What are you doing on Shakespeare’s birthday?

His putative birthday, anyway, which is this coming Saturday, April 23. I’m inviting you herewith to spend part of this high holiday talking about a subject central to the Bard’s life: playwriting.

In honor of the upcoming Oregon Book Awards, the good people at Literary Arts, the Dramatists Guild, Portland Center Stage and Portland Theatre Works are hosting a panel discussion with the nominees for the Angus L. Bowmer Award — that’s the drama prize, mais oui. And guess who’s moderating? Moi-même. But it’s not all about us. We’ll discuss both the plight and the promise of being a contemporary playwright. Can you be one without living in New York? Or sans MFA? How do you get known outside of Portland, which is fast becoming known as the nation’s favorite “tryout town”?

These are a few things we might discuss, but how much we cover is really up to you and your most incisive questions. Our panelists will share their thoughts, and with any luck, so will YOU.

Details in the press release below. Please come!


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PANEL ON OREGON PLAYWRITING RAMPS UP TO LITERARY ARTS’ OREGON BOOK AWARDS

Panel includes nominees for Angus L. Bowmer Award

This year on Shakespeare’s birthday — Saturday, April 23 — the Dramatists Guild offers Northwest members an opportunity to meet some of Oregon’s finest playwrights, ask questions about their work, and hear what they have to say about the dramatist’s life. The panel discussion includes Wayne Harrel,* Susan Mach, George Taylor,* and Cynthia Whitcomb, the Oregon Book Award finalists for the coveted Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama.

Marc Acito and Molly Best Tinsley* are also finalists for the Bowmer Award. The winner of Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama, as well as the Oregon Book Awards winners in seven other categories, will be announced at the Oregon Book Awards ceremony on Monday, April 25, at 7:00 pm at the Gerding Theater. To learn more about the awards ceremony and view a complete list of finalists and nominees in all genres, please visit http://www.literary-arts.org/awards/.

The OBA drama panel on April 23 will be held at Portland Center Stage’s Julie S. Vigeland Rehearsal Hall, on the theater’s third floor, 5:30-6:30 pm, and moderated by nationally known dramaturg Mead Hunter. Admission is free. In addition to the Dramatists Guild, event co-sponsors include Literary Arts, Portland Center Stage, and Portland Theatre Works. The Guild’s Oregon representatives, playwrights Andrea Stolowitz and Steve Patterson, will also be on hand to answer questions about Dramatists Guild news and the playwriting trade. Immediately following the panel, members are invited to a wine and cheese reception from 6:30-7:30 on the mezzanine level of Portland Center Stage’s Armory Building.

If you haven’t yet had your fill of culture, PCS also presents a 7:30 pm performance of Opus that evening, and you can receive $5.00 off your ticket price when you mention the promotional code “STRINGS” over the phone or when ordering tickets online. This offer is good for any Tuesday through Sunday performance from April 15 to May 8.

For more information, contact your Oregon Guild reps, Andrea and Steve, or contact Sarah Mitchell, Education & Community Programs Coordinator for Portland Center Stage, 503.445.3795 or sarahm@pcs.org.


*Dramatists Guild member

Andrea Stolowitz and Steve Patterson
DG Portland, OR co-Regional Reps

Radio Golf signs off, Delve signs on

This Sunday, a celebrated event comes to a close here in Portland -- Portland Playhouse’s production of August Wilson’s Radio Golf, which has enjoyed a mostly sold-out run, in an excellent co-pro with the new BaseRoots Theatre Company. If you’re really, really lucky, you might be able to snag a ticket for this weekend and see what the fuss has been about.

In case you don’t make it, let me fill you in. August’s last play was widely regarded during its premiere runs (2005-2007) as latter-day Wilson. But its original director, Timothy Douglas, once told me that the day would come when it would be extolled as one of the playwright’s best works. Well, that time may be now. In an act of canny self-criticism, Portland Playhouse -- which occupies a former church in a marginalized neighborhood -- decided to mount a play that pits self-interest against deferred gratification and asks us to tally up the costs of progress for its own sake as opposed to preserving or restoring what we’ve already got.

Though like most of the 10 plays in August’s Century Cycle, Radio Golf is set in Pittsburgh -- specifically that city’s Hill District (where the playwright stands in the photo at right) -- attendees at the Portland production’s many talkback sessions have marveled that the play wasn’t written expressly for our own town, where issues of gentrification are rife. Plus this production was serendipitous for me personally because I already had it on my syllabus for the Delve course I started leading just this past Tuesday.

Delve, by the way, is the umbrella term for the reader's seminars offered through Literary Arts. These are devised as group explorations of literature; I’m not a teacher, but rather a “guide”; there are participants, rather than students. An ecumenical conception! When Jen MacGregor approached me about choosing something to delve into from dramatic literature, August -- a man I’d known in my grad school days, when his first plays were being developed and produced at Yale Rep -- was the natural choice.

Each seminar meets only six times, so I had to be selective about which of the 10 plays to exclude. But I knew from the start we had to end with Radio Golf. And thanks to Portland Playhouse, we really begin and end with the play, since virtually the entire class attended this remarkable production.

The seminar is a discovery process for me, too. Back in the day at the New Haven canning factory, some of us took August a little for granted; he was a journeyman artist, we assumed, just as we were. After all, not only did I see some of his early works’ premieres, I actually edited and did the layout for the first published editions of two of them. It has taken me 20+ years to see that just because I caught some typos or smoothed out prefatory material didn't make the plays were less effulgent. Now certain plays in particular -- Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, for one, and Gem of the Ocean, for another -- appear numinous, and all the more startling because their startling spans of human experience seemed housed within conventional dramaturgies. Yet for all that, they still shake your soul.

Now I'm looking forward to Tuesday evenings. Because I can’t wait to hear what my fellow travelers discover each week at Delve.

Wordstock Loves You

Oregon playwriting gets a boost of well-deserved recognition this Sunday when the five finalists for the 2008 Oregon Book Awards find out who gets the Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama.

Literary Arts presents the drama award every other year, and each time it’s adjudged by a prominent literary figure from out of state, in order to avoid even the appearance of cronyism. (Isn’t that cute? I think Literary Arts is unaware of how teeny tiny the theater universe actually is….) Now that the name of the lucky winner is in the can, we can learn the judge’s erstwhile secret identity: the fab and glam Sherry Kramer, who is not only a fiercely original writer but also one of the best playwriting teachers in the nation. So it will be interesting indeed to see who Sherry selected for top honors.



The competition is fierce: Dori Appel of Ashland, for Hat Tricks; Jacklyn Maddux of Portland, for Strange Sightings in the Great Southwest; Steve Patterson of Portland, for Lost Wavelengths; Francesca Sanders of Portland, for I Become a Guitar; and George Taylor of Beaverton, for Renaissance.

Confession: I’m partisan here. Francesca is an alumna of PlayGroup, the playwriting group that I host at PCS; and Steve is a current PlayGroup member. The play for which he’s nominated got a workshop in JAW 2006. Good thing the choice of ultimate winner is not up to me.

BUT! Here's what is up to me. Prior to the announcement Sunday evening, all five playwrights will be appear at Wordstock, speaking on a panel moderated by moi-meme. I’ll ask each writer to read a brief excerpt from his/her nominated work, then I’ll ask some questions, then you’ll ask some questions.

Date: November 9, at the climax of the 3-day festival
Time: 2pm sharp
Place: Oregon Convention Center, Wieden + Kennedy Stage, Room D-136

Wordstock, by the way, is Portland’s “annual festival of the book.” It's a big deal, a real celebration of writing of all kinds, from poetry to graphic novels. Click here to see its whimsical (and oddly touching) welcome video with a great bonus: images of gorgeous autumnal Portland.

For Oregon artists only

FYI:

In last year's round of fellowships awarded to writers by Literary Arts, playwrights did mighty fine. Of the 14 awards bestowed on an array of genres, an unprecedented THREE went to people writing for live performance: William Sam Gregory (a member emeritus of PlayGroup); Sue Mach, who is participating in JAW’s wild Commission! Commission! event this year; and John Frohnmayer, whose musical Spin uses his years as the head of the NEA as dramatic fodder.

So playwrights walked away with > 21% of the Oregon Literary Fellowships -- “not too shabby,” as my mother-in-law likes to say.

If you’re an Oregon resident and you’ve got a finished script, why not submit it to Literary Arts? There’s no application fee, and the application itself is E-Z. You might walk away with some fresh funds, and better yet, you gain the approbation of your peers and the attention of potential producers.

The deadline is coming up: June 27. (NB that's not a postmark deadline.) Apply here.