Recording is a Team Effort

Just a handful of the amazing individuals who are helping turn this album dream into reality!

I spent the past weekend at 25th Street Recording in Oakland with the Four Immigrants cast, musicians and creative team to record the original cast album for the show*. To be honest, going into the weekend, I was feeling fairly anxious. I have recorded two cast albums before, and both of them demanded so much time and attention that my impression of the recording process was that it was always mentally draining. So, I braced myself for a similar experience this time. I'm delighted to say that, while the recording sessions were definitely still demanding, the entire process actually went very smoothly and with minimal hiccups.

It was immediately clear to me that this was because I had such a great team of people around me. We were fortunate not only to have the entire cast back, but each musician in our 6-person ensemble had played in the pit for the show as well! This enabled us to jump right back into the material even after almost half a year had passed since the last time we performed it. Perhaps the biggest help was that I had a team of people to help take on some of the administrative and decision-making roles. For my past albums, I wore the hats of producer, manager, and music director combined. For The Four Immigrants, we split up these responsibilities among five people, and, by doing so, were able to keep things focused, organized and on track. This made a world of difference. Having a team of people you trust. Working with them and leaning on them. This sense of relying on others to help us get through to the end is, interestingly enough, one of the major themes in the show as well. I'm so grateful to all of the individuals who lent their skills, talent, time, and funds to this project. I wouldn't be able to do it alone.

*We are still trying to raise funds to help with the final production and distribution costs of the album. If you would like to make a donation, click here.

The Struggle of Open-Endedness

When I have a production, a workshop, even a meeting to look forward to, I usually find it very easy to focus and get work done. There is a built-in accountability to knowing that others are counting on me delivering something so that further development of a new work/play can begin. However, when I'm in between deadlines, it's a lot harder to find that fire and drive to get the creative wheels turning.

I find myself in such a phase right now. For Inside Out & Back Again, a play which has a definite deadline (it opens in March 2018), the script has been rewritten and brought to a place where the creative teams agrees it's ready for a workshop - which will begin this weekend. All of my other projects don't have deadlines yet. So while I could and should be working on them, it's easy to find myself within a fog of distraction.

To be fair, some of these projects need some time in this amorphous state where they exist primarily in my brain, and are worked and re-worked away from a laptop or notebook. Some of them require research and cogitation before I attempt to create something that even looks like a script. I try to remember this, so I don't feel discouraged by the fact that I might not be "producing" something. Still, structure is good for me. So, I remind myself that there are deadlines on the horizon, even though they may feel far away, or even if I don't see them yet. So, working backwards from those larger deadlines, I try to create mini-deadlines that will help me progress. I have also started to participate in a silent writing group, where I meet with fellow playwrights to stay quiet and just write (or read or research, as the need may be). I find these times to be helpful for focusing because it's harder for the fog of distraction to take hold when I'm out of the house and around others.

I share this because it's so easy to look at the big markers of playwriting and marvel at the world premieres, the workshops, the readings. But, being a playwright is as much about these days/weeks/months of open-endedness, from which they must forge and fashion a pattern and routine that works for themselves - much like the act of writing a play.

Creativity Quotation #23

"Once again the only thing that mattered was the work, except now he realized that the work was him. There is no separating yourself from the things you make, he thought. If you are a cesspool, what else can your work be except shit?" - Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

A special performance of Nightingale

For the most recent production of The Song of the Nightingale, Town Hall Theatre had received a few grants to put on student matinee performances for local elementary schools. These special daytime performances would be an opportunity for children, many of whom may not have seen a live performance before, to see a shortened version of the show. Unfortunately, one of those schools - Shore Acres in Pittsburg - could not attend due to air quality warnings in the wake of the Sonoma County fires last month.

Actors Minseob Yeom, Chris Juan, Pauli Amornkul, Isabel To, and me performing at Shore Acres Elementary.

The lovely folks at Town Hall decided to coordinate and reschedule with Shore Acres to do a special on-site visit. We polled the cast to see who might be available, and once I knew who we had, I created a 20-minute reader's theatre presentation of the show which featured 5 musical numbers. We had no set, no props, no band (save for me on the keyboard), and minimal costumes. However, as soon as we began to narrate the story, we could tell we had the kids' attention! As Artistic Director Susan Evans put it, "They were rapt!" It was a delightful sight to see the faces of the kids light up and stay so engaged. Of course, this makes sense. Nothing is more powerful at painting the picture of a story than a child's own imagination. Even though they didn't get to hear all of the songs from the show or meet all the actors or experience all of the production elements, they still tracked with the story of the little bird who saves an entire kingdom with her song.

Bringing Movement into Playwriting

Me, trying to be "movement-y" with Michael Mohammed.

Recently, I've been considering how I can access more of my right brain while writing. This might sound redundant to some, since writing can be a creative act, and thus would tap into right-brain energy. However, I often feel that writing can become a very left-brain act for me, as I focus a lot on linearity, logic, and building a concrete structure. These aren't things to avoid, necessarily, but I do feel they can sometimes limit where I take my thoughts creatively. As I begin writing the script for Calafia, which occurs in a realm of fantasy, I want to allow my right brain to do some more conjuring without letting my left brain get in the way.

One way I thought of doing this was through movement. So, this week, I met with director/choreographer/teacher Michael Mohammed (director of the recent Town Hall Theatre production of The Song of the Nightingale), who gave me some ideas about how to connect movement of my body to the work I have to do as a playwright. Michael guided me through a handful of movement and gesture exercises. One of the most insightful was imagining the space I was in as a gravity room, where center stage has normal earth gravity, stage right has 200% gravity, and stage left has 0%. Walking back and forth, I was invited to explore the heaviness or lightness of my body. Then we layered on another gradient: emotion. What if stage right was anger at 200% gravity and stage left was joy at 0%? And what if you swapped the emotions? What if we tried fear or sadness?

For me, this opened up a new way of fleshing out my characters. I have already taken the exercise home and worked on it with some of the roles in Calafia. I'm discovering through posture and gesture what priorities or desires might exist for my characters. For the titular role of Calafia, for example, I learned that she would much prefer to stand in the middle with chest and head held high. And if circumstances cause her to head toward either the 200% or the 0% directions with her body, she begins to feel out of place or exposed. Her priority is to retain the status quo, but it might also be a cover-up for deeper emotions that she does not wish to express for fear that it will make her look weak or out of control. I don't think I would have learned this about her this quickly in another way, and this leaves me feeling very excited to continue bringing movement into my playwriting process.