Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “new play”
Central Works Theatre has announced its 30th (!) Season, and Bystanders is one of the four plays that will premier there in 2020. It promises to be a kick-ass season, which includes a musical. Central Works produces only new plays. In 2019, three of four plays produced were written by women; next year, their playwright gender parity is 50/50. While …
Writing “Bystanders” is heart-rending. The play does not posit a solution, but follows one woman’s resolute action to open people’s eyes to the problem of mass shootings. The Onion nails the terrible state we’re in: “ROSEBURG, OR—In the hours following a violent rampage in southwestern Oregon in which a lone attacker killed nine individuals and seriously injured seven others, citizens …
I love this passage on play structure from James Fritz, over at The Bruntwood Prize (which Fritz has been awarded). “How do you structure a play? Well, often that depends on what your play is trying to do: where does it want to take its audience? What is its intention? Different modes of performance require different structures and rhythms. The …
In writing “Bystanders,” I’m tackling a challenge I haven’t before: writing a full-length two-hander. I’ve written short two-handers, but that’s an entirely different form. As part of my process, I’m reading a lot of two-handers to analyze how they tick. I like this insight from screenwriter Jim Barker. It applies neatly to “Bystanders”: “Story is a form of persuasion, and …
I’m reading Soraya Chemaly’s new book as part of my research for “Bystanders.” In “Bystanders,” two very angry women disagree on the appropriate response to a school shooting that has devastated them both. I’m going to quote from the book: “Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, …
This article is part of my research for my latest play, “Bystanders.” In it, two women are affected by the trauma of a mass shooting. I came across this fascinating article about how traumatic memories are formed, processed and stored. Memories of trauma are unique because of how brains and bodies respond to threat Jacek Debiec, University of Michigan Most …
I’m thinking of doing an adaptation featuring E.W. Hornung’s characters, Raffles the master jewel thief and Bunny Manders, his sidekick. The stories are clever and elegant, and there’s a sly critique of the class system built into each one. The Raffles stories were written at the same time as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and were a kind …
In 1964 Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old woman, was raped and murdered in Queens, New York. A New York Times reporter, using police interviews, wrote that 37 people witnessed the attack and refused to call the police or intervene in any way. Thus the “bystander effect” became popular in pop culture, even making its way into social psychology. The New York …
On Memorial Day, Marilynn Fowler of KPOO Radio in San Francisco interviewed Chelsea Bearce and me about “The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective.” We had a lot of fun! Find out which of us worked in an office with a serial killer, and which of us has been doing theatre since she was eleven. Listen Here:
The reviews are in for “Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective” at Central Works, and they are terrific! With this cast and creative team, I would be shocked if it went any other way. (Still, you never know.) Sold-out houses also are finding the play hilarious, relevant, and emotionally satisfying. A woman approached me last night to say, “I was very moved.” …