From “Transition”
pica.org/festival_detail_new.aspx?eventid=337

A device that simulates the effects of being in another dimension.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine

Dream Machine from Tommy Smith on Vimeo.

(This is an excerpt from the MAP Fund press release regarding TRANSITION, the new show I’m directing and co-creating with Reggie Watts. See the show at: www.pica.org/festival_detail_new.aspx?eventid=337)

PERFORMER REGGIE WATTS, CHOREOGRAPHER BILL T. JONES, AND PLAYWRIGHT LISA D’AMOUR AMONG 2008 MAP FUND GRANTEES

NEW YORK, NY (July 15, 2008) – The Multi-Arts Production Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, announces the recipients of its 2008 grants for new work in live performance. Thirty-eight projects, engaging more than 70 individual composers, choreographers, designers, solo performers, and playwrights will receive awards ranging from $10,000 to $40,000. In addition to the monetary award, as part of Creative Capital’s commitment to helping artists sustain their creative practices over a lifetime, grantees will take part in a professional development weekend retreat, which offers skills-building assistance in fundraising, networking, marketing, and strategic planning.

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
Portland, OR
Reggie Watts: Transition
Lead Artist: Reggie Watts, Tommy Smith
A theatrical employment of visual and linguistic tricks to destabilize the mind and render it open to suggestion.

See full article at: www.mapfund.org/announcement_188.html

The mythic “Writer’s Block” …

I just experienced a couple months (two) where I simply could not write. Or rather, write anything good. Granted, I kept busy during this time — thankfully, I’m co-creating and directing Reggie Watts’ next show (www.pica.org/festival_detail_new.aspx?eventid=337) otherwise I would have been in Kafka-like despair for lack of creative output.

But for a writer, writing is a very important thing. And when you can’t do it, or feel like you can’t do it, your total sense of worth goes down the tubes. Drinking has an added tinge of despair. The sky seems duller. You wake up and think: This again?

Enter into my last few months. It started with my last p73 reading of THE WIFE, which got such a total and baffling response that it simply shut me down. You get three tiers of response from readings. There is the superficial level — everyone smiling and saying good work. This is always appreciated, of course, but you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. There are two subcategories here: People who are on your side, and whether they liked it or not, will give you honest response that will benefit your thinking in further drafts. The other: People who don’t care for your artistic project in general, and will lob comments aimed to kneecap your worth as an artist and, by proxy, human being.

Many times, the latter category are playwrights themselves. After the reading, I found myself cooking breakfast for a playwright friend of mine who was present at the reading, and as I was frying the eggs slowly over the stovetop, I was greeted with passive-agressive and outright vicious comments about my naive assumptions about Jews and women. A week later, I found myself on a train with another playwright, who similarly had major problems with how I could *possibly* depict people in this manner. In both cases, they assumed I didn’t know my tactics — that the childish and self-centered and racially incorrect POV that the play employs was somehow a mistake of my misguided perception. (read the play here to see for yourself: www.vimeo.com/tommysmith) Of course, I smiled and said nothing during these interrogations — the only thing worse than a playwright writing a play is a playwright defending a play.

When I get stuck in these situations, I wonder if people are superimposing their desire to see the narrative conform with how they view the world. I know I do this when I see work. Playwrights are people with stubborn and inflexible points-of-view — without this, we wouldn’t be able to write.

But when this stubborn and inflexible point of view becomes dilluted, we pause. We reconsider. We evaluate our tactics and purpose for writing our narrative. And we entertain the death-knell for any artist: Maybe they’re *right*.

I can’t claim why Writer’s Block happens to anyone else, but for me, it always occurs when I listen to people too much. You can’t shut yourself off to all comments, of course, because you’re in theatre, and without a certain level of communication it all falls apart. But when you feel people aren’t understanding your work, and they are letting their frustration with your project overwhelm their decency in conveying their response, you must not listen to them anymore. Even if they are right. Because the worst thing that can inflict you as an artist is a multiplicity of voices inside your consciousness. How can you possibly express yourself or your characters if you are trying to pay heed to the multiple desires of an outside commentators? I’ve seen so many promising plays destroyed by “committee” — the playwright, in an effort to make their work please everyone, creates a monster that contains a lot of elements but has no driving perspective. I would rather see a searing play from a singular voice with flawed dramaturgy (e.g. Thomas Bradshaw) than a well-made drama with nothing to say because it has three or four voices competing for dominance.

I was receiving so many varied comments on THE WIFE — many positive, some negative, all with a strong point-of-view on how it should be *different* — that I literally had to flee the city. I went to LA — Reggie and I decided to construct our show while crashing a series of couches. And the detachment ended up cutting down the voices rolling in my head. I ate lots of cheeseburgers. I swam in rolling waves. I hung out with my LA friends, who are *convinced* that everything (aside from global evidence to the contrary) is going to be all right. I disengaged. Five days before I left, I woke up with an idea, and that idea led me to my computer, and before I knew it I had the narrative for my next play. Nothing *happened* — I just stopped listening, and made myself unavailable to commentary.

I know much more accomplished playwrights than I who have been crippled by reviews, or stopped writing temporarily because of how something was received. The Block happens at all levels, at all times, all ages.

I don’t really have a final thought or aphorism to summarize all the above. I should probably get back to writing…

(Addition on 7/13/08: Just talked with Thomas Bradshaw. What I mean by “flawed dramaturgy” is that the strong idiosyncrasies of the writing and subject matter force the play to not conform to a easily recognizable structure, and in many cases, refuse to include characters we can “identify with”. I simply don’t understand this need for “identification” in characters — when I listen to classical, I don’t complain when a violin solo is too complex and out of my experience, and nor should people care if they can’t see their desires reflected in complex and challenging writing, because there are millions of different experiences and you should be grateful that you’re getting to experience one that it outside yourself.

Regardless, “flawed” plays often render themselves useless in the eyes of producers and literary managers, who have been forced to concern themselves with the desires of a phantom audience. But these kind of plays include everything by Caryl Churchill, Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”, Sam Shepard through the 80s, Charles Mee, everything by Harold Pinter, etc. In short, masterpieces. AND the only plays we remember from that era. So the argument could be made: Flawed plays with strong points-of-view have shaped the history of theatre.)

Dig rehearsal from Tommy Smith on Vimeo.

Michael McQuilken (man in video) and I are going to Prague Theatre Festival later this month to perform our co-written show “A Day In Dig Nation”. We just re-staged the opening; Michael needed this for rehearsal purposes. Rehearsal space is my loft. Imagine an intricate projection sequence going on behind Michael, illustrating the sound & foley…

“On Playwriting” from Tommy Smith on Vimeo.

The first in a series of web videos commissioned by The New York Council for Poets and Playwrights (NYCPP).

Marsha Norman blogs about August. If you haven’t seen the play, don’t read her post. But she mentions something very interesting:

“…Finally, at least for this go-round, I like what this play represents: a life-long association of a writer with a group of actors and a theater. This is why Shakespeare wrote so much, he had a whole gang of actors waiting to do his work. Go down the list — the writers who wrote a lot of wonderful plays were always associated with a community of actors they could write for: Shepard, Chekhov, Brian Friel, Alan Ackbourne [sic], David Mamet, Lanford Wilson, Caryl Churchill, Richard Foreman, Wendy Wasserstein. Playwrights who live apart from theaters and actors have a lot of trouble getting their work done. Playwrights need to be around actors, need to be a part of a theater’s life…”

We were recently thinking about this – a playwright’s association with “a group of actors”. It would be wonderful to structure the fellowship so that the same group of actors could work with our fellow on his/her play for the course of the fellowship year. Of course, we’d work around the actors’ schedules – but wouldn’t it be exciting to creating some type of acting company? (Obviously, we’d only set this up if the fellow wanted it.) I think about Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue and how in the rehearsal room the roles in that play became so indelibly associated with those actors, their speech patterns, their postures.

We’re hosting a benefit at In The Heights this evening. We’re having a little soiree at Angus McIndoe prior to the show. Naturally, we’re stressed out. Are people going to show up? Will there be enough food, etc.? Will people like each other? Party-planning is always so stressful.

The readings happened. I think everyone (Tommy and Andy) was happy with them. We really lucked out with the casts for the readings. Mia Barron, Adam Dannheisser, Barrett Doss, Mary Jane Gibson, John Rolle and Brian Hutcheson were in The Wife. Michael Chernus, Zabby Guevara, Dick Latessa, Marsha Mason, Paul O’Brien and Brenda Wehle were in Mother Earth. Thank you, Zoe Rotter (for The Wife) and Daniel Swee (for Mother Earth). We really do think that casting directors are lifesavers.

We’re working with Zoe again on a second reading of The Wife. The reading is going to be probably in the second week of March. Tommy and May (Adrales) have asked that the cast meet for a couple of hours of rehearsal in the morning; they’re then going to present a reading to a very small invited audience in the afternoon. Tommy wants to gauge initial audience reaction. The play is dark dark dark. It’s quiet and funny at first (after the first reading, one of the actors emailed us to tell us that she thought the play was “Pinter-esque”). But then it takes a turn and becomes fairly dark. (By the way, the blurry camera photo on the left shows Tommy’s back, May’s profile and Barrett in mid-reading.)

Of course, we’re still hoping that Renee Zellwegger agrees to star in it when it’s produced on Broadway.

By the way, this totally depressed us.  The first few paragraphs reminded us of that profile in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times about struggling artists in the New York City Off-Off-Broadway scene.  Nothing like a good cheer-me-up on a gloomy February afternoon.

PS122ILuvU from Reggie Watts on Vimeo.

I am a regular collaborator with Reggie Watts on experimental theatrical/filmic ventures. In this clip, Reggie plays for a fundraiser for New York Theatre Review 2008. I appear briefly at the start. This was in October 2007. (Oh yeah, and the 2008 NYTR comes out in Spring, edited by the unstoppable Brook Stowe, featuring a ton of great essays and plays, including my own WHITE HOT and an interview I did with Reggie about our UTR piece DISINFORMATION.)

Story of the Eye, Chapter Two from Tommy Smith on Vimeo.

Warning: Graphic.

(See Chapter One info for project details.)

Story of the Eye, Chapter One. from Tommy Smith on Vimeo.

I’m developing Georges Bataille’s “Story of the Eye” (1928) into an operatic play. Here is Chapter One.

Linguistically, the book is kind of a dare: Bataille keeps pushing offensive images in front of the reader to make him/her squirm. By reading it aloud, I’m trying to overcome my knee-jerk squeamishness to access the deeper themes running through the material.

Warning: VERY graphic language/situations/symbology.

For more info on Bataille:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Bataille
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