Here is the sixth in a series of interviews devoted to people involved in the new play development sector. On Deck: Amy Mueller, Artistic Director of the Playwrights Foundation. Previous interviews include: Jason Loewith, Philip Himberg, Polly Carl, Todd London, Wendy C. Goldberg.
The Playwrights Foundation is now accepting scripts for the 2010 BAPF and their other programs through November 30th, 2009.
Vijay Mathew: The Bay Area Playwrights Festival is the centerpiece of The Playwrights Foundation programs. How would you describe its purpose for playwrights and for the new play development field?
Amy Mueller: The Bay Area Playwrights Festival has been around for more than 32 years, and over those three decades we’ve established an excellent track record in our steadfast commitment to the discovery of and support for the work of writers who are as yet largely unknown. Writers like Sam Sheppard, Nilo Cruz, Maria Irene Fornes, David Henry Hwang, Claire Chafee, Liz Duffy Adams, Marcus Gardley and many, many others kick-started their national careers as a result of the BAPF. In that way the Festival has played a key role in bringing new voices to the national stage, and in offering significant opportunities to (dare I use this word) “emerging writers” – okay, emergent, newish, just starting out, been writing for a long time but have not been seen much yet writers. We also have an ardent, unwavering commitment to social and artistic pluralism.
Vijay Mathew: What would make a successful festival experience for a playwright?
Amy Mueller: Well, I think there are quite a few factors, but for us, the most successful outcome is a writer getting a chance to really dig deeply into the work with top notch professional collaborators, artists who are attuned to the piece and with whom the individual writer can share an artistic bond. In that way playwrights have the opportunity to learn as much as possible about the piece as it is, and, if desired, advance it to a more finished stage of development – or work towards personally prescribed goals for the work. We work to set up an atmosphere where the playwrights are able enjoy focused time inside a process that works really well for them and that is largely directed by them. Although we have an approach to structuring the festival, we often work with each writer individually to shape the experience to their needs. We also value the national visibility afforded by our festival – as well as the more concrete measure of a subsequent production of the work.
Vijay Mathew: What is the structure of festival? How was it developed and designed? And how do you custom tailor it to the playwrights needs?
Amy Mueller: This festival has been through lots of different incarnations and iterations of itself. It was originally shaped by the founding artists to meet the demands of the time in which it existed. In the late seventies the festival was kind of an open creative process out in the Marin Headlands where huge group of artists would head out and live together for a number of weeks. And it wasn't so much structured. I mean there were scripts, there were plays but there were also unfinished works and there was a lot of improvisation and collaboration. One of the purposes in the early years when Robert Woodruff (the founder) ran it was to create – an idea that we maintain even today – a fruitful exchange between the playwrights and the artistic collaborators. And that is a free flow of ideas as opposed to ‘here is your play and all these artists are going to come together to make it a production’. So the idea was much more collectively oriented although the playwrights had the central artistic position within that structure-they lead it. Everybody was there to serve the vision of the writer, or the writer/director. So those were the early years of it and I think that was a really incredible climate. But very suddenly the money just dried up. And so the festival morphed into a developmental reading series, very common now, but not so much then. I've been Artistic Director for the past 9 years and we have focused on deepening the experience for the writers. Giving them more rehearsal time for instance and intensifying the annual retreat. For example, the artist retreat used to occur at least a month before the festival. I observed that there wouldn't be a lot that would actually happen between the retreat and the festival and I thought maybe if I intensify the time frame that more could actually get done. I think that has proven to be true.
Vijay Mathew: Walk us through the retreat and then on to the Festival.
Amy Mueller: The artist retreat is a kind of a crucible for the writers, a brain trust of the artistic members of the team, and is a time for the company to bond and get to know one another. No one is ever allowed to make suggestions for the writing of the plays, but asked to respond only to the work itself. We follow the Artist Response Format modeled after Liz Lerman’s well known process. We’ve found, and playwrights tell us, that for the retreat, writers find this incredibly useful. It allows the playwright to think about the questions s/he has at this point in the process, and gives them info about how the play is landing and that sort of thing. Afterwards the playwrights have a couple of days just on their own to rewrite and relax. Rehearsals usually start a couple of days after the retreat, approximately 14 hours of rehearsal before the first reading and sometimes more. During the first weekend of the festival all the plays are read to the public over about 46 hours. There is an audience and we engage in a pretty big push to have an audience there. Subsequent to the first reading, we offer another week of rehearsals, somewhere between 6 and 10 hours, depending on the year and the piece and how much rehearsal makes sense. Sometimes, the writers do a ton of rewriting after the first reading, sometimes none – it is entirely up to the writer. We also have a meeting with all the writers without their artistic teams, right after the first reading to debrief. On the second weekend, each of the plays are read a second time, usually before a larger audience.
Vijay Mathew: Is there any audience feedback for the public festival readings?
Amy Mueller: Yes, there is. I am aware of a national discussion about audience feedback. I'm one of those people that are ambivalent about it -- for certain writers audience feedback can be somewhat debilitating and tedious, for others absolutely engaging and important. I believe the success of audience feedback session is largely dependant on how it’s handled. I do think audiences really enjoy that part of it, they have a chance to both experience the play and do some cognitive processing about the play. And generally audiences really, really love meeting the playwrights and asking the playwright questions and hearing the playwright talk about the play. But I feel that there's some piece in that that is missing when you begin to look at it from the point of view of the writer. How do you then as a writer begin to frame what it is that you're doing with the audience? You don't necessarily have to swallow the bitter pill. You don't necessarily have to say categorically, “I'm not into feedback sessions from the audience and I know this is going to be completely un-useful to me and you're making me do it.” There's that, yes. And then there's another perspective which is to allow yourself to have a kind of curiosity about who it is that’s listening and what their questions are, what their thoughts are. If the discussion is monitored well and does not allow audience members to delve into heavy criticism, which I think is deeply counter-productive for an artist, it can be incredibly useful to listen to how a play lands. There’s something really key about what questions the audiences might have and whether or not you want those questions to exist in the minds of your audience.
Vijay Mathew: So this approach to a feedback session is about testing whether or not the intentions of the playwright are landing with the audience, if the play is communicating effectively.
Amy Mueller: Yes. What questions are you are really addressing in this early part of a play’s developmental process? Plays come to us in all different states. If a project is very much in its early developmental stage, its going to undergo quite a revision and we all know that, and that the playwright has been doing all the information gathering during the rehearsal process, from the actors and hearing it read and so forth – it’s important to limit the discussion. Sometimes I'll even let the audience know that the writer has pages of notes already and wants to only talk about the originating ideas in the play – or whatever. And so I really do try to frame those discussions so that they are not damaging to the play – or filling the playwright with unwelcome commentary.
Vijay Mathew: How are the plays chosen for the Festival? And how many are there?
Amy Mueller: We do six full-length plays in a typical year and we've also added a program called BASH!, which stands for Bay Area Shorts – specifically for Bay Area writers. This year we worked on five full-length plays and two one-act BASH! plays, which we commissioned. We select the full-length plays through the recommendations of a 12 to 15 member reading panel. It is a selection of artistic directors from local small theaters, dramaturgs in larger theaters, freelancers, literary managers, and there are a couple of actors on the panel who are extremely interested in new plays. We read between 400 and 500 plays. Every play is read by two members of the committee. Once it’s evaluated, it is either moved forward to consider or it’s returned. And then we usually chose about 40 plays for full consideration. So we reduce it by 90%.
Vijay Mathew: What are the criteria for selecting the plays?
Amy Mueller: First and foremost for us is an original voice. Secondly, we look for plays from young (to the form)/new/emergent writers. We always choose at least one writer who's just out of grad school or even still in grad school or perhaps not enrolled in a grad school but very early in their career as a playwright. We have a very strong commitment to diverse voices, which you can see throughout our entire organization and all of our programs. And the festival is no exception to that. We also look for what we call ‘exceptional’. And I have a hard time describing what that is, but I know it.
Vijay Mathew: Exceptional is different from original voice, right?
Amy Mueller: Yes. It’s different from original voice. So exceptional has to do with how a piece, a particular play stands out. So some plays really, really stand out for their content. But maybe the form or the structure or the characters are possibly uninteresting or not very compelling. Or don't move. Or there's a way in which it is not pushing the form forward a little bit. In terms of ‘exceptional’, I really felt that way about Chris Chen who's going to be in this year’s festival. He was in the festival in 2007 while he was still a student. And the play that he wrote was so phenomenally unique and interesting and powerful and was really exploring a form. And it wasn't altogether successful especially when we first read it. So it definitely needed a developmental process. We look for plays that are not finished. They are not complete. That there's something we can still really offer the writers.
Vijay Mathew: How much does a playwright’s potential for having a professional career in the theater system as it exists today – by what he/she writes or by who he/she is – factor into the selection criteria? Or does it?
Amy Mueller: It’s not something we talk about a lot. Because I think that potential does exist for a lot of people. And yet, there is always a sense that the voice of the writer is an important one. One year we picked this play by a writer who lives in Ohio. And nobody had ever heard of his work at all. And I google’d him and didn't find much. But we loved his piece. And we selected the work for the festival and it was a very unusual play, not commercial at all. And he ended up getting a full production of it at a theater in Denver and moving on to a really great University gig and is writing a lot still -- professionally. You know at that time I don't think he would have necessarily fit the mold as ‘potentially professional in the theater system’ if that were one of the criteria. He wasn't in a graduate program. He was just a writer, living in the world. So I think we are usually more taken with the work itself.
Vijay Mathew: So you're geared more towards pure artistic development as opposed to a kind of fusion of artistic development with career development. The Festival is focused on the art and giving playwrights an opportunity to develop their work instead of showcasing it.
Amy Mueller: Yes. I think that’s a good way to put it. We do a lot of putting the word out to the professional theater community about the work and we work at matchmaking. But that’s the extent of it.
Vijay Mathew: So the playwrights don't come in with the expectation that this festival will launch them. It’s more that they are coming in because it’s a great opportunity to really have the resources to work on their material and advance in that way.
Amy Mueller: Yes. I think that’s true. Especially because we are on the west coast I think it’s different from being in New York where there are so many producers, and one is always showcasing the writer and the work. We definitely focus most of our energy on the artistic product.
Vijay Mathew: What has the relationship been like for the Playwrights Foundation with producing theaters? How do the producing theaters use the Playwrights Foundation as a resource and in which ways do they find it useful?
Amy Mueller: It’s only recently that we have established deep ties with producing theaters. Before I came on board it was essentially non-existent. And I've worked really tirelessly to begin to establish a couple of different avenues and ways for people to work with us. For the past six years we’ve advanced projects to production through our Producing Partnership/Commissioning Program through which we either co-commission a new play with a producing theater, or partner in the premiere of a play. Typically those theaters are smaller, and more in need of our partnership and mentorship. We offer housing, travel and dramaturgy for the writer, developmental workshops, marketing support and dialogue, all aimed at making the playwright’s experience fruitful and on enhancing the process for success. Right now we’re in the midst of a co-production of Marcus Gardley’s play …and Jesus moonwalks the Mississippi with The Cutting Ball Theater, and a new Sheila Callaghan co-commission with FoolsFURY Theater, and a partnership with Crowded Fire on the premiere of Drip by Christina Anderson. All of these are different kinds of partnerships with Bay Area companies. Last year we had a successful collaboration with TheatreWorks, which is the largest theater we ever worked with, on a new musical. They specialize in musicals and we have not been doing many musicals, so it was a really, really great collaborative process. And we’re talking to American Conservatory Theater about developmental work with their conservatory students.
Vijay Mathew: How much is a typical commission and what are the commitments?
Amy Mueller: I think the largest one we paid was 10,000 dollars down to 3,000. We like to try to hit 5,000 on average if we can. What’s so great about this program is that we do it within the context of the producer making a firm agreement that they will produce the play once it’s completed. We spend a lot of time at the beginning of the process looking at how that’s going to be successful for that particular company and we only commission works from playwrights we know, which gives a built-in interest already present- there's an organic sense to it.
Vijay Mathew: Thank you Amy, what’s coming up next for The Playwrights Foundation?
Amy Mueller: We're kicking off a our eight play Rough Reading Series on Tuesday, Nov 10 with a reading of Karen Hartman's Goldie, Max & Milk hosted by A.C.T. at their Hastings Studio (it's free); and it's submission season over here! We're accepting scripts for consideration in our programs through November 30th. All information, including our new address, is available on our website. We very much look forward to reading those plays!
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