5 Questions With Barry Levey

The 1st reading in our FORUM "Soundings" series is MAIMED by Barry Levey. This reading will be begin at 7:00pm and will be held at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Dreyfuss Theatre, 285 Madison Avenue, Madison, NJ. Click here for directions. Click here for a printable map of the campus (the Dreyfuss Theatre is located in Building 9).

Eitan’s Aunt Miriam loves him very much, but she’s a “character” who occasionally needs to be hospitalized, and her antics have her ultimately banished from his family’s house.  Still she persists in infiltrating his life and memories with big stories that might be real or imagined.

Barry Levey's New York productions include Hoaxocaust! (FringeNYC 2014 Overall Excellence Winner; Baruch Performing Arts Center; Theater for the New City; Prospect Theater Company); Critical Darling (The New Group); All the Way From China (Mad Dog at the Gene Frankel); and two short plays for Ars Nova, Downeaster Alexa and Yale Law School, the latter of which was a finalist for the Heideman Prize (Actors Theatre of Louisville). Barry is a two-time O’Neill finalist, for Citizens of Rome and Woman of Troy, which has also been developed at the Lark, Resonance Ensemble, and Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama. Barry’s work has also been developed by Arena Stage, Rattlestick, and Williamstown, among others. Upcoming: GarageBand^® for Lovers, a short play for Project Y. Barry holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from UC San Diego.  

1)      What was the inspiration for MAIMED?

Every family has a “crazy” relation (and if you don’t know yours, as the poker proverb goes, it’s you). Of course, the larger-than-life someone is, the more outsize an influence they can have on your life. And ironically, while their off-kilter sensibility might have a positive effect on you--making you less inhibited, or inspiring you to dream big dreams--that same sensibility might actually make their own lives harder: they might suffer from arrested development, or delusions or grandeur, or something even darker. I read Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame and thought, “How delightful this character is--and how mentally ill.” I wanted to explore the tension between the campy fun of a personality like Mame’s, and the reality of what it’s really like to live with it--to really be Mame, or her nephew. I suspected it wouldn’t all be fox hunts and Jerry Herman songs.

2)      You hold a BA from Yale and an MFA from UC San Diego. How has your East Coast and West Coast education influenced your writing?  

Neither, as much as my Midwest upbringing. I guess my sense of sarcasm is kind of East Coast, but I think it’s more directly inherited from my Cleveland, Ohio born-and-raised father. I will say this: I never studied playwriting at Yale, but I studied under the wonderful Adele Edling Shank at UCSD, so in that respect, West Coast wins, hands-down.

3)      Your play Hoaxocaust! was a FringeNYC 2014 Overall Excellence Winner. The Fringe Festival is an exciting and thrilling ride in theatre production. Do you have any wild and crazy stories of your experience?

Two of them. One: I’d developed the piece for years with an amazing actor, and had no intention whatsoever of ever performing it myself. Fast-forward to a scheduling conflict after we’d already been accepted into the Festival, and I was suddenly living an Eat, Pray Love, bucket-list sort of moment: performing in New York City. Two: opening night of the Festival, I gave a 60-second preview of the piece at a party and was booed. I hadn’t performed in front of anyone since high school, and was devastated. To go from getting booed on the first night to winning a Best Solo Performance award on the last; it’s a story, I believe Adele Shank would say, with an arc. 

4)      You’ve written several short plays. What do you find is the biggest challenge when writing a short play versus  a full-length piece?

Oh my god, writing a short play is so much easier. Except no one wants to come see it, after. The biggest challenge with short plays is finding anyone who wants to to watch them.

5)      So you’re walking along the beach and come upon a lantern. A genie appears and grants you three wishes. What would those wishes be?  

This reminds me of an ill-advised barefoot walk I just had on Ocean Beach, on a recent return to San Diego. If this had happened there, I’d have wished for a disease-free recovery from whatever needle I’d just stepped on to induce the hallucination.

Playwrights Theatre will present these readings free of charge, with an optional donation of $10

♦ A $25 dollar donation will get you a FORUM pass that covers all of the readings.

♦ A $250 donation will get you a rehearsal pass that allows access to all reading rehearsals.

♦ Reservations can be made online at or call (973) 514-1787 X10

Click here to reserve your seat to see MAIMED.

You can also find additional information on our website about the entire FORUM reading series. 

 


 

Play the New Jersey Theatre Alliance's Trivia Tuesday and You Could Win

Do you think you know about our New Jersey Professional Theatres? Test you knowledge by participating in our Theatre Trivia Tuesday!  

Every Tuesday (starting December 9th) throughout the month of December, the New Jersey Theatre Alliance we will post a series of questions on their Facebook page about member theatres.

The person with the most correct answers at the end of the day, will receive a $25 Visa gift card and be crowned our "NJTA Theatre Geek of the Week."

Winners will be announced the following day (Wednesdays) on their Facebook page.

*Winners of prior weeks are not eligible to be entered in the remaining 2014 Theatre Trivia Tuesday contest. 

Here's the first question of the day (hint: if you know about us, then you know the answer).

Theatre Trivia Tuesday Question 1: This actor (seated at the table) has been in three co-productions: "The Good German," "Two Jews Walked into a War," and "100 Years," and is the Artistic Director for number 17 on our map above. Name the actor and his theatre! #njtheatre

 

Visit the New Jersey Theatre Alliance's Facebook page to play https://www.facebook.com/NewJerseyTheatreAlliance

Join Therése Halscheid For Her Book Launch on November 30, 2014

BOOK LAUNCH 

A reading from "Frozen Latitudes" by Therése Halscheid

Sunday, November 30th @ 1:00 pm

Barnes & Noble

Town Place Garden State Park 

911 Haddonfield Rd. / Cherry Hill, NJ 08002

Contact store: 856-486-1492

Click here for more information 

 

Writerly Advice from Fengar Gael

We are continuing our Writerly Advice series with playwright, Fengar Gael. We asked her what advice she would give to playwrights just starting out? Here's what she had to say...

Read poetry, taste everything, cultivate all your aesthetic senses and sensibilities; enrich your life with fascinating friends, haunt museums and galleries, attend concerts of every kind; try to avoid social networks or the compulsion to flip to the Internet while writing, and thereby wasting hours of your precious life and causing the muse to flee; try to find sacred, solitary time for just writing as often as possible, and to quote Emily Dickinson, "Be a fire that lights itself." 

Don't wait for commissions or even kind words of encouragement; be your own inspiration, and it helps to join or create a group that reads and critiques plays-in-process. If playwriting is your literary form, and you possess a quixotic belief in the transforming power of language, remember that words live on the page as well as the stage, so try to make the script a pleasure to read as well as to perform (because it may takes years to find a producer). I should add that theatre can be a humbling profession and you’ll be subject to the hill-valley syndrome of great news (your play is being produced) followed by devastating news (the theatre lost its funding), so try to have other outlets and hobbies and take up a sport, like running. 

Also and most importantly, never police your own imagination: Just because you’re not African, Asian, Jewish, Catholic, or Muslim, or old, young, male or female, or lived through wars, experienced poverty, imprisonment, hideous cancers, and other assorted miseries, doesn’t mean you can’t imagine anything you wish. 

The great evolutionary triumph of the species is imagination, so to define yourself in terms of your creatureliness, your gender, age, race or ethnicity is to be forever stranded on a smaller planet, so have fun, dabble in everything at every level. 

I should add that it’s important to keep revising and recrafting your plays, for as the French poet, Paul Valery wrote: "A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned." The same is true of a play so as you evolve, your plays evolve, and you can reenter and refine and restructure their worlds. Although Aristotle wrote (and I tend to agree) that “the essence of drama is story,” I think that the theatre is still evolving, so be inventive, dare to break the rules and know that so much more is still possible. 

The great advantage of writing for the theatre is that unlike actors, directors, designers and virtually everyone else in the profession, you’re not at the mercy of opportunity. Playwrights can write plays miles away from an actual theatre. 

Also avoid people who say there’s no future in writing for the theatre. I think people will come to the theatre more than ever before, if only to heal their damaged attention spans, to finally focus on the perpetual wide screen of the stage where no bullying cameras are telling us precisely where to look, no soundtrack assaulting our ears, where we’re no longer isolated but in the company of other human beings, and where our presence actually matters, so keep writing plays. 

A good rehearsal with an inspired company is right up there with the great pleasures of life! 

 

To learn more about Fengar, visit her website

Writerly Advice from Bob Clyman

Hello Young Playwrights! We're continuing our series of advice/thoughts/words of wisdom with playwright, Bob Clyman.

 
Writerly advice from Bob...

 

'Always give your enemy the best lines.'  That's one of my favorite quotes, and for years I've been attributing it to George Bernard Shaw.  I was sure he wrote it, and it certainly sounds like him, but when I tried to look it up recently to make sure I wasn't paraphrasing it, I couldn't find any quotes remotely like that attributed to him or, for that matter, to anyone else.  

So did I invent it?  Is it mine?  

What if I wrote it years ago in some early draft I can't remember, just like I couldn't remember where Shaw wrote it, if and when he did.  If somebody remembered reading that draft and for some odd reason had kept it all these years, and then he heard me today, saying those exact same words but in a different context, could I rightfully be accused of plagiarism for failing to attribute it to myself?  

Bob Clyman’s plays have been produced Off-Broadway and at regional theatres, such as the Alley Theatre, Laguna Playhouse, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, San Jose Repertory Theatre, George Street Theatre, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Colony Studio Theatre in Los Angeles, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, and L.A. Theatre Works, in addition to touring Scotland.  His play SECRET ORDER was initially commissioned and produced by The Ensemble Studio Theatre under the auspices of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  It was subsequently produced at 59E59 Theatre in New York, where it was nominated for an Outer Circle Critics Award for the best script in 2008.  It has since been produced at many regional theatres. To learn more about Bob, visit his website

Tune In This Wednesday

Be sure to check out Playwrights Theatre's own, Jim Ligon, on this week's THE MYSTERIES OF LAURA. He's in episode 5, "The Mystery of the Terminal Tenant" on NBC, Wednesday
October 15 at 8:00pm.