Kate Mulley

Since stepping down as Literary Manager of Nylon Fusion Collective in late November, I’ve been looking at my life as a playwright a little differently. I’m still committed to my merry band of writers and we have some tricks up our collective sleeve for the upcoming year. I’m also committed to Bentley’s Nose, a [brand-]new New York-based theater company dedicated to bridging the gap between Dartmouth undergrads and post-college life in theater. Our first project will be a workshop of a new play of mine entitled The Reluctant Lesbian. We’ll spend a week rehearsing and playing and will present it on the Saturday afternoon of Winter Carnival. I couldn’t be more excited to spend a week in Hanover making theater with very very talented people. As soon as I’m back from that, I’m starting a screenwriting class at NYU with the intention of adapting The Tutor into a marketable screenplay. I’ve read a handful of screenwriting books, but have never taken a class, so it should be a fun experiment.

Just before Christmas, a conversation with a playwright mentor sparked my desire to push beyond what I’m doing now. To take chances and ask questions and risk rejection. Since then, I’ve actually made a spreadsheet of 20+ residencies and fellowships and playwriting competitions to be aware of and to apply to. Something about the new year (and sometimes Thanksgiving, for whatever reason) always instills this desire to really push harder and do new things. 2011 was a wonderful year for my writing life. I was blessed to have two plays produced in New York. I also endeavored to develop my interest in producing further. Let’s hope that 2012 has wonderful things in store as well!

Theatre about the theatre seems like it has always had its place. Playwrights spend so much time living a life in the theatre that they sometimes find that the best material comes from within their world. The upside is that it’s honest and well-researched. The downside is that one can only see so many plays about a playwright struggling through their psychological issues.

I saw another one of these yesterday at the Bank Street Theatre (The Atmosphere of Memory) and left the theatre wishing that the playwright hadn’t felt the need to explore this particular play within a play. It’s fun to watch actors like Ellen Burstyn and John Glover play over the top parents who have made their son crazy through years of psychological warfare. It’s less fun to watch the playwright character storm around the stage like an overgrown 5 year old trying to discover what made him so unhappy and neurotic (halfway through I decided he was channelling Woody Allen, sigh)

We’re all guilty of writing about things that interest us. My writers group members make fun of me for writing about romantically challenged women in or obsessed with England as a default. Writing plays is a special form of narcissism. Not only are you taking something from your brain and assuming people will care, you’re making actors perform it, directors hone it, and designers provide you with whatever you came up with. The world can, in fact, revolve around you when you’re a playwright, however, anything that’s too self-referential risks alienating the audience (and not in a good Brechtian way) or worse, boring them. And so, I hereby resolve to never write a play about a playwright and his or her issues.

Last weekend I attended three very different “commercial” theatre events. Two were Broadway productions, the third a hot ticket imported from England. Each followed particular “rules” for successful commercial theatre in the 21st century and I found it to be an intriguing combination of tastes and aesthetics.

Friday night I was offered a last minute ticket to David Ives’ Venus in Fur, newly transferred to Broadway after a successful run at CSC in the spring. A two-hander about a playwright and a mysterious actress, Venus in Fur borrows its plot and character types from the Austrian novella Venus im Pelz (this is one of those times German seems so self-evident to me!) by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. It explores the games (psychological and otherwise) that are played in romantic and sexual relationships, while also exposes “the theatre.” Nina Arianda is stunning in this play. Her energy and capability are astonishing to watch. Hugh Dancy can’t really compete with her, nor is he really allowed to. I’ve noticed that playwrights tend to get a bad rap in plays (oddly) and are always played as helpless, overly intellectual people who are blown away by larger personalities (especially actors). Whether this is intentional, it allows for a lot of very true feeling situations between the two characters and ultimately it’s an entertaining, well-performed two-hander. (The rules here are small cast, sexy subject matter, star casting.)

Saturday night I attended a special Halloween weekend performance of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, a production I saw in Boston almost two years ago. The audience was instructed to wear film noir clothing and everyone seemed to follow their instructions (say what you will about New Yorkers, if you tell them to dress a certain way for a cool party, they will). It was quite an experience to be surrounded by people wearing outfits that occasionally resembled actors’ costumes running around in masks. I saw a great deal that I had not seen during the performance in Boston but still felt (and I’ve said this about other Punchdrunk performances) that I was able to ‘cheat the system.’ Once you understand what they are doing, it’s very easy to tailor your own experience and not be surprised by what you see. There were two moments on Saturday night that surprised me, one was the “orgy” in the basement (I had heard of this, but not seen it last time) and when I happened upon a very large crowd watching Macbeth dancing with bricks. I think that Punchdrunk’s aesthetic is absolutely gorgeous and that their ambition is noteworthy, I’d just like to see something by them that scared me the same way that their Faust scared me 5 years ago. After the show, there was a theme dance party, which I was unfortunately to sick to stay for. It looked fun, but my throat led me home to bed and a hot toddy. (The rules here are “cool factor” (apparently a recent episode of Gossip Girl was filmed at Sleep No More), transfer from London, audience participation.)

Sunday afternoon I had the pleasure of seeing a college classmate perform the lead role in the Broadway production of Sister Act. My extreme pride for Kim completely outweighed any issues I had with the show. I found myself standing in tears at the end of the play not because of the arc of the story, but because of how amazing it was to see someone I know achieve her dream so completely. The music was catchy, the slight variations on the plot of the film were smart and the production value was high. But it remains a musical based on a film from the 90s, a very popular cash cow at the moment. (The rules here are adaptation of popular 90s film, movie star producer/cheerleader (Whoopi Goldberg, natch), disco theme/spangly overload.)

After quite some time working on my own plays and not attending shows, Halloween weekend was a good lesson in what’s being produced, what’s popular and why.

(Monday afternoon I saw a reading/workshop of a new musical, Volleygirls, and thoroughly enjoyed its originality, emphasis on the relationships on a women’s sports teams and clever humor. Keep a look out! Monday night I attended Celebrity Autobiography, which was very entertaining, especially since Florence Henderson winked at me!)

Since The Tutor, I’ve been busily working on my Writers Collective play, You Are Here. It’ll be performed at the Gene Frankel Theatre Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in November. More information can be found at the play’s new website here.

And now, back to writing, website creating and other assorted theatrical activities. I’m seeing The Mountaintop this afternoon, which will be a nice break from working on my own play.

Pardon the self-calls. Here’s another review of The Tutor, this time from the California Literary Review. We were surprised that they came to the show, but the reviewer seemed to enjoy it, so that’s good (and luckily he came on a night when things were actually working!).

We’ve had 3 more performances since opening night and 2 more reviews. One from nytheatre.com and the other from Big Vision Empty Wallet, both rather positive.

Every performance has been different, mostly due to strange technical issues that we’ve had to deal with at the theatre. One day the projections didn’t work, but the live video did and yesterday the projector didn’t work (so no projections or live video) and the speakers were screwed up. It felt like the unplugged (and occasionally underwater) version of the play (which luckily seems to work just as well as the tech-heavy version). One final performance on Saturday afternoon! Hopefully everything will be in working order by then.

Opening night of The Tutor went splendidly, despite being stranded at 32nd and 5th looking for a cab 30 minutes before the play was scheduled to start. I was able to fold programs in the cab and get there right as the audience was filing in (oddly, they didn’t stop me from going in without a ticket, which is slightly worrying…). Due to the nature of the Fringe, this was our first full run in the space and other than some technical hiccups, the show went very very well. We’ve already received our first review and it’s incredibly favorable.

There are four more performances, the next one at noon tomorrow. In the meantime, I hope to sleep, maybe do some yoga, and read the newspaper.

Last weekend, I spent about 15 hours in a surprisingly comfortable seat in a custom-built theatre in the Park Avenue Armory watching 5 separate Shakespeare plays being performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. My partner in crime, Stephanie, and I booked the tickets back in March, before The Tutor was accepted to the Fringe, before Spoken For had rehearsal space on Sunday and Monday nights, before a lot of things. The expense and the grandness of the endeavor made it an unmissable event once we committed to our “weekend of Shakespeare.”

Friday night was Romeo and Juliet. I know this play incredibly well, from studying it, seeing films, reading and seeing adaptations of the story, and yet I had never seen a production of the play. Rupert Goold (whose Enron I raved about here) directed this one and used a clever conceit to show the way that Romeo and Juliet felt isolated from the rest of the people in their world. Both were dressed like contemporary teenagers throughout the play, while all the other characters were in period dress. It was a fiery production with some terrific actors and a good way to start out the weekend. Before the show we went to a bar down the street where we spotted what could only be members of the RSC company (we later saw these self-same actors playing, among other roles, Brutus, Marc Antony and Kent– more on this later.), we hoped to find them after the show (the actors playing Tybalt and Mercutio in particular), but did not.

Saturday afternoon was As You Like It. This is another play that I know intimately from reading it in 7th grade and performing in it in 8th (I played Le Beau, which was quite possibly the low-light of my acting career, I wanted more lines and would have preferred to play a female character). I also saw an RSC production in the 90s that apparently included Joseph Fiennes and David Tennant in its cast. This production was incredibly fun. The ever-changing time periods were slightly confusing (I gathered that we went from Spanish Inquisition to Jews hiding during WWII to whenever it was acceptable to wear Converse and a waistcoat), but I stopped caring eventually and just laughed and swooned along with the merry band of exiles in the Forest of Arden. Katy Stephens was brilliant as Rosalind and Jonjo O’Neill (Mercutio from the night before) was a curious, but ultimately appropriate choice for Orlando. His emo guitar musings were hilarious and he resembled a young Matthew MacFayden.

For our “dinner break” we hiked up to the London Candy Shop on 94th and Lex to stock up on appropriate intermission snacks and returned to the pub for drinks, chicken wings and a glimpse of the Red Sox-Yankee game. King Lear on Saturday night was a disappointment. Other reviews have bemoaned its lack of emotional content and I have to agree with them. Lear is a beautifully crafted play with a truly dire conclusion and what I initially thought to be Shakespeare burnout turned out to just be a disappointing production of a play that should have been better. Individual pieces were excellent. Darrell D’Silva who played Kent and Charles Aitken who played Edgar (and Oliver in As You Like It) both rose above the oddly staged muddle of the play.

Sunday morning, we experienced strange Upper East Side passive aggressive behavior over brunch before entering the theatre for an afternoon in Rome with Julius Caesar. The night before I had researched the director, Lucy Bailey, and discovered that her husband is also her projection designer and was interested to see the result. The projections, unfortunately, were the only thing that distracted me from the intensity of the production. As a fan of technological experiments in theatre, I tend to give projections, videos and the like the benefit of the doubt. These projections, however, were cheap looking, strange and cartoonish. Sam Troughton, playing Brutus with a crutch because he tore his knee playing Romeo last month, was intense yet naive. Greg Hicks, who had seemed so different as Lear the night before, nailed Caesar with a sardonic, powerful performance. And our friend from the pub, Darrell D’Silva was a brilliant Marc Antony.

At the end of the show I was sad to think that this would be my last outing with the company. However, some last minute changes to my rehearsal schedule meant that I was able to retain my ticket for Winter’s Tale. With no context for what I was about to see, I sat on the edge of my seat (partly because I been sitting for so many hours and needed to do something different) and just followed this play about jealousy and marriage and love and deception. The design was gorgeous, the choices were sound and once again, Hicks and D’Silva were in top form. I really enjoyed the production (despite the strangeness of aspects of the play itself) and was happy to end the weekend on a note of oddly joyous revelry.

Of course, when I returned home I read online about a second night of looting in London. The footage of the looting in London and the manic frenzy in Julius Caesar seemed more similar than not. The slow and stubborn response that David Cameron made to the events reminded me of the metaphorical and physical blindness of Lear and Gloucester. The girls in Croydon drinking rose at 9:30 am and complaining about “the rich” had the same youthful ignorance as Juliet as portrayed by Mariah Gale (except they didn’t have a fierce nurse to knock them to their senses). I read somewhere recently that to fix theatre we should stop forcing Shakespeare down students’ throats. That we should show them theatre that is interesting and exciting. After last weekend, I would hazard to say (and others have surely said it before me) that there is still a timeliness to Shakespeare’s works. Not only does it give us an insight into human nature, but it reminds us that even when the worst times seem upon us, we can be revived in knowing that things can brighten and improve. For every moment in life that reminds us of Julius Caesar, may there be one that reminds us of the unexpected joy of the final scene of Winter’s Tale or of seeing the Park Avenue Armory covered in scrawled paper with missives to an unrequited love. This is what Shakespeare can do for us, if we give him (and a hundred or so employees of the RSC) a weekend of our lives.

I’ve been interviewed by Adam Szymkowicz for his excellent ‘I Interview Playwrights’ blog. Check it out here!

I’m in the throes of preparing for The Tutor and that has included compiling lists of agents and literary managers and “influential acquaintances” to contact and invite. Two years ago, when Sezze Sun was produced I forgot to do this. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but that play was such a bear to get on its feet that I just didn’t have time. And by the time I remembered it was too late. So it was a little disheartening to read this post from the Arena Stage this morning. I’ve worked in major off-Broadway literary departments, I have theatre publishing experience and I’m also a literary manager myself. So I know how difficult the slog of receiving unsolicited submissions is. I know that receiving solicited submissions is just as much of a slog. But when it’s my play, it somehow feels different. I’ve only done one mass mailing of a script, back in 2006 before I left for London. A handful of people wrote back asking for the full script, but no one really bit. Since then, I’ve done more targeted mailings to new writing theatres but have found that producing my own work and working with director/producer friends to develop work is much more rewarding(not to mention more practical) than sitting around waiting for rejection letters with feedback from interns to roll in.

This morning I also read the New Yorker article about Sheryl Sandberg and the male-dominated world of Silicon Valley. As has been written here and elsewhere, theatre, specifically commercial theatre,  is no different. Her advice for working women is strong; she said this at Barnard’s graduation this year, “Go home tonight and ask yourselves, What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it!” It’s great advice for anyone, but it’s especially great advice for people who are in unconventional fields (like playwriting). There’s another instance where she offers a job to a female colleague who demurs saying that she’s not qualified. Her response to her colleague? “No man would ever turn down more responsibility.” As the product of 8 years of single sex education and the daughter of a (over-)working mother, I was constantly told that my gender had nothing to do with my ability to succeed academically and professionally. And while I continue to believe it, statistics sometimes prove otherwise. But no one said it would be easy.