It was such a thrill to be chosen for the production! It’s nerve-wracking when you’re in the theater, waiting for the show to begin: What if it isn’t any good? What if the other plays are so much better that mine just seems stupid? What if other people think it’s great and I think it’s stupid?

Long story short: I thought my play turned out pretty good. I’m never going to be able to see my work cold, though: I always know what was going through my mind when I wrote something, and I know that certain things I wanted to achieve aren’t there (and maybe it wasn’t clear to any of the participants that they were there). The guy I went to the show with (I’ll call him “Darin”) liked my play very much, which is always quite a relief to me, as he is what they call in the business “A Very Tough Critic.” I know what he’s like critiquing my work, and I’m his wife; I can’t imagine what it’s like to work for him.

Still: it’s always easier to see other people’s work from a distance. It’s completely difficult to see yours without knowing how the sausage was made.

Although I did know something about the production of the play in the festival written by a friend of mine, something that affected the final staging quite a bit. I didn’t tell Darin until the play was over, and he was shocked. “My God, that was the worst thing about that play!” he said. Apparently it was an element obvious to everyone except the director, who insisted on running with it anyhow.

One of the “nice” things about being a playwright is that you are, in fact, the final say on how your work is staged. No one can change a word without your say-so. Actors are on book, dammit; there is no “improvisation” or “inspiration” with the text as there is in movies and TV. The playwright has the right to pull the play at any time, because they own the copyright on the play. Screenwriters traded that power for money, so screenwriters get paid a lot to get shoved around and shat on; playwrights make no money whatsoever but are considered the author of the work.

Just depends what you think is important, that’s all.

Anyhow. It’s really exciting to see real live people saying words I wrote in a situation I dreamed up. I can’t imagine getting tired of that.

You were a joy to read… before twitter. Now, not so much. Seriously, have you not better things to say?

Well, the Twitter is basically a way to have something to say, frankly. I suppose everyone who’d be interested in my tweets have probably added me to their own Twitter lists, so I could probably stop posting them here. (I’m DianePatterson on Twitter, btw, in case you’re looking for me.)

But to answer your question: at the moment I haven’t found a particular raison d’être for this blog. Many of the things I’d like to talk about really aren’t fair for me to talk about much (for instance: my kids—yeah, I know, I win some kind of Mom-points for finally figuring that out) and others are just…well…

Writing: I don’t talk about it’s going with my novel on submission in New York, mostly because there’s nothing to report. I’ve done my part: I wrote the best novel I could, I got the best agent I could, and off to the races they go. I have received a few rejections so far, and while they’ve definitely been of the “Wow, that’s a glowing rejection” variety, the key word for me is not “glowing.” There’s no use trying to interpret what they meant: it’s just a “no.” And the only thing to say about that is “Next!”

I also don’t want to dwell endlessly on what’s happening there until such time as something happens. I wouldn’t do it if I were on a job hunt, and I’m not going to do it here.

If it sells, however: just try and shut me up.

I’ve finally (finally!) started work on something completely new. Although I ran it past one guy I know and he said, basically, “What’s different about that?” (Which is the key to sticking lightning in a bottle, story-wise, of course.) And that’s made me wonder about to make it that much more different. But we’ll see as I go.

TheaTUH: My full-length play, The Guest House, starts rehearsals tonight for staged readings the first weekend of October. I don’t know what to expect. Same deal as with the novel: I wrote it, I sent it in to the world, where other people like directors and actors will make something of it. Fly, little play, be free.

Politics: I’ve told Darin that if McCain wins it’s time to seriously talk about moving elsewhere. If I’m willing to brave Canadian winters, things are serious.

Honestly, how far have we fallen as a nation? We joke about torture, and the orders emanated from the top. Not a few “bad apples” (remember that knee slapper?), but from the highest authorities in the nation. There’s a story in today’s SFGate about how a group of historians and activists are trying to move now to prevent Dick Cheney from destroying government documents. What the fuck? Does anyone really understand what the collapse of Freddie and Fannie means, on top of the money we’re throwing down the rabbit hole in Iraq? (Amongst other fabulous blogs, you should check out The Cunning Realist, by a conservative economist who likens our current situation to the drastic days of the Weimar Republic, and yeah, he’s enough of a wonk to give examples why.)

I’m not going to go into why McCain is such an amazingly horrible choice as President. If you don’t know, you’re uninformed, and you should work on changing that right now.

No, I’m not a big Obama fan. (For one thing: FISA, motherfucker? What in the hell does the Administration have on all of these people to make them vote for that? And who here is the slightest bit shocked that I’d imply that?) But yeah, he’s better than the alternative.

Kids: Kids in first grade are supposed to choose books at their own reading level to read aloud to parents. Simon picked his book on Evolution, which just goes to show my 6-year-old is smarter than Sarah Palin.

Sophia is taking taekwondo, ballet, and swimming, and she asked if she could add gymnastics. (I said, Uh, no.) Given that she doesn’t eat, I have no idea where she gets the energy. I would suspect photosynthesis, except she certainly doesn’t eat vegetables.

Fitness: I restarted my gym program after many, many months off, and I love being back there. There’s something about heaving that piece of iron repeatedly that makes me say, “Yes!” I can already feel a difference not only with how my jeans fit (nyuk), but in how well I can keep up with my friends when we go running. If I can start keeping up with them all the time, that will be kewl.

I don’t want to post any progress I’m having either with the weights or the weight (ha), because, well… I’m incredibly judgemental: lots of people post on the 3fatchicks boards with a weight-loss thermometer in their signature proudly proclaiming how much they have to lose and how far they’ve gotten so far, and when the loss is all of 1.5 pounds, I want to say, Why don’t you wait until you have a number that’s statistically significant? I know this probably says more about me. But really: isn’t this blog all about me?

Movies: They suck. Seriously, they do. I actually cut back on our date nights not because of the economy (Darin’s a Director, now, btw, so he’s doing fine), but because we kept wondering what the hell we should go out and do. The last few movies we’ve seen have been: Hamlet 2, The House Bunny, Tropic Thunder, and The Dark Knight. I’m sure there was something between Tropic Thunder and The Dark Knight, but it made little to no impression on me, clearly.

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly has been our go-to guy for movie reviews since forever, but after Hamlet 2 (which he gave a B+ and deserved more like, I dunno, a D, and that’s only because the “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” sequence was pretty funny) he’s lost about 40,000 of his Killer Movie Critic Cred points.

The House Bunny wasn’t under the impression that it was high art, but it couldn’t figure out what the hell it wanted to be: comedy, farce, parody (yes, these are all different things). And often it would change mid-scene.

Tropic Thunder was deeply hilarious in many ways, but as Ken Levine astutely noted, Pretty much only to Biz people. And a few weeks later I only remember the opening trailer with Downey’s character and the scene where Ben Stiller clearly doesn’t get that Steve Coogan has been blown to bits in front of him.

The Dark Knight: I was underwhelmed. Since apparently it was actually the second coming of Homer and Shakespeare’s love child, I’ll leave it at that.

The whole experience was fabulous. Watching the director work with the actors, seeing the actors try various things, sitting through several rehearsals of not only my show but others to see how they were coming together: priceless. Also, my critical faculties zoomed way up during the process — as I told Mary Ann during our drives to and from Foothill, I was itching to get out my red pen and edit everyone’s play, not just my own. “Give me a chance, I’ll take out five minutes from everyone’s play!” I said. (This wasn’t an option for any of us; final edits were due July 24: they were not chancing playwrights rewriting up until opening night.)

The only thing that had me really, really worried was that the show was really, really long (two and a half hours, including intermission) and my play was last. Why was mine last? Was this a comment on my play? Would the audience even stay that long to see mine? (Seriously, I can overanalyze anything.) I liked the friends who told me mine was last because you always save the best for last. I have no idea how in fact the show order was chosen, but that explanation suited me just fine.

And then, August 10, the birthday of moi, the New Works Festival opened. I discovered that I can’t see a play as if for the first time: all I could see was where the actors did something different, or missed a line. Why didn’t the audience laugh at that? Or, why did they laugh at that line, that was never funny before. I couldn’t accurately judge what the audience thought of any one play, but they sure seemed to like the evening overall. The actors had so much more energy with an actual audience there. Lines went faster, action became more electric. Theater is a participatory sport, whether or not the audience knows it.

Darin went to the show on Saturday night.

Darin’s special genius is being able to honestly assess things for what they are, point out their strengths, and analyze their weaknesses. This turns out to be a very marketable skill (as you might imagine), although a couple of times it’s really, really annoyed some people; they don’t want to hear criticism, they just want to hear how great everything is. If this is what you want, Darin is not your guy. I don’t show everything I write to Darin, because if I ask him what he thinks, he’s going to tell me. Only when I’m sure I’m ready to hear it do I ask.

When he came home from the show, he said, “I’m not sure which was the best, yours or (other play), but I liked both of them for (list of reasons here).” And you have no idea how much that critique meant to me. We discussed some of the other plays too, and he had much the same take on most of them that I did. I’m sure if I would have let him, he would have done an analysis of my play that would show me where I could strengthen it and explain a bit more, and which parts I could cut but I didn’t ask and he’s not going to volunteer (because he likes being married and he knows my process by now).

My friend Rob went with Darin Saturday and told me he really enjoyed it too, particularly mine. He even said, “You should write more of these,” which was nice to hear. And he even explained to me why mine was last: “no dull moments…
perhaps not every joke worked, but one had not time to ponder it because, hey, here’s the next one.”

So, it’s all over now. Alas. I am quite fired up to finish a full-length play and submit to a few festivals. The Foothill Playwriting class starts Sept. 26 — if you’re looking for a great writing class with a committed (and committable) bunch of writers in it, I highly recommend it.

Remember: here’s the show info (mine is the one with both God and the devil, just in case you were wondering), and you can buy tickets online for the Foothill New Works Festival. It’s two hours of entertaining theater for a low price! Where else do you get that kind of return on your investment? Come on, you know you want to.

Frost/Nixon achieved one thing I thought would have been impossible: it made me wonder how the story was going to turn out. We have the story of how David Frost became the guy to score the big interview with post-Watergate Richard Nixon. Frost was evidently a lightweight show host, better known for his partying than his journalistic skills. And Nixon was, well, Nixon — bloody but unbowed after Watergate. Nixon wants to get back into politics, be the grand old man in Washington, and Frost wants to make a name for himself, rolling everything he’s got professionally and financially on setting this interview up. After much negotiation, the interviews finally start…and Frost gets hammered by Nixon, who’s an old pro at taking charge. What is Frost going to do?

Frank Langella is great as Nixon, and Michael Sheen is wonderful as Frost. The supporting cast is pretty good — the narrator is an associate of Frost who informs us of scene changes and where and when we are at any point. During the interviews, the actors are projected on TV monitors at the back of the stage, so Frost and Nixon get the job of doing stage acting and screen acting at the same time.

However, there’s something I really need to investigate: according to my playwriting teacher, Actors Equity rules say that every single actor on stage gets paid the same, no matter what — which is why these days you don’t have the casts of thousands you might have had in, say, a Noel Coward play. In Frost/Nixon, however, there are a ton of actors on the stage, and some of them have very few lines. One of them, Nixon’s dresser, had one line. And no one is in that theater to see anyone except Frank Langella. So the producers have got to be compensating Langella somehow, if not by salary, than by some other method.

Talk Radio is Eric Bogosian’s play about a foul-mouthed shock jock the night before he goes into national syndication. He manages to alienate his friends and his lover — will he manage to alienate all of us, too? Who is this guy, what drives him to do the things he does? Barry Champlain, the talk radio host, does a number of interviews with callers, who want to argue with him, or praise him, or what have you. We get monologues from his friend/sound engineer, from his producer/girlfriend, from the liaison to the corporate bosses, and finally from Champlain himself, after everyone has walked out on him due to his abusive behavior. Liev Schreiber was great as Champlain, who was infuriating and hateful, while simultaneously absolutely refusing to change who he was for anyone or anything.

Three interesting things about this show:

1) Both Darin and I were stunned by how mediocre the actors doing the sound engineer and the producer were during their monologues. I mean, this is New York: you can walk into any Dunkin’ Donuts and say, “I need 35 classically trained actors!” and walk out with a full cast plus backups. I have no idea how these two got their jobs. They weren’t awful. They just weren’t very good.

2) The actors weren’t miked, which seems to be fairly rare these days. The only time anyone was miked was when Champlain was on the air.

3) The show is set in 1987, and during his on-air stint Champlain rants about several 1987-era things, primarily Iran-Contra. During Champlain’s monologue, which ended the damn show, someone screams from the top balcony, “Talk about the Iraq War!” You could hear a pin drop in the theater. Then Schreiber gets started again and once again we hear, “Talk about the Iraq War!” followed by furious hissing and shouting. I believe Schreiber, mid-monologue, started to crack up, completely ruining the dramatic import of whatever the hell he was saying. In fact, pretty much all I can remember of the monologue is that some asshole who’d just spent $50 on a ticket to a play just ruined the end of the play for everyone in that theater.

The kids and I got off the plane at 10:30pm Sunday night — Darin had flown home the day before to rehearse for the Developer’s Conference up in San Francisco (you may have heard a little bit about the recent project he developed: Safari for Windows?).

Monday night Darin was still up in San Francisco and I headed out to Foothill College for the first night of auditions for the New Works Festival. We saw maybe twenty actors, doing “sides” (small excerpts) from everyone’s plays, for the directors and playwrights in the Festival. By the end of the evening, the playwrights totally hated their own plays and probably everyone else’s too. Hearing the same damn thing over and over again can make you crazy.

That said: it was fascinating to watch how some actors just leaped off the stage at you, grabbed you by the throat, and said, “I have presence!” You could tell when every director and playwright in the room was writing down exclamation marks next to an actor’s name. One actor was so good that, even though we’d seen one particular side about 48 times, she still managed to crack us up with it. That is beyond talent, it’s just lightning in a bottle. I have no idea why some people have it and some don’t.

I got home at 11. Darin got home some time after that, so he won on the “busy” spectrum.

Tuesday night we all trooped back to Foothill for the second night of auditions. Everyone had said that the second night would be much bigger in terms of number of actors, because actors are superstitious and believe that if they come the first night you’ll forget them. (One of the people sitting in the theater said, “Well, that’s pretty much true, actually.”) However, rumor did not turn out to be true, and we had fewer actors to see. Then afterward the playwrights and directors and festival management got together and hashed out casting lists for everyone’s play, and I think everyone was fairly pleased with how things shook out.

Wow, is casting not an easy process. For one thing, actors just have to spontaneously do their best, with no rehearsal, with no preparation. For another thing, what one person might like in an actor, another person might not like at all. (In fact, that happened to my carpool mate and me with one actor: she was thrilled with the audition, I was like, “Are you kidding?”) And then there were some actors who were very good but just completely wrong for the roles available. And then there were the actors we all know but had nothing for — that was the toughest. What do you say next time you see them? “You were great, you just weren’t right for the play.” It’s true…but it hurts.

Despite seeing many fewer actors and casting the plays relatively quickly, I still got home at 10:30. Everyone was asleep.

Wednesday night was Playwriting class, and in addition to some very funny stuff by one writer (including a deeply funny and vicious sendup of the audition night process), we did 41 pages of my current play in progress. And I got glowing reviews from my classmates, and since I know how critical they can be, I was walking on air afterward. (I tried walking on water: failed miserably.) I told everyone I’d written all of the pages they hadn’t seen before pretty much on the flight from San Francisco to New York (when I was flying first class), and the teacher suggested they take up a collection to send me on a flight from San Francisco to Australia so I could finish it.

I got home at 10:30 and wasn’t walking particularly steadily. I avoided falling asleep during the car ride and felt this was a great victory.

Thursday I collapsed and napped at home while the kids played World of Warcraft and watched whatever TV shows they wanted. I don’t want to fall asleep when I’m home with the kids, but I couldn’t stop myself. And they hadn’t watched much TV or played World of Warcraft in weeks, so I didn’t feel too guilty.

Just during the auditions I felt like I learned a ton about how to put on a show. I am so thrilled to be involved with the New Works Festival — Foothill is a great training ground for actors, writers, and directors. I’ve gotten much more hands on experience with the process of actually making a script into reality there than I ever did at USC. How amazing is that?

Next week: the kids are in camp and I’m just going to sleep.