Kathleen Warnock
  • Home
  • Playwright
  • Too Many Hats (a blog)
  • Best Lesbian Erotica

Gardening at the Lillies

6/7/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
Torrential rains left calf-deep puddles at the intersection of 42nd St. & 8th Ave. on Monday afternoon, and for a while everyone who came into the lobby of Playwrights Horizons just dripped for a bit. I squish-squished down the stairs to the restroom where several of us tried to pat our exposed parts dry with paper towels, then squish-squished back up for this year’s iteration of the lovely Lilly Awards: the day when the women playwrights honor their own and anyone else they feel like honoring.











The brainchild of playwright/activists Julia Jordan, Marsha Norman & Teresa Rebeck (pictured above), the Lillies were invented to acknowledge people whose work was consistently overlooked; to right a wrong; to say, “thank you, you rock” to people who make going to the theater worthwhile. And as the awards have moved from their infancy to toddlerhood, they are taking off running, with a swagger, no less, with a character, a style, and panache of their own. They no longer exist as a reaction, but as their own ecosystem, and an annual fete that’s a loud celebration.

I sat, a small puddle collecting underneath my seat (from the rain!) closer to stage right, and waited to see who’d be sitting in the semi-circle of chairs onstage, admired the massive bouquets of lilies at either end of the chairs, and waved at and chatted with nearby friends.

The auditorium had looked a bit sparse as we approached the 6 o’clock start, but suddenly blossomed to capacity with damp, happy people.

Then the chairs on the stage filled in, and Teresa welcomed us, and handed us over to Lisa Kron for the Benediction. Lisa is a great American playwright & performer, but she could totally have a side career as a toastmaster. If you’ve ever seen her emcee an event, or give a speech, you won’t forget it, and probably find yourself quoting it the next day.

She promised us a moment of despair, some crankiness, and that she would end on a positive note, and delivered on all counts, reminiscing about her college days in which she was deemed a “character actress” which, she said, is code for “lesbian.” Then she came to NYC and recalled seeing the Split Britches company (pictured below): Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin as a moment when her life “pivoted” in a direction it’s followed ever since, and she urged the assembled to challenge institutional thinking, and received wisdom, predicted that one day she might call someone a “dildo,” and concluded with: “Welcome to the Lillies, Amen!”
Picture
Julia Jordan gave a brief history of the awards, and the progress in getting mainstream theaters to produce plays written by women. It’s up to around 30%, she reported, though statistics like that, I will point out, are but the tip of the iceberg, and rarely include the huge amount of work by women done by independent theaters and solo artists.

As someone whose work, and the work of most of my friends is produced mostly in independent venues (and frequently self-produced), I appreciate & hope that the rising tide will lift all the boats, but in my world, parity is seen far more often than it is further uptown. Peggy Shaw has never made it to Broadway, but she’s one of the most important and influential artists in American solo and independent theater. Lisa Kron saw her perform at WOW, which still exists, and still incubates new work by women, as do spaces like La Mama (which was mentioned at the Lillies) and Dixon Place and HERE, also founded & run by women (Ellie Covan and Kristin Marting). I’m just saying that looking downtown & across the river yields a garden of wildflowers that complements the Lillies.

Marsha Norman reported that the Lillies are increasing their reach (and grasp) by sponsoring readings of new work, and in this, their fourth year giving out prizes that are “not just medals.”

Then she recounted how, since their founding, many people have helpfully pointed out that Lillian Hellman (the Lilly for whom the awards are named) “didn’t like women,” and indeed there is a famous quote in which Hellman said she was a playwright and a woman, but not a woman playwright. This led to a recurring theme of the event…women talking about how isolating it was to be the only woman in a room full of writers, and comparisons to dogs (used as a metaphor more than once), and led to a goal of the ceremony: Not to apologize for, but to celebrate Lillian Hellman (pictured below).
Picture
Picture
Playwright Neena Beeber came to the stage to present Jessica Hecht the Greta Garbo Award in Acting. Hecht spoke movingly from the point of view of an actor who wants to work with a playwright again and again, and sometimes must wait years between roles before getting a chance to return to collaborate with a fellow artist.


















Then actor Terry Kinney, natty in a 3-piece suit and cap, with a lovely blue tie ascended the stage to speak about Lois Smith (pictured above) with great affection and respect, and to present her with a Lifetime Achievement Award for acting. Smith appeared to be taken completely by surprise by the award, but with the aplomb of a great actress (and ordained minister!) she thanked the Lillies and remarked that sometimes the greatest life lesson is “just paying attention.” And she complimented the organizers for “bringing about the change they described.”

Composer/performer/percussionist/sound designer David Van TIghem came to the podium and fooled around with the microphone, because he was there to present the first Seriously Stunning Sound Design award to Jill du Boff. The Lillies have made it a practice to honor the women in the technical, production and management aspects of theater, and this kind of openness, it seems to me, is one of the differences between the closed ecosystem that represents so many awards, and is the difference between “congratulations to us” and “congratulations to us all.”

Picture
Sarah Ruhl (pictured above, with Paula Vogel), who won the very first Lilly, was then called to the stage to present the latest one to Paula Vogel. She cited just some of Vogel’s achievements, her activism and generosity, told us how she has taught and inspired so many playwrights, and presented her friend and mentor with the beribboned Lilly medal. Vogel addressed Marsha Norman as her own inspiration, for letting her know “that a woman could open the door, AND leave it open for the next one to come through.” She said she feels the theater has become more enriched and deeper because “we’ve learned to love each other” and that her own life has been profoundly changed by the women and men in her workshops, and how much she has learned from their “profound journeys.”

Then Mandy Greenfield of the Manhattan Theatre Club presented the next Lilly to Julie Crosby, artistic director of The Women’s Project & Productions, and Crosby spent a few moments talking about the renaissance of the company, both from an artistic and management standpoint; telling us that in its 35th anniversary season, the theater is “solvent” and that Time/Warner has committed $10,000 per lab artist for their playwrights and directors’ labs, and that Mayor Bloomberg has also become a sponsor. She told us that 84% of the Project’s income goes back to artists.

Which is a huge institutional achievement, and here I am the fly in the ointment, but I will point out that with that kind of support, the Women’s Project should drop the $20 fee it charges to APPLY to its playwrights lab. The fee applies a de facto penalty on women who start out in the American economy making less than men, who may have crushing student loan debt, or a family to support, or who just aren’t lucky enough to have been born middle class, or have somehow lost that status.

I’ve had email exchanges with the people who run the program, in which the responses run along the lines of what you always hear when you argue against charging a playwright a fee to have her work read: well, we have administrative costs. We have to pay the screeners. This is only a fraction of what it costs to run the program…

And as someone who’s worked both in the administrative and receiving end of the non-profit arts, and written plenty of grant proposals, my response is: it’s not the playwrights’ responsibility to fund a program that’s there to develop playwrights for a company that has a mission to develop new work. Like the lottery, submission fees are the equivalent of a “poor people’s tax.”

End of (essential) digression.

Picture
Marsha Norman, with great pride & joy in her former student, presented the next Lilly, the “Welcome to the World” award to Laura Marx, whose play “Bethany,” presented by The Women’s Project, was a much remarked-upon and well-received debut production for her.

The outstanding director Leigh Silverman came up to present a Lilly to Tanya Barfield (both pictured above), for her most recent work, the critically acclaimed “The Call,” which opened on Broadway this spring. The award was fittingly titled: “The Hang in There, It’s the Middle of Your Career, We Need More of Your Plays” award, and was accompanied by one of the “surprises” promised by the organizers.

Teresa Rebeck announced that she’d been approached by producer Stacy Mindich, who wanted to create a commission for a woman playwright. And while Barfield was still standing there, they gave her a a $25,000 commission for her next play. Barfield was overcome with emotion, and the playwright said a few deeply-felt words about her life as a playwright, which includes working a full-time job and raising children, and how much this means to her.

Picture
Lisa Kron then asked someone to hand her her wallet…and proceeded to present the next Lilly to director Lear de BIssonet, for her direction of Brecht’s “The Good Person of Szechuan,” which had an ecstatic, sold-out run at La Mama earlier this year, and will move to the Public this fall.

Then came the award that’s become a highlight of the event, which answers the question: “Who is this year’s Miss Lilly?” And the answer was Garry Garrison, director of Creative Affairs for the Dramatists Guild, who donned the traditional sash & tiara, received a bouquet, and was proclaimed an “honorary woman” for his efforts.

Then another surprise hit the stage in the form of Cusi Cram, who announced that the Lillies are joining forces with the new prize for women playwrights: the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers. The prize, which is now up to $1,000 and a staged reading of the selected work, was awarded to Jiehae Park, for her play, “Hannah and the Dread Gazebo,” which had its reading on June 4 at Primary Stages. 

Picture
The Lillies then invented themselves again by awarding a special prize to Denise Scott Brown (pictured above), a legendary 81-year-old architect, and husband of the Pritzker Award-winning Robert Venturi, her design partner. In 1991, the Pritzker, the top award for architecture, was given to Venturi alone, though he and Scott Brown had been partners in every way as architects. 

Scott Brown’s deliberate exclusion from the prize recently prompted students at Harvard’s School of Design to start an online petition to recognize her for the work she did in partnership with her husband. The petition now has over 13,000 signatures, which Scott Brown noted is “a lot for architecture.” (It’s a lot for theater, too).

Scott Brown then proceeded to give an eloquent talk that’s worthy of a blog post of its own; she immediately connected the treatment she’d received in her career with the “dispossession” that is often felt by women playwrights; she spoke of growing up with an architect for a mother, and how she spent the early part of her career shocked to find out that she was one of the few women in the rooms full of architects. She even wrote an article called “On Sexism and the Star System in Architecture.” She has always gone her own way, she said, and the rewards have been “ecstasy, and my own self-respect.”

Picture
The final award of the program was to another kind of architect: to the woman who created one of the most influential and valuable awards for women playwrights. When Mimi Kilgore (pictured above) lost her sister, Susan Smith Blackburn, she created a Prize in Susan’s honor, which is now given annually to recognize women “who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre,” and which awards $50,000 annually to the Finalists:  $25,000 for the top prize, and $25 each to the finalists. In addition, the Winner receives a signed and numbered Willem de Kooning print made especially for the award.  

The award was presented to Kilgore by her son, Alex (also pictured), who spoke eloquently of his mother’s dedication to plays written by women, and when she accepted the medal, Kilgore said the award has “given my life a purpose and a strong sense of direction.”

Then all the women in the audience who’d won the prize, been finalists, or served on the board were asked to join the Kilgores onstage, and the amount, range, and diversity of the talent was breathtaking, and the perfect final image to take away from the celebration.

As we slowly made our way across the street for the afterparty, I thought of the work that has moved me recently, and how much of it was made possible by the long walk uphill that so many women and men have taken, that’s still going on, that one day may end at a level playing field.

In the last month (which included a stint at the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival), I’ve been privileged to see new work from Vickey Curtis, a wonderful Irish playwright & director; the Flux Theatre production of Johnna Adams’s “Sans Merci”; an outstanding solo play, “No Need for Seduction,” written & performed by Victoria Libertore, with a commission from Dixon Place; Mariah McCarthy’s site-specific “Mrs. Mayfield’s Fifth-Grade Class 20th Reunion” produced by Caps Lock Theatre; and the latest version of “The F*cking World According to Molly,” a solo show created by Andrea Alton at the Terranova Collective’s Solo Nova Festival.

This weekend, I'm off to the opening of my play, "Grieving for Genevieve" at the Venus Play Shack in Laurel, MD, an independent thatre that's the brain & love child of Deb Randall...one of the many women who have spent their careers making it possible for women theater artists to have a place, not just in New York, not just in the institutional, mainstream theatre, but in every city, town and village where there's someone willing to look at an empty space and see a stage, stay up nights writing grants for the local arts council, build an audience that knows and wants more work from women. 

That put me in mind of people like Staci Swedeen and her Flying Anvil Theater in Knoxville, Dewey Scott-Wiley & Larry Hembree, with Trustus in Columbia, SC, Marj O'Neill Butler and The Women's Theatre Project in Florida..and so many more, more than I could name, which is a good thing. And I won't ever stop trying to find them and thank them (and, of course, send them my work).

We are the Lillies of the Field: see how they grow; we do toil and spin, and we are all the better for it.

0 Comments

Blogging Molly: The F*cking World According to Andrea

8/17/2011

0 Comments

 
Back around 2007, I had a show in the Spring EATfest at Emerging Artists Theatre; I was very happy with the EAT production of “Some Are People,” directed by Mark Finley, and made it a point to see most of the performances. The play was bracketed by a pair of 10-minute pieces that I loved watching as well: Peter Snoad’s “My Name is Art” and Chris Widney’s “One of the Great Ones.”
    And that’s how I met Andrea Alton; she played a loud, obnoxious patron in a modern art museum, and she had be giggling from the get go. Andrea kept working at EAT and elsewhere, and I loved seeing what she was going to do next. She invited me to the Fringe production of the play she wrote with Allen Warnock in the 2008 Fringe, and I got tickets right away. (NB: I call Allen Warnock my long-lost cousin because we HAVE to be related not too far back. There’s just not that many of us). So along with our friend Cheryl B., we went to the show, a two-hander, in which Andrea and Allen played all the parts, including the two eponymous best friends: poets and co-hosts of a public access cable show about poetry and crafts.
Picture
Andrea Alton and Allen Warnock in her play, "Pioneer Lovin'."
As veterans of many (many) an open mic, Cheryl & I recognized great bad poetry at the first syllable. We howled and guffawed and drooled so that (as sometimes happens), the actors started playing the show at us. One of the many characters Andrea played was Molly, a security guard/poet, who made only a brief appearance, but stole all our hearts with her homemade water ices and lesbian poetry.
    Cheryl had already booked both Allen and Andrea at her Poetry vs. Comedy series, and I quickly shanghaied them for my series, Drunken! Careening! Writers! After the Fringe, Andrea and Allen kept working on the show, which had a strong spine: what happens to friends who are artists when one of them suddenly becomes successful? Can their relationship survive the sudden difference in their stature?
    They eventually took it to a commercial run in NYC in 2010, in between doing other gigs, which for Andrea included appearances at more EATfests in plays by Staci Swedeen (as a hippie dog trainer) Jon Spano (a very angry nurse/ betrayed wife) and Mark Finley (a neglected teenage heiress/serial killer). She played a  groupie/stalker in the reading of Meryl Cohn’s “Insatiable Hunger,” this past May, cracking up the object of her affections, Lea DeLaria (and everyone else).

Picture
Andrea as a lonely teenage heiress/murderer in Mark Finley's "The Chiselers."
She directed a piece by Emily Mitchell for an EATfest, and whenever I saw her, she was talking about writing, or taking a class, or doing standup somewhere, saying “yes” when people asked her to do a gig. Molly the lesbian security guard/poet from “Carl and Shelley”  took on a life of her own: she started to turn up, complete with mullet and safety vest, and perform her poEMs (her pronunciation) around town, including at Drunken! Careening! Writers! She acquired a last name (Dykeman) and a middle name (“Equality,” at about the same time everyone else from Facebook was calling him/herself Equality or Hussein). An appearance by Molly soon became an event: from beauty pageants (the ironic, queer ones) to Butch Burlesque, benefits (including one for the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival that I organized last year).
    Andrea’s Molly became the go-to butch when you needed someone foulmouthed, funny, and totally fearless. Embraced by the butch community in particular (some of whom walk up to her and quote her poEMs), she did get some pushback from one queer artist, who thought it was inappropriate for Andrea to "appropriate" a butch persona. (When I heard about that, I thought: slippery slope…does that mean that gays shouldn’t play straight parts?)
    And what exactly IS an artist supposed to do to get to work? If you're not a "type," if you're not the age/height/weight/style/color/haircut they're looking for, are you supposed to wait around for the rest of the world to catch up with you...or create your own scene and put yourself to work?
    And the proof is in the pudding, or in the butches in this case, and the full houses and shrieks of laughter show me that a queer audience gets what Andrea’s doing with Molly, and because it is a beautiful characterization, well-crafted and truthful, they’ll shout along with Molly when she tells her F-Train Girl: “I WANNA STICK MY FACE IN YOUR VAGINA!”

Picture
(Really, don’t bring children to see Molly. Or your more sensitive adult friends).
            Andrea had the idea that she could do a solo show with Molly, and she asked Mark Finley to direct, and he knows a good thing when he sees one, and said, OF COURSE. And, as always, Andrea worked her ass off: she presented a version of her long-form Molly show at One Woman Standing, as part of the New Works Series at EAT (a series she also curates). She applied to this year’s Fringe…and got in. And got a BIG theater to fill.
    So she got to work again: raising money, surrounding herself with producing, creative and tech staff who bring their own talents to making Molly shine. Doing the publicity, making more appearances, and spreading the word among her growing community on her blog, on Facebook, Twitter, and the gay bars in Park Slope.
    As soon as tickets went on sale, I got mine for Opening Night, and joined the large crowd for “The F*cking World According to Molly” at the Players Theater on MacDougal Street. She surfed the waves of laughter and will be even better when she gets off book (I kid!)
    And she did go to the next level: the show is not an hour of standup, it’s a play, about a very specific woman, and how the hell she gets through life, and creates her art, and tries to get over/through/around a devastating loss to find the things that make her happy: ladies and chicken fingers (or nachos). And in the midst of this, she finds the time to tintervene when she sees injustice being done in the schoolyard where she works. That is, when she doesn’t call in sick or high.
    There are 4 more performances of Andrea's show: Fri 19 @ 6  Sat 20 @ 9:15  Thu 25 @ 2  Sun 28 @ 4:15. You should go. Get tickets here.

Picture
Hanging out with Molly at Dixon Place.

    I have been kicking around in New York City since the title of Orwell’s book. And I still look forward to the next show, the next interesting writer or actor or all-of-the-above (...except for clowns. Clowns make me nervous). And people sometimes ask me: how is it you’ve been able to hang in here so long, and not get bitter or mean or crazy? And I say: you haven’t seen me in the mornings. And also, I don’t put everything I say or think on the internet. However, AFTER my coffee and my editing skills, what gets me through the day (and night) is the considerable energy and talent of the people I call friends and colleagues. I feed off it, it inspires me, and makes me want to go home and create something.
    So, as long as I have talented friends doing great new work, I’m good. Can’t wait to see what comes next. And play with the talent.
    Like, tomorrow night (Aug. 18), I sure hope you’ll come see Drunken! Careening! Writers!, at KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St, 7pm FREE, with J. Stephen Brantley, Kevin Holohan and Thaddeus Rutkowski.
    I met J. Stephen at an EATfest…and then we went to Ireland and ate some oatmeal...but that’s a story for another night.

0 Comments

    Kathleen W.

    Writer, editor, curator, Ambassador of Love.

    Archives

    May 2014
    March 2014
    September 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    January 2013
    June 2012
    May 2012
    March 2012
    August 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    January 2011
    November 2010
    July 2010

    Categories

    All
    Adpatations
    Andrea Alton
    Awards
    Best Lesbian Erotica
    Burlesque
    Cheryl B.
    Composing
    Courtesy
    Craft Of Writing
    Dance
    Doric Wilson
    Drunken Careening Writers
    East Village
    Egopo
    Emerging Artists Theatre
    Farting
    Grounded Aerial
    Ireland
    Kgb
    Marketing
    Marketing For Writers
    Metropolitan Playhouse
    Mona Lisa
    Musicals
    My Awesome Friends
    New Plays
    Ny Fringe
    Peek-A-Boo Revue
    Performing Artists
    Philadelphia
    Pifa
    Plays
    Plays And Playwrights
    Playwrights
    Poetry
    Poets
    Readings
    Residencies
    Statements Of Purpose
    Storytelling
    Theater
    Tosos
    Women Playwrights
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.