THE F PROCESS

I have a show opening a week from Wednesday called F that I wrote some of and in which I am playing three roles, two of which I didn’t write. I can explain.

The original brain behind F was Jason Green, a playwright who’s produced a lot of his work at manhattantheatresource (site of George Hunka’s upcoming Sustaining). He approached three Source regulars – Joe Ganem, Homer Frizzell, and myself – who had all had short pieces produced at theatresource and elsewhere. What Jason had was an innovative idea for a short-play showcase, the type of thing that goes up at theatresource, and in fact all over town, all the time.

If you’re producing Off-Of Broadway a short-play showcase is one of your best bets. Once you’ve gotten over the hump of understanding that Off-Off Broadway shows are almost exclusively attended by friends of the people in the production, you start trying to find ways to maximize the number of friend-groups you can reach. This may seem cynical at first-glance, but it has a healthy result. People realize that if they only work with their close friends, everyone will be inviting the same people to the show. Whereas if people work with others they don’t know as well, each person involved will be inviting a different crowd to the show. Thus are the denizens of Off-Off Broadway forced to get out and meet new people, thus upping the chances of the right elusive collaborative alchemy occurring that will give an audience a good show for their fifteen bucks.

The shorter the plays, the more you can fit on one bill. I’ve had five ten-to-twenty minute plays produced in showcases of four-to-eight plays, and on four other cases I’ve had forty-minute plays paired with one or two others of roughly the same length. These shows were usually much better attended than longer plays of mine produced on their own because more than one playwright and more than one cast was inviting friends. You can’t get rich producing short-play showcases, but you don’t have to lose money if you’re clever.

Jason’s idea was: rather than producing a bunch of short scenes, why not try to merge everyone’s work into one ongoing long scene? He proposed that we each write half a dozen or more short scenes taking place on the F-train (picked because almost everyone uses it to get to theatresource) and then weave them together into one continuous street-scene type play. I think this was eighteen months or two years ago.

We all sort of wrote sporadically between other projects. For a long time it didn’t seem real; it felt like we wrote scenes as some kind of bizarre excuse to hang out and drink in order to swap them when we were done.

What made it real was our decision to bring on Shey Lyn Zanotti as our director. We knew we needed someone other than the four of us to make the hard decisions about cutting and weaving and re-ordering, and we all knew Shey as someone down-to-earth and straightforward about what she wants and totally unafraid to give a writer direct criticism.

Shey wanted a straight-up, no frills examination of the ways in which familiar people connect vs. the ways total strangers connect in the environment of forced intimacy the subway creates. The first thing she did was cut any scene with a fanciful element, so Jason’s clairvoyant mime and all of my ghosts and aliens (I can’t help it, I love ghosts and aliens but especially ROBOTS and ZOMBIES and ROBOT ZOMBIES) got the shaft. She then oversaw a weave of the script that cannily mixed scenes of strangers and “familiars” in a pleasingly bumpy texture.

This has paid off in rehearsal. I particularly like the noise and abrasion of the encounters of strangers followed by the more quiet devastation of a conversation between two people who are close but who have reached an impossible impasse. (I deliberately wrote one sweet and nice scene that works out for both characters, just to see if I could do it. If you see the show, try to guess which one it is.) This has been super-fun process, and I'm grateful to Jason for bringing me on board.

I’m at kind of a crossroads with short play fests. I do share Edward Albee’s disdain for the term “full-length play.” A play’s full length is whatever the hell it’s supposed to be. If a play is fully rendered at thirty minutes, expanding it to two padded hours won’t make it any “fuller.” Nonetheless, I want to get back into writing two-act or ninety-minute single-act plays full time.

The North Korea play has proven more challenging than it was going to be anyway because my creative muscles that sustain a dramatic arc over two hours have atrophied over years of exclusively writing ten-to-forty minute plays because I knew they would get produced and I knew they’d draw good crowds (because of all the other plays on the bill).

My favorite experiences as a theatre-goer have never been short play fests. I’ve had tremendous fun at them, and seen some quite moving short pieces. But for some reason, my most powerful experiences at the theater have been when one story, one theatrical event, dominated my evening, and was the only thing I was contemplating as I went home that night. Earlier this week I saw Tracy Letts’s BUG, which at two hours and fifteen minutes would never share a bill with another piece – but I wouldn’t have wanted it to anyway. BUG gave me enough that I wanted it to claim an entire evening of my thought and meditation.

And as a writer, I’m ambitious to do that for others. I want what I’m offering to be that big.

(Please save all jokes for the comments section.)

But at the same time, I’m scared to leave the sanctuary of the many-short-plays evening. There’s so many people and so much fun and so much audience. It’s hard to be on your own. I don’t know what the best thing to do is. I mean, obviously part of this is born of the same frustration all us unknowns have: I want people to see my play ‘cause they want to, not ‘cause they owe it to their friends.

Yeah, that wish plus $2000 rents a week at manhattantheatresource. It’s cold out there. You need friends.

Anyway, check out the plug. Shey's put together a teriffic show here.

Coney Island Bound Productions presents

F

by Homer Frizzell, Joe Ganem, Jason Green, and Mac Rogers

Directed by Shey Lynn Zanotti

Featuring Cathy Conley, Austen Cooke, Jeff Deglow, Alex Goldberg, Jennifer Katz, Journey Macfarlane, Hakim MacMillan, Jason Piccoli, Mac Rogers, Krista Rushing, Kristen Vaughan, and Jennifer Laine Williams

Eavesdrop on thirty-eight New Yorkers as they fight, love, beg, blackmail, break up, make out, lie, spy, gab, grub, confront, retreat, hustle, and hesitate on one ninety-minute evening ride on the F-train.

Wed - Sat, Sept 22 - 25 at 8pm
tickets $15

Reservations 212-501-4751

--SlowLearner

Comments

[philucifer]

Hope you don't mind, but I pulled a quote from your blog in order to plug "F" at gothamist.com. I wanted to make sure you got some exposure. It sounds good.

I'm going to try to make it, but this weekend's looking a little grim.

Oh, and please stop by the Nosedive Fundraiser on Sat., 11:15pm (or any time after) if you can. Lots of booze. Details at the website.

Best,

Philucifer

[Mac]

Thanks, Phil! I wouldn't sweat it too much; it looks like we may be told out. On the fundraiser: are the breast puppets back?

[Philucifer]

I wish. We've been trying to top the breast puppets for years. (Is there a pun in there, somewhere?) But we will be premiering our first short film, as well as our new member -- a stripper named Bunny.

And booze. Lots of booze.