PlayPenn

The pre-conference retreat ended on Sunday – it was intense! Each day the Playground area filled with playwrights, directors, designers, dramaturgs, and interns, and over the course of the weekend we read through every play as a group. Afterwards there was time for questions and comments. Hearing the plays read out loud gave them a lot more life than when they were just floating around in my head, and it was exciting to actually meet the people who wrote the scripts! Bill and I gave all the dramaturgs the folders we had spent the last few weeks putting together, and they all seemed very pleased with them!

Friday night we all went to the Philadelphia Art Museum after the day was over and had the chance to hear some jazz, look at some art, and get to know each-other better. Saturday night we went to a party on Boathouse Row where there was lots of wine and good food! Pictures will soon follow…

Today was the first day of getting ready for the conference, which meant that I got to finally go to the Adrienne Theater on Sansom St. and see where all the plays will be taking place (as well as where I’ll be every day for the next two weeks!). More excitingly, I got to meet my five fellow interns, (Maddie, Jess, Mark, Allie, and Jessica) and John Flak who will be in charge of telling us what to do.  

The Adrienne Theater!

 

Our first task was to remove dozens of heavy boxes from Flak’s basement and then unload them at the theater. Despite the over-100 degree heat, we managed! We also painstakingly labelled coffee mugs, folders, and amassed piles of delicious Trader Joe’s snacks for later in the conference. A computer was set up, rooms were cleared, and floors were vacuumed. Luckily the theater was air-conditioned! 

Tomorrow we meet again at ten, and the next day the pre-conference retreat begins…

Bill and I have been working on the dramaturgical research, which has given me a new respect for the awesome power of the internet, as well as the chance to read and look at lots of interesting things! My internet-admiration arises  from wading through seas of information, images, and music which are all just a mouse-click away. As someone who subsists on a limited internet diet of email, facebook, and the occasional blog, I am filled with astonishment at just how much stuff is out there - narrowing the chaos down, and being able to find exactly what I’m looking for has been a challenge!

“Cross-textual” dramaturgy has been useful this week. For example, in plays like Clementine in the Lower Nine, there are several concrete topics and themes to research, i.e. Katrina, the story of Agamemnon, etc. But what about a play like Hum? Hum takes place in a futuristic urban landscape in which humans can no longer use speech to communicate. Instead the two main characters communicate their love for each other through holding up post-it notes while they make breakfast. Electronic white noise known as “the hum” blankets the world. After the husband has a chance encounter with a sinister man in a subway car, he gets drawn into the murky heart of the hum…

For plays like Hum, therefore, I have been looking for less literal material, i.e. images which speak to the atmosphere of the play, pieces of fiction and music. For this blog post, I wanted to share some of the pieces of art I have discovered along the way…

These are from a series by artists Aziz +Cucher.

The series is called “Dystopia” and deals with the way our individuality gets erased in a world of technology, as well as the disappearance of face-to-face interaction.

For Etched in Skin I did some research into black women artists. This is Emma Amos’s Worksuit. In this piece she “wears” the body of a white man, while painting a white woman sprawled on the ground.  

 Faith Ringgold is another artist I looked at for Etched in Skin. This is her painting The American Series #20: Die. (Also, her website is really cool, particularly the section “Racial Questions and Answers” www.faithringgold.com/)

That’s all for now! I got the schedule of the conference today, and it looks great…I can’t believe I’m going to get to meet the playwrights of plays I’ve been thinking about and researching for so much!

I have to confess, before this summer I had only a hazy sense of what “dramaturgy” entailed; the most I could have told you was that it was somehow related to drama. When I discovered that I would be helping with “dramaturgy stuff” I immediately went to the ever-helpful, all-encompassing Wikipedia. Unfortunately my research was futile, as I found only the following vague definition:

 “Dramaturgy is the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage. Some dramatists combine writing and dramaturgy when creating a drama. Others work with a specialist, called a dramaturg, to adapt a work for the stage.”

Hmm…I could still only conclude that dramaturgy had something to do with drama, and that a person called a dramaturg existed!

I have since learned (from Bill, who learned the art of dramaturgy in his graduate program at Villanova) that one of the things a dramaturg does is research background information on a play; for example, historical or cultural information which is pertinent to the work. There is also “cross-textual” dramaturgical research which looks for less literal information, and is oriented more towards inspiring creativity. 

The dramaturg then puts together a dramaturgical notebook full of relevant articles, stories, notes, etc. for the director and actors to look at and use. The dramaturg should be the font of all knowledge for the play…

I have been doing some dramaturgical research for Dan Dietz’s Clementine in the Lower Nine, which has been both interesting and challenging. Clementine in the Lower Nine tells the story of a family in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and is loosely based on the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Understanding more about the Lower Ninth Ward and its history, as well as the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra has made Clementine even more interesting and enjoyable to read. I highly recommend the book Voices from the Storm, a collection of first-person accounts of living through Hurricane Katrina… 

At www.playpenn.org you can find out where and when the Clementine in the Lower Nine reading will be taking place - it should be amazing!

This past week Bill D’Agostino, my fellow intern and a recent graduate of Villanova’s theater program, and I have been industriously re-organizing the filing system, which has proved to be a mammoth task! Between the two of us we have waded through all the paperwork that has ever been involved in PlayPenn: stacks of contracts, receipts from playwrights buying Snickers bars in Iowa gas stations, and airplane tickets. Filing brings its own joys, however, and it was very satisfying in the end to see the cacophony of paperwork tamed into neat categories and folders!

Last Thursday we took a break from hanging folders and labels, and embarked in Bill’s car on a mad-cap expedition around Center City. Under conditions of high winds and scorching heat, we wove through traffic to deliver piles of PlayPenn brochures to theaters. Here are a couple of photos I took to document the journey…

The Philadelphia Theatre Company's banners blowing in the breeze.

Plays and Players on a shady street.

An unrelated, but very cool mural opposite the Philadelphia Theatre Company.

My name is Laura Martin and I will be spending my summer helping out with the PlayPenn summer conference in Philly, and blogging about my experience! I will begin with a little introduction to myself and to PlayPenn…

I am a senior philosophy major at Haverford College, and have enjoyed acting ever since I played a very young Golde in my seventh grade production of “Fiddler on the Roof”. I have written a couple of short plays in the past (one about a very strange guidance counselor, and another about an odd situation at a bus stop); favorite plays of mine include “Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley and “Angels in America” by Tony Kushner. I enjoy reading good fiction (I recently finished Margaret Atwood’s “The Year of the Flood” which I highly recommend), trying new cuisines, and am excited to explore Philly this summer!     

But enough about me - what is PlayPenn, and what does it do?  PlayPenn is a non-profit organization which accepts submissions of scripts of new plays from all across the country. Paul Meshejian, the Artistic Director and Founder of PlayPenn described the selection process to me, and it sounds intense – from hundreds of scripts submitted, only six are ultimately chosen. The finalists are invited to the conference in July where they get to develop their plays with a director, a dramaturg and actors. The conference ends with a staged reading of each of the plays, and many of them go on to be produced!

 If you go to the PlayPenn website: www.playpenn.org/index.html, you can read about the different plays which have been selected for this year’s conference. The plays encompass a host of intriguing, provocative, and moving characters and situations. A drug-addled prophet arrives amidst the wreckage of a New Orleans family. An obese man named Charlie finds solace in the clumsy, but heartfelt essays he corrects online for a living, while his life outside the computer screen disintegrates. There’s a world in which humans can no longer communicate through language. A marriage is tested by the challenge of raising a son with autism, an unexpected pregnancy happens, and a woman must question how well she really knows those she loves…

So there is a little introduction to me, and to what PlayPenn does! I will return soon to share some of my experiences during the first week…

Laura Martin ’11 has a Humanities Center internship with PlayPenn, a theater organization in Philadelphia.