“The Code” wins contest
Posted by: donfried on: September 13, 2009
A few weeks ago, my 10-minute play “The Code” won first prize in the 2009 Front Range Playwrights’ Showcase at Coal Creek Community Theater in Louisville, Colorado. “The Code” is the first play in Senior Moments, a series of 5 short plays I’ve written for Tim Englert and Ellen Ranson, two actor friends of mine, to present at senior residences.
Tim and Ellen — they’re “well-seasoned” adults — call themselves the “Silver Circuit” when they tour performing plays for older audiences. Earlier this year, they told me that they were having difficulty finding two-person plays for one older male and one older female actor to present at senior residences. They asked me if I’d be interested in writing something specifically for them. I jumped at the chance.
The last two plays I’d written were Shakespeare Incorporated and Postville. Both are large cast, large set, full-length plays and, frankly, I was burned out. So the prospect of working on short, comedic plays was particularly appealing. Especially something with strict requirements — one elderly male and one elderly female actor, minimal set and production requirements — and one which would have have more or less guaranteed productions when I was finished.
Senior Moments is now finished and Tim, Ellen and I are scheduled to present it in a dramatic reading at Golden West, a large senior residence in Boulder, on September 24th. After that, they’ll start to perform it at homes for the elderly up and down the Front Range in Colorado.
Today there was a wonderful article in the Boulder Camera newspaper about Tim, Ellen, Silver Circuit, and “The Code.” Take a look.
Just Treat Me Like You Would Shakespeare
Posted by: donfried on: August 8, 2009
Last night we had the 6th of 8 performances of Taste of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. (I’m in a Renaissance quintet that we formed to sing before and during the play.)
Merchant of Venice has sometimes been tough to swallow. It’s a great play, but it’s deeply anti-Semitic. While it’s probable that Shakespeare didn’t have anything personal against Jews — they were expelled from England in 1290 and weren’t officially allowed back in until 1655 — anti-Semitism remained widespread in Britain. As well read as Shakespeare was, he would have been exposed to it in literature and come to regard it as accepted wisdom. The play reflects that fact.
Nonetheless, we’ve gotten through 6 performances of Merchant of Venice so far without any picketing. It is Shakespeare, after all, so people make allowances.
Jump forward 400 years to the readings of my play, Postville, (The Plays, They’re Hijacking My Play) this past week.
When I started talking about writing a play about the events in Postville, my family and friends pleaded with me not to.
“There’s no way you’re going to be able to write this play without it being anti-Semitic,” they told me.
“Sure there is,” I responded, although I have to admit that at the time I wasn’t quite convinced. Unless the play was going to be too sticky-sweet to say anything, it was going to have to tread through a host of “ism” minefields — anti-Semitism, anti-immigrantism, anti-Midwest farmerism, …
I’m convinced that I’ve achieved the objective of writing a play that deals sensitively and appropriately with a number of difficult issues. But each time there’s a public reading — this past week were the second and third — I’m concerned that I’m going to get the crap kicked out of me by people who hear individual sentences but miss the point.
“You said that Jews are cheap!” Kaboom!
“You showed a Hispanic immigrant who couldn’t speak English well!” Crash!
Some of that happened in Des Moines in March, but I knew it would. (See Write Your Own Damn Play.)
There was only one instance of it this week. And that was a woman who beat me up for not following up in the play on the otherwise un-referred-to occupants of a bus that gets clobbered by a train. Anti-innocent-bystanderism? (Come on, Lady, even Tolstoy when he was writing War and Peace had to make choices about what to include and what to leave out!)
I’m hugely relieved, but I’ll continue to worry about people who are so burned by their hot buttons that they can’t or won’t see things in context.
So here’s my plea. Just treat me with the same consideration you’d give Shakespeare. That wouldn’t be so hard, would it?
Smoke Out
Posted by: donfried on: April 23, 2009
Well, this past Monday was April 20th. That may not be significant to those of you who don’t live in the Boulder area, but 4/20 at 4:20 p.m. is the traditional Smoke Out on the University of Colorado campus. And what that means is that somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people show up to smoke the evil weed. (Ostensibly to lobby for a change in marijuana laws. Yeah, right!).
Over the past several years the University administration and the police have tried a number of creative means of discouraging the festivities. These have included blocking off the entrances to the chosen location and turning on the sprinklers. Last year they filmed the crowd, posted photos on the Internet, and offered a reward for anyone who would identify a “perpetrator.”
In the run-up to this year, the administration simply asked students and the public nicely to stay home. That didn’t work any better than previous years’ strategies had.
I had a meeting in the front lobby of the University Theater building at 5 p.m. on Monday, and as I approached the area where on-street parking is usually plentiful, I realized that Monday wasn’t a usual day. 20 minutes of searching and about a mile and a half further, I found a place to park and walked back to the campus. I haven’t seen crowds like that — both in terms of numbers or appearance — since Woodstock. (Which, by the way, I got within 14 miles of and then said “Screw it” and left.)
Immediately after the end of my run as Darwin in “The Debate” I shaved my beard and got a hair cut. So instead of looking like a sympathetic and possibly participating overaged hippie, I look like an overaged suburban voyeur.
As luck would have it, the center of the Smoke Out was in Norlin Quad, right in front of the University Theater. Talk about a contact high! From a quarter of a mile away the smell was noticeable — not that I would recognize what MJ smells like, you understand. From 200 yards away, the clouds were visible.
I’m afraid I don’t remember much about the meeting. I do remember being terribly hungry and going out for pizza afterward.
What was I writing about?
Award for “Postville,” London production for “Shakespeare Incorporated”
Posted by: donfried on: April 19, 2009
I heard yesterday that my “Postville” play was selected as one of the winners in the 2009 Playwrights Showcase of the Western Region playwrighting competition. The competition was open to writers from the 23 states west of the Mississippi River. During the Showcase (some time from August 5th – 8th), “Postville” will have a staged reading at the Curious Theatre in Denver.
The award is certainly comforting after the flagellation I got from the activists and superannuated playwriting professors at the reading at StageWest in Des Moines. From the audience reaction I knew the play was better than that, but it’s still nice to get some recognition like this.
The other good news is that “Shakespeare Incorporated” is going to be produced in London, either this Autumn or early next Spring.
Last summer, when “(Not) At Home” was being produced at the Boulder International Fringe Festival, the Fringe folks contacted me to ask if I’d be willing to house some out-of-town artists. I looked at the list and noticed that some of them were from the U.K. Maybe I’ll make a contact that will help in marketing my work in the U.K, I thought. So I agreed to house a Brit.
Sure enough, I made contact with Andy McQuade, a wonderful actor and the Artistic Director of the Second Skin Theatre Company in London. I gave him a copy of “Shakespeare Incorporated,” and he loved it. About 6 weeks ago he contacted me, and we’ve signed a deal for him to produce “SI” in London. He’s looking for a suitable theater venue now. I’ll post more when things are finalized.
Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?
In case you didn’t recognize it, this is my happy face.
My pinnacle of job satisfaction
Posted by: donfried on: April 16, 2009
When I was still working for a living, I was on the road pretty much Monday through Friday, 40 or more weeks a year. My job was selling large, multi-national Information Technology Services outsourcing deals, usually in the $500 million and up value range, and sometimes in the multiple billions of dollars.
Deals like those are not high percentage wins; you win about one in 10, and you work on each deal for an average of about 18 months. Do the math. 10% hit rate; 18 months work on each. Yeah, you’re getting the idea. (Maybe others are better at it, but that was it for me.) Because of the size of the deals — one of the deals I worked on that closed was worth $20 billion — the company could afford to keep me around and well paid in between wins.
But that didn’t mean that there was much job satisfaction in working my ass off and constantly getting my hopes up, and then losing one deal after another Take my word for it, it wasn’t a lot of fun. And even in the incredibly rare cases where I worked on deals that won, there was always someone else who would manage to make sure that I had moved onto another deal months before and would steal the credit.
Which brings us to today’s really sad story.
One evening when Rhonda, Eric, David and I were still living in England, the four of us sat down to the all-too-infrequent event of eating dinner together. (I think it was some time around 1994.) We had a dog at the time, and the dog was in the habit of doing in the back yard what dogs do in back yards.
“Someone’s got to go out and clean up Sheba’s poop from the back yard,” I announced.
“Ooh, I hate that job, I hate that job,” shouted David and Eric in chorus. (Rhonda remained silent, since she was generally exempted from poop-cleaning duties.)
“Really?” I responded. “I kind of like it.”
The three of them looked at me like I had two heads. It got me to thinking. Why would anybody like that job?
And I realized. I would go out into the back yard with a shovel in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. The plastic bag was empty and the yard was full. 15 minutes later, the yard was empty and the plastic bag was full. I’d actually accomplished something! And nobody was going to steal the credit from me.
That was as close as I came to job satisfaction for 30 years. And that was when it occurred to me that I really needed to get a life. It took me another 12 years to get it.
I told you it was a sad story.
Write your own damn play!
Posted by: donfried on: April 5, 2009
It’s been a mighty busy week in the great scheme of play marketing.
Last Monday I flew to Omaha and then rented a car and drove to Des Moines for a public reading of “Postville” at StageWest. (“Postville” is my play about the group of Hasidic Jews who bought a defunct meatpacking plant in a struggling, northeast Iowa town and reopened it as a kosher facility. Click here for the synopsis.) There was a rehearsal on Monday night and then the reading was Tuesday night. There were over 100 people at the reading, which is about three times the turnout that they normally get for this kind of thing. Given the media attention the play has gotten, that wasn’t surprising.
The reading went better than I had hoped for — people laughed at the right times, they oohed and aahed at the right times, they even wiped their eyes and sniffled at the right times. Wait! Maybe that was me wiping and sniffling. But the laughing and oohing and aahing is the gospel truth.
Everybody seemed engrossed in the play from the first page through the end, an hour and forty intermission-free minutes later. No shuffling in seats, no checking of watches or talking among themselves, and only two people running out to the rest room. And when it was over, there was sustained, enthusiastic applause. I’ve been around theater enough to know the difference between polite, “Let’s get out of here, but not embarrass the cast” applause, and “This was really pretty good” applause. This was the latter.
Next there was a 5 minute potty break. Most of the audience then left, but about 30 people returned for a talk-back session.
The events in Postville (see the article on the play in the Iowa Independent or the Des Moines Register for some of the background) have been in the news in Iowa on a daily basis for the past year, and it has all been incredibly traumatic and emotional for the people of Iowa. Was the owner of the plant guilty of immigration and human-rights violations? Or was the whole thing being blown out of proportion by the media because he is a member of a Jewish religious sect? Did the immigration agents abuse the rights of the illegal immigrants? There are dozens of issues here.
Given the level of attention and emotion, I knew that many Iowans were going to have very strong prejudices about what should be the focus of the play, what should be included and excluded, and even whether it should have been written at all. So I was expecting to get beaten up by at least some of the people who remained for the talk-back session. And I was.
Three groups emerged from those who stayed. Five or six people were what I’ll call activists. They came with an axe to grind, and they were going to grind it. How dare I write a fictional play (the play has been marketed as a fictional account, inspired by the events in Postville) and use the name of the town? I should either write a documentary, 100% factual, or else I should move the setting of the play somewhere else, change the Hasidim to some other group (Amish?), and make it otherwise unrecognizable. Some people insisted I should make it more clear that the owner of the plant was criminally guilty. Others insisted that I should make him completely innocent.
You get the idea. Nobody likes to talk more or louder than a social activist with an audience. These 5 or 6 people each had vastly differing opinions, each insisted that I HAD TO change the play as he or her wanted it changed. Between them they monopolized most of the conversation.
The second group was made up of three older college playwriting professors. Someone who has taught playwriting for 40 years gets used to looking for problems and telling their students how to fix them. And the students have to listen to them. So off we went to the races with the professors being professorial, recommending changes that ranged from throwing out 80% of the play to throwing out 120% of the play and starting over. My favorite suggestion from this group was that the play shouldn’t have 11 characters and take place in and around the main street of the town of Postville, it should have 2 characters and all take place in the living room of one of the Hasidic Jews. In Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Thanks a lot. Very helpful.
The third group was made up of normal theater-goers, a few of whom said nice things about the play, but most of whom sat in shocked silence while the activists eviscerated me and the playwriting professors eviscerated my play.
Later, the people from StageWest and several of the readers told me that they couldn’t believe with how much aplomb I had sat and absorbed the abuse. One of them said to me, “But I guess you’ve been to this sort of rodeo before.” Amen to that, sister. It takes a thick skin to be a playwright!
By the way, the feedback from the cast and the artistic management of StageWest is that “Postville” is a good play, which may need some tweaking but certainly doesn’t need to be gutted before moving on to production. (Thank you to Ron, Ron, Todd, and the cast for your hard work. You did a great job.)
The next day I drove to Postville and met with several people, including the rabbi of the town’s Hasidic community and the man who had been the mayor during and after the raids. Overall, I felt I got a mandate to go ahead with the play basically as is, and to leave it referring to Postville. Several of the people I talked to said that it may even do the town some good. And the ex-mayor suggested that I submit “Postville” to nearby Luther College to see if they would be interested in producing it.
The next step is a reading of “Postville” at the Theater Company of Lafayette (Colorado) in September, and a production at their Mary Miller Theater next February.
Take that, bleeding heart activists! And for everyone who told me what I HAVE TO DO to rewrite most or all of the script, write your own damn play.
Great Review of Ups & Downs on Rebecca’s Reads
Posted by: donfried on: April 5, 2009
Melissa Koltes of Rebecca’s Reads posted a review this week of David’s and my bo0k, Ups & Downs. Here’s an extract from what she had to day.
“I do not typically laugh out loud as I am reading. But this book made me LOL more times than I can count. … The authors do a fantastic job of giving a visual account of the uniqueness of the towns-people, the villages, the countries and the cultures. The beauty of the landscape, the difficulty of the journey and the individual experiences that each narrate is awe inspiring, incredibly amusing, and greatly entertaining.”
Airline comes up with creative way to beat recession
Posted by: donfried on: March 25, 2009
Yesterday morning I flew from Denver to Austin for 4 days of topping up my grandfatherly batteries. When I got to the baggage claim area in Austin, I went over to monitors to see which carousel my bag would be coming in on. The second listing on the screen was an arrival for flight 1147 from Austin!
That’s right, Flight 1147 (the name of the airline is being withheld to avoid a lawsuit) was going from Austin to Austin. (As my old Haverford College classmate Dave Barry says, “I’m not making this up.”)
At first I thought it had to be a mistake. But then it hit me. No, it wasn’t a mistake. It was just another creative attempt by a struggling airline to BEAT THE RECESSION.
I would love to have been a Japanese tourist taking photos (nobody pays any attention to a Japanese tourist taking photos) at the meeting where they came up with that idea.
“Come on, guys, there must be something else we can do to avoid losing our jobs.”
“Maybe we should schedule more flights.”
“Don’t be silly. There aren’t enough people on the flights we run now, so we lose money on every one. The more we schedule, the more we lose.”
“How about if we get more people to fly?”
“We tried that last week. It didn’t work. “
“OK, then, let’s run fewer flights.”
“That’s not going to work either. Then we don’t cover our overhead.”
“You mean like the building? Maybe we can get a smaller building”
“I mean like your salary. Maybe we should get you a smaller salary. The problem is that our costs are too high.”
“I know, let’s cut back on services.”
There’s a stunned silence in the room.
“Wait! I’ve got it! Let’s schedule flights from airports to the same airports.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, I’m serious. Think about about. What’s our biggest expense? Fuel. How much fuel is it going to take to taxi out onto the runway, sit for 20 minutes, and then come back to the terminal?”
“Maybe you’ve got something there.
“That’d be bound to increase our on-time arrival percentage too.”
“It might. If — and this is a big if — we could manage to get the planes back to the terminals on time.”
“And we wouldn’t need nearly as many staff checking people in and handling their bags. Who’s going to bring a suitcase if they’re going to be home in an hour anyway?”
“Practically no one.”
“We could save a lot of money on the planes, too. I mean the planes wouldn’t even need engines would they? Just one of those little tractors to pull them away from the gate.”
“We’ve got plenty of those already.”
“And no toilets! The doors would have to be there, of course, but there wouldn’t need to be anything behind them. We’d just keep the seat-belt sign on for the whole time.”
By now the ideas would be flying (unlike the planes) fast and furious. Skip ahead a year — a venture this complex is going to take lots of planning, isn’t it? — and voila, we have a flight from Austin to Austin.
By the way, the arrival listing on the computer monitor in Baggage Claim showed that Flight 1147 was scheduled to arrive 90 minutes late.
Reset or Overcharge?
Posted by: donfried on: March 6, 2009
I was listening to NPR on the car radio while I was driving to the theater tonight for my last performance as Darwin in the Lincoln/Darwin plays. There was a piece about Hillary Clinton exchanging gifts with her Russian diplomatic counterpart. It seems she tried to give him a “reset” button, as a tongue-in-cheek fillip for both countries to reset their relationship. Except the State Department folks got the word wrong — Russian is one tough language — and instead of using the Russian word for “reset,” they used the word for “overcharge.”
It got me thinking of the classic marketing blunders that I collected during my years in international business. Here are some of my favorites.
When Coca-Cola first came to China, there were hundreds of ways that the words “Coca-Cola” could be rendered in Chinese. (Chinese is a tonal language, with five tone levels. A four syllable word can be pronounced 5 to the 4th power ways.) It turned out that the one that sounded best to the ears of the American boss, and the one which was used for the introduction of the product in China, meant either “bite the wax tadpole,” or “pregant horse.” The Chinese employees were too polite to tell the boss what he had done, and sales of “Bite the Wax Tadpole Cola” were — well, let’s just say they were less than forecast.
Eventually, someone told him what was going on, and they changed the name to something that sounded identical to him, but meant “nectar of the gods, you will have a thousand sons.” Sales skyrocketed, and the rest is history.
When Ford introduced the Pinto in Brazil, there were few sales to men. It turns out that Pinto is Brazilian Portugese slang for “small penis.”
Another Brazilian marketing blunder was made by Waterman pens. At the time, Waterman’s U.S. advertising slogan was, “It won’t leak and embarrass you.” The translator wasn’t all that good in Portugese and used the word, “embarrazer.” Sounds like “embarrass,” doesn’t it? Wrong. It means “to make pregnant.” So until the advertising program was changed, Waterman pens in Brazil wouldn’t “leak and make you pregnant.”
Remember the old Coors advertising campaign, “Turn it loose.” The translator for a South American ad campaign didn’t understand just what the benefits of the product were, and Coors was released with a campaign to help people move their bowels.
I’ve got hundreds more, but I’ve got to get to into my Darwin costume now and start practicing my phony British accent.
Enjoy the view of my little turtle backside
Posted by: donfried on: March 1, 2009
This morning there was quite a nice little piece in the Boulder Camera about all my theater activities and the book launch and reading coming up next Sunday for “Ups & Downs: The (Mis)Adventures of a Crusty Old Fart and His Bouncy Son as they Trek Through the Alps.”
Good news, right? But half-way into the piece, it says, “He’s also involved in Rising Stage, a local troupe devoted to new plays.” Which was true the last time I spoke to the columnist, but since my acrimonious break-up with the Boulder Chapter of Colorado Dramatists is no longer the case.
Now I’m sitting here absolutely certain that my former colleagues at Rising Stage have already convened a meeting and (having finally stopped holding hands and humming and opened their eyes — and in the few minutes they can spare not talking about what a big, cruel world it is and how much they’re going to do to save it, very little of which they actually do) are talking about how I intentionally falsified the truth in my mania for self-aggrandizement and what an asshole I am!
I’m bracing for a scathing email to come winging over the wires any minute. I’ll reply and explain what happened, but it won’t do any good. Once you reject the true touchy-feeliness, you will be consummately evil. In fact, you will always have been consummately evil, no matter how long before the breakup you had a cordial relationship.
Am I being paranoid? Of course. But it’s not like it’s not justified. And it’s not like it’s something I can stop. When will I ever stop agonizing about the fact that not everyone is going to love me? Probably never.
I’m resolved to the fact that there will always be an ample supply of people who are angry at me. Because the one thing I will never do is to stop sticking my turtle-head out of its shell and making progress. And seeing my little turtle backside in front of them is one thing that a lot of turtles in the world just can’t stand.
