Kate Mulley

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.

Tickets for The Tutor are now on sale here!

There will be an opening night party next door to the Living Theatre at culturefix after Friday night’s performance. Ticketholders and friends are welcome!

Venue and dates have been confirmed for my production of The Tutor in the New York International Fringe Festival. The play will be performed at the Living Theatre on 21 Clinton Street on the Lower East Side.

Performances are:

Friday August 12 at 7pm (with an opening night party to follow)

Sunday August 14 at 12 noon

Monday August 15 at 10pm

Wednesday August 17 at 3:45pm

Saturday August 20 at 4:45 pm

Tickets will go on sale on July 22nd on fringenyc.org!

In addition to my Fringe play, I have two other projects coming up in the near and far future. The first is a further incarnation of Strange Bare Facts, my play that premiered at the NYU Forum for Theatre and Public Health. I’m expanding it for a reading at the beginning of July at the New London Barn Playhouse in New London, NH. Much of the cast from the reading at NYU will be involved and I’m excited to get to spend some time up north doing theater.  I did some research in London last week and look forward to incorporating it into the play.

Later in the year, in November, the NyLon Fusion Writers Collective will premiere its new devised piece tentatively titled Spoken For. We’ll be casting in the next month or so and will work with actors to develop a metatheatrical piece about expatriates in London. We’ve been in the planning stages for a while now, so it’s nice to have something concrete to really push us forward.

Last week, in the whirl of the Royal Wedding, I heard from the New York International Fringe Festival that my play The Tutor has been accepted for the 2011 Festival. I’m very excited to start working towards a full production after a staged reading of a one act version last June and a reading of the expanded script in December. It’s about an SAT tutor with a dark secret and how it affects one of her students and his family. It’s a fun play, but also a little bit dark and sexy. Something for everyone! Dates/venue won’t be announced until July, will keep everyone posted!

I’ve somehow managed to miss productions of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch throughout the years. A stunningly choreographed docudrama about the Scottish infantry regiment, its history and its experience in the Iraq War, Black Watch is playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse for the third time in the past 5 years. I must admit to be a little skeptical about the decision to produce this piece again rather than experimenting with new work, but I’m glad it returned to New York so that I could finally see it.

One of the first plays about the Iraq war to be written from the perspective of the soldiers, Black Watch quite deftly maneuvers between meta-theatricality, choreographed movement pieces and explorations of the dialectic of boredom and terror at war. The mostly young Scottish touring cast do an exceptional job portraying men on the brink of discovery, hoping that they will find some meaning to their lives through signing up. The history of the regiment and its relation to the history and pride of Scotland are cleverly devised and I noted in the program that many of the actors have family members who fought with the Black Watch, which adds to the experience. It’s a strong example of what smart theatrically-minded people can achieve with a good script, compelling material and some purposeful movement.

And then I came home and found out that Osama bin Laden had been killed by Navy Seals which was almost surreally fitting (while still being inherently complicated).

Tomorrow I have rehearsal for a reading of my newest play, Strange Bare Facts. It’s been a very difficult piece to write because there has been so much research involved. A lot of times I’ll have fantastic ideas for plays and they’ll sit in half-written forms on my computer waiting for me to return to them and this play could have gone that way many times over the past 7 months. But I was lucky enough to hear about the NYU Forum on Theatre for Public Health and even luckier for my play proposal to be accepted. The forum begins on Thursday and my reading is on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, it’s only open to forum participants, but I hope to continue to work on the play using feedback from the reading.

For people interested in the project, this is the proposal: Strange Bare Facts is a play about a lesser-known figure in the history of public health and epidemiology in 20th century England. J. Alison Glover was a soldier in the Boer War, a doctor on the front in World War I and was instrumental in keeping soldiers from catching disease. His early dedication to understanding health care variation through his study of tonsillectomies was groundbreaking and is still cited today. The play draws from both contemporary and historical episodes in its exploration of Glover‘s life and its legacy. Strange Bare Facts educates and entertains its audience by telling the story of a man with a very contemporary perspective who hoped to change the way medicine was provided to patients, facing adversity, war and critics. An inspiring story for health care practitioners and anyone interested in how we can treat patients more effectively and more productively.

The past week was filled with a handful of Broadway shows, some not great, some fantastic. Tuesday night I saw That Championship Season at the last minute and found it pretty dreadful. It’s a play about a championship basketball team coming together 20 years after they won the state championship. They have reunions every year but this one is different (kinda) because there are all of these secrets to expose. Except that the secrets weren’t all that interesting. I kept waiting for the big reveal and it ended up being pretty uneventful. The play explores the changing role of white male hegemony between the 50s and 70s and part of the problem seemed to be that much of the  audience seemed to agree with the racist, sexist things being said. It’s possible that I’m projecting, but the way the audience reacted to off-color jokes or remarks seemed to be positive as opposed to uncomfortable… Which confused me slightly. And despite an pretty all-star cast, it was just lackluster all around. Quite disappointing.

Not at all disappointing was Priscilla Queen of the Desert. I’ve never seen the movie, but was excited to continue my love for plays about/starring drag queens with this show. And it exceeded my expectations. Three drag queens travel from Sydney to Alice Springs in a bus so that one of them can meet his young son. Filled with disco/top 40 hits and boasting some of the craziest costumes I’ve ever seen, Priscilla was an utter delight. And I have a new raging crush on Nick Adams, who plays Adam/Felicia. So much so that I wrote my first piece of fan mail on a vintage peacock postcard (it seemed appropriate). That’s right. I’m 27 years old and I wrote my first piece of fan mail last night to an actor who plays a drag queen. Apparently some changes were made to the show to make it more “Broadway-friendly” and tone it down slightly from the Australian and West End versions. And while this a little frustrating from an artistic perspective, I’m sure the family with young children sitting in front of me were pleased. Even so there were probably going to be a lot of questions about what they had seen. But I would recommend it to anyone. It’s a fantastically over-the-top theatrical experience and worth it to see the number of costume changes alone!

Have realized that my theatrical tastes now encompass over the top musicals(preferably with drag queens) and witty erudite plays and very little in between. I suppose it makes sense considering my introduction to the theatre was through movie musicals, but it’s a little incongruous.

Saturday night, I saw the new Stephen Adly Guirgis play, The Motherfucker with the Hat. For what sounds like it should be a provocative show (profanity in the title! Chris Rock!), it fell flat overall. The pre-show buzz was that the play was great but that Chris Rock was not, so those were my expectations coming into it. By the end of the play, I was disappointed with the play and pleasantly surprised by Rock’s performance (he reminded me of Julianne Moore in The Vertical Hour in that he acted the way I probably would if I found myself on Broadway in 8th grade– too many small hand gestures and the uncanny ability to get stuck in an awkward pose).

Guirgis is well-known for his gritty, urban, clever plays. He’s one of the most popular playwrights at the Drama Book Shop. I had read some other plays of his, but never had the opportunity to see one and was looking forward to the experience. Sadly, the premise of the play is so tiny in its scope that there’s really nothing to behold. A man on parole, trying to stay sober, suspects his girlfriend since 8th grade of cheating on him. His sponsor, who’s been sober for 15 years, lets him stay with him while he gets his thoughts on track. Fine. The dialogue is occasionally laugh out loud funny but as my “playmate” said had “too many words.” Everyone was saying everything they could. And it was exhausting. And then every plot twist that you could expect happens. Which is not what I remember from Guirgis’ other plays.

And so, putting on my producer hat, I wonder why this play premiered on Broadway. Couldn’t the Public have produced this and maybe the pressure of catering to the Broadway audience would be avoided? Put profanity and Chris Rock on Broadway and people (tourists?) shy away from it. Put it downtown and the show might sell out. And if you’re going to put profanity and Chris Rock onstage, at least make it interesting so that people are scandalized and there’s a buzz about the content of the play rather than the title. Instead there’s some goofy stage combat and one fleshed out character out of five.*

*I almost feel bad for being so negative about this play, but when you’ve enjoyed other work by a playwright and they appear to be phoning it in (I felt this way about Superior Donuts by Tracy Letts), it’s disappointing. There are too many good plays out there not getting produced to see boring plays about romantic/addiction issues. I also think that there’s an an assumption that audiences will recognize a playwright’s name. Unless their name is David Mamet or Tennessee Williams (and even so!), that’s not true.

Last Wednesday I was fortunate enough to get a rush ticket to see the current Broadway revival of Arcadia. I saw the West End production(which had the same director and the same set) before I moved to New York (you can read my slightly nonsensical post about it here) and thought it was fantastic.This time around I still enjoyed the play very much, but found aspects of it lacking. The cast was uneven and the direction seemed, perhaps, broader than it had been in London. I was utterly charmed by Billy Crudup’s take on Bernard Nightingale, despite having reservations when I heard he was playing him. His manic enthusiasm brought something new to the part while also seeming very familiar. The manic rakish academic is a type that I’ve come into contact in very frequently, and Crudup is certainly the right man to bring it to stage.

Arcadia is a difficult play to describe, but I will try to do it justice. The play takes place in one room and two time periods in Sidley Park, a country house in England. The action alternates between the two time periods while the props/animals onstage tie the two together. In the early 1800s a precocious mathematician surprises her charming tutor, a contemporary of Byron in school and at Cambridge, with her genius. In the 1990s, two academics, one researching the garden at Sidley Park, the other a voracious, misogynistic Byron scholar spar over books in the estate’s library. Discoveries, true and false, are made. Love is kindled and lost. And it’s very very funny. Each time I see or read this play, something else occurs to me. Something in its brilliance or its soul all of a sudden crystalizes for me. And then I wonder if that thing occurred to me the last time I saw the play or if it’s a new thought. Which might be the point. Either way, it was a great night, though marred slightly by a man who had what appeared to be a heart attack between the 3rd and 4th scenes and the mismanagement by the house staff/stage manager of the situation.*

*As a playwright and a former usher, I am very particular about these sorts of things.