These women of the arts hail from different disciplines, but they all have an indomitable spirit and a luminescent spark that makes them amazing human beings who are out there every day, doing amazing work.

Today we continue our series with Robin Rice Lichtig.  Robin is no stranger to The Happiest Medium; I’ve had the opportunity to review her work as well as sit on a panel with her last December to discuss the role of women in Off-Off Broadway.  But when you’re as prolific a playwright as Ms. Lichtig a few months makes a world of difference so I’m pleased she’s joining us again to give us an update on her work, as well as share with us her experience of what it’s been like to be a woman in her business.  I’ll let Robin tell you in her own words:

Robin Rice Lichtig

Things are bursting at the seams these days. Playwrights have a rough row to hoe — rougher even if you’re a woman. I can offer as encouragement these facts: I was fortunate last year with world premieres of full length plays in New York and South Africa, a reading in Berlin, and a number of workshops and reading in New York.

So far, 2011 is jam packed with short play productions and my full-length PLAY NICE! opened last night at 59E59 Theatre in New York. (It runs through March 27) I would like to encourage women playwrights to get their short plays into festivals whenever they can. It was through a ten-minute play presented for only two nights at Abingdon Theatre in New York that the producer of PLAY NICE! found me. Ego Actus is also going to produce FRONTIER in the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity in New York in June. At a meeting of the Planet Connections personnel early last Sunday morning, it was exciting to see that about 99 per cent of the people running this large, eco-friendly event are women.

We all know that the percentage of plays written by women is abominably low. Add ageism to that and anyone without fierce drive and focus will quit in a heartbeat. It’s an uphill climb, but it’s not impossible. I suggest joining the International Centre for Woman Playwrights and get on their listserve — a very supportive group.

Last Monday the League of Professional Theatre Women had a benefit to raise money for the organization at New World Stages in New York. Not only the writers, but the producers, backstage workers and technical people were women. Over 200 people were in the audience at $50 a ticket. The atmosphere was charged. It was a fabulous evening celebrating successful women in theater. I was also part of a SWAN Day production in Ontario, Canada, last weekend. SWAN Days are taking place all over the country this month, giving shouts out to women in theater. Loads of encouraging new things happening.

Gotta run. Submissions to make, networking to do. Speaking of which, conferences are an excellent way of getting your name out there. Hope to see some of you at Humana the first weekend in April.

~~~

Thanks so much, Robin – we celebrate you today!

A little more about Ms.Lichtig:

• Robin Rice Lichtig – See www.dramamama.net for details on upcoming gigs, synopses, and other cool stuff.
• March 8-27: PLAY NICE! at 59E59 Theatre, NYC.
• March 20: MOM from LISTEN! THE RIVER. Cornelia Street Cafe, NYC.
• Spring: ALICE IN BLACK AND WHITE. Staten Island, NY.
• June: FRONTIER. Planet Connections Theatre Festivity. NYC.
• June 18: SECRETS ON A CHINESE BED. Marblehead Little Theatre, Marblehead, MA.
• In the works: SUKI LIVINGSTON OPENS LIKE A PARACHUTE.

Related Posts:

• Women’s History Month: Celebrating Women In The Arts – Spotlight On Alex Bond
• Women’s History Month: Celebrating Women In The Arts – Spotlight On Glory Kadigan
• Women Of Off-Off-Broadway: Spotlight On – Robin Rice Lichtig
• It’s A Triple Play For Natalie Menna!
• A Brief History Of Thyme (2012 Planet Connections Festivity)

A few weeks ago I was honored to be able to sit on a panel of women brought together by Monica Bauer to discuss the specific challenges (and joys!) of being a woman in the Off-Off Broadway community.  My fellow panelists were from many different paths, but we all came together with the same spirit and goal – to color an area of the larger picture with our own story in order to present a richer canvas to the  audience.

Our discussion was lively, energetic, informative and surprisingly fun.  Since I was the only one of the bunch with an actual tool to preserve what had happened that evening  (this website you see before you) I offered to turn our discussion into a web series for posterity.  Over the next few weeks I’ll feature a different, amazing Woman of Off-Off Broadway who will share her journey with us all.

Kicking us off this week is playwright  Robin Rice Lichtig.    The author of over 40 plays, including 12 full lengths, Lichtig’s plays have been produced worldwide.  She is currently working on an autobiographical play (SUKI LIVINGSTON OPENS LIKE A PARACHUTE), a play about the Victorian photographer Alice Austen, and a puppet theatrical to be produced in a Manhattan park next summer. PLAY NICE! will have a New York premiere in May. SEARCHING FOR A NEW SUN will have a New York workshop and/or premiere next spring following a reading in Berlin.

We were all asked to give one of our best and worst experiences working in Off-Off Broadway.  Robin, what was yours?

One of the worst experiences I have had with a theater happened in New York about six years ago. A long one-act play (now titled O RUMBLES OF JOY!, published by JAC Publications and Promotions) was cast, rehearsed, and on stage while I was intensely involved with a residency at The Lark so I couldn’t keep an eye on the proceedings at the unnamed theater. I dashed from the closing feedback session at The Lark around the corner in time to catch the very last performance. To my horror I found that not only had the director cast one of the male characters with a woman in the cast of three, she then apparently didn’t know what to do with the character (since this was totally absurd) so she took the liberty of having the character exit half way through the play and never enter again. This was the pivotal character. He was never supposed to leave the stage. With him being given a sex-change operation, and then killed off (along with what he said) way before the end of the play, the result — well I wouldn’t even call it chaos. Nothing that exciting. It was plain stupid. I wrote a very strong letter to the artistic director, who phoned me and defended the director. Needless to say I want nothing to do with that producer ever again. The only good thing was that I had told nobody about the production so no one I knew wasted their money on it. I’m not naming the theater here, but when people ask me personally I don’t hold back! I firmly believe that we playwrights need to support each other.

Give one thing you learned from a fellow panelist that illuminated something for you, or sparked something in you – even if it was in response to your own story – actually ESPECIALLY if it made you see your own story differently!

What I learned from #2 and from other experiences along the way is that I need to (1) not accept just any old offer of a production and (2) interview a director before giving the green light. The best way to do this is, I think, to ask a director to describe his or her vision of the play before I say anything about it. Does this vision match my own or are we on different pages? Does he or she seem to want to impose a vision that is different from that of the play? Of course new playwrights are anxious to take any production they’re offered, but if the director and writer aren’t seeing eye-to-eye, if the director’s goal isn’t to realize the play that the writer has written, then the play won’t be served.

I think the overall message that came through in the panel is that all our experiences have valuable learning components for the part of this business that happens once a play leaves the beautiful solitude of our studies. Those of us who can turn hurtful experiences into learning experiences will continue forward strengthened.

~~~

Robin Rice Lichtig is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the League of Professional Theatre Women, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America, and a founder of Manhattan Oracles, a developmental playwriting group now in its eighth year.

More information can be found on her website.

Related Posts:

• Women’s History Month: Celebrating Women In The Arts – Spotlight On Robin Rice Lichtig
• Keeping Her Balls In The Air – Monica Bauer Tells Us How She Does It
• “The Power Of Birds” – A Family Learning To Fly In Formation

If you weren’t one of the lucky ones who was able to get to Planet Connections to experience Made For Each Other- take heart!  It’s coming around again as part of an evening of theatre entitle BALLS: the Testosterone Plays of Monica Bauer.  In order to be able to get this production off the ground some very talented, inspirational writers are gathering on Saturday, September 11th for a one-night-only fundraiser entitled “WOMEN WITH BALLS” short plays by women about men.

This news makes me very happy becuase 1)  Made for Each Other is a terrific show which I’m excited to have a chance to see again  2) this gives me an opportunity to interview playwright Monica Bauer - a talented, funny, smart woman.  Monica took some time out of her really busy schedule to tell me a little bit about the great women who will be sharing the bill with her on 9/11,  how she convincingly channeled the spirit of  war veterans, and what it means to be a woman with balls . . .

Monica! First of all – I love the title of your fundraiser Women With Balls . . . how were you able to gather all these strong-voiced female playwrights together?

Monica Bauer

I’ve been lucky enough to meet and work with several of these terrific playwrights in other places. Robin Rice Lichtig became my Internet pal as we both posted on the International Centre for Women Playwright’s site. Turns out that Robin and I both had plays in an evening titled Women for Women at the HERE Arts Center in 2004, which is where I first saw her powerful monologue Stand Strong, which we are featuring on September 11th! We didn’t know each other then, but realized this after she submitted Stand Strong to Women With Balls! It’s a very small playwriting world off-off Broadway! Robin sent a call for scripts to a list of women playwrights in New York, so Robin is responsible for some of these great women being on board.

Richey Nash as journalist Michael Apres and Jeremy Gabriel as photojournalist Jack Velazquez in the world premiere production of HEADS -- written by EM Lewis, directed by Darin Anthony, and produced at the Blank Theater in Hollywood, CA. Photo by Rick Baumgartner

EM Lewis is bringing a scene from her multiple award winning Iraq war play, Heads, which premiered in Los Angeles two years ago. I first saw Heads in 2007 at the Great Plains Theater Conference. Ellen Lewis and I had become friends on another Internet list for playwrights, called the Binge (which is not about binge eating, it’s about binge-submitting, sending plays all over the country). That’s how we realized we had both been accepted at the same Conference. So we split the cost of a hotel room, and have been referring to each other as” roomies” ever since.
One of our Honorary Co-Chairs is Kathleen Warnock, whose great work is seen all over the place, and is active in gay and lesbian theater at TOSOS II. She approached folks she knew whowere good writers. And the rest came to us from a call for scripts passed around at a meeting of “50/50 in 2020”!

The first half of  your event is devoted to plays that center around 9/11 as this will fall on the Anniversary of 9/11. I’ve seen two 9/11 plays in the past year – one was based in magical realism, one was more about conspiracy theory and politics. Where do the Women With Balls plays fall on the spectrum?

Heads is a realistic suspense story with twists and turns, about three Americans and a Brit who are waiting to die in an insurgent dungeon during the worst of the Iraqi insurgency.  Stand Strong is the story of a young elementary school teacher whose students get too close a view of the attack; it has a strong poetic streak and some magical realism. The other two 9/11 plays are mine. Two Men Walked Into a Bar has been produced in Boston and New York, and it uses a lot of black humor to tell the story of an Iraq war vet’s meeting a Vietnam war vet at 3 a.m. in a seedy Alabama bar. It’s so realistic in its portrayal of Marines, I’ve attended talk-backs where audiences were shocked to discover a woman wrote it, even though my name was right there on the playbill! The Most Important Thing was a hit at the Boston Theater Marathon in 2004, and it’s a two-hander, a character study of a man who comes to a video dating service two weeks after 9/11, desperate to find the love of his life as fast as possible.

What they all have in common is a focus on character, not politics. I find a lot of overtly political 9/11 plays don’t interest me, because I know the story, and they just preach to the choir. If I want to learn about the politics of 9/11, I read books.

As a female – and proclaimed Feminist – playwright you’re bringing home the point that women can write theatre for, and about men just as well as a man can. Because, of course, for years men have been giving us our most treasured (as well as reviled) female characters. So, turning the tables a little –  what are some themes that men write about women that you feel they get right, and what do you think they get completely wrong?

I’m not comfortable calling any playwright’s work “wrong.” I think any playwright who pays attention to human behavior will get characters of any gender “right.” There used to be controversy in the 1940’s and 50’s about gay men writing plays, at a time when gay men could not write openly about relationships between men, that perhaps plawrights such as Tennessee Williams were really writing about gay men disguised as women. Williams thought that was ridiculous, and I agree.

This is where I part company with some feminists, who feel that we need women’s voices in the theater, because only women writers can write about strong women, or women’s issues, and get it “right.” What I do find interesting, is the kinds of prejudices we bring unconsciously to our work. Often, if a man writes a character who is an executive, the default position is male, and a woman is only an executive if they want to write specifically about the issue of “women executives.” The same problem happens in terms of race.

This fundraiser is for 2 of your shows – one which I saw – and loved – Made For Each Other . . . and the other is Two Men Walked Into A Bar. Tell our readers a little about each show – and why these are the two you’ve decided to showcase in an evening together.

John Fico, star of "Made for Each Other" (Photo by Ellis Gaskell)

In Two Men Walked Into a Bar, I’ve also got a young man and an older man, in a high-stakes situation. I’ve had military men who just couldn’t figure out how I could get it so “right”, in terms of the code of honor in the Marine Corps. It helps that I served in the National Guard many years ago, and I’ve had a family friend who was (and always will be, in some way) a Marine.  We liberals don’t often get the military “right,” so it’s important to me that I give these two Marines the respect they deserve. But I also deliver an unexpected shift, and a surprise at the end.  That’s one more thing these two plays they have in common, but if I told you, it would spoil the surprise; and it’s not what you think!

You’re active in the 50-50 in 2020 movement, dedicated to increasing the production of women playwrights. I’d love to know a little more about that movement and also how people who are interested can help the cause.

Please come to the Facebook page, “Female Playwrights”, where you can click on a link to a fuller description of how this group first became organized. Here’s a link to the New York Times story last year about the disparity between productions of male and female playwrights. This study, and the controversy that followed in terms of interpreting the data, kicked this movement into high gear last year.

Okay last question – bonus question . . . the point where you can tell me anything you want. Leave us with a joke, a secret, tell a favorite story from the past, give me your favorite quote . . . fill me in on anything I might have missed. The mic is yours . . .

I was recently attending a reading at a bookstore in New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale and the most over-educated group of bookstore-browsers on the planet. A friend of mine was reading her short fiction. We were chatting afterwards with a bunch of writers, and a man I had not met before asked me what kind of writing I did. I told him. Then he asked if I had a play that he could attend, and I told him I had a play about two Marines coming up on September 11th. He smiled and said, “Wow, a play about lady Marines! I bet that’s interesting!” ‘Nuff said!
_____
‘Nuff Said indeed!  Well, I’m grateful that Monica Bauer could give us so many tantalizing bits of what we can expect – not only from the event on September 11th “WOMEN WITH BALLS” short plays by women about men but also the actual plays which will be showcased in BALLS: the Testosterone Plays of Monica Bauer.

If you can’t attend the fundraiser but wish to contribute to helping the production play you may make a tax-deductible donation in support of Women With Balls by clicking this link to Monica Bauer’s account as a Sponsored Artist of Fractured Atlas.

Related Posts:

• BALLS! – Come See What Goes On In The Minds Of Men
• It’s A Double Header Of Our Favorites – BALLS! And KILL THE BAND!
• Made For Each Other – ‘Til Death (Or Something Like It) Do Us Part (Planet Connections 2010)
• Ye Elizabeths: Living Vicariously Because … (2012 Planet Connections Festivity)
• Open Mic Night And Post-Irene PARTY!

The Power of Birds (written by Robin Rice Lichtig and directed by Elizabeth Bunnell) begins with migration; but that of a family, not a flock.  For a moment if you just sit still enough, you can see the allegory of it take shape in front of you: Father Philip Fogarty (Jay Potter) has left the family (apparently for good) and without even an emotional downshift Mom Loretta (Annie McGovern) moves into lead position – steering the flock toward new territory and new horizons that she feels will benefit all of them.  Loretta Fogarty takes a job in a new state and brings her two children and her mother-in-law along.  It’s as if nature has taken the place of nurture and the migration must happen according to some unspoken but unmistakable design.  And despite grumblings from 12 year old daughter Zoe (Emma Galvin) who had a strong connection to her father, the family moves because they are compelled to by some inner compass.  Loretta, a gym teacher with very little regard for the world of ornithology which was so important to her husband , uses sports metaphors and cheers to rally her family and take them into the next phase of the game (“Go Team Fogarty!”).  Like a parrot, son Charlie (Noah Galvin) repeats everything his mother says, and even if he’s saying it for the first time you get a sense that it was filtered through his mother’s voice at some point first (In response to where their father might be, Charlie and his mother have this exchange: CHARLIE: Not working in an office like a man, right Mom?  LORETTA: Not taking care of his 12-year-old children. CHARLIE: Not taking us on family trips, right Mom?)  He is like the other half of his mother, like a twin.

He’s not his mother’s twin, however, he’s actually Zoe’s twin though the two children couldn’t be more different … and this is evident in the way each child aligns them self with a parent of their own. For while Charlie is carved from their mother’s stock, Zoe is her father’s daughter through and through, and it’s as if she’s still psychically connected to him, or wishing she could be.  Without him front and center, leading their family, her ability to stay the course becomes wavering.  She falters.  She cowers.  She’s not herself with her father gone.

It’s an interesting way to be a family … birdlike, even as Loretta resists the power to be like a bird.  But even as she tears up her husbands good-bye note Zoe races to it, gathers it up, hoards it and attempts to build it back up into a note again, as if she’s using it to build a nest.

Freebird

So it’s no surprise that in a “if you build it he will come” type reasoning Zoe becomes obsessed with bringing her father back by using a tree house (to our eyes … but to a bird’s eye -especially a human-sized bird’s eye … this is clearly a nest) and uses her father’s own mother Lily (Margot Avery) as bait in order to lure him back.  She reasons that he would be unable to find them in their new home, but migrational flight patterns would draw him back to their family (or at least to her).     Her faith that a small house filled with his favorite things will bring her father back (as the bowerbird fills his bower with seeds, leaves and pebbles to entice the female bird)  with enough of her father’s most precious things he won’t be able to resist.  The same way birds can’t resist the GPS that’s encoded in their DNA to fly not just in a direction but to a certain place, Zoe reasons her father will be unable to wrest free of his encoded need to fly back to her.

Emma Galvin gives an energetic and emotional performance as the daughter left both shattered,  as well as unmoored by her father’s departure; you can feel the desperate need in every bounding step she takes.  She moves with a type of urgency that underlines the subtext of the play; the notion that time is wasting, that she needs to act quickly and precisely in a definitive and prescribed method in order for her father to make his way back to her.

Grandmother Lily provides an amazing transformation as she allows herself to be the crown jewel of this birdhouse.  Her motives are to be closer to the sky in order to commune with the sunset which she feels embodies the spirit of her recently-deceased husband.  As she allows the solitude of the tree house/nest to intertwine with her emotionally, she becomes more and more birdlike until ultimately,  she flies.  Margot Avery’s transformation is layered and filled with realism, odd though it is.  Despite the characteristics she takes on, Ms. Avery never devolves into a caricature.  She embodies the spirit of the birds rather than merely imitating them, and that creates a springboard from which her fellow actors may take off and join her on the journey, for there own transformation.

If you’re looking for a concrete story about a family, you won’t find it here; while many of the actions and ways of this family are familiar, the overall theme of this piece is allegory and magical realism.  If you’re looking for a story about the healing power of faith  … in yourself as well as in those who are closest to you … then The Power of Birds will leave you enchanted.

~~~

Related Posts:

• Women’s History Month: Celebrating Women In The Arts – Spotlight On Robin Rice Lichtig
• Women Of Off-Off-Broadway: Spotlight On – Robin Rice Lichtig
• Keeping Her Balls In The Air – Monica Bauer Tells Us How She Does It