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Insight for Playwrights
PLAYWRIGHT PROFILES BY SANDRA HOSKING
Surefire Success …Playwright: Linda Eisenstein
Hometown: Chicago & San Francisco
Education: B.A. in Psychology, Master's in English, Cleveland State University
Web Site: www.lindaeisenstein.com
Selected Titles: Three the Hard Way, Rehearsing Cyrano, The Last Red Wagon Tent Show in the Land, Star Wares, The Next GenerationIt is often said that writing is a solitary task. For a playwright, this isolation can be alleviated when a play finds a theater willing to produce it. The writer feels up when the audience applauds, awestruck when they sit silently after the curtain closes, and like kicking herself when a bad review comes out.
What's more valuable than kind words from an audience member or a good review, though, is finding a director or theater group that likes a writer's work enough to produce future shows or at least offer an opportunity for development.
Playwright Linda Eisenstein, 52, has been lucky enough to forge such relationships with directors and musical collaborators.
Director Roxanne Wach, of Omaha, Nebraska-based SNAP! Productions has directed five and produced one of her plays. "I think the elements that draw me to her work are the ancient, primal, and ritual aspects. Also her use of Eastern religious themes," Wach says.
Finding an ally like Wach and being able to cultivate such a long-term relationship is an ornate feather for any playwright's cap.
"I really enjoy the theater process while directing her works," Wach says. "We e-mail the entire time I'm in rehearsal … It's wonderful to be able to share the interesting things that come up during rehearsals … and to be able to have immediate feedback. I've really enjoyed my directing experiences with new plays when the playwright is able to be involved on some level. It's a gift."
Eisenstein, too, appreciates the concept of collaboration while acknowledging its challenges.
"Collaboration can be fabulous--inspiring you to create work you'd never in a million years dream up on your own--and it can also be a thorny challenge," she says. "Trust is essential. So is candid communication, good work habits, mutual admiration, and chemistry--including the ability to laugh at the same things. Musical collaborations are a lot like a marriage. You have to weather ups and downs, deadlines, crises, and the ungodly stresses and long development periods of working on musicals--while maintaining your relationship, the integrity of your work, and the ultimate good of the whole. They're not for the faint-hearted or the easily wounded."
The stakes are higher for collaborators on a musical because of the intensity of emotion involved in the process.
"Music works on a different part of your brain than text does: it arouses and stimulates your limbic system, carrying subtext and emotion in a very direct way. For me, music is like an expressway to your unconscious needs and desires and yearnings. A song can put an audience in a kind of altered state almost instantly," Eisenstein says.
She currently is working on two new musicals.
Discordia, a satire, is based on the myth of Percival and the Holy Grail with elements of modern-world concerns.
"Set in an Arthurian landscape that looks a lot like post-9/11 America, the innocent young knight Percival and the seen-it-all-before prophetess Cassandra try to do good in a complex, confusing world. His quest for the Holy Grail brings Percival up against greedy barons, war-like knights obsessed with homeland security, and mesmerized consumers seeking Grails for Sale at the castle mall," Eisenstein says.
She's collaborating with James A. Levin with whom she's worked on several other musicals.
"My collaborations with James are always based in sociopolitical comedy. We start with what's bothering us most in the contemporary landscape, and then try to find a central metaphor with a character trying to make sense of things. We've been inspired by the San Francisco Mime Troupe's work, and how they mix progressive politics, music, and comedy," she says.
The score is eclectic, from vaudeville to hip hop. "We're shameless about quoting pop culture."
Meanwhile, Eisenstein is working with Chicago lyricists and librettists Patti McKenny and Doug Frew on Becoming George, a chamber musical about an imagined meeting in 1870 between writer and feminist icon George Sand and actress Sarah Bernhardt. Excerpts of Becoming George have been presented at a series of workshops with Chicago Musical Theatre Works.
"Sand is in her 60's, settling into retirement at her country estate, having given up Paris and the theatre. The up-and-coming Bernhardt is in desperate straits after having just been fired from the Comedie-Francaise. Their mutual friend, dramatist Alexandre Dumas--Sand's play doctor for 20 years, who has designs on Sarah--brings them together with a proposal: to collaborate on a brilliant new play. The sizzling topic: The Life and Loves of George Sand, with Sarah to star as Sand. Comedy and conflict ensues--for how can this trio of grand artistic egos make a commercial property out of the sprawling, contradictory genius that was Sand? Aided by two servants--Sand's radical young secretary, Gerard, and her pragmatic housekeeper, Marthe--and haunted by The Authority, the voice of the French patriarchy that vilified her at every turn--George Sand looks back on her life, and gives Bernhardt some unexpected lessons in how to live as an extraordinary woman, outside the lines," Eisenstein says.
Bernhardt's predicament in Becoming George is an example of many women found in Eisenstein's work. Her plays often include "a woman facing a crisis of transformation--where something about her present life no longer works and things begin to blur around the edges for her. Frequently there is a conflict between different parts of herself and the needs of others--a tug of war between relationships, spirituality, creativity, family, sexual identity, work," she says.
Wach echoes that assessment. Eisenstein's "plays resonate with universal themes, but draw the audience to them in unusual ways. For instance, in Marla's Devotion, Marla is searching for her spirituality, her sense of self. Who isn't? However, Marla does it through an ancient Buddhist practice that entails her doing yogic prostrations with every step she takes. And, in Running from the Red Girl, the main character is trying to come to terms with her wild/darker side. Who hasn't done that? However in the play, the Red Girl is a channeled vampire goddess."
Eisenstein also is working on a comedy, currently titled Have a Holy Martyr Day, about a closeted lesbian parochial school teacher who delves into activism.
The Cleveland-based playwright frequently can be seen at the library or a coffee shop pecking away at her laptop computer. "I like getting out of my office, and often write in long-hand in order to break through blocks. I find the characters speak differently that way."
Maybe characters get tired of isolation too.
Upcoming Productions
*Three the Hard Way at Cincinnati's New Edgecliff Theatre and by Harridan Productions, in Chicago, March 2003.
*The Last Red Wagon Tent Show in the Land at Teaneck New Theatre, in Teaneck, N.J., spring 2003.
*Discordia at Cleveland Public Theatre, September 2003.Tips
Network. "One of my favorite phrases is: 'Theatres don't produce plays; people get your plays produced.' Think global, act local. Get involved with area theatres-volunteer, meet actors and directors, volunteer in a literary office or on a script committee. Learn how a theatre is run, and how decisions are made. Most theatre ecosystems have great similarities. We're in a hand-crafted business -- word-of-mouth and recommendations matter, and our world is so small that theatre people are connected by many fewer than six degrees of separation."
It doesn't matter where you live. "The Internet has helped create global cyber-communities of common interest. There are wonderful e-mail lists for playwrights, directors, actors, theatre people. Of the past 100 productions I've had, nearly 80 percent had a connection to someone I met via the 'Net. I'm particularly fond of the International Centre for Women Playwrights list for support, info, and marvelous company."
Surefire ways to get rejected: Load up on exposition; write nothing but unpleasant characters and generic dialogue; invent your own play format. View more tips and Eisenstein's well-circulated article "17 Surefire Ways to Get Your Script Rejected" at www.lindaeisenstein.com/17Ways.html.
Sandra Hosking's plays have been produced in New York City, Los Angeles, Canada, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. Please send comments, questions, and story ideas to sandykayz@cs.com.
Reprinted with permission from INSIGHT FOR PLAYWRIGHTS, Vol X, Issue 12, Dec. 2002
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