For a long time, I would not admit to it. Sure, I budgeted, talked directors into signing on, arranged for rehearsal space, built websites, ordered postcards, bought snacks to sell during intermission, handed actors an envelope with a stipend. That’s part of being a playwright, isn’t it? There would be a point, I thought, when I passed all that off to other people, and just went to rehearsals, did rewrites, and read the program, rather than handing it out, on opening night.

Surely, all that would give way to…something simpler, less fraught. (And don’t call me Shirley). I was a playwright, not a producer.

After  a wonderful production of my first full-length play, “To the Top,” at South Carolina’s Trustus Theater back in the last century, I realized…that wasn’t going to happen again very often. And if I waited for someone else to do it, I might be waiting a long time. I kept writing, and sending the plays out…and somewhere in there was accepted into the Turnip Festival with “I’m Gonna Run Away,” a play I was supposed to produce myself! “Oh shit,” I thought. And immediately called Peter Bloch, friend, fellow veteran of John Strasberg’s acting class, and someone who had already started to direct (including a staged reading of one of my short plays at Dixon Place). Peter took me in hand, and showed me what a director does, and gave me shoves in the direction of how to put a show together.

We won “Audience Favorite” that year at Turnip, which came with a check and a trophy. Peter and I went on to produce “The Space Between Heartbeats” at the Samuel French Festival (back when it was at the American Theater for Actors, where there were holes in the stage and about a dozen plays a night). The play was entered under the auspices of Mirror Repertory Company, an off-Broadway company, where I’d worked as assistant/general dogsbody, in one of the more learning-intensive jobs I’ve ever had, to Artistic Director Sabra Jones, and I considered it a great coup when I talked her into playing one of the parts. I didn’t however, actually SEE the performance, as I was backstage, holding up a flat.

Somewhere in there, I was acquiring a tribe: other playwrights who had work they wanted to be produced. We got together one weekend and came up with the idea of organizing a group to send out our work…then one of us suggested: why don’t we pool our resources and put up a night of our work? That is the 2-sentence version of how we formed En Avant Playwrights, with the considerable help of Tina Howe, our mentor at Hunter College.

We produced three nights of new work at Hunter’s Loewe Theater through En Avant over about two years, each playwright producing his or her own play, and all of us divvying up the responsibilities of the overall production. We got stronger in our skills, and connections, and found actors and directors we liked, and kept working with them. Some of us started producing our work elsewhere, with other companies, or on our own.

Somewhere in there I went on a game show. That itself wasn’t unusual; I’ve been on five game shows. I call it “the new arts funding.” But I had my biggest score on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” winning $50,000 before walking away from a question I wasn’t sure I could answer (and it was a good thing, too, because I would have gotten it wrong).

Talking with Peter Bloch, I said: maybe we can produce a bunch of my short plays. And he said: why not a full-length? And I was stunned. I didn’t realize I could do that. So we applied to the Midtown International Theatre Festival with “Grieving for Genevieve,” and got in. We recruited a cast we liked, and had enough friends and followers to make some cool costumes, snag some unique props, and load it all into the wheelchair (which I bought off eBay when this guy’s mom got too fat for it), and pack it into the car (which I’d also paid off with the Millionaire winnings), aka the Propmobile, after each performance. We sold out most of the run, got some good reviews, and I didn’t have to go on (which looked like a distinct possibility when we lost one actor, Derin Altay, to an Equity regional gig…but I was able to convince another actor, Meghan Cary, who’d been in “A Bushel of Crabs” to learn the script in a long weekend and step into the role for the second half of the run).

Somewhere in there, I got involved with TOSOS II, when Doric Wilson took an interest in my work. “Send me something,” he said, and I sent him the full-length “Rock the Line,” and he said: “let’s read it.” We did a helluva reading…I’d asked Peter Bloch to direct, but he ended up in the hospital (not at my hand, I always remind people) and Doric found Steven McElroy to take over. We had a great cast, including Meghan Cary and Stephanie Deliani, from En Avant days, Karen Stanion from “Grieving for Genevive,” and Jamie Heinlein, from Mirror Rep days, among others. Paul Adams, of Emerging Artists Theatre asked if EAT could produce it. And they did, beautifully, and have since produced my plays “Some Are People,” “The Adventures of…” “One Small Step,” “Sharing the Pie,” “Staying Put,” and “Secret Angel,” (some of which I later produced again at the Universal Theater Festival in Provincetown).

Doric asked me to help with the Robert Chesley/Jane Chambers Playwrights Project, which presents staged readings of new work and revisits GLBT plays that need to be seen. And somehow, I failed to connect that if you present staged readings…you might end up producing them. I kept bringing in cool plays, and Doric and Mark Finley and Barry Childs of TOSOS kept mounting great readings…and you know something’s going to happen here, right?

Somewhere in there, “Rock the Line” won the Robert Chesley Award (which came with a check), and we took the money and went to Ireland…and discovered the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. I came back with the resolution that I’d find a way to get one of my plays there. EAT had produced “Some Are People,” directed by Mark Finley, with Karen Stanion, among others, at EATfest, and I thought it would be a perfect candidate for Dublin…along with two plays by Kevin Brofsky and Matt Casarino. Paul Adams said: well, you can go if you take responsibility for it, and I referred to myself as the Dublin “wrangler,” raising money, buying plane tickets, arranging for an invited dress rehearsal…and once there, handing out postcards, buying props, you know, all the stuff the playwright does.

We went back again the next year, at the invitation of Artistic Director Brian Merriman, with my “The Adventures of…” and J. Stephen Brantley’s “Break,” and TOSOS went with Chris Weikel’s “Pig Tale.” It was actually, well, not easier, but more familiar, the second time around.

Then Mark said: what if TOSOS produces Meryl Cohn’s “And Sophie Comes Too” in the NY Fringe? And I pretended like I wasn’t going to doing so much, because after all, it wasn’t my play, even though I’d brought it to TOSOS, and I love Meryl’s work (and Meryl). Somewhere in there, I found myself getting the postcards, and taking pictures to use until the real photo shoot happened, and chatting with reviewers I knew and…being on the crew for the shows when the other crew couldn’t be there. It was interesting to sit backstage and listen to the show, and hear stuff that told me things as a playwright; to feel the audience, and compare them from one show to the next, and put it all in the magic trunk to pull out in one form or another some other time.

The next summer, TOSOS produced The Five Lesbian Brothers’ “The Secretaries” in the Fringe, and I said YEAH when Mark announced it. And I was proud to be called Associate Producer. I’ve never been so thrilled to work on someone else’s play…or as pleased with the results. The quality of the work, and what we all brought to it, gave me as much joy as anything I’ve done in the theater.

Though at one point, sitting at the bar at Cowgirl, someone I sort-of-knew came up to me and asked if I’d be interested in doing publicity for her play…and I said: “No, I’m a playwright,” and it left me feeling… unsettled. How come she didn’t know I’m a playwright?

Later, at another EAT show, a friend introduced me to the person she was with, saying “And this is Kathleen…she’s a marvelous publicist and producer…” and I was surprised at how angry that made me, and reminded her: “no, I’m really a playwright…you were in one of my plays, remember?” (And I’m not marvelous. I’m competent, and occasionally inspired).

And somewhere in there, a couple of dear friends passed away, and I helped to produce their celebrations of life; because that’s what it is, when you have a theater, and music and performers, and video and lights and sound. It’s a production. How can you feel obligated or weird about that? Do a budget, arrange for programs, work out a running order…

And now, it’s 2012, and I’m wrangling… organizing…PRODUCING the world premiere of my play, “Outlook,” at the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival for Emerging Artists Theatre, directed by Mark Finley, with Meghan Cary (from En Avant and Grieving for Genevieve and Rock the Line days), and Donnetta Lavinia Grays (another playwright who produces); Irene Longshore and Danielle Quisenberry from EAT, and Jen Russo as production stage manager; Jen who marched with me in the St. Pat’s for All Parade two weekends ago in Queens, carrying the Dublin banner.

I am a playwright. And producing the work is part of my job. I’m proud to be a member of the Honorary Awards Committee for the New York Innovative Theatre Awards, because they are me: people who do it on inspiration, luck, talent, training and no money. We’re the direct descendents of the Caffe Cino, WOW, LaMama, and all other  mothers and fathers of us; all the people in basements and the backs of bars, and Brooklyn, where the audience sits three feet away from the stage (if there’s a stage), and the bathroom is backstage (or not working at all), and when the lights go down, and the bells ring, you can almost hear Joe Cino say, “it’s magic time.”

It’s made me who I am today: a playwright. And a producer.

It’s also completely a manifestation of the economic and class system in America today…but that’s another story for another time.

Below is the IndieGoGo link to our fundraising campaign. You’ll probably be hearing from me soon. Because, you know, I'm a producer. And a playwright.

The front wall of the Verizon Hall on the Commonwealth Plaza at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia is 90 feet tall; it would be a great, huge stage…if only it were horizontal. And yet, that’s not a problem for Grounded Aerial, a Brooklyn-based troupe which will perform “Chance Encounters” as part of the opening gala of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts on April 7.

Using carefully rigged harnesses, performers who are trained dancers and aerialists will scurry and fly up and down walls, both ignoring and using the law of gravity to create their work. “Chance Encounters” is a site-specific piece created specifically for PIFA by Grounded Aerial founder and Artistic Director Karen Fuhrman.

Fuhrman was teaching a workshop at the Philadelphia Circus School of the Arts, (which is also presenting a show, The Green Fairy Cabaret at PIFA), and Executive Director Shana Kennedy put her in touch with the festival, and the collaboration began.

“I went in there and I saw the space, and thought: this is perfect as far as aerial land. It’s tall, with points everywhere,” Furhman said. The festival’s theme: artistic experimentation and uninhibited creativity that Paris 1910 – 1920 gave Fuhrman some ideas to start playing around with. 

One of the things that Furhman kept coming back to was the idea that the period was a time when people and things sped up: they left where they were from and traveled by train, and moved from one place to the other, for reasons ranging from and including love and war. The idea of people passing, meeting, deciding to engage, or not, gave rise to the name and theme Grounded Aerial chose for the piece “Chance Encounters.”

“Chance encounters are timeless in the sense of then happening all the time; they are a human trait,” said Fuhrman. “But I’m putting it in this time and place: the French, early 20th century, time period. And still, there’s a timelessness, to it, whether you’re walking through the airport or the subway, wherever you happen to be. Catch the eye of a stranger…that’s what I’m exploring.”

Grounded Aerial works out of a studio in Williamsburg, where the wall is 16 feet high; available 90-foot walls are pretty hard to come by in Brooklyn or Philadelphia, so Fuhrman and her company are working the piece out in sections.

“With my studio, our wall is a whopping 16 feet high, which is nice to get down the gist and the very general blocking,” she said. Fuhrman is creating the piece for six professional dancer/aerialists, and six dancers from the Philadelphia University of the Arts, giving the student artists an experience working with a professional company.

“My dancer/aerialists are veterans,” Furhman explained. “We’ve all been in different aerial shows:  De La Guarda,  Fuerza Bruta.” Their combined many years of experience is what they’re using to estimate what the finished piece will look like, and how to get used to the space once they get on (or up on) it.

And, as the gala approaches, the company will essentially give everyone who’s passing by a good look at an open rehearsal. They’ll be up on the wall at Verizon Hall from April 4-6 for several hours a day, finishing their blocking and rehearsing and teching the piece.

Aaron Verdery is the technical director of Grounded Aerial, and the man who makes the dancers fly. Verdery was in on the project from its inception, and he’s met with the technical staff of the Kimmel Center to work out every detail of a system that will keep the aerialists safe and able to do their work.

Furhman is proud of her company’s record.

“Our history involves extensive safety training and aerial background that has been instilled in us for years. We’re trained aerialists as well as dancers: we’re not only dancers that happen to be in the air.”

The piece is choreographed and teched down to the second, Furhman explained, from the ground up. The six aerialists become 3 couples, with ensemble choreography, and a duet for one couple in the middle of the piece.

“We show how they’re meeting, and their nuances and it’s like a commentary on couples, fear involved, apprehension of developing their romance, and like a quick, then the 2 other couples on either side come back down, continue and with the remaining of the piece,” Furhman said. “It starts with a really grand ‘Moulin Rougey’ kind of waltz, then an adagio, guitar section, then after that the duet, then back to the waltz, and then the piece ends.”  The company has been working on the piece, which should check in at about 12 minutes, in 3-times-a-week rehearsals for the last three months.

In addition, Grounded Aerial is doing a show closer to their home ground (or wall) at the Brooklyn Lyceum. It’s is called Insectinside, and it’s a dance/theater piece in which the 14 performers play insects. Furhman plays a Luna Moth. She’s been developing the piece for the last six years, and it just so happens that her leading man is a Spider.

(Insert “Turn Off the Dark” joke here). Or, for $15, you can buy a ticket to a show where nobody gets hurt.
This interview is brought to you with the support of PIFA (Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts).  If you liked the interview above and want to help ensure that PIFA becomes an annual event please Like their Facebook Page and Follow them on Twitter !