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The first event I attended here at DG Con was a conversation with Christopher Durang, whose play Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them was at CPT not too long ago.

Durang was a highly engaging story-teller and was fabulous to listen to. For some strange reason, or perhaps not so strange, I was reminded of John Bellairs–perhaps it is the Catholic upbringing and the way it manifests itself in the work.

What follows below are the notes that I took as I listened. I have expanded on some things as I was inspired to do so:

One of the opening questions posed to Durang by host Jim Price was what is it that leads to the mix of serious and the strange in his writing. Durang talked about early influences, including: how to succeed in business w/o even trying; and I Love Lucy. Durang said that he was always attracted to quick paced performances and is not a fan of the real-time nature of drama in the 50s.

Durang wrote his first play @ age 8; and it revolved around the I Love Lucy episode when Lucy has a baby… the family and friends practice… it’s time… then panic when it happens… he loved that.

Durang says that he came from a family that was open to the arts
memoir of johnny durang…? He had his first production in 2nd grade… and he discovered that it was fun.

early musical banned in boston, etc. 13th birthday gypsy… his mother was like gypsy because she would tell everyone about his plays…

The 1st audition process he was involved in included girls from other schools; he was at an all-boys Catholic school; he recalls that the nuns were not happy that the girl (in the show) had to drop a shoulder strap at the end; the show ended w/4 weddings (it was very shakespearean).

Durang attended Delbarton 7 -12; had to work hard at math, not very good at it. Durang remarked that his mother’s divorce lawyer suggested he attend Harvard, where he goes. There he goes through a bout of depression from fresh – junior; not much theater during that time. Part of the depression he attributes the discovery/realization that what he learned during his Catholic upbringing, with regard to God and the universe, is not true.

At Harvard he creates the greatest musical ever sung for which Al Franken auditioned. (mad magazine style spoof of “real” songs)
Gospels in musical comedy terms. “everything’s coming up moses”
He lived in Dunster House. al gore and tommy lee jones were there at the time. The show included 9 apostles (5 women) couldn’t get 12. 2 weekends; good reviews; later uproar… offensive to Catholics…
“pigs trampling in a sanctuary” quote… included this statement in his Yale application.

yale
albert? irish nuns (repressive) vs. italian (violent)
a lot of cabaret stuff
howard stein
william blake/thomas gray met in glass menagerie
& eleanor and franklin roosevelt
2 weekends
graduate newspaper (wrote their own review under a pseudonym — did not give themselves a rave)
life story of mitsy gaynor? gloria steinem…

Durang remarked that from one of his shows there were lines cut … And Durang had to go to whomever cut them–professor, faculty–and say, essentially, sorry, our name is on it, not yours… I don’t remember the context; fully. But this goes to the Holding Our Tongue DG conference in Cleveland, where I first met Gary Garrison; and the issues surrounding the forms that censorship take.

new york
sigorney weaver
so hard to make a living…
wendy wasserstein
taught acting even though he didn’t act
typist at Yale Medical — had to write rejection letters for people’s “donated” bodies because they had too many
got $8K grant from yale
cbs playwriitng?
titanic… (sigorny weaver)
idiots karamozov
lustintania (another ship that sank) das lustintania songer spiel…
sister mary ignatious
vanities — 11pm slot $5 per performance
brecht — eva perone the demon first lady of buenas aires (a ‘fib’ they created)

With regard to the playwriting business today, Durang remarked that he has found the movement to be toward development versus production;
caveat being that he doesn’t know as much now about what’s going on…
teaching with Marsha Norman. Durang finds the atmosphere troublesome
in that, as he recalls when he started out in ’75-’76; there was alot of $ for production of plays (new american plays); now it’s “workshops”; and that if 5 theaters have an interest in a writer all five theaters will do readings of his/her work; the playwright doesn’t get a production and each theater will dramaturge the play and make suggestions and “playwrights lose their play” that way.

Further, Durang finds that dramaturgs tend to subscribe to rules when there are, in fact, no dramaturgy rules. For instance, one dramaturg told him that you “can’t open a play w/ a :30 minute monolog”.

Advice to writers: if you see something you love, try to figure out what it is about it that you love and how you can write something similar to it; additionally, it is important to find people who will give you feedback about the play that YOU want to write.

find your voice:
have them write from “their own stuff”
best plays come from when you’re writing “your stuff”
wrote from a feeling he had (sister marry ignatious) had no idea it would be successful

how long can you not produce before people forget about you: agent: 2 years (laugh)
mother was dying of cancer
the actor’s nightmare… (another play)

don’t hold on to just one play… be prolific…

question: self-censorship (sister mary)
wasn’t mad when he wrote it
did he ever not want to put some stuff in the play–want to hold back
thought everyone would agree with him
rules didn’t make sense to him
no idea people would find it funny
adults performing something children wrote (as funny)
especially with their understanding of the story
jesus crucified, but for children replacing it with a blonde-haired doll, etc.

sex and longing was tough for him because it was so badly received
hasn’t even read the reviews yet
difficult because he couldn’t fix it.

difficulty getting into expository writing classes at Harvard
was having a difficult time at that point in his life
didn’t feel brave enough to go to NY on his own
teacher encouragement was very important

write intuitively, spur of the moment, and when he feels like it/enjoys it

found it important to schedule time and force himself to write and stick with stuff even when he didn’t want to

business of life and laziness keep him from writing…

daniel goldfarb in his class…

betty’s summer vacation
writes improvisationally–so a serial killer appears…

friendliest plays–beyond therapy
best received

depressed to discover that the things he learned in Catholic school weren’t true (part of his depression)
cognitive therapy — positive frame of mind will generate positivity, etc.

I attended a fantastic Dramatist’s Guild symposium on Saturday, September 20th, at Cleveland Public Theatre.  The symposium was about Censorship in the Theatre and was arranged and coordinated by Faye Sholiton who deserves a tremendous amount of recognition and thanks for her effort in coordinating this event.  The staff of Cleveland Public Theatre are also to be much, much thanked and congratulated for this event which was not only well-attended but of significant importance.

The “headline” guest was Ozen Yula.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ozen Yula, he is a playwright from Turkey whose play was not only shut down in Istanbul; but it is entirely likely that he will be the unfortunate recipient of a death threat in his home country.  For clarification, a death threat in Yula’s part of the world is not the same as the run-of-the-mill death threat one might receive in the United States.  In the US you receive a few phone calls, voicemail messages, etc., from some impotent rage-filled couch potatoes who have nothing better to do but stew around in the mess they call their life while attempting to control other people.  In Turkey, on the other hand, your photograph appears in a fundamentalist newspaper where you are listed as being a very bad person and then a few weeks later you turn up dead and your killer is never caught.

Now, Ozen Yula did conceive of and create a fairly provocative play–by some people’s standards: Lick But Don’t Swallow.  The premise is sort of like a distorted It’s a Wonderful Life or perhaps Two of a Kind if you like John Travolta, Olivia Newton John, and screwball comedies; but I digress: an angel is sent back to Earth for 24 hours during which she must save one person.  The catch? The angel is sent back as a porn star.  (Well, no one said it would be easy…)  So, the whole of the play is a male and female porn star, a camera man, and a director.  As the porn stars fuck in various positions, she blathers on about a host of issues: from famine and hunger to violence, etc.  It is clear that Yula has a droll sense of humor and is not a little irreverent.  It is quite ironic in that, given the subject matter and the handling of the content, I don’t know that this play would have a particularly great staying power in the marketplace, funny as it is.  However, now that someone want to ban the play and possibly kill the playwright (Assassination is the extreme form of censorship–George Bernard Shaw), the play will take on a degree of interest and value that it may never have had.  Like so many things, as soon as someone wants to cover it everyone in the world wants to see what is going to be covered.

So, the play was set to go up in Istanbul, Turkey (at the Kumbaraci 50 theater in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul according to Tony Brown) and due to threats, etc., the theater notified the police and asked for some protection.  At this point, the theater was shut down (even though it had just been built) due to concerns about its compliance with fire codes.  As Yula explained, this may have been coded language to remind everyone of the Sivas Massacre in 1993: where 37 intellectuals, artists, and hotel employees were burned to death by a similar breed of fundamentalist nits that continue to infest the globe in 2010.  Yula is scheduled to return to Turkey later this month and God bless him and keep him from the deranged mob that he’s bound eventually to encounter.  This is censorship in its most overt form.

Yula was surprisingly philosophic and calm about the whole thing, saying that his intent is to “hold up a mirror” to his society/culture and hopes to “help through literature” so that the poor (economically) and brainwashed masses in Istanbul can “see their lives”.  This is now his ethic of playwriting.  Yula is clearly intent on doing the same thing here as his play Don’t Call Me Fat is up at Cleveland Public Theatre right now, and addresses the American obsession with eating, obesity, weight loss, and fame–themes that Yula identified in our society by watching television!

There are all sorts of forms of censorship, but the most disturbing sort follows on the heels of the sort described above–the violent type that Yula faces–and this most disturbing type is Self-Censorship.  This form received a great amount of attention during the day as it is the kind that most people face: for a variety of reasons.  The violence that accompanies some sorts of censorship are aimed squarely at the notion of making people shut their mouths and not to say anything in the first place.  As some of us playwrights went off to lunch we joked with each other saying things like, “I want you to just shut your mouth, as my having to censor you requires too much effort” and “the sooner you learn to censor yourself the easier it will be for me.”  Ha ha ha.  But that, of course, is the idea.  The whole of censorship and control aims at ensuring that thinking is controlled and regulated.  Once thoughts get outside of the head, then there is great effort involved in stomping out the ideas that have escaped.  Other forms of censorship include indirect means.  For instance, in 1996 in Mecklenburg County (North Carolina) the Charlotte Repertory Theater was assaulted for putting up a production of Angels in America.  A local religious nit there (we have them in America too, they just kill less frequently now than they used to) objected to the gay themes and no doubt the overtly liberal bias evinced by Kushner’s politics. Because there was no method of overtly closing the production due to these themes, the nit and the Republican mayor decided to go after the production for having nudity in it.  They were unsuccessful at stopping the production, however the Mecklenburg County Commissioners later retaliated by stripping all arts funding from arts organizations in the county ($2.5 million) and continued to retaliate until summarily voted out of office in 1996. Local playwright Eric Coble wrote a play about the events surrounding this insanity entitled Southern Rapture. Other silly forms (but no less frightening in their implications) include such things as changing the advertising for the Vagina Monolgues to the “Hoo-Haa Monologues” as clearly some American’s have no capacity to think about human sexuality or the human body in any manner beyond the level of a second grader.

Other items of note.  During the opening discussion with Ozen Yula, Tony Brown moderated the interview and later a panel, which included Michael Mauldin, Head of the Dramatic Arts Program at Cleveland State University.  Gary Garrison, Executive Director of Creative Affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America talked a bit about how the DGA handles censorship issues.  Later in the afternoon, Raymond Bobgan, Executive Artistic Director for Cleveland Public Theatre gave an update on the Gordon Square Arts District planning/activities.  Later, later in the afternoon there was a panel discussion which included David Faux, Director of Business Affairs at the Dramatists Guild; Ari Roth, Artistic Director of Theater J; and Betty Shamieh, a playwright whose plays have been highly successful in Europe and translated into many languages, but have not been staged in the US, as she sees it, because of their representation of Palestinian families and issues of concern to Arab-Americans.

On the whole, this was an invigorating and exhausting day, and much glory and honor is due to those who arranged for it to happen.