Wherein We Speak Icelandic
At dinner, Kara (Manning) talked about the difficulties of juggling her freelance gigs as a music journalist and her career as a playwright. She talked about that rare thing: The ability for an emerging playwright (any writer, really) to focus entirely on her writing without the distractions of deadlines from a paying gig. It’s tricky. She kept saying that her time at Yale was a real luxury. She then expressed concern that no one else would understand what she was talking about — she was worried that she sounded like she was talking “Icelandic”. Not really. Her story is all too familiar. It reminds why this type of residency (any residency really) is so important for writers. It also reminds us how badly we wish we could fully fund our playwrights and provide them with enough resources - anything! - so that they can just sit down and write, research, do whatever they need to do to move on to the next play, rewrite any play, or just think about a play — to do it all without having to run to that temp job to make ends meet. Basically, we want to turn our playwrights into trust fund babies.
We’re organizing the first read-through of Tommy’s newest play (Beautiful Day) tomorrow. It’s in the evening. The play looks at the relationship between Leon Theremin and prima ballerina Lavinia Williams, who was a member of the American Negro Ballet.
And now a word about our fall production…