Artists I admire: Frank Langella, Kathryn Erbe, and Florian Zeller

About ten days ago, I had the chance to see Frank Langella play the title role in The Father by Florian Zeller in an English translation by Christopher Hampton. I'm not entirely sure why I wanted to see it, other than wanting to see Frank Langella perform live and that the production directed by Doug Hughes had received positive reviews. Kathryn Erbe is also in it, and I knew her work from Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

I knew that Langella played an older man suffering from memory loss, old age, and dementia. What I didn't know was how extraordinary he would be in the role and how heartfelt Erbe would be in hers. As I sat in the theatre, I found myself immediately connecting his performance to my grandmother's final years before she passed. She was often confused, not always sure who I was, sometimes clear and then five minutes later not so clear. And my mother was privy to that slow and steady decline, day by day, over a period of four years. As the final fifteen minutes of the play unfolded, I found it impossible not to cry, for my mother and my grandmother, as the experience of witnessing dementia in someone we love was captured so well by Kathryn Erbe and the act of having dementia itself was portrayed so painfully well by Langella.  He taught me what it must have been like for my grandmother, and it was terrifying. Zeller's play allows the audience to gain this understanding in a theatrical way that is unsettling and moving, and the playwright's skill is on display throughout the tight 90-minute piece. I left the theatre and continued to cry as I walked down the street, because I finally understood the depth of pain and sadness that my mother and grandmother must have felt in a way that I hadn't grasped before. It's one of those great productions that hurts because of its honesty but opens the heart at the same time. The Father now lives on my Top 10 theatre productions list. It has stayed with me since.

For giving extraordinary performances in a great play, for committing fully to terror of it all, and for giving me invaluable insights into my grandmother's final years and my mother's experience as a witness of it all, Frank Langella, Kathryn Erbe, and Florian Zeller are the artists I admire for this week.

Artists I admire: TreePress

On Friday, I had the chance to meet with Laura Fisher and Jespal Rajdev, who with their co-founder Adrienne Ferguson, started an online marketplace called TreePress. I've known about TreePress since about this time last year, when the idea was in its initial stages. I've been watching the progression of the marketplace's offerings with interest, but my conversation with Laura and Jes really solidified in my mind that the entire concept behind their online presence is truly innovative and has the potential to shift the way theatrical collaborators find one other, particularly playwrights and producers and educators.

I would encourage you to visit the site and see for yourself, and watch how it develops over the next six months. That development and the articulation of their vision over time will do a far better job than I can at explaining exactly what will happen and how its happening.  However, I do want to say that I'm #grateful to Laura and Jes for explaining the idea of RELEVANCE to me as a way to measure a play's worth, rather than simply relying on the play's quality, one of only several factors that might go into a play's selection for production. It's very easy for me or anyone else to dismiss a play based on my own impressions of what "quality" is, but there are lots of other reasons that a producer, school, or theatre might choose to do a play: cast size, distribution of lines, subject matter, message to the audience, etc. All of these factors play a role.  "Of course they do," you might be saying to yourself, but I'm not sure that all of those reasons are necessary legible or conscious in the decision-making process about a play's quality. So I'm committing to thinking about a play's RELEVANCE rather than only about a play's quality, as that might help to create an overall clearer picture of why certain plays get produced and not others. There's power in making a gut reaction more legible. That's one of things I feel like TreePress is preparing to do really well.

For helping me to think differently and more openly about plays and their relevance, for sharing their ideas with me and asking me about mine, and for innovating in a field that desperately needs it (new play development), the founders of TreePress are the artists I admire for this week.

Artists I admire: John Patrick Shanley

Last Saturday evening, the Program in Educational Theatre hosted a 50th anniversary alumni event featuring a conversation with John Patrick Shanley, the most distinguished alumnus of the program. Shanley is a decorated playwright and screenwriter,  best known for the Pulitzer Prize winning play Doubt and Moonstruck for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Both pieces of writing affected me for different reasons, but those reasons certainly relate to the cultures that Shanley presents. The Italian American families of Moonstruck and the Catholicism of Doubt resonated deeply with me, even though I don't outwardly appear to fit in with either of those cultures. Beyond my last name, I don't "look" very Italian, and my regular Catholic practice ended many years ago. That said, I recognized things about myself in both pieces of fiction, mostly because in his specificity, Shanley managed to show me something universal.

Shanley was interviewed for the event by my colleague Philip Taylor, and the conversation between the two men covered all sorts of territory. Some of the best takeaways from John Patrick Shanley included the following (pardon my paraphrasing):

Theatre is the place to do unsafe things safely.

I tell any writer--you have a lot of bad writing to do, so get started.

I had come not value the truth. I was too busy trying to show people how smart I was.

Trust that your truth is worth sharing.

Anything that you find embarrassing, damning, shameful is probably what you should write about.

If you have more than one character on stage, they should not be in agreement.

Find a peaceful core place to check in with yourself and figure out where you're at.

Sometimes you write something and it tells you what's going on.

After time, you get the audience in your body, and you can feel them responding as you write.

For giving us unforgettable characters for the stage and screen, for graciously sharing his wisdom with a room full of strangers connected by their love for the Program in Educational Theatre at NYU, and for continuing to write and create from a place of truth, honesty, and personal experience, John Patrick Shanley is the artist I admire for this week.

Artists I admire: the students in my Creating Ethnodrama class

Last evening the students in one of my classes shared excerpts of their original ethnodramas, and I left the experience feeling so proud of their work and moved by their commitment to risk taking and experimentation.

Ethnodrama refers to a playscript composed from interview transcripts, field notes, journal entries, personal memories and experiences, and/or print and media artifacts. My course is called "Creating Ethnodrama: Theory and Practice," and we've spent the last eight weeks working towards last evening's script sharings. Students established a research question and interview prompts and then interviewed people about one of two different topics: body image across gender, race, and ethnicity or online dating culture. They coded the data and then worked in small scripting groups of three or four to generate original scripts using the verbatim interview transcriptions and field notes.

Last evening we heard a ten minute excerpt from each script, and the results were fascinating and inspiring. Different interpretations of the data emerged based on each scripting group's points of view. And equally compelling was how each group chose an aesthetic framework within which to present the data. We were also joined by two arts-based research scholars, Nisha Sajnani (Lesley University/NYU) and Richard Sallis (University of Melbourne) who graciously provided additional reflections after each script reading. It was one of those evenings, at the end of a very long day, that energized me and filled me with gratitude.

For finding creative ways to embrace parameters and structure, for diving into the deep end and trusting that the life jacket hadinflated, and for sharing their fantastic ideas with me, the students in my Creating Ethnodrama class are the artists I admire for this week.

Artists I admire: Moises Kaufman

I can trace many important moments of discovery in my life back to theatrical productions that I experienced as an audience member. One of those moments was when I saw Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moises Kaufman. I was in my third year of graduate school, and one of my professors suggested that a group of us go see the performance. We drove down to New York City from Amherst, Massachusetts, on a cold, rainy Sunday, and we saw the play at the Minetta Lane Theatre. I remember that it was one of those completely overwhelming moments for me as a watched actors switch seamlessly back and forth between characters, pick up books and read from them as if they were collecting research notes right in front of us, and capture sexuality and sensuality without using nudity or being salacious. The play was not about shocking its audience but rather about educating its audience about Oscar Wilde and world in which he lived and died.

Very soon after seeing that first time, I went back for a second time. I couldn't get enough of the experience, this theatricalization of research that somehow made me want to learn me and see more and make more. It was the perfect combination of history and artistry, and I felt like I was seeing possibilities that I didn't know existed in the theatre.

Fast forward to the present while reflecting on my past, and it's clear that Kaufman's play has affected many of the pieces I've created and hope to create in the future. I've embraced my love of history and have used primary and secondary source material to create new work. I continue to think about how gender and sexuality play out in daily interactions and in artistic explorations. The energy and eroticism of Gross Indecency is something that I won't ever forget, and I try to go towards it in my own work.

For inspiring me to use history to make research based art, for showing me the depth of Wilde's facility with language, and for giving me a goal to reach for each time I make a new play, Moises Kaufman is the artist I admire for this week.