Author: briandanieloglesby

The Jungle Book

News about The Jungle Book will be coming soon.

I started writing this play a year ago. It was produced. And things are happening.

End of Tease.

Fairy Tales and Food

Yesterday, I wrote “End of Play” on the first draft and meant it.

23,700 words in three weeks.

Why does that number matter? It’s almost twice the size of the average play these days, but a longer play doesn’t equal a better one.

The container for this play — tentatively titled The Brothers Grimm and the Huntsmen — requires a helluva lot of words. The story, right now, is that the Brothers Grimm are stumbling through the forest looking to scrape stories from crones in cottages when they come upon the Twelve Huntsmen (who are actually women) in the middle of their own fairy tale. Over a feast, the Huntsmen share various stories they’ve accumulated. The stories for a given night’s performance are selected (mostly) at random. Every night will have a different permutation of which tales told and in what order.

I like that theatre invites the unexpected. Art in the moment — of the present — means that anything, really, can happen, something that theatre world needs to remember next time it loses its shit about an audience member getting onstage before the show.

So, yes, this means that the play should be massive.

And it’s a confidence builder to write a lot in a little time. I’ve sat next to many a skilled writer coughing up thousands of beautiful words while I slowly chipped away at my own work. Words become so precious when you’re a slow writer, which increases anxiety and makes for worse words. (I partly credit this article from the Playwright’s Center for this summer’s increased productivity.) So I needed to write a lot in a short amount of time.

More soon…

I’ve submerged myself in magic.In cannibalism. In poison apples. In talking pies. In candy houses and starvation.

And young people.

And it’s amazing.

Three times a week, I meet with a small crew of teenagers from Acme Theatre Company. We play around. Do improv. Freewrite. Tell stories. And we eat. There’s always, always food. And then I go home and I write. And write. And write.

This was the first meeting with Emily, Acme’s one adult:

Davis is a town surrounded by agriculture, so food intrigued her, and she’d met with someone at the local Co-Op grocery story about a fundraiser involving food besides… And we knew we needed a starting place, and the Grimm’s brothers, with their Hansel and Gretel and embrace of cannibalism and poison apples felt right.

I set about reading the tales. A little bit over two weeks ago.

210 of them. It was quite tiring.

From those, I earmarked about 40 of them to read again.

From those I took 20, the ones where food was functional, important, magical, or just interesting.

The teenagers became experts in those. And from their energy and work, I started to transform the ones that stood out into short plays. Throw on a few fairy tales they invented, and I’m at 10 of the 12 we’ll eventually land on.

I write and then cut. I’m at 18,000 words. A great many of these words, or rather the order they’re in, suck, but not all of them.

And it’s a blast.

Grandma Beth fell, so I’m back in California early and will be here the rest of the summer. Everything seems significant when you’re losing a family member. Buying her a bottle of dishsoap — “Will this be too much soap? This is optimism.”

Before I left, I finished up working as dramaturg for a new play at a Latin@ playwriting festival in town. The playwright wrote a lovely little article about the process. Take a look: http://blackgirllatinworld.com/2015/05/30/3-lessons-the-austin-latino-new-play-festival-process-taught-me/

(She focused on three lessons: Write Honestly, Feedback is Key, and A Playwrights Work if Never Done. Yes, yes, and yes.)

Projects:

Acme Theatre Commission: Untitled TYA Piece

I’ll be penning a play based on fairy tales and food for the company, and I’ll even do what I can to post updates on the process. Yesterday, the company’s AD Emily and I met for burritos — dear God, why can’t Texans make burritos, why are Californians the only creatures who seem to have figured them out? — and conversation. Our conversation meandered into about diversity in the theatre.

Often conversations about how to achieve diversity in the theatre — and subsequently, the resources meant to ameliorate the lack thereof — are misdirected. They’re aimed at the so-called ‘top,’ at regional theatres (and sometimes graduate programs). I have a thousand thoughts, but essentially, this I believe: if you’re looking at the top, you’ve already screwed the pooch. You gotta focus on young people. Kids. This is a project that requires a five-year-plan and a ten-year-plan, and that’s where a youth theatre like Emily’s comes into play.

I’m trying to set up a workshop with my company, Barnyard Theatre, to develop Nameless in the Desert. It’s about 40 minutes right now, and has room to grow.

Finally, my friend Caleb Britton and I are in the early planning stages of a play combining EDM and ISIS. There’s something in the stories of young people, recruited via internet / social networking, running off to join ISIS. Heinous acts of violence routinely sprout up. What is the impulse to run away from home? Where does that come from? And what about the people left behind?

New play development gives me happiness like nothing else, and I’m honored to dramaturg for Stories of Us, coming up at Teatro Vivo in Austin. I am a particular breed of dramaturg, a working breed, like a sheepdog or something, and that breed spend hours herding the metaphorical sheep for this play…

Damn, that metaphor falls apart like wet paper, doesn’t it?

Anyway, in the coming months, I’ll be putting up a services section. I’ve avoided doing this for more than a year because I wanted to get the branding right. There isn’t a word for a “dramaturg but for fiction and some kinds of essays and nonfiction, too.” But perfect is the enemy of good, so I’ll say screw it.

Speaking of services, this summer, I’ll be working on a commission for a TYA / Theatre for All Audiences play with Acme Theatre Company. TYA seems to be much of my life as of late.

Friends of an Austin nature!

My ten minute The Disappearing Rose Trick is fully produced with a fabulous cast and fabulous crew in Out of Ink, this weekend and next.

It gives me great joy.

I’ve been working on exploring The Disappearing Rose Trick as a longer piece with two other plays in Brothers, Sisters, Santos.

Great love to you all.

My short play Hatcher Makes a Salad, about a man who begins to love the parasite feeding on his arm, will be part of Gestures, an evening of ten-minute plays in Brooklyn. More info here

Don’t forget: Out of Ink in Austin and Buffalo United Artists in New York are on their way…

Other projects in the cooker:

Between Brother and Sister and The Disappearing Rose Trick are two short pieces about generations of the Rojas family. I’ve been working on taking these two and a third and turning it into an evening of theatre. The project — a three one-act play — is tentatively titled Brothers, Sisters, Santos. 

These are stories that are loosely inspired by my mother’s family.

Very loose. Loose in a way that both protects the family and endangers them. I want to tie balloons to each of the characters that say, “NOT MY FAMILY I SWEAR,” so audience members would never forget.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Catholicism. The simple view on Catholics is that you must do good works to earn your spot in heaven. I’m not Catholic. I was raised by a lapsed Catholic, but someone who, when I asked her favorite saint, she sent me two. I’ve been thinking, lately, about my charge. Our charge. Our share of the burden. That’s what I’ve been calling it. How we intercede. How we make a change.

How we earn our place on this earth.

Alright darlin’s, I haven’t updated in a while, so here goes…

Jungle Book

I frequently criticize Sacramento theatre for its lack of creative or original programming. Every company seems to produce a play another company produced a year, a month, a week before, creating a daisy chain of safe bets, canonized white people, and other forms blandness as a theatrical landscape.

That said, what Sacramento has that places like New York lacks is time. There is no dearth of talent, either, and these are the ingredients you need to make great theatre. Money helps, of course, but if you don’t have the money to fly in professional actors and designers and so on and so on, then you should at least have the time and dedication to. do. it. right.

The artists at Big Idea put the time and energy into the production. For a fraction of a fraction of a big budget play, on the fumes of fundraising, the scrapings above their rent, they built a phenomenal production.

Skybridge Update

I ended the semester with a production of a play that I wrote with and for the students, a fun piece titled Nameless in the Desert. Skybridge is a strange school, and an aspect of it’s strangeness is that it sits next to this:

A warehouse…. Then you walk in, and…

  

It’s a beautiful hundred seat theatre, owned by a lovely magician and his family, who produce weekly magic shows.  John, the magician, built the theatre himself. And so it was with great graciousness and generosity that he let us — a group of rambunctious high school and junior high students — to rent the space.

I’m proud of this play. It’s one of my favorites. Nameless wakes up in the desert, not knowing who he is or how he got there — all he knows is that he has a mission to be great… And he gallivants.

More info on this later – except to say this: Dear high school theatre departments, Please hire playwrights to write plays with and for your students. You’ll get something that no one has ever seen before. You’ll get something for every student – to break them, to build them, to reinvent them, to use them, to bring them into the community.

Skybridge II

At the end of last semester, one of the other teachers left. Three days before school begins, I inherited his classes. So… this semester I teach the following: Radio Theatre (two sections); Myths and Monsters (Greek mythology); Shakespeare; Composition; Creating Theatre (two sections); Exploring Acting; Theatre Design and Technology — and LGBT Stories. Along with Farming (two sections); Genetics; and ‘The Maker Class’ (in addition to taking on some admin duties) Am I qualified to teach these? Time will tell. I did theatre in a barn, so that checks farming?

I’m slowly finding ways of carving off more and more writing time, but this has been the struggle (and now I sit here at Quacks updating my website? Hypocrite, Briandaniel, hypocrite).

One of my former students once told me how she’d learned that the way to navigate having multiple identities, living multiple lives, is to let them take turns. Sometimes, you’re more of a parent than a career person, that sort of thing. Last semester, my writer identity took over. This semester, for this first month, I’m more of a teacher. But that is okay.

Few writers make a living at just writing. Usually, we put together strange and complex lives, and so here I am, assembling myself from bits and pieces.

I recognize that it is now in vogue to criticize artists who “romanticize busy,” but we should recognize that there’s great privilege to being able to criticize those who are busy. Some folks are busy by necessity. Some folks are busy because they have an expansive vision for themselves, for doing something in that small amount of time we get to be on earth. I don’t know where I live, except to say that if I cut the next person who puts up a think-piece on busyness.

Other Updates:

Trainwhistles will appear at the Buffalo United Artist’s ten-minute LGBT play festival.

The Disappearing Rose Trick will take part in Out of Ink in Austin. Between Brother and Sister is part of FronteraFest’s Best of Fest in Austin.

My short story It’s 1943 and Hold the Rocks in Your Mouth won the Sacramento Valley Writing Contest, administered via Heyday Press. 1943 is an experimental short story, and Heyday tends towards more conventional fare, so this is a lovely surprise.

I have so many thoughts — all of them positive — about The Jungle Book.

Mainly, they consist of HOLY CRAP. It was exactly what I believe theatre should be.

A little too fast. A little dangerous. At any moment, the wheels could come flying off…

The collaboration was humbling in the ways that collaboration should be. They used the play as a canvas on which to paint their own vision. Most of the cuts they made, most of the suggestions they made in terms of scenes and development, were right square on the money, and when a company can work through your play, change it, and make it better, well, it reveals two things: one, you’re made better by the people around you, a playwright ain’t an infallible god and, two, you can live in a world where others tell you what to write.

Anyway…

Here’s the local paper’s coverage.

And if you donate (and let me know), I’ll send you a DVD of the play when it comes out.

Big Idea is a home for theatre artists in Sacramento, and I want to support ’em in that.

I sat in on rehearsal of The Jungle Book yesterday, and look how pretty it is:

Big Idea Theatre and The Jungle Book. 

I’ve posted it before, and I post it again:

Image from the rehearsals:

And a mask in the making:

– o –

Skybridge

This is my first semester as the Director of Theatre Arts at Skybridge Academy. I’ve been building the theatre department. As a playwright/theatremaker, I find myself creating or making off-beat and askew classe. I teach a couple of relatively traditional acting and playwriting classes, but I’m most at home with a class called Creating Theatre, which is similar to a class on devising. The students explore non-script-based work… One recent project was for the students to ‘create an event ritual marking a transition.’

Over weeks of discussions and facilitating, the students decided to create a Funeral for an Imaginary Friend, specifically Josephine the Pantomime Goose. This included excellent speeches, a video of one of the students hanging out with Josephine, a trip to the school’s pond where they all threw imaginary ashes out into the water, and finally ended the event with a donut-based reception. A good time was had by all… except the gluten-free kids who couldn’t have the donuts, an oversight that I will not repeat.

Skybridge is an interesting animal. It’s the kind of school that has a gluten-free kitchen, and does so by necessity. We have to tell several students constantly to put on their shoes. I am also a bus/van driver for it. A student brought something to school in a box for Kombucha.

I’ll be updating with info soon about a play I’m writing with the students. We’re using some of the devising techniques and kinesthetic dramaturgy we used in creating Third Street. 

Essentially, rather than building an ensemble-written play with me as director/curator, I retain the role of playwright with modified community-oriented goals. I know that sounds like a fruitcake of theatre buzzwords, so let me explain:

As I write the script, I bring in pages. The students reflect on the images this world elicits and improvise characters who could live in this world. In total, they made about 15, ranging from the strange flower-obsessed “Daisy,” to a homicidal anonymous man. From these characters, I pick a few to live inside the play. We discuss themes that are starting to emerge, and we use these themes to further explore what the structure should be. I go home and write, leaving gaps in the story for the students to fill through more improv-based activities.

The result? A play that maintains relative cohesion of aesthetic vision and a strong central narrative. Often, devised works in a horizontal process become collage, which is a different kind of beautiful, but I like writing a play with a single or dual engine driving it. Other results: students actively create a play and have ownership over this creation, learn the writing process, and reflect on how a play or story works. The long term hope: they become empowered and write their own stuff and go to new plays instead of relying on the canonized works.

Also, I really like the play that resulted from this process. It’s called Nameless in the Desert (though I may rename it if I find something better). In a beautiful and bizarre way, it feels like the play that most accurately represents where I am now now now…

Six months ago, I emerged from my second MFA program knowing that I wanted to somehow be both a writer and a teacher, that I needed these identities to fold together and become the same. I LOATHE playwrights and other writers who cannot teach but use teaching to earn their living; alternatively, I do not want to let my teaching, which has more immediate gratification, to subsume my writerly identity. So, the two must be one and the same.

This forged identity is not new, nor is it the product of the burgeoning MFA spitting playwright pupae into TheatreWorld ™. Ancient Greek playwrights were also directors of their work as well as teachers of the young pre-citizen boys in the chorus. From what I understand, the term didaskalos referred to both a teacher (hence, ‘didact’) and to director, which were poet/playwrights.  Shakespeare, of course, didn’t pen every word by himself in a lonely room – he wrote for and with an ensemble of actor / theatremakers.

I am not saying that Skybridge Academy, which actively populates the school with working artists, is consciously bottling themselves in some Grecian urn. I am saying that I’m pleased that I can be a writerteacherplaywrighttheatremakercitizen. A didaskalos.

– B