THE
WEIRDEST
ENTRY
BY
QUINCY
LONG
What was the weirdest entry into writing a play I’ve experienced? Somebody threw an ashtray at me. I was doing some research in a small town in Pennsylvania for a misbegotten play about Johnny Appleseed. He was a Swedenborgian, a complicated and fascinating religion. There’s a Swedenborgian Cathedral in Bryn Athyn, Pa. After touring it I wandered into a local bar, ordered a Coke and watched an ashtray whizz by my face and hit the wall. Apparently I’d wandered into a biker bar, and Coca-Cola-sipping playwrights were not welcome. I hustled out of there and filed the incident away in my Vault of Humiliations and Resentments where all good comedy comes from. Some time later I went to work for a fly-by-night outfit that generated screenplay treatments. The ashtray episode surfaced in a treatment I wrote about rural cops. It flopped, and the ashtray incident took another dive into the lost and found until I was invited to Sundance Playwrights Lab to work on a children’s musical for South Coast Rep. After wrestling during the day with all things children, I was moved in the evenings to take a run at turning that old film treatment into a play for adults. Yes, there would be a bar. And an ashtray. Religion too. The cops morphed into some drunken loggers (sons of bikers?) on a toot. And because the story had been marinating in the vault for a while the play came out quickly. We even managed to squeeze in an under-the-table reading at Sundance the night before I left. Down the line the new play acquired its title—"The Joy of Going Somewhere Definite"—from an overheard comment at some theater conference. It seemed to fit the essential randomness of the story. From there the play made the rounds of readings, staged readings and finally productions, ending up as my most-produced play. Lessons learned? Never order Coke in a biker bar, and always write the treatment before writing the play. It saves stumbling around too long in the dark. Unless, of course, you prefer stumbling around in the dark, which I sometimes do. On, and whoever fired that ashtray at my head? Thanks!
AT WHAT
MOMENT
THE ART OF YOUR LIFE?
BY
DIANE
GLANCY
A line of dialogue straight as a wand. Frances Willard Elementary School 4th or 5th grade. 10 or 11 years old. Maybe 1950 or 51. Kansas City, Missouri. I wanted to be one of the good fairies in a grade-school play but was not chosen. I remember watching the play from the wardroom room. Through a crack in the door. The room wood-paneled. A long table. Sewing machine. Netting and cardboard left from the fairy dresses and the fairy wands the teacher made. It was my beginning. Staying behind what was happening. Observing. Later I traveled as the unchosen one to write a play. It was the same process— with similitude— still beside the event. A play is a contention that pokes. The playwright not part of. Left out. Making stage for others. I may not have known it then. It was what I would do. What I would experience. All of it more than the surface of what is happening on the stage. To look through the space between the door and its frame. Beneath. Beside. Into. An indirect participation. A motive for. Drafting and redrafting. Perseverance. Working with absence. Language is sound. Something not seen. Without visual representation. Trying to move beyond the erasure. The provocation. Through a crevice. For a conduit others take. Not told what to do but to do the telling. Let my eyes behold the things that are equal— Psalm 17:2. In the wardrobe room— the engine room— I was with remnants of fabric for fairy dresses and fairy wands and maybe left-over wiring for the wings was there. The fabric for the costumes on stage and the remnants on the table in the wardrobe room were the same material. I shall be satisfied with likeness— Psalm 17:15— I shall be satisfied with what is imagined and what can be made of it in the script. For my plays, I would go where they were. Beyond their beginning in Kansas City to the far shore of The Tent, where I am glad to be. For “Stone Heart,” about Sacajawea, I drove by myself along the Missouri and Columbia rivers. It was on Highway 2 in Montana where another play, “Salvage,” or the idea for “Salvage,” got into my car. For “A Line of Driftwood, the Ada Blackjack Story,” I was in Alaska. For “The Leveret,” I walked by myself through the San Gabriel Mission in Los Angeles. For “Signage” I drove in Arkansas. For “Two Road Map,” I drove to South Dakota. Still 10-years old standing off to the side, unnoticed, wishing for a line straight as a fairy’s wand.
A
READING
WITH
THE TENT
BY
KERMIT
FRAZIER
I can’t say enough about what a wonderful opportunity it was to have my new play, "Wheresoever They Lie," presented recently by the Tent Theater at HERE Arts Center. To have my work as an “Elder” playwright continue to be encouraged, championed even, by fellow artists who know. With a stellar director and actors and fine administrative support, I felt so visible still, so able to continue not only to shape dramatic stories but also to even more importantly see them three-dimensionally. For theater, of course, is “the seeing space” and we playwrights, unlike other writers, need such space in order to be able to complete our work, need those other theater artists, need the rhythms, reactions, interactions of the audience. It’s all a crucial, vital extension of who we are, how we see, how we’re able to consistently, insistently “be.” And we can’t, we shouldn’t, we must not go away quietly under some imagined, tacit end point of a writer’s creative life. We see and see, we write and write as long as we can. And I am so grateful that the Tent Theater is here to encourage us in/on that journey. What a vital company it is!
A
COUNCIL
OF
ELDERS
BY
CARLYLE
BROWN
Recently I received a 2022 Legacy Award from the Legacy Playwright’s Initiative of the Dramatists Guild Foundation to honor and recognize established American Playwrights for their sustained influence on the American theater in hopes of bringing renewed attention to their body of work. The award was appropriately announced at a reading of a new play sponsored by the newly formed TENT Theater whose mission is likewise support and advocacy for American Playwrights of a certain generation, playwrights over the age of 60, who despite our travails, still live as working artists in our maturity, still creating new work. In response to being a recipient of the Award I wrote “For being recognized for one’s full body of work, to be acknowledged and even memorialized for one’s contribution to the theatre, to be encouraged in your twilight, in your third act and supported just when one may be on the cusp of a creative expansion, are the rarest of gifts. As a young man I marveled that Goethe wrote Faust when he was 80. Now, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched.” As surprised as I was to receive the Award, I was even more surprised that I had aged enough to receive it. Old age had sneaked up on me. I had come to the age where the inevitable had become inevitable, when you can look back and can see how life has played out, and when you look around you see who’s left. Consequently, being a story-teller, you perceive that out of all of that there are still many more stories to tell. As Robert Frost writes, “But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep.” With old age comes responsibility. In the words of the African proverb, “When an old man dies, a library burns.” Write on brothers and sisters, write on. —Carlyle Brown
WHY
WE NEED
THE
TENT
BY
EMILY
MANN
It’s a shock to be this old. I don’t know when it happened. I don’t feel any different than I did when I was 38 or 48 or 28, except that I know more. And I’m more at peace. I know who I am. I actually adore being an elder, a mentor, and a grandmother. But I hate having to navigate a society with such disdain for women of a certain age. I wasn’t prepared for fewer job offers. I wasn’t prepared for the eye rolling or the ‘OK, Boomer’ attitudes, and I say this as one of the lucky ones because in fact, my calendar is filled with projects I love, and I am working with two small theater companies whose leadership greatly value my past contributions and want very much to support me in the future. So in no way am I complaining about my personal situation. However, most of my revered colleagues are not so fortunate. They have an enormous amount to contribute and they need support at a time in our industry when youth is the greatest prize and old age the greatest sin. Experience in life and how to live it is in many cultures revered as a community’s greatest treasure. But not in ours. And so, in a youth obsessed industry comes The Tent. Most of us are at the top of our games. And we gather under The Tent to support each other and make sure our contributions will be heard at a time when what we know and what we have to say is needed most. —Emily Mann
THE
CURSE OF
BEING
OLDER
BY
CONSTANCE
CONGDON
The curse of being older, as a playwright, is probably there in why my work isn’t done, but sexism is still the biggest factor. Recently, I read the Variety review of my play Paradise Street and the reviewer’s main issue was one of my two main characters was so unpleasant, unsympathetic, that he couldn’t invest in her and, therefore, in my story. So I thought about negative characters in plays and there are so many MALE characters that are murderous, unlovable, and those characters are necessary, interesting, fun for actors to play. Richard III. Titus Andronicus. Scrooge. So many Sam Shepard characters. Et alia. The problem was that she was female. About age? My age may be a problem. Something is. —Constance Congdon
MAKING
PROMISES
I CAN
KEEP
BY
THERESA
REBECK
The Tent is a place where career playwrights gather. We’ve all been at this so long, and we see it as a glorious continuum, one that has been practiced for centuries by the likes of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Edward Albee, August Wilson, Caryl Churchill, all of whose playwriting skills ripened over time like fine wines. When I started writing, I had a lot of promise. Now I’m making promises I can keep. Playwrights who have been at it for a while are finding new depths of power, perspective and wisdom. We're advocating for a vision of the theatre that is broad and deep, ageless and fierce. —Theresa Rebeck