Broadway World Awards Honor “Reduction in Force”

Kendra Lee Oberhauser in "Reduction in Force"

Central Works Theatre’s production of “Reduction in Force” has been voted Best Local Play in the2011 Broadway World San Francisco Theatre Awards! Also snagging kudos are Gary Graves (Best Director), Jan Zvaifler (Best FeaturedActress), and Gregory Scharpen (Best Sound Design). Very excited to be honored in this people’s choice-style awards competition.

By the way, Kendra Lee Oberhauser and John Patrick Moore were also honored with nominations for Best Featured Actress and Best Featured Actor, respectively. It was almost a sweep!

In Brief

“I just think the least you can ask for from art is that it be at least as interesting as life. Art that takes a little tiny, tiny, tiny piece of life and just sort of sits there—I just don’t want to spend two hours in that little tiny room.”

~Liz Duffy Adams

Not Without Our Women

2011 was an exciting year for NOT WITHOUT OUR WOMEN. Last March Caroline, Andy and I were off to Athens, Ohio, for a very successful reading of the show at ArtsWest Theatre. We regrouped a bit and made some decisions about plot, character, musical changes etc. Then in November, as finalists in the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre’s Scriptfest competition, we headed off to Asheville, North Carolina, to participate as one of four finalist plays. More conversation and rewriting…and now… we are ready for another SF reading.

This time around we are being sponsored by 3Girls Theatre, for whom I am an Associate Playwright. The new company will present premieres and readings of plays by women playwrights at Thick House on Portrero Hill in San Francisco throughout March. As part of Women’s History Month, we will present a reading on March 12 and 13th, 2012. It’s free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!

UPDATE: Get tickets here! (Pssst: they’re free)

Suheir Hammad: poems of women and war

Have a lovely holiday, filled with peace.

“Get Out The Knife”

My piece ruminating on writing a one-minute play is up over at the One-Minute Play Blog along with a GIANT photo (argh). My one-minute play, “Can’t,” about technology addiction, runs this weekend at Thick House, with a ton of other cool one-minute plays. Hope to see you there!

In Brief

Why do we call a play “a play”? Why do we use the same word for a play as we do for playing the piano and children at play? So if it isn’t fun, in the broadest sense, if it isn’t engaging, there’s no point in doing it.

~Margaret Atwood

So you want to write a play

Scene Rewriting Exercise

Here’s a scene rewriting exercise I learned the other day:

1) Take an existing scene from your play.

2) Edit out 1/3 of the dialogue. Replace the dialogue you have removed with silent action or pauses.

3) See what you’ve got.

You can then repeat the exercise with the new scene: remove another 1/3 of the dialogue and replace with action or pauses. By then the scene will be almost surreal, but you may gain new insights. Give it a try!

What is unforgivable?

I love the description of the play “Julius by Design” by Kara Lee Corthron in this podcast. The exploration of unwritten rules in relationships and what turns out to be “unforgivable” is very interesting. This is #377 in a series of podcasts by NY Theatre.

Listen to the podcast here.