Projects, projects...

Things are busy, busy, busy. As always! It's a good thing.

On Saturday, I went to the last session in the current 8-week "semester" of Lee Wochner's "Words That Speak" playwriting workshop. I always appreciate Lee's ability to lead a workshop that helps all the participants be their best writing selves -- smart discussion, strong criticism, and lots of support. He has been a great teacher, mentor and friend to me. And I've met so many great people in his workshop. Fabulous writers! I need to write him a letter, an actual put-it-in-the-mailbox-with-a-stamp letter telling him how much he's done for me. Now it's time for me to start putting together readings for our group.

Speaking of fabulous writers I met in Lee's workshop... I went to a reading of Stephanie Walker's The Art of Disappearing last night, at the Blank's Living Room Series. It's a lovely play -- and was well-directed by an Oregon Shakespeare Festival fellow and beautifully acted as well. Stephanie had a full house of supportive people in the audience, and she deserved it. She's a great playwright -- and it doesn't surprise me at all that she's doing great things.

On Sunday, I finished a new draft of the screenplay of Infinite Black Suitcase and sent it off to Jeremy to give to his manager, who apparently packages people for the making of indie films. I have no idea where this will go... but nothing ventured, nothing gained!

Another project I have in progress is the Binge. Don't worry -- my eating habits have not gone downhill, suddenly. The Playwrights Binge List is a yahoogroup, started by Boston playwright Patrick Gabridge, where we support each others marketing efforts. Twice a year, we send out a play a day for a month to contests, festivals and theaters, sharing submission opportunities and cheering each other on. It's one of the best lists I'm on -- the rest of the year, we still stay in touch with each other. It's a good time for me, right now, to be pushing hard at marketing my plays, so look out world! March is the month! Two days down and twenty-nine to go...

Theater triple-header

I saw three plays this weekend, in an attempt to catch up on my theater-going (and Ovation voting duties):

• The Laramie Project at Westchester Playhouse
• Pippin at the Taper
• Fata Morgana at Pacific Resident Theater

I've read and seen the film of The Laramie Project, but this was the first time I'd seen it staged. It is such a powerful play. It's about what happened to Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was murdered in Wyoming. But it's also, more fundamentally, about people struggling with their identity in the wake of an event that challenges their perceptions of themselves. Who are we, that this could happen here? A very, very good question.

Pippin didn't really do that much for me. I appreciated it -- Deaf West did a great job at integrating the signing and singing in the musical, and at selecting a play that could have relevance to the deaf community, when looked at from this angle. But ultimately, I didn't particularly like the music, thought the stage was very empty-feeling for a musical, and didn't care about young Prince Pippin's quest for identity and meaning. Maybe if I hadn't just seen The Laramie Project, Pippin would have felt less like navel-gazing to me... On another note, what did they do to the Taper??? I LOVED this venue before the renovation. It felt so intimate, and the stage so close. Now -- not so much. And I'd heard people talk about the acoustics being worse -- I definitely think they are. A musical should fill the room with sound. Even with the actors miked, the Taper wasn't filled with sound on Saturday afternoon... On the upside, though, the two actors playing Pippin were both fabulous. I wanted to keep watching them, just in a different play.

Fata Morgana was interesting. My friend -- playwright and actor Tony Pasqualini -- was in it, which drew me there. It's an old Hungarian play about a sincere young man who falls in love, for the first time, with his... ahem... experienced older cousin from the city. They have one wonderful night together, then his family and her husband all arrive at the family home -- and he tells them all that she's going to divorce her husband and marry him. It's kind of a coming of age comic tragedy, tragic comedy... Three acts, great costumes, and a sad empathy for the young man who is learning for the first time that the world isn't a simple place and love doesn't conquer all.

I went to Laramie alone, but with Michael and Stephanie to Pippin -- so fun hanging out with them and talking theater and life and everything after! At Fata Morgana, I ran into Bennet Cohon and his wife, and it was great talking with them. Sounds like he's going to be involved with putting up some more one-acts at Write Act this summer (he produced my play The Edge of Ross Island there in the fall). I also ran into a gal who had directed a reading of Catch for me in an ALAP reading ages ago. I really, really have to do the revisions on that play and start sending it out. It is TIME.

In other news, I went to workshop (without pages, bad playwright) and am still dealing with a gas leak under my apartment (argh!!). Busy weekend! I still had time to watch a few episodes of Criminal Minds, though. Oh, cop shows! I can't get enough of your angsty grappling with good and evil.

Just a few more days...

Wowza.

One more weekend -- five more performances -- of Song of Extinction. How did we get here? How does a six-week run go so fast? I'm beginning to grieve it already. (Why do I always do this? Everything is temporary. Everything goes...) Luckily, this week is so busy, I won't have much time to be emotional.

Wednesday: 7-10pm at Moving Arts (Hyperion) is the readings of four new plays in progress from Lee Wochner's playwriting workshop that I'm producing -- new work by Terence Anthony, Ross Tedford Kendall, Ian McDonald and Bill Young.

Thursday: Registrar's Office Holiday Party at noon.
8-11pm -- Song of Extinction and the Song "Girls' Night" Party at [Inside] the Ford

Friday: SIS Holiday Party at noon.
Go home after work and prep for saturday workshop.

Saturday: 10am to 4pm -- Teach a Writing Workshop at [Inside] the Ford
5pm -- Gloog Party (Mill and Charles) in Topanga Canyon (don't think I can make this happen)
8pm -- Death & the Maiden at Sidewalk Studios in Burbank (ovation)
8pm -- Jennie Webb's Christmas Party in Eagle Rock (don't think I can make this happen, either)

Sunday: 3pm -- Song of Extinction
5pm -- panel discussion -- I've got all the panelists set for this!
7pm -- final performance of Song of Extinction
After... begin to take down set

Whew!

I'm going to be really, really ready for Christmas break...

The Cambodian Experience: Stories of Strength and Survival
Sunday, December 14th at 5pm

The central character in "Song of Extinction" is a man named Khim Phan, who survived the Cambodian genocide when he was a boy, came to the United States and made a life for himself here. Join us on Sunday, December 14th at 5pm at [Inside] the Ford for our final panel
discussion, with people who can talk about what that journey is really
like. Greg Mellen, a reporter for the Long Beach Press-Telegram whose beat includes Cambodia Town, will moderate. Panelists include survivors Gen Lee, Kreng Krich, Phansy Peang and Prach Ly, a young man Newsweek called "the first Cambodian rap star," whose work focuses on the Cambodian genocide and life in the Cambodian community. Also on the panel will be Jack Ong, director of the Dr. Haing S. Ngor Foundation, which develops programs fostering diversity and multicultural understanding through education, activism and the arts, and works to preserve the legacy of Dr. Haing S. Ngor and his human rights work in Cambodia and America, as well as the history of those who survived the genocidal regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979). (www.haingngorfoundation.org)