Cul-de-Sac, new play by Rachel Carey, Beth Jastroch, and Bob Kolsby

Congratulations to Rachel Carey — author of the novel Debt (Silver Birch Press, 2013) — and her fellow playwrights Beth Jastroch and Bob Kolsby on the premiere of their collaborative play Cul-de-Sac at The Shelter in New York City. Directed by Michael Kingsbaker, the play runs from Thursday, June 5 through Sunday, June 8th and features Kelley Gates, Meghan E. Jones, Jordan Kenneth Kamp, C.J. Lindsey, Morgan McGuire, and Aaron Novak.

BACKGROUND:  In the summer of 2013, The Shelter tasked three writers with a unique, collaborative challenge: using a palette of assigned characters, meld individually written stories into a single, seamless play. Six characters, three writers, one narrative. Nine months later, Cul-de-Sac was born. Examining the lives of three couples living as neighbors on a suburban cul-de-sac, writers Rachel Carey, Beth Jastroch, and Bob Kolsby use marriage as a forum to examine the shifting gender norms, cultural expectations, and everyday realities faced by today’s young couples. They show us that what happens behind closed doors can often surprise us, challenging our beliefs about love, passion, and the fidelity of marriage.

WHEN: Thursday, June 5 – Sunday, June 8, 2014

WHERE: Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street, New York City 10014 (just below Bleecker in the West Village)

RUNNING TIME: 130 minutes with a 10-minute intermission

TICKETS: ovationtix.com

What fiction means, excerpt from play by Oscar Wilde

According to Oscar Wilde: 

 “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise they’ll kill you.”

Wilde kept his Victorian contemporaries laughing with his delightful play The Importance of Being Earnest. But in the midst of the hilarity, Wilde slipped in social commentary about everything from theft and domestic service to alcohol consumption and marriage.

Some of my favorite lines revolve around the era’s most popular form of entertainment — the three-volume novel. Here is some of the play’s comical and cutting dialogue:

CECELY: I believe that memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels…

MISS PRISM: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.

CECILY: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily. I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

MISS PRISM: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde debuted in London on February 14, 1895. The play is available free at Project Gutenberg.

Lois Smith and James Dean

Lois Smith made her film debut in East of Eden, based on the John Steinbeck novel, where she shared the screen with James Dean. Warner Brothers released the movie in April 1955, about six months before Dean’s death in a car crash.

More than a half century later, in 2012, Lois Smith starred on Broadway in Heartless, the Sam Shepard-penned drama, where she played Mable, a woman partially paralyzed because she fell out of a tree while watching East of Eden on a drive-in movie screen.

Writing a Novel, Quote by William Saroyan

“I don’t have a name and I don’t have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.”

WILLIAM SAROYAN, when asked the name of his next book.

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William Saroyan (1908-1981) was an American writer of Armenian descent who grew up in the Fresno, California, area, where many of his stories (plays, novels, short stories) take place. He is best known for his play The Time of Your Life — winner of the 1940 Pulitizer Prize — and his novel The Human Comedy (1943). Saroyan enjoyed a long and prolific career — and was the author of over 25 books, around 30 plays, and numerous short stories. In 1943, he won an Oscar for Best Story for the film version of his novel The Human Comedy. 

Getting back to the Saroyan quote at the top of this post…this was one writer who could feel confident when he sat down with a typewriter and white paper that he could come up with a story — he had lots of practice doing just that.

PHOTO: William Saroyan and typewriter, awaiting the arrival of some white paper.

Happy Birthday to Playwright August Wilson

“I know some things when I start. I know, let’s say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it’s going to be about a piano, but that’s it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.” AUGUST WILSON (1945-2005)

For writers who make it up as they go along (and I plead guilty), August Wilson‘s comment about his working method makes us feel…well, okay about not knowing where we’re going when we start.

Born on April 27, 1945, Wilson grew up poor in Pittsburgh, dropped out of high school at 16, and educated himself at the Carnegie Library while working a series of menial jobs. In 1965, at age 20, he purchased a used typewriter for 10 dollars and started to compose poetry. A few years later, in 1968, he cofounded the Black Horizon Theatre and began to write and produce plays — starting with Recycling. Wilson went on to author many plays — including the Pulitzer Prize winning Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990). One of the all-time great American playwrights — with a career that spanned nearly 40 years — Wilson’s work continues to inspire and promote discussion. He passed away at age 60 in 2005, and has been the recipient of many posthumous tributes — including a theater in the New York City Broadway Theater District named in his honor.

Script Doctor, New Yorker Cartoon by Michael Maslin

Phases, a New Play by Rachel Carey Premieres in New York City

Congratulations to Rachel Carey — whose debut novel DEBT will be available from Silver Birch Press later this month — on the premiere of Phases, a play she wrote and directed that’s featured in the 2012 Thespis Theater Festival in New York City.

The play’s final performance will take place on Saturday, October 13, 2012, at 9 p.m. For more information, visit the Thespis Theater Festival website.

Phases is a comedy about the ways that the memory of past relationships can haunt present relationships — and follows John, a young man who becomes obsessed with running away to Alaska but can’t decide which girl he wants to take with him.

Congratulations to Rachel Carey for an outstanding coast-to-coast October 2012 — premiere of her play Phases in New York and publication of her novel Debt in Los Angeles.

Lois Smith and James Dean

Lois Smith made her film debut in East of Eden, based on the John Steinbeck novel, where she shared the screen with James Dean — or more aptly, he shared his sizzling screen presence with her. Warner Brothers released the movie in April 1955, about six months before Dean’s death in a car crash.

Now, 57 years later, Lois Smith is starring in Heartless, the Sam Shepard-penned drama that opened in New York earlier this week, where she plays Mable, a woman who is partially paralyzed because she fell out of a tree while watching East of Eden on a drive-in movie screen. Somehow, this begs the expression “fearful symmetry.” (A nod to William Blake.)

Break a leg, Lois. Wait a minute, let me rephrase that. Have a great run, Lois. No, let me rephrase that. Enjoy the fearful symmetry of your full-circle experience, Lois.