Thanks be to _____________ .

December 6th, 2011

Happy belated Thanksgiving. Despite kinda sullen odds on Thanksgiving’s chances on this side of the pond, Tom and I stubbornly celebrate every year in our house in the Holyland, just like the mad Statesiders do – well, not exactly “just like”: I’m starting to associate the holiday with a house full of Irish Thanksgiving-virgins eating banoffee pie and sipping Buckfast rather than a cozy kitchen packed with just my family, a ginormous turkey and canned cranberry sauce (a.k.a. heaven-in-a-tin, rather unexpectedly. Love of canned food as symptom of homesickness?). Funny how the world goes. Anyroad, it’s been a tough year for a lot of people, and it felt good to really celebrate.

Not all tough, though: sometimes, downright invigorating. Speaking of thankful, I wanted to give a shout-out to a few writers I’ve had a chance to sit down and chat with  lately: Shannon Yee, Ariel Killick and Danny Start. Nice chats over bowls of soup and mugs of coffee, brimful of ideas. Keep your eyes peeled.

Thanks also for your patience as the literary arm of the theatre co. creaks back into motion. I’ve got a stack of scripts I’m looking forward to reading, and (in case you haven’t seen it elsewhere), our call for scripts for the 2012 Biscuit Tins is out in the world. Deadline’s 2nd February 2012 to be considered for next year’s series. Be great to hear from you if you’ve got something in the works that deserves some development:

CALL FOR SCRIPTS – Biscuit Tin Readings 2012

So get writing – and maybe join us next year for the Great Thank. You’ve got till Thursday, 22nd Nov. 2012 to figure out what the frack goes in pumpkin pie.

 

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Feeling grand, baby.

October 21st, 2011

Grey freezingness aside, it’s a day for listening to Nina Simone. A good day. (And if you’re not in the habit of blasting Dr. Simone on good days, get that way quick.)

Getting set for the final two performances of Michael Shannon’s THE WRITERS’ ROOM. Our indefatigueable director Richard Lavery is back in town, and our cast and crews have worked with serious dedication on this piece since June. This is the fourth stop on the mini-festival tour, and it’s been great to see the piece develop into the tightly-wound little gem it is now.

Between the rehearsed reading and lots of work this week, I’ve been clearing out the house (kicking aside the chaff, making good-karma donations to charity, etc.). Last night I found a photo taken of the cast of DON’T: A GUIDE TO BELFAST IN ONE ACT. Stephen Bleakney and I co-wrote and -directed it at the John Hewitt in early 2007, on the last night of smoking in pubs. The company are all huddled around some long-gone graffiti in Exchange Place (“This is Belfast, not a warzone”), looking younger than four years ago should. And Mike Shannon’s there as well – somehow Stephen and I finagled him into acting in it. (Soon after the picture was taken, the entire cast sang the theme to “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” in unison, while walking through the Cathedral Quarter. As you do.) I think when I see Mike standing next to the bigger-than-A0 poster of his play at the Opera House later today, I’ll get an even better sense of how far we’ve come.

Now – off to the Baby Grand. See y’all soon.

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Drop and give me 50, soldier.

August 16th, 2011

 

Busy week  :  Two cities.

 

London  :  Michael Shannon’s ‘The Writers’ Room’ . Camden Fringe . Two nights, two full houses . Cast and crew : exhausted and elated . Rightly so . Wandering the quays . Writing by Tower Bridge . Researching at the V&A . Seeing old friends . Remembering why I’m doing all of this.

 

Belfast  :  Jaki McCarrick’s ‘The American Hotel’ . Beautiful, complex war story . Script-development boot camp . Revisions, deletions, amendments, and a brand new Act 3 : all in two days. Fast work. Good work. Hard work. (And yes, press-ups.)

 

Right, folks  :  Ulster Hall on Wednesday, 7pm  :  That’s an order.

 

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Mr. President, do you have the biscuit?

July 18th, 2011

Accidents happen. For this theatre company, they tend to come right around the time we’re trying to name something. The Biscuit Tin Readings, for instance, started with a gun …

We needed one for our production of “The Writers’ Room” at Pick’n'Mix this past June. (Me: “Can’t we just borrow someone’s?” Richard: “Stupid American.”) So our intrepid and methodical artistic director went through all the necessary preparations and precautions for stage weaponry (insurance, training for handing it, permits from the cops for firing blank ammo, getting a locked firearms bag). When he went to pick up the gun we’d be using for the performance, it was handed over in a biscuit tin.

Score one for security.

We like the idea of atypical packaging, a hint of the unexpected, and ‘biscuit tin’ seemed perfect for a series of quite varied rehearsed readings. Since then, we’ve dug into ‘biscuit’ history, and found out the word has associations that aren’t as cozy or sweet as your granny thinks …

NUCLEAR WARFARE: Each U.S. president carries a card with the combination for opening the briefcase that contains the nuclear codes. That card’s code word: the biscuit. Lore goes that Clinton let the biscuit go missing for months during his presidency. Jimmy Carter once left his biscuit in a suit that got sent to the cleaners.

STREET SLANG: ‘Biscuit’ is slang for a handgun, specifically a revolver. (From Urban Dictionary: “You can’t hide no biscuit in yo’ pants like that!”)  ‘Biscuit’ can also mean ugly shoes or a woman’s bum. A ‘disco biscuit’ is an ecstasy pill.

So yeah. The Biscuit Tin Readings: not quite a rave, not exactly warfare, but surely a little something unexpected.

Wednesday night’s reading of “Robots in Disguise” by Mike Coleman is on the horizon: James McAnespy plays Howard Chubb, a exec from the Transformation Team. He’ll demonstrate how he’s whipped the hopelessly inefficient Smith family (Ed Boyd, Emma Little, Kim Moylan and Chris McCurry) into bureaucratic shape. Directed by Gayle Dennison.

I’ll leave you with the inimitable words of Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith, in his song “Bacon Biscuit Blues”:

Baby ask me no questions
I’ll tell you no lies
Put your biscuits in the oven
Honey, watch my dumplin

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Choose your adhesives wisely

June 17th, 2011

Dramaturgs aren’t usually allowed near the carpet tape or power tools, so the prep work for our production of Michael Shannon’s “The Writers’ Room” has been learning-curve central.

I’ve been doing my best to help out our designer, London-based Rachel Szmukler (more calm, collected and spatially gifted than I) construct the stage. This week we have mostly been drilling, sanding, measuring, lifting, listening to 6 Music, sourcing drillbits (countersync and otherwise), balancing Dorito breakfasts with detox tea, and – most recently – affixing carpet tiles.

Notes on carpet adhesive:

1. Tape is better than wood-glue when you’re dealing with felt underlay.

2. Some things just need to be brand-name.

I’m the kind of person who gets ‘freewheeling on my three-speed down the Grosvenor Road’ confused with ‘competing in the Tour de France’, so (unshockingly) I’ve decided I’m fully capable of recarpeting Richard’s living room if he’ll pay me for it. (Unlikely.) What’s life about if you’re not getting ideas above your station?

Still, it’s been nice to flex atypical brain & body muscles. And yesterday we feverishly finished our set-construction in time to meet the actors for a dress rehearsal. Richard and the performers have been doing stellar work with Mike’s script; and with Jacqueline O’Hagan’s light design and soundscape by songwriter/DJ Martin Byrne, it’s doing some top-quality sticking together. Looking forward to it – and all the shows – at Pick’n'Mix this weekend, and to hitting the road to London with our production this summer.

I’ll be chained safely back in my place, slave to text & page, for our next series of rehearsed readings, kicking off at the Ulster Hall’s Group Space 20th July. We’ll be unveiling the series – five new plays, excellent & unique storytelling, and a few familiar faces – soon.

But first: Pick yer Mix.

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You’ve got till April Fools’ Day.

February 21st, 2011

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

VI - Six rehearsed readings of new plays, to be produced by Accidental in 2011

In 2010, we worked with six emerging playwrights and a talented crew of actors to develop six new pieces of stage writing, bringing the plays to Belfast audiences as rehearsed readings. (Poke around on the website for details about last year’s edition of VI, including photos and recordings of the performances at Blick Studios.)

Now we’re on the lookout for six more new voices, and looking forward to producing another series of six readings in the coming months: We want new (never-before performed) writing for the stage that’s definitely fearless, perhaps funny, and that would allow us to stretch our own – and an audience’s – creativity.

Submission guidelines:

_Each play should be at most about 45 pages (no longer than an hour).

_Send the play in .pdf format to emily@accidentaltheatre.co.uk by Friday 1st April 2011.

_Include a brief biography of yourself in the body of the e-mail.

_Multiple submissions are fine, if you’ve more than one piece that might be right for this series, but we’ll only accept one piece by any given author.

Any questions, give me a shout. Thanks.

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Sacred fools

September 28th, 2010

So there was me, post-election 2004, living off my last nickels in a swell gaff in West Hollywood, looking for a job, and jonesing for some theatre-making. In retrospect, it was the name that made me choose the company, really. I can’t even remember if I found it online or just walked by the building on my way elsewhere. (You couldn’t walk past a building with ‘Sacred Fools’ written on it either. Try it sometime.)

I started going to company meetings, started helping with stage crew, and ended up getting whisked into their twice-yearly overnight theatre project – Fast & Loose. Didn’t matter who you were or what you usually did for Sacred Fools: For those 24 hours, you were a writer, a director, an actor, a techie, a whatever. And you worked hard and quick, and you loved it.

I directed a play called “Psycho-Tit Jamboree”; my most pressing tech concern was to find A) an empty hairspray bottle and B) the right mix of melted vanilla ice cream and water to simulate breast-milk. Messy but memorable.

Somehow Fast & Loose seemed like exactly the right madness to spring on Belfast once I came to study creative writing here. At its heart, Fast & Loose is a new-writing project, giving four scriptwriters (and sometimes never-before scriptwriters) the chance to take their words to the stage. I helped run it for three years at Queen’s with the aid of Anna Newell and the Centre for Excellence in the Creative and Performing Arts (r.i.p.). Now Accidental Theatre is bringing it back as part of Queen’s Quarter Weekends, in partnership with the QU Players drama group.

So yes: A crew of (perhaps foolish) people – four writers, four directors, two producers, a slew of tech crew, and a gaggle of actors – get 24 hours to make four new plays. Come along and see what happens. I can almost guarantee that there will be very little mess, vanilla-flavoured or otherwise. Almost.

Write to me (emily@accidentaltheatre.co.uk) if you want to know more or get involved.

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Why has the refrigerator stopped working?

August 25th, 2010

All the rest of the stuff in the kitchen is fine.

Well, the washing machine is spinning away. But the kettle won’t turn on, the toaster and the lights are shot and the socket for the hairdryer in the bedroom is on the fritz … Clearly a fuse thing. But I’ve messed with the fuses like six times now, and I’m not the person who’s meant to fix this. A) Fuses are dangerous (right?) and B) I haven’t got time. See?

Things to do

  1. Finalise the script and rehearsal plans for Donal O’Hagan’s new play The Kitchen, the Bedroom and the Grave - our next and final of the VI Rehearsed Readings at Blick, coming up at 7pm on 9th September (Richard has moved to temporarily greener London pastures, so I’m directing this time; really looking forward to it!)
  2. Plan Fast & Loose – the 4th annual 24-hour, new-writing theatre project at Queen’s, happening 8th-9th October 2010 at the Students’ Union, produced by Accidental Theatre avec la collaboration de la QU Players
  3. Catch up on script notes and other assorted editing
  4. Get ready to start teaching at the Heaney Centre again
  5. Eat this delicious piece of chilli chocolate
  6. Redraft my novel
  7. Hang out the washing
  8. Fix the refrigerator fuse

I really should get around to number 8. There’s some quality chicken in the freezer, and the coldness’ll only hold out so long while the mains are off. Oh but there’s always number 9: Squirrel around on Spotify (I forgot how much I loved the Violent Femmes until the refrigerator stopped working).

No. Fridges and Femmes be damned. I’ll stick with number 1.

Take care, y’all, and hope to see you at Blick next month.

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Toward a More Perfect Theory of Knowledge

July 20th, 2010

It couldn’t be summer. A’ight, so the Holyland is deserted, it’s spitting rain ⅝ of the time, and it’s not quite the 37° I grew up with in Atlanta. (I’ve mostly gotten over that. Mostly.) But this summer otherwise shattered my typical assumptions a couple weeks ago, at our fourth of the VI readings: Folks turned up. Had to turn a couple people away at the door (Blick Studios, beautiful but tiny), had to run out and get more wine. In early July? In Belfast? Go figure.

Good to see folks there – made for good post-show chat, and there was plenty to discuss. My folks were in town visiting (“I love the weather here, honey, it’s so breezy” –Mum), and I think my dad cornered the author (William Patterson) to hash out parallels between the ‘80s student punk scene in his play (Some Kind of Stranger) and the anti-war movement in the States during Vietnam.

So we’re four down, two to go. It’s been a good run – check out the videos here on our site, and meet the writers via Tammy Moore’s interviews on Culture Northern Ireland. It’s been a trip working with all of them – and not just for what they put on the page and where we take it in the development process. Hard to guess what else ends up in the accidental mix: Margaret Irish and I swapped amateur insights on astrology and the beauty of writing on trains. Neil Edwards was graciously able to contain his rage when I brought up the group stage of the World Cup. Jaki McCarrick, I discovered, might have the most energetic and supportive blog on the island. I can always count on Michael Shannon to masterfully ridicule my crush on Peter Capaldi. William Patterson is a perfect ambassador for creativity within Whitehall (free the civil service!). And during a recent private reading (part of the script development for September’s upcoming reading VI, The Kitchen the Bedroom, and the Grave), Donal O’Hagan got us talking about the theory of knowledge – somehow, I don’t think we’ve exhausted the topic …

Speaking of which, Neil Edwards’ School of Thought is our fifth reading (12th August, 7pm at Blick). A sliver of time to unwind, watch, and see what topics the wine suggests afterward. Talk to you there.

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Six is My Lucky Number

April 8th, 2010

I’m not ever going to ever see Avatar. Up to three hours of iffy storyline and worse dialogue propped up by hyper-technicolour-3D-pyrotechnics? Bleurgh. Lucky that Belfast theatre has declared 2010 The Year of the Rehearsed Reading. Give Avatar an Oscrap™ for ‘achievement in special effects’ and give me ‘recession theatre’ any day.

Rehearsed readings should be a part of any well rounded year, but they seem to have especially charmed us in this era of the ‘credit-crunch lunch’. There’s been fantastic fare at the Black Box lunchtimes and the Ulster Hall Sundays. And the bundle of new script submissions I sat down to read for Accidental last year has turned into a string of rehearsed readings of six new plays by six very good – and very different – writers.

Michael Shannon’s The Writers’ Room. Jaki McCarrick’s Leopoldville. Margaret Irish’s Ravine. William Patterson’s Some Kind of Stranger. Neil A. Edwards’ School of Thought. Donal O’Hagan’s The Kitchen, the Bedroom, & the Grave. I’ll admit, I do like sixes. But there’s a solid kind of symmetry to the plays beyond that: the stripes of humour and anger through them, and the way their various settings act as traps. A single room with a box of props. A pub in the Irish borderlands. The bottom of a steep ravine. The Belfast vs. the Bangor crowd at Queen’s. A secondary school. A kitchen, a couple of bedrooms …

A lot can happen in constrained spaces – and when theatre productions are pared down to a reading of the words on the page, too. Austerity aside, it’s feeling like we’ve got some good months ahead. Six of them, at least.

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