Cheeseburger Philosophy
Mark Della Ventura
Lights up on a playwright is staring at his computer. After a few seconds, a friend enters…
Friend: Hey.
Playwright: Hey.
Quick pause…
Friend: You okay?
Quick pause…
Friend: What’s up?
Playwright: Nothing, I’m just trying to think of something profound to say.
Friend: For what?
Playwright: For the One-Minute Play Festival this weekend…
Friend: Oh, the one happening at the Deering Estate on Sunday, February 26th with a performance at 4:30 pm and 8:00 pm?
Playwright: Yeah, that one. Dominic D’Andrea just e-mailed us asking us to write a blog post for the website.
Friend: Ah…
Playwright: So I’m trying to think of something smart to say so I don’t sound like an idiot.
Friend: True.
Playwright: I just don’t know where to start…
Quick pause…
Friend: This might be stupid…
Playwright: Okay.
Friend: But what if you wrote a one-minute play about you not knowing what to write for the blog?
Playwright: (thinks) Do you think that’s tacky?
Friend: I don’t know. Maybe?
Playwright: I don’t think anyone else did that.
Friend: I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?
Playwright: Well, if it’s stupid, I could become the laughing stock of the theatre community. (beat) I’ll do it.
Blackout. End of play.
My freshman year at New World School of the Arts, we took an improvisation class taught by David Kwiat and one of my favorite games was “Death in a Minute.” The game is exactly what it sounds like: within sixty seconds, you and your scene partner need to die. The end.
After the rules were explained, most of us just sat there, thinking. I, personally, was a little intimidated by the task of having to create immediate circumstances, conflict and resolution through death. And then after thinking about it for a minute (no pun intended), I became intrigued and excited. It was liberating to not have to work so hard. There was no time for over analyzing. David Kwiat went on to explain, “you don’t even need to use the whole minute, just take however long it takes to die, but make sure it’s less than a minute.” What I took from that advice was that you can tell a story in as much as five hours or in as little as five seconds: time really doesn’t matter.
When I first got Dominic D’Andrea’s e-mail about participating in the OMPF, my first reaction was slight confusion, which quickly made its way to excitement. Many people in the South Florida theatre community know me as an actor, not really as a playwright. So the thought of being a seen as a playwright and to share the stage with 20+ playwrights (who are established and recognized playwrights) was an honor.
Events like this are like a cheeseburger that I wouldn’t eat: rare, which make them all the more special. One of my favorite parts of Naked Stage’s 24 Hour Theater Project is being surrounded by passion. With that many artists in one location, it’s hard not to feel it and not to be affected and inspired by it. Everyone is there to support everyone: to have a good time, to laugh, to think, to meet, to talk, to bond, to learn, to grow.
With my writing, I’m not trying to change the world…and it’s definitely affected by how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking. I don’t do hours upon hours of research, trying to create worlds that I don’t know anything about. I admire people that do.
I love making people smile, laugh and think. I love telling stories. I like letting a play be what it wants to be without imposing too much on it. I even enjoy when I don’t understand something I write. The best part is that there isn’t a formula; there isn’t a “paint by numbers” for playwrighting. Like acting and directing (any art form, really), the process is ever evolving. I’m always learning. I’m always growing. And always enjoying the ride.
Special thanks to Dominic D’Andrea and Tessa LaNeve for bringing this new and exciting event to South Florida!
And Sunday, after the festivities are complete, we as a community can say…(and this is how my mother likes cheeseburgers)…“well done!”
-Mark Della Ventura
The First South Florida One-Minute Play Festival will be held Sunday Feb 26th at 4:30PM and 8:30 PM at The Deering Estate. Tickets are $25 and proceeds will benefit SFTL’s playwright workshop programming. For tickets and info click here.
40+ black outs.
David Sirios
Growing up in Connecticut, when I saw ads or brochures for South Florida… playwriting wasn’t on them. When I thought of theatre I thought of the bad plays my high school did, Broadway of course, and “those people who can do what I’d never do in a million years.”
But after high school, where all I did was study and sports… I moved to Miami. Who would have thought this is where I would find the acting bug. I didn’t find it until I went to BCC and Debby Kondelik informed me this is what I was supposed to do. And being the green kid from Connecticut I just thought I was supposed to agree with her.
Looking back, when I first moved here there wasn’t a Gablestage, Mosaic, Promethean, Thinking Cap, City Theatre, Empire Stage, Ground Up and Rising, Infinite Abyss, M Ensemble, Mad Cat, Zoetic and Alliance. Just now as I type all those brilliant companies I can’t believe how fast this community has expanded in less than ten years, and how fortunate I’ve been able to be a part of it.
I had a very privileged 2011, and to be asked to be a part of this One-Minute Play Festival is an honor. There are only a few times a year this community is able to truly bond and collaborate, and I feel blessed that Dominic D’Andrea brought another one of those events to South Florida.
It comes at a great time, so many new voices in playwriting are emerging from this area, and the fight to keep talent here in South Florida has been an arduous one. I think the more small and modest companies doing really true and honest work will start to open the eyes of the newly graduated talent, and show that New York isn’t the only place to starve yourself while making good work, and you can do it without ear muffs.
As far as what I wrote, I don’t sit at my computer at the same time every day painfully deconstructing the human psyche and wondering why I ever started writing in the first place. (and wishing for death) I just write what I think would be entertaining, might make you think a bit, and what I know my friends and family would want to watch. When I reread something I wrote, and I say… my best friends would want to watch this at least twice, I know I got something.
The fact we have one minute to do it. This actually came as a relief more than a burden, and not just because I love constraints when I write. The attention span of the audiences now are so limited sixty seconds might even be too long. Giving them 40+ black outs might be a good thing so they have time to text their dog before the night is finished.
But I have a feeling with the amazing productions that have been popping up over the last few years, the audiences are starting to change for the better. And artists are demanding in a positive way for the theatre-goer to be taken away for a few hours from this social networking frenzy we live in now.
And to be taken away to the Deering Estate is a benefit in its own. I had the pleasure of doing a few readings there for the supremely talented local playwrights, Andie Arthur and Chris Demos-Brown, and wanted a great excuse to come back. This is by far the most ideal reason to do so.
I’m certain this first annual Florida event will be followed by many more. With the emerging talent and companies in this area, this is only the beginning.
-Davis Sirois
The First South Florida One-Minute Play Festival will be held Sunday Feb 26th at 4:30PM and 8:30 PM at The Deering Estate. Tickets are $25 and proceeds will benefit SFTL’s playwright workshop programming. For tickets and info click here.
This might get me into trouble but here goes:
Edith Freni
This might get me into trouble but here goes: I don’t think writing a one-minute play is that hard. But, you know, maybe I did it wrong. Maybe my two one-minute plays will flop and everyone in the audience will roll their eyes and shake their heads and make comments like, “Wow. Wow. That was…is she serious with that shit?” If that happens, I will wear the dunce cap and sit in the corner and everyone can throw rotten fruit at me.
When the opportunity to participate in the South Florida O.M.P.F. came my way, I’d just finished an adaptation of THE BACCHAE and was very much in need of a break from all that language. Also, I have a natural tendency to embellish, to overwrite and be obsessively specific with stage directions in my work. This is something I am actively addressing in my writing these days as I try to get more information and meaning out of less text.
Beckett achieved this kind of literary economy by writing in French, which, as most of us know, was not his native language. By writing in French, he was forced to be spare; he didn’t have the “words.” The O.M.P. form allows you (or forces you, depending on where you’re standing) to be spare while also crafting an effective and affecting single dramatic moment. I think this is not only possible but also that it shouldn’t involve too much hair pulling. I agree with what fellow OMPF playwright Pia Wilson wrote in her earlier post:
“Within that one minute, a playwright can explore a theme; build an arc with a beginning, middle, end; and develop characters.”
A full-length play is just a succession of single dramatic moments strung together to create a longer narrative. And that’s true no matter what your preferred style or dramatic form. So then an O.M.P. is really a single dramatic moment that reveals one closed story point about your characters or their world. I call it “closed” simply because it does not lead to another moment.
The lovely thing about plays is that the more minute the details, the more universally relatable they become. So your one-minute play, which we might also consider a single minute detail, has the power to illuminate more about the “big picture” than that “big picture” full length you’ve been overwriting for the last [insert absurd amount of time here.] And by “you,” I mean “me.” Obviously.
Do you have less of everything when writing a one-minute play? Do you have less time and fewer words and fewer opportunities for revelation? Sure. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This form asks the playwright to give her audience some credit. According to the O.M.P.F. guidelines, it asks the playwright to “allow some room for the actors to create a space that feels relaxed and crafted.” Basically, it asks the playwright to back the f*ck up and stop being so damned precious.
Too often, we forget that what we’re creating is a living, breathing thing and not some museum piece meant to be roped off or stuffed into the archives, brought out on rare occasions and glanced at from a safe distance. Plays are meant to be breathed on and touched. They are meant to be thrown around like a Frisbee or broken like a cheap vase and then patched back up again with super glue and tape. They are not meant to be perfect—whatever that means–ever.
When we have ninety pages or a hundred minutes at our disposal, we tend to forget all of that and focus instead on the play as a finished product. In the process, we often lose sight of why we even started writing in the first place. If your play is a single moment, you can’t worry about where it has been or where it is going. Writing a one-minute play is a lesson in something greater than mere trick dramaturgy. The process teaches us that there may well be a greater truth revealed in sixty seconds than in the whole of our lives.
-Edith Freni
Mymultipersonality.wordpress.com
The First South Florida One-Minute Play Festival will be held Sunday Feb 26th at 4:30PM and 8:30 PM at The Deering Estate. Tickets are $25 and proceeds will benefit SFTL’s playwright workshop programming. For tickets and info click here.
One-Minute-ish
Edward G. Excaliber
Sixty seconds? You mean I have to fit in something dramatic and meaningful into just sixty seconds? I’d rather have a root canal without the Novocain. How can you pinpoint that level of action within the confines of a singular minute? I can’t develop actual relationships or nuances in just sixty seconds. When first asked to write a one minute script I had never even heard of the idea. One thing was clear; I was either going to overwrite the script or not write it at all.
Instead I decided to take the approach of the jack in the box. A one minute look in on the lives of characters felt to me like a children’s toy, carefully winding the mysterious container for about forty to fifty seconds and then POP!
Sitting down to my computer and pondering what idea to compress into sixty seconds of theatre was tasking. I soon began to look at sketch comedy for some relatable areas of structure. On Saturday Night Live there are usually two kinds of sketches: the first is the one where the gag is revealed early on and then pummeled into the viewers skulls for the next five to six minutes; the other is the skit that seems to be normal, or at least what normal at SNL is, and then all hell breaks loose with an ending twist. I wanted to look on my script as the latter.
In speaking with fellow local playwright Juan Sanchez, I realized that life is anything but dramatic. We only remember the dramatic moments in our lives because they are lasting. Life is mundane and monotonous. Sixty seconds of action is what we usually experience in life. In awe of this revelation I rushed to my computer and began to write focusing only on everyday life.
If a one-minute script needed to show some powerful event that affected the characters in a way that we need to see it presented on stage, why not root it in our own perceptions of reality? I thought of a speeding ticket, the process, the length, the annoyance, the discussion afterwards. A speeding ticket certainly does not last just a minute neither does the event last a lifetime; but we never forget this moment (especially for those of us who are fortunate enough to only have a few). Speeding tickets stick out like a sore thumb in our memories. We’ll be driving down the very road we were stopped and never look on it the same.
But what if a speeding ticket was combined with something close to our hearts? My ultimate idea was to take a quick glance on a childhood character experiencing an annoying occurrence in hi s otherwise blockbuster life. With this idea in hand I was able to finish my one minute script, my beautiful seven page one minute script.
I met square one yet again. Some areas were hard to cut but were ultimately not needed for the script I wanted to write, other areas of course were not needed at all. By the time I had gotten the script down to three pages I soon realized how much stronger it had become. It didn’t need to have flowery language or complex time paradoxes intertwining with romance. It was a speeding ticket for Christ’s sake!
Leave only what is essential. I went back to watching Saturday Night Live but this time watched through some of the early 90’s skits. I learned that there was always a gimmick but that sometimes the gimmick did not take control of the situation. I didn’t want that for my script. I scrapped the speeding ticket fiasco and went in another direction. Family. Family is good. Families are always good. Sprinkle in a little dysfunction and we might have something.
A complete dysfunctional family in sixty seconds seems impossible. But I decided to tackle this challenge and have the gimmick take the back seat so to say. In doing so I was able to write four characters that were not only relatable but natural. Focusing on a game of musical chairs, I had the family engaged in a family pastime with familiar roles; though this time around I left the “POP!” for the very last line. I used misdirection to hold those fifty-nine seconds of suspense before unleashing my intent.
After my first write I came in at only three pages. Confident in the fact that I could cut it down to one to two pages, I wrote on to see where these characters were taking me. In the end I was able to finish this script at the desired time limit (-ish). Boiling beneath however, I had unfinished business with my speeding ticket script.
A couple of weeks away changed my views on some areas of my first script. It made it a whole lot easier to cut down to just three quarters of a page. Through this extended introspective rewriting process I decided to keep some of the original areas I had cut. At long last my speeding ticket script was looking more and more believable, relatable, and overall plain funny.
Writing a one-minute play helped me connect more with the real world in a sense because of how close it is to real life. It seemed silly to me at first that I could write a play about a family playing musical chairs and a boy getting a speeding ticket and have them actually be interesting. But life itself is so uninteresting that it works. These menial tasks or obstacles are what make up our personal action.
Winding and rewinding the jack in the box became a tested and true skill for me in endeavoring on to further one minute scripts. I never knew that this process wouldn’t be torturous. That I wouldn’t have to cut my script to shreds but rather focus my script and make it more believable.
That root canal is beginning to sound like too much of a hassle.
-Edward G. Excaliber
The First South Florida One-Minute Play Festival will be held Sunday Feb 26th at 4:30PM and 8:30 PM at The Deering Estate. Tickets are $25 and proceeds will benefit SFTL’s playwright workshop programming. For tickets and info click here.
My Roots Are Showing
David Caudle
So I just booked a trip to my hometown for the South Florida One-Minute Play Festival at the gorgeous Deering Estate.
It’s part of a national festival series run by Dominic D’Andrea. The New York event was at Primary Stages, which has been my artistic home for several years, and was by all accounts a huge success. I can’t wait for Dominic and Primary’ Stages’ Tessa LaNeve to see what a thriving community of amazing theatre artists South Florida has. Right after the OMPF, I’ll go to New Orleans, where my play Visiting Hours is premiering with a hot new company called the Rising Shiners. The play is about a lesbian couple whose troubled adult son is arrested for assault. Set in Miami, the play was also developed there, in Rem Cabrera’s Downstage Miami program. Under the tutelage of Arthur Kopit, under the banyans of Coconut Grove, Ricky J. Martinez, Lauren Feldman and I each sweated to hone our South Floridian voices.
Another of my hometown, home-grown plays, The Sunken Living Room, premiered at Miami’s New Theatre and Southern Rep in New Orleans, and has gone on to awards, publication by Samuel French, with monologues in anthologies, etc. Needless to say I’m really proud that my roots are showing in my work. No matter where I live now or in the future, I learned to swim at Venetian Pools, cracked open coconuts that fell in my yard, biked up the bumpy path on Old Cutler Road, and pined for Shorty’s Barbecue to rebuild after the fire. I’ve even got the Melanoma scar from years of tow-headed sunburns at Crandon Park beach.
The South Florida One-Minute Play Festival’s proceeds will go to supporting efforts by the Deering Estate and the Theatre League of South Florida to workshop and develop new plays by local writers. It’s a rich, diverse community with a specific and fascinating history. Miami may have only three to five feet of soil above sea level, but there’s no telling what treasures can grow out of it.
-David Caudle
The First South Florida One-Minute Play Festival will be held Sunday Feb 26th at 4:30PM and 8:30 PM at The Deering Estate. Tickets are $25 and proceeds will benefit SFTL’s playwright workshop programming. For tickets and info click here.
South Florida Theatre League’s Andie Arthur on OMPF, and all things So Fla!
Andie Arthur
I have a feeling that on February 26th, when the first ever South Florida One-Minute Play Festival is over, there’ll be a general feeling of camaraderie and good will and a sincere request to Dominic to do it again next year.
Mainly because as a theatre community; we have so few opportunities to come together. There’s the Carbonell Awards, the South Florida Theatre League Annual Holiday Party and The Naked Stage’s 24 Hour Theatre Project, but there aren’t many times a year where a large cross section of the community gets to work together, established artists working side by side with emerging artists. A large factor in that is geography – the South Florida Theatre Community stretches from Jupiter to Key West. While there are small clusters of theatres in Boca Raton, Coral Gables, and Ft. Lauderdale, most theatres within our community are at least a 30 minute drive from the next closest theatre. It takes effort and planning to bring people together.
And not only will the One-Minute Play Festival bring people together, it allows South Florida to show the world (via New Play TV) that we have a considerable amount of talent. There are plays by South Florida Favorites, including Michael McKeever, Juan C. Sanchez, and David Sirois, but there will also be plays by some talented emerging playwrights as well as established playwrights who are from Miami, but aren’t produced here.
Along with the diversity of playwrights, we’ll get to hear from a varied group of directors, including two local artistic directors. All four of our directors are talented and have a passion for new work. Both New Theatre’s artistic director Ricky J. Martinez and literary manager Steven Chambers are directing. New Theatre is a well-established theatre, best known for the world premiere of Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics. It’s a member of the National New Play Network, and a supporter of local artists, including OMPF playwrights Juan C. Sanchez, Michael Mckeever, and David Caudle. In addition to Ricky and Steven, we’ll be working with Nicole Stodard and Elizabeth Price. Nicole is the artistic director of Thinking Cap Theatre, a new theatre in Ft. Lauderdale, with a mission to produce experimental, provocative, and socially-conscious work. Thinking Cap Theatre brought Joshua Conkel’s Milk, Milk Lemonade to South Florida, and will be producing The All-American Genderf**k Cabaret by #2amt favorite Mariah McCarthy later this season. Nicole herself is an active #2amt participant, and has an eye to what’s happening across the country. Rounding out our directors is Elizabeth Price, a freelance director who recently moved here and is currently working with City Theatre. She co-coordinated their CityWrights conference for playwrights with me last year, and has a brilliant mind. Since we have four very different perspectives, working with ten to eleven plays each, it’ll be great to see what the artistic diversity brings.
And of course, we couldn’t do this without performers. While I don’t know all the casts yet (the directors choose their own casts), I do know that the One-Minute Play Festival is going to be a great opportunity for emerging actors to be seen. Because we’re broadcasting the Festival on New Play TV, we are only working with non-Equity talent. Our local universities including Florida International University, University of Miami, Barry University, and the New World School of the Arts are graduating some impressive talent. Unfortunately, a considerable amount of our graduates feel the need to move to New York or Los Angeles to get work, particularly our actors of color. I don’t blame them for going where the work is – but I hope that if there’s a greater awareness that they’re here and they’re awesome, that they will have the opportunity to find more work locally and help strengthen the local theatrical eco-system.
If it isn’t clear already, what excites me the most about the One-Minute Play Festival is that it gives me another opportunity to build community; both within the festival itself and the goals that it supports. Income earned from the Festival will go right back into workshops by the South Florida Theatre League. In the past year, since we began our workshop program, we’ve been able to bring together theatre people of all ages and backgrounds to learn. We started last year with a workshop with the House Theatre of Chicago at the Adrienne Arsht Center, where we had forty people of all ages (from high school students to retirees) and backgrounds (from registered nurses to Carbonell Award Winners and multiple artistic directors) learning how to create devised work together. The registered nurses were able to take that knowledge to help create programs in children’s hospitals, while the artistic directors found another tool to help them craft their work – it was an amazing opportunity that we wanted to recreate.
When Jennifer Tisthammer asked me if I wanted to do workshops at the Deering Estate, I jumped at the chance. While the Theatre Lab is an ongoing project, we’ve already had a playwriting workshop and a viewpoints workshop – and we have two workshops to go, including one with the Puppet Network of South Florida. The Deering Estate workshops have been just as varied in participants as our first workshop with the House and with similar results, bringing a range of people from different backgrounds together.
And that’s why we’re happy to present the One-Minute Play Festival at the Deering Estate, because they have been crazy supportive of our work, of building community, and of playwrights in particular. The Deering Estate took in Miami-Dade County’s Playwright Development Program with open arms two years ago, essentially saving the program from elimination. The Playwright Development Program is a series of six weekend workshops spread out over two years, with a master playwright teaching up to four local playwrights. (Both Kenny Finkle, last cycle’s master playwright and Deborah Zoe Laufer, this cycle’s master playwright, are writing for OMPF.) The Deering Estate opened their attic space for the program, taking all the playwrights in as playwrights in residence, providing the support needed to keep the program going.
With so much good energy – from the space itself to the cross section of local artists participating – I have high hopes for the One-Minute Play Festival. It’s exactly the sort of event that can bring a community together and allow us to spread our Florida brand of sunshine out into the world.
-Andie Arthur
The First South Florida One-Minute Play Festival will be held Sunday Feb 26th at 4:30PM and 8:30 PM at The Deering Estate. Tickets are $25 and proceeds will benefit SFTL’s playwright workshop programming. For tickets and info click here.
Announcing the 1st South Florida One-Minute Play Festival
The One-Minute Play Festival, The Deering Estate, and The South Florida Theatre League Present:
The First South Florida One-Minute Play Festival
2 Shows Only: Feb 26th, 2012 at 4:30PM, and 8PM
At The Deering Estate
16701 SW 72nd Ave Miami, FL 33157
Tickets are $25 per show and can be purchased online or by calling the Deering Estate Ticket Office at 305-235-1668 ext. 233.
Or you can purchase online here.
Featuring 40+ Brand New One-Minute Plays by writers connected to the South Florida Community, including:
Michael McKeever, Michael Yawney, Juan C. Sanchez, Gene Excaliber, David Sirois, Mark Della Ventura, Vanessa Garcia, Kimberly Patterson, Marj O’Neill-Butler, Andrew Rosendorf, Kenny Finkle, Sheri Wilner, Deborah Zoe Laufer, Andie Arthur, Carmen Pelaez, David Caudle, Stacy O’Neill, Neena Beber, Edith Freni, Jorge Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, and more!
Directed by Steven Chambers, Elizabeth Price, Nicole Stoddard, and Ricky J. Martinez
Curated by OMPF Producing Artistic Director and founder Dominic D’Andrea, OMPF Festival Director: Tessa LaNeve (Primary Stages), and co-produced by Andie Arthur (South Florida Theatre League) and Jennifer Tisthammer (The Deering Estate.)
The proceeds from this event will benefit the Theatre Lab, a yearlong series of playwright workshops presented by the South Florida Theatre League and the Deering Estate.
About the South Florida OMPF Partners:
The One-Minute Play Festival (OMPF) is an NYC-based theatre company, founded by director/dramaturg Dominic D’Andrea, working in partnership with institutional theatres and collectives across the country who share playwright or community-specific missions. OMPF creates local playwright-focused community events, using a specific playmaking process, with the goal of promoting the spirit of radical inclusion by representing the culture of playwrights of different age, gender, race culture, and points of career. OMPF attempts to reflect the theatrical landscape of local artistic communities by creating a dialogue between the collective conscious and the individual voice. OMPF is the first and only major American One-Minute Play Festival.
The South Florida Theatre League is an alliance of theatrical organizations and professionals dedicated to nurturing, promoting, and advocating for the growth and prestige of the South Florida theatre industry. For more click here.
Located along the edge of Biscayne Bay, the 444-acre Deering Estate at Cutler is an environmental, archeological and historical preserve. The Estate is part of the Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Space Department, which manages the Estate on behalf of the State of Florida.The Deering Estate is also a cultural and educational facility that features classes and programs for children and adults, teacher training and research opportunities. The Estate also serves as a small conference center for community organizations and corporate groups who share Charles Deering’s interest in the environment, botany, history, fine arts, antiques, rare books and wine.
This event is made possible with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.
