shares with I Wanna Destroy You is that it’s also about a poor Brooklyn gay couple, albeit in a very different way. I’ve been going to a lot of gay rights protests this year and am, in all actuality, one half of a broke-as-a-joke Brooklyn gay couple, so questions of gay identity within straight society are on the front burner of my thoughts.

Specifically, I’m interested in the gay man as best friend, confidante, and catty fashion expert in our popular culture. It’s a fairly new cliché (we used to be perverts and psychopaths!) and while I’m glad for the positive rebranding, I can’t help thinking it’s one that’s actually damaging. Gay men have become like the adorable woodland creatures that helped Cinderella get dressed for the ball. Cute, but irrelevant. Also, in what ways do I as a gay man play into this stereotype, purposely even, to gain access into stuff I might not otherwise?

Think of Anthony, Charlotte York’s wedding planner and “friend” from Sex and the City, for example. He was certainly funny, and always at hand to answer a question about blow jobs, but was suspiciously missing during all of the key moments of his gal pal’s life. So was Stanford, Carrie’s “gay husband”.

To steal the vapid first line of every column Carrie ever wrote: In a city like New York, I had to wonder… To which I follow with; are gay men only acceptable if they’re planning your wedding, cutting your hair, or rearranging straight people’s furniture? And how much of our culture can mainstream culture steal without actually giving us equality? I mean, is it ironic to anybody else that our first black President is ignoring civil rights whilst his wife stands next to him wearing a gown by Jason Wu?

Anyway, I digress…

Beau, the protagonist in I Wanna Destroy You, is for all intents and purposes, the perfect gay man. He’s cute, funny, a snappy dresser, and the personal assistant to a famous romance novelist. Except that he’s getting older. Except that he’s broke, but still expected to wear designer clothes. Except that the woman he works for treats him like a yorkie or a hand bag. Except that his boyfriend burnt his face off whilst trying to deep fry a turkey on Thanksgiving and now wants to move back to Kentucky. I Wanna Destroy You is an examination of gay men and materialism, identity politics. In short, it’s about a gay man who turns thirty, freaks the fuck out about his life, and decides to destroy it.

Thanks for nothing, Carrie!

Joshua's Bloodworks reading of I Wanna Destroy You happens next Wednesday (6/24). 7 pm. @Seaport. Check back next week for the details!

BLOODWORKS: TONIGHT! (& for the next 3 weeks!)

Youngblood (Ensemble Studio Theatre's company of playwrights under 30) is proud to present BLOODWORKS - our annual reading series, featuring a brand new full-length play from each of our member playwrights.

ALL READINGS are @ 7pm and are free of charge @SEAPORT! - 210 Front Street

TONIGHT, June 17th:

NO POEM, NO SONG
by Jesse Cameron Alick

directed by Michael Goldfried

with Alaina Feehan, Kristen-Alexander Griffith, James Singletary, Darius Stone, Andy Waldschmidt, Kai Chapman, Eddie O'Blevins, Chris Berry, Jason Grimste, Melanie King, Mary Trotter, Tatiana Suarez Pico, Aixa Kendrick, Kimberlee Walker, Ngozi Anyanwu

Coming up:
Tues June 23 - PATRICK LINK
Weds June 24 - JOSHUA CONKEL
Tues June 30 - ELIZA CLARK
Weds July 1 - ROBERT ASKINS

This year, for the first time, the BLOODWORKS readings are hosted by Dog Run Rep at the @SEAPORT! space at South Street Seaport.

@SEAPORT! is located at 210 Front Street, in the South Street SeaportA/C to Broadway/Nassau, 2/3/4/5/J/M/Z to Fulton Street
Walk down Fulton Street to the Seaport, turn left before The Gap and the BODIES exhibit. @SEAPORT! is half a block down on the left.

GOOGLE MAP

BECKWITH BLOGGING BLOODWORKS

Nikole Beckwith:

You know those times that you are in the subway and you see the train and you swipe your card and run up to the train really fast and awkward. And when you get there the train is just sitting. All it's doors are shut but it's just sitting there letting you look inside. And after it has been sitting there for so long you think that the doors have got to open, that it would be impossible for this train to have just been sitting here and that any second now it was going to open up - just when that thought solidifies is when the train pulls away; slowly at first, then faster and you're stuck waiting for the next one.

That is what it was like the last few weeks writing my play. I would sit in front of my open document staring; looking in it's windows at the people inside wondering why it wouldn't just open it's doors. I'd think "Come on, I see them in there. I invented them. Just let me in" and suddenly it would be past 5pm and the day had pulled away and I'd be stuck waiting for the next one. And the next one.

The hardest part was seeing inside the windows, because I know this play; I know it's muscle and bone. I see it's shape and weight and I know how it tastes. But the connecting tissue, what keeps it together, what lets it move was avoiding me like the plague.

The experience of really wrestling a play, really trying to get those pages in a death-grip (pardon the pun, see the play) no matter how frustrating and discouraging at times- was very valuable. I have specific writing rituals and habits that I have always indulged but, as my reading date for Bloodworks approached I had to learn to bend my own rules. I like to write in the day. I like it to be the first thing I do and I prefer to do it in giant stretches. 9-5 bring it on. But come the second week in June, I had to get my night-writing on. I had to make myself write at home (which i almost never do) and I had to steal hour long panels of time here and there whenever I could.

Also I don't let anyone read a play until it's first draft is completed but I didn't have Imagine My Sadness finished for my draft deadline at YB so I shared the play without an end written, I had to email my cast just 40 pages (out of 96) to look at before rehearsals and I often felt so stuck I kept making my close friend/amazing playwright (who, as luck would have it, happened to be staying with me for the last week) read 30 page segments over and over and after we'd talk I would push forward or go backward or shake a fist in the air. All of which was incredibly helpful.

In addition to all of that comfort-zone-leaving and writers-block-having there were the Youngblood-ers that kept checking in on me and offering a much needed arm squeeze time and again when they would see my brow furrow at the mere mention of my play's progress. The support was very much appreciated. Solidarity is the lonely man's milk of human kindness and everyone knows that writers spend a lot of time alone.

At 2am on Sunday morning I wrote the words "End of Play" and by 4pm Sunday afternoon I had done my last skim/spell check tweak. Just in time to get my scripts printed for my Monday rehearsal. It's a first draft that I am really excited to beat up and iron out. Something I really look forward to getting other people in on; actors, director, YB-ers and living breathing reactionary people in those folding chairs on Tuesday. Let's all make this play takes it's first step together. You get the camera ready and I'll start the scrapbook.

xo nkl

Nikole's Bloodworks reading of Imagine My Sadness is this Tuesday (6/16) @SEAPORT! - 210 Front Street (@SEAPORT! is located at 210 Front Street, in the South Street Seaport--A/C to Broadway/Nassau, 2/3/4/5/J/M/Z to Fulton Street. Walk down Fulton Street to the Seaport, turn left before The Gap and the BODIES exhibit-- @SEAPORT! is half a block down on the left.) Admission is free.

LINKS ON LINKS

Patrick Link:

I love how on blogs you can link to stuff. I wish I could that in my plays. It provides an excellent opportunity for added subtext. Even a great work like The Seagull could benefit from hyperlinks. Take a look:

-

MEDVEDENKO: Why do you always wear black?

MASHA: Because I'm in mourning for my life. I'm not happy.

MEDVEDENKO: Why not? (Perplexed) I don't understand why not. You're in good health; your father is...well, he's not rich, but he's pretty well off. I'm in a lot worse shape than you. I make twenty-three rubles a month, that's before payroll deductions, and I'm not in mourning. (Sits)

MASHA: It has nothing to do with money. You can still be poor and still be happy.

(Scene)

See? Isn't that cool?

(patrick's bloodworks reading is June 23 @SEAPORT.)

BLOODWORKS: TONIGHT! TOMORROW!

TONIGHT:
Great Eastern

by Anna Moench

directed by Michael Silverstone


TOMORROW:
We In Silence Hear A Whisper

by Jon Kern

directed by Colette Robert

featuring Ayesha Ngaujah, Shydel James, Frank Harts, Louis Changchien, Laura Heidinger

BLOODWORKS: 2009 Youngblood's annual reading series Youngblood (Ensemble Studio Theatre's company of playwrights under 30) is proud to present BLOODWORKS - our annual reading series, featuring a brand new full-length play from each of our member playwrights.

ALL READINGS are @ 7pm and are free of charge @SEAPORT! - 210 Front Street
@SEAPORT! is located at 210 Front Street, in the South Street Seaport
A/C to Broadway/Nassau, 2/3/4/5/J/M/Z to Fulton Street
Walk down Fulton Street to the Seaport, turn left before The Gap and the BODIES exhibit. @SEAPORT! is half a block down on the left.has just started to teeter on its axis.
This year, for the first time, the BLOODWORKS readings are hosted by Dog Run Rep at the @SEAPORT! space at South Street Seaport.

Coming up:

Tues June 16 - NIKOLE BECKWITH

Weds June 17 - JESSE CAMERON ALICK

Tues June 23 - PATRICK LINK

Weds June 24 - JOSHUA CONKEL

Tues June 30 - ELIZA CLARK

Weds July 1 - ROBERT ASKINS