Hi:

First, some details about us:

Our group:
The Actors Theater of Orcas Island,
Eastsound, WA 98245

Contact Info:
web www.orcasactors.org

cell phone: Doug Bechtel (360) 317-5601

We are actually on an island in North Puget Sound. The population of our island is around 4,000, maybe 3,000 in the winter and far more in the summer. There are two full time theaters on the island – the 230 seat Orcas Center (www.orcascenter.org) and the 60 seat Actors Theater.

The Actors Theater does 5 or 6 shows a year with 5 to 7 performances each. Every year we present a ten minute playfest – 7 ten minute plays written by people who live on our island. It is, by far, our most popular show of the year – so popular that we charge $5 a ticket rather than our normal $10. Even with the $5 ticket it is our most profitable production of the year. Part of its popularity comes from the 50 people it takes to present the show – that guarantees 50 sets of friends and family.

The playfest is family oriented fare and G or PG rated. We have presented plays from playwrights as young as 14. Our plays have had actors as young as 10 years old. The playfest is juried. We set up an anonymous play review committee of experienced playwrights that read and offer suggestions on the plays submitted. They can then be reworked and re-submitted until the due date, the last day of February. We usually have 15 to 18 plays submitted. The selection is done based on the most recent submittal. The selection committee gives me a list of all plays ranked from best to worst. A second committee made up of actors, directors, and other theater
knowledgeable people also review the plays and provide me with their play rankings. I do not read the plays unless there is a question on suitability. I then make the final decision. For example, last year the two groups agreed on five plays, both ranked the sixth high but not in the top seven. The last play was difficult to choose – the remaining rankings of the two groups did not agree at all. I talked to both groups separately and made my choice.

It seems that every year we select four or five established playwrights and two or three new playwrights. We argue internally whether we want to do the “best plays” or encourage “new playwrights” but so far we have never had to make that choice. We’ve always had at least two new playwrights on the best play list so we have never had to cross that bridge.
We then offer the selected scripts to directors to select the one they want to direct. This is also a chance for new directors to show their capabilities. We try not to have a new director direct the play of a new playwright. We have never had a play that no one wanted to direct although there is always some arm twisting to match directors with playwrights. All new directors have an assigned “mentor” who attends rehearsals to make sure the director is moving the rehearsals forward. It is more difficult to find good mentors than it might seem. Many potential mentors tend to focus on the directorial choices made by the new director rather than on making sure the director is making choices.

I would say that over one third of our first time directors are not asked back.

The biggest problem we have with our ten minute playfest is getting the playwrights to step back and allow the director to do their work. The playwrights, particularly the first time ones, have such a strong vision of the play in their mind that they can’t accept any interpretation of their play that does not EXACTLY match the vision in their mind. Every year I have to get involved with one or two director/playwright combinations over their inability to find a joint vision of the play.

Another problem we have is dealing with plays are the scripts that are skits not plays. Skits that have no character arc. The writers feel that as long as they are funny they should be done. We try to be very firm about this but it is a difficult one to call. Sometimes the committees can’t agree on whether it is a skit or a play.

Another problem is trying to filter out the “tyrant playwright” – the playwright from Hell. People who are so domineering that the director can’t direct and the actors can’t act. For the most part we have been able to filter them out during the selection process.

I have never had to pull a play from the lineup after it was selected but I had to threaten to twice – once because the director interpretation of the play moved it outside the “family oriented” genre and once because the playwright wouldn’t step back and was running around backstage giving actors line readings and telling them to ignore the director and listen only to the playwright. I have replaced a director once and should have replaced the director another time. I usually attend a late rehearsal of each play to make sure things are doing well. For the first five years I directed one or two plays each year. The last two years I’ve tried not to direct but somehow I end up filling in for someone. Last year I had to step in for a sick director.

Here is an aside: Our upcoming playfest will be our 8th. In the beginning another director and I picked all the plays. A few years ago, we got the stupidest, dumbest, SciFi play I have ever read. It is about a spaceship run by a computer (played by an actor in a refrigerator!!!). I would never have given it a second glance, but I was talked into doing it because it was written by a high school student. It was the monster hit of the playfest. Go figure.

On a different topic:

Almost every year we present a second or third production of a new full length play. We don’t do first productions of full length plays because they take too much time. Playwrights have told me that it is far harder to get a second production than a first – because the “World Premier” cachet is gone.

We have done “World Premiers” in the past but it takes far too much work to get a script truly ready for the stage.

In November we closed the second production of TORSO by Seattle playwright Keri Healey. TORSO had been in rehearsal for the Seattle premier, off and on, for two years. We don’t have that kind of time.

Every two or three years, we present locally written works that are not suitable for our playfest due to material, language, style or length. These are normally done as fully staged readings. They are also very popular.

Our theater sponsors a playwrights forum which meets monthly to read and share work. There are about a dozen active playwrights on Orcas and a couple dozen that show up for playfest or to share their works in progress.

Every couple of years we present a six week workshop on writing plays that focuses on Ten Minute plays but also lays the foundation for longer plays.

If you have a 400 seat theater that you need to fill every night to pay the bills, ten minute plays may not be for you. At best, the quality of locally written ten minute plays is uneven. Here are my thoughts on whether a theater should do ten minute plays:

It takes a lot of actors to populate 7 or 8 ten minute plays. This gives the “under cast” actors opportunity to develop their skills.

Actors and Directors love the ten minute format – it all happens fast – you don’t have to give up three or more months to do a play.

It gives the theater a good chance to look at new directors without all the risks of putting a full production in the hands of a new (either first time or new to your theater) director.

It gives directors a chance to look at new actors under actual play conditions.

It doesn’t take long to put together a playfest – We look at over three months for a full production from auditions to closing night. A playfest is half that – 4 weeks from auditions to opening night. Each ten minute play has 6 to 8 rehearsals plus a couple of tech rehearsals, a dress rehearsal then opening night.

The load on the theater is heavy during rehearsals. In a full production we average 35 rehearsals over an eight week period. The ten minute plays need to schedule 50 to 70 rehearsals during a one month period. We have usually found that several plays can rehearse during the day. We limit individual play rehearsals to 90 minutes at night and 2 hours during the day and on weekends.

A ten minute playfest is inexpensive to produce: No set, no royalties, no costumes, etc. We allow each play $25 for incidentals.

The technical requirements are minimal- the walls of the set are fixed: Usually three doors and a window. Plays are very limited in their set up take down time so the set decoration is minimal. It is about the plays and the acting not the set. The lights are a standard wash with a special for each show. Each show provides its own pre and post show music.

It takes more time than you would expect to tie the various plays together. We schedule “furniture moving” rehearsals with the stage crew and directors. I know of another theater who does “Benchwarmers” – Ten Minute plays with no set – just a bench. We are far more liberal with our playwrights. The audience loves watching the choreographed scene changes.

Someone needs to keep an eye on the progress of the rehearsals – sometimes directors and playwrights take them outside our “Family Fare” criteria.

We assign a mentor to each first time director (whether new or experienced) to make sure the director is moving in the right direction and to answer production questions.

While we let each director choose which play they want to direct, we usually end having to do some gentle arm twisting to get the right combinations of playwrights and directors – we don’t want first time directors to work with first time playwrights.

Be prepared to mediate artistic differences between directors and playwrights. We make it clear that it is the playwrights vision that we will present not the directors.

We require playwrights to attend the first three rehearsals for rewrites then “encourage” them NOT to attend the remaining rehearsals.

You need to have experienced people work with the playwrights during script development. We tend to get a lot of skits with no character arc or other elements of a play.

We have an anonymous play review committee make comments on the plays as they are submitted. During review the plays are also anonymous. The playfest producer summarizes comments from the committee and furnishes them to the playwright for rewrites.

We set a cut off date for scripts but scripts are accepted at any time before the cut-off date and playwrights are encouraged to submit scripts as often as they want for critique and suggestions. The judging is based on the latest version of a play.

Hope this helps

Doug

I’ve been remiss in keeping my journal but my social schedule is keeping me busy.

I slept in to 8 am on Sunday. I think it’s going to take some time to catch up on my sleep.

I have a party in the Bed-Sty section of Brooklyn (Bedford – Stuyvesant for those not in the know) this afternoon then I plan on going to the Drama Book Shop then meet Madeline Muravchek for dinner at six at Union Square.

Easy to get to – two subways, walk five blocks. So I hop on the first subway – get off at 59th to find some beer to take with me. No luck. Back on the subway and get off at Times Square. Walk for blocks and blocks finally find a place that had cheap beer (Bud) for $11 a six pack. I get on the second of the two subways I need to take, realize about fifteen minutes into the trip I’m on the wrong subway, so I backtrack to Times Square again and look for the subway I was supposed to take. I can’t find it so I ask a cop. Nice guy, good answer. The subway I want isn’t available at Times Square – I need to go to West 4th and get it there. Know what subway I need? Right! The one I was on and back tracked so back onto it and go south. It’s now taken me over an hour and a half to get to where it was supposed to take me twenty minutes to get to. (But that includes getting the beer.) Get the right subway and get to the party over an hour late but I’m still one of the first there. The others trickle in over the afternoon. With very few exceptions, the later they arrive the later they got home last night (or to be more accurate, this morning).

You know, one of the best things about the subway is the cost structure. The fare is $2 (or $76 for an unlimited one month pass like I have) and once you are in the subway you can take as many trains as you want. You can ride all day if you want – until you leave the subway system.

The party was at a brownstone – what we call a townhouse today – the interesting thing is that the houses are just 20 feet wide. Deep enough to have a reasonable square footage but really narrow. This is based on my survey of two places. Different families live upstairs and downstairs.

The party was really fun – a nice mix of people from the Lab, others associated with the theater and neighbors of our host. We had a cookout in the back yard.

I’m having a real good time so I bag the plan to go to the Drama Book Shop and leave at 5 pm to meet Madeline at 6 at Union Square. I ask directions: Go to West 4th (I know that station pretty well now), walk north ten blocks to 14th then turn right and walk to Union Square. Is there any way to tell which way is North? Just walk towards the Empire State Building. Got it.

Back on the Subway, the right direction this time, get off at West 4th and exit the subway. First, there’s no way to see the Empire State Building or anything else with all the high buildings surrounding me. Second, I end up in the middle of the biggest Gay Pride parade I’ve ever seen – floats, streets blocked off in every direction, men wearing a G-string and nothing else, women topless with Obama stickers over their nipples. The sidewalks jammed with people to the point of making them impassable. I watched the parade for a few minutes then need to get going if I’m going to make Union Square by 6 pm. So I struggle through the mob, getting my ass grabbed regularly. I don’t want to know whether it is men or women – I think I know the answer – and at this point it really doesn’t make any difference. Relax and enjoy, right?

I get a call from Madeline and she is running late and won’t get there until 6:30. I’m saved. I get there about 20 after and Madeline shows up a few minutes later. We walk deep into the village and have a nice dinner at a Philipino restaurant. We talked for several hours. She says to say hi to everyone.

We talked about her life – she’s leaving for Paris with Rob O’Neill to teach theater for a month. She’s getting discouraged – she keeps auditioning and getting call backs but not getting the parts. She encourages me to do some theater off Orcas Island – of course, she thinks it should be in New York but maybe Seattle is okay.

I get home around eleven. My feet hurt from the walking. Somehow I got a blister. Which really surprises me – I’ve walked far further before.

The day started with two presentations on on the Meisner approach to acting – the approach builds a system of habits in the actor similar to playing the piano where the pianist doesn’t think but lest the music flow for the page to his fingers without conscious thought. Meisner stresses imagination as the source of emotion rather than emotional memory – saying it is healthier for the actor. Very few people have enough experience to have an emotion that works for every circumstance the actor might find himself/herself in.

Acting is living (behaving) truthfully (emotional truth) under imaginary circumstances.

Character is found in the point of view (reacting not acting). Listening is a key part.

Don’t do anything until something outside you makes you do it. What you do depends not on you but on the other person.

Keep attention and focus outside you.

Meisner said: 85% of acting could be improved by just picking up your cues faster.

After that we had a session on creating a non profit theater. Not much new.

After lunch, we had a long talk with Anne about the lab and what was happening in theater and what was working for us in the theater and what wasn’t.

One topic was the loss of younger audiences. I said that I’ve heard that for decades. Today the young people are both working are raising families and don’t have the time or energy to come to the theater. I suggested that they would be back when they reached their 40’s. It wasn’t taken well. I don’t know – kind of shoot the messenger or this guy’s too old to know what’s going on.

After the session we had a party then off the to bar for the real party. I got home about ten.

We have a party in Brooklyn Sunday.

More later.

Thursday 4 – Friday 4 – June 1st and 22nd

Thursday morning was a group discussion of available director training opportunities. I was surprised how many different programs are out there – short term intensives, resident summer programs, college based long term programs and many, many opportunities for internships, assistant director positions and so on. There are very few opportunities for training that do not cost money.

Thursday afternoon we went back to our rehearsing of the John Guare play. Things went a lot better Thursday. Maybe because we had the pressure of a performance Thursday night. If you forgot (or didn’t bother to read it the first time) the Guare play is A Woman on the Threshold, Beckoning. It is 9/11 based. Anyway, we were given complete freedom as to what we did for a presentation. Some groups did a straight presentation of the play. Our group did an interpretation of how the play made us feel (don’t blame me) we took three sections of the play including one from the beginning, one from the middle and one from the ending. I thought that it came out surprisingly well. It was a movement piece. We did our presentation in the Mitzi Newhouse Theater lobby. The lobby has about a hundred lockers which are available free to put your coats, umbrella’s and packages in during a performance – neat idea. The theater side of the lobby is curved (the seats on the other side of the wall are also curved to match). The lockers are in this wall. Since the theater is 3/4 round the lockers were in a large curve – anyone standing in the lobby could not see all the lockers. We opened all of the lockers. For the middle part of the play we got the audience singing a song (I can’t remember the song right now. It’ll come and I’ll add it later.) Then five of us ran , one at a time around the curve. The fourth person closed the doors as he passed them (very rapidly). The effect was to hear a very loud sound coming towards you, pass in front of you and move into the distance again – to symbolize the falling of the towers. Effective.

Friday – interesting start to the day.

Several days ago Daniel Swee, the Casting Director at LCT was there with someone else. People were directing most of the questions to him and they wanted questions on a different topic. So they promised us a day with just Daniel himself. Friday morning was the time. The problem was that there were just 20 of us there – out of a total of 55. He said that he was offended by the low turnout. Not unreasonable but the presentation after him didn’t have a big draw and the late night partying is getting serious. People come in late. Fact of life.

That said, the up side is that the group dynamic was far different far more interactive with every one participating and it turned out to be one of the better discussion we had with anyone. Here are my notes:

Casting start six months out for a straight play and longer for a musical. Longer for the leads and shorter for understudies and spear carriers.

Directors need to know what they want in a character so they can ask the right questions in an audition and be able to make a decision in a reasonably short time period.

How do you cast spear carriers? With a lot of care actually. Many of the spear carriers also serve as understudies and the requirements may be very different.

He hates having two actors read together. One is always working at a deficit – being overpowered by the other, being upstages, being made to look bad so the other will look better. LCT hires good actors to read to give the actor the most help possible to look good. They use people who can keep their mouths closed afterwards and have an ego that lets them help the other actor look good.

The biggest problem he has with actors auditioning is not knowing the work. Not having read the play and studied the character they are being called for. They usually send out sides (five pages) for the actor to look at. He wants them mostly off book but with the side still in their hands (if they don’t have it, it makes it look like more of a performance so they should have it even if they don’t need it.) It’s hard to do rapid fire dialog if you don’t know the words. Many playwrights write intelligent characters with complex ideas and sentence structure. It’s hards to do without knowing the material.

Experienced actors and “name” actors often won’t audition for a role. They are hired for other (often commercial) reasons.

Law and Order TV show is the best thing that has happened to actors in NYC. They use a lot of new actors and they get seen.

They do open calls as required by the union but most of their casting comes from prior knowledge of the actor. They don’t invite people in unless they are under serious consideration for the role.

Schools are graduating far too many actors who will never work. They just don’t have the talent but the schools need the money. He also said that agents push actors out to get money. Years ago the agents would bring an actor along, picking roles that fit the development of the actors. Now it is all about money and that usually means TV and movies.

He is seeing fewer young actors with great roles under their belts than he used to see.

The rest of the day was spent in small group sessions learning about Grotowski – a famous Polish director. Rather than a character having an arc in a play, the performance is made up of thousands and thousands of individual moments each with its own start, run and end and event. He only directed five plays in his life – the best known was Acropolis. He died in 1999. His last play (which was never performed) was in rehearsal for FIFTEEN YEARS. I wonder what the ingenue looked like?????

We also had as session on fund raising and grants. Money is a big problem for most of these very small theaters. About 5% of us knew much about the process.

Party time afterwards.

Wednesday 4, June 20th

Another up and down day. But more on that later.

We had a thunderstorm last night – the east coast kind with bright flashes of light and great rolling thunder. I remembered all the nights in Connecticut, as a kid, watching the flashes and counting the seconds to the thunder to figure out how far away it was. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. . . . Five seconds to a mile. I’d hear it coming closer then move away. What was the minimum time? How close did it get? Funny how something as simple as a thunderstorm could bring back such a specific childhood memory. Didn’t get too close last night – fifteen seconds was the shortest – 3 miles.

Walking to LCT today, I felt like an actor on stage with a good scene partner. Everyday, something about her performance is slightly different, still the same but something changes just a little and it makes it new – like the first time all over again. Each day I discover the city all over again. Not a copy but a re-creation that has changed very subtly.

Last night we had a brown bag dinner about staging opera. I went to Ollies Noodle House and got fried rice. I’ve missed Chinese food. Next week after this thing is over, I’m going to go to Chinatown and pig out.

I wonder how much weight I’ve gained? Probably a good bit.

We had an early morning session on how American Theater works. It was primarily for the foreign directors but several of us sat in on it. Here are my notes:

Most non musicals have three weeks of rehearsal, one week of tech then 4 to 6 weeks of previews. Major changes are made during the previews based in part on how the audience reacts. Actors often find themselves rehearsing a scene one way during the day but performing it another way at night. This is an exhausting grind – twelve hour days. About ten days before opening, the play is fixed and no more major changes are made. About six days before opening the press is invited so they can write their reviews to come out just after opening night.

Shakespeare in the Park does most of its performances as previews – the tickets are free and they always have full houses – and they don’t want the reviews.

New York theater is run by the unions. Things as simple as turning on the lights in a theater has to be done by a union worker and could cost up to $2,000. An experienced director at LCT will earn about $2,000 a week. TV pays $35,000 a week.

93% of the union actors are unemployed at any given time.

LCT has 46,000 members. There is a three year waiting list. They have found that their members are growing older. The young members don’t renew on time and the older ones are right there. Members pay $35 a year and get to buy tickets to a preview for $35 – about half price. When I asked if the members get any other privileges like electing the board of directors. They seemed horrified that a member might actually elect the board. There are no other bennies to membership.

We listened to Ira Weitzman who produces musicals for LCT. Here are my notes:

LCT doesn’t do any work on musicals unless they fully intend to produce it. Over the years about 98% of the ones they start working on get produced.

There was a lot of talk about The Light In The Piazza which got it’s start n Seattle. Bart Sher directed it like a play with music rather than a musical. The difference isn’t obvious but makes a big difference. After Seattle Piazza went to Chicago and then on to New York.. There were a lot of changes to the show between Chicago and New York.

For the last twenty years, every composer and writer wanted to be like Sondheim. Not so anymore. He is seeing young artists (Playwrights, composers, lyricists) doing their own thing.

Music lets you feel the feeling.
A Play lets you think the thoughts.
A Musical lets you feel the thoughts.

“If they’re in love they sing. If they’re making love, they dance.”

Next year, LCT is doing South Pacific. Ira was asked why they are doing an old piece like that. His response was they maybe we don’t know South Pacific as well as we thought we did. The messages of that show are relevant all over again today.

He said that many feel that a musical is a lighter, more entertaining form of theater. They are missing what musical theater can do and therefore make it trivial.

As an aside: One thing that I never appreciated before is the true effect of the 9/11 tragedy on New Yorkers. This is really the single biggest thing that has ever happened here. I don’ think those of us on the west coast, or at least me, have any real idea just how much it affected people living here.

Just before our lunch break, we toured Lincoln Center Theaters. The larger theater, the Vivian Beaumont, has over 1,000 seats depending on the stage arrangement. You can not imagine how big the stage is. It is the third largest stage in NYC after the Met Opera and Rockefeller Center. All of Orcas Center could probably fit on that stage plus there is a great thrust which can serve as the orchestra pit for a musical or be decked over for a straight play. The seating arrangement is really intimate – you would never know there were 1,000 seats – none of them at over 50 feet from the stage. The smaller Mitzi Newhouse is a 300 seat theater which has the acting area on the floor and the seats raked up from there. It is three quarters in the round. It is so quiet in the Newhouse that you could hear a pin drop. A whisper sounds like a scream and can be heard anywhere in the room.

Wednesday afternoon they broke us up into groups to work on “emotion”. It is hard to explain in a few words. But we separated ourselves by how much emotion we want in a play. I ended up in the second group from the top although I thought I should be in the top group. People were fighting to be in the top group and I just gave up and settled for the second group.

We spent the evening trying to figure out how to present the Guare play we had worked on two weeks ago. It was a terrible experience. Enough said. I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that we drank our dinner? A first for me – at least at Lincoln Center.