Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

Lillian Hellman
Born: June 20, 1905
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Died: June 30, 1984
Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, USA

We’re going to be quoting Lillian Hellman every day this month in honor of her 105th birday!

FYI: This year a new award in honor of playwright Lillian Hellman was created by The Committee for Recognizing Women in Theatre: The Lilly Award. The first awards were presented May 24, 2010 at Playwrights Horizon and celebrated women playwrights, directors, designers and advocates in theatre.

She warned me it was going to be tough to be a woman working in the theater. She said I’d need to write like the devil and also act like one when necessary. She was right on all counts.

what Marsha Norman said Lillian Hellman told her on working in the theatre

The Plays

• Another Part of the Forest, 1946
• The Autumn Garden, 1951
• Candide, 1957 (Tony Nominee, Best Book Musical)
• The Children’s Hour, 1934
• Days to Come, 1936
• Lark, 1955 (adaptation)
• The Little Foxes, 1941
• Montserrat, 1950 (adaptation)
• My Mother, My Father and Me, 1960
• Regina, 1949
• The Searching Wind, 1944
• Toys in the Attic, 1960 (Tony Nominee, Best Play)
• Watch on the Rhine, 1941

Some of the Films

• The Chase, 1966 (based on Horton Foote’s play)
• The Children’s Hour, 1961 (based on her play)
• Dark Angel, 1935
• Dead End, 1937
• The Little Foxes, 1941 (based on her play; nominated for Oscar)
• The North Star, 1943 (nominated for Oscar)
• The Searching Wind, 1946 (based on her play)
• The Spanish Earth, 1937 (uncredited)
• These Three, 1936 (based on her play, The Children’s Hour)
• Watch on the Rhine, 1943 (based on her play)
• The Westerner, 1940 (uncredited)

Theresa Rebeck
Birthday Unknown
Kenwood, Ohio, USA

There is a Native American saying, “It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.” And Walter Cronkite told us, “In seeking truth, you have to get both sides of the story.”

It’s time to hear both sides, to hear all voices, to build a culture where stories are told by both men and women. That is the way the planet is going to survive, and it’s the way we are going to survive.

Theresa Rebeck
from the annual
ART/NY Curtain Call presentation
Laura Pels Theater
March 15, 2010

Stephen Sondheim
New York, New York, USA
March 22, 1930

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos, and certainly puzzles. The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is you know there is a solution. I also like murder mysteries for the same reason. Again, the puzzle murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it’s all going to be neatly wound up at the end and everything’s going to make logical sense. I think that’s why murder mysteries are popular, is this defense against chaos.

Stephen Sondheim
Academy of Achievement
Interview July 5, 2005

Also don’t miss the American Theatre Wing Interview

Beautiful….

Less than 4 minutes to give it a listen.

You won’t regret it.

That’s why I wrote the play – for myself – to be inspired in some way. You know, to pick garbage up off the road, go to Rwanda to write a play about the genocide, to continuously do things that not only improve myself but improve the world. That’s why I write and I just hope that people in the theatre coming to see the play will be inspired to do whatever they feel they need to do to improve themselves and the world. I just truly hope it moves and challenges and inspires other people to do better.

Playwright Katori Hall
from an interview about her play
The Mountaintop
Whatsonstage.com, August 10, 2009

January: Art Pays
February: Art Questions
March: The Urge to Create
April: Prayer of Gratitude
May: Creative Stream
June: We’re Always Creating
July: On Not Taking Credit
August: Art Is
September: Keep the Change
October: An Act of Joy
November: A Trio of Voices
December: It Starts With A Joke

Closing Thoughts

December 21 marked our last meditation in our little one-minute focusing experiment. A year ago, confronted by the sorrowful downward trend in the economy, I wanted to find a way to move through 2009 with as much uplift in my Spirit as possible. I approached a couple of playwright pals about creating a meditation series—not a spiritual inner seeking kind of Zen or transcendental meditation—but the old-fashioned kind in the form of mini discourses on art, on what inspires us, nurtures and feeds us as artists.

Closing Thoughts: listen here

We agreed upon a monthly teleconference and that we would rotate through as primary “meditaters.” No meditation would be pre-approved by me or by anyone. If we failed or succeeded each month it came out of a trust and love for each other.

It was an opportunity for us to work in a simple and remote fashion and to be part of a small collective effort.

In 2009 we saw theatres struggling to stay alive, some cutting back programs, some closing their doors, and playwrights not receiving promised productions or prize money.

Whether or not you have enjoyed, been baffled or provoked or even uplifted at all by any of our twelve meditations, we feel at least for ourselves we have succeeded in providing a line and an anchor to keep us moored during these rough economic seas. We showed up for each other and ourselves, and personally I feel very honored and pleased my pals made this commitment for the last 12 months. We will not be repeating this meditation series for 2010, but we hope everyone will carry the spirit of it forward. We ask that of ourselves and invite you to keep only the highest thoughts for your own art and entertainment.

We challenge all of us to embrace this idea: Artists must learn to thrive.

As someone has said “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” (This quote continually gets attributed to Einstein yet I cannot find a source for it.)

During a recent discussion about the economy an artist said to me, “What’s so different about this downward cycle for theatre people? We have always had little money to work with and we have always been able to find a way to do our work. My response to that is, yes we know almost too well how to survive and to get by. Instead, I believe, we must learn to do more than that. We must let go of the starving artist, the idea that no one can make a living, the scrambling over the crumb of opportunities thrown our way. We must stop letting others tell us who can play and who cannot. We must not be frightened. We must stand up for our work and create the forms anew and transform the stages for it.

We must learn to instead thrive.

The world does not ask us to be artists.

The world does not owe its artists anything.

The world may not even want us.

But we know,

We know

The world needs us.

We must transform ourselves into an independent tribe that thrives.

Look it up in the dictionary if you don’t know what the word means.

And then embrace it.

Learn it.

And then thrive.

Thank you.

Happy New Year.

My tiny band of playwright friends & I

wish you as we always do…

An extraordinarily creative life.

Happy New Year!

The 12th and final in our One-Minute Creative Coffee Break Meditation series for 2009:

Listen to the Dec 21 OMCCB Meditation: It Starts with a Joke

We wish you an extraordinarily creative day!

P.S. My closing remarks will be uploaded and posted later this week.

Noel Coward
December 16, 1899
Teddington, London, United Kingdom

I was trained when I was very young as a show-off, and I’ve continued triumphantly until this moment.

Noel Coward talks to Patrick Garland, BBC1, December 7, 1969.

What: Our final meditation for 2009! Our original invitation is here.

When: Mon., Dec 14, 2009 at 7:30 PST / 10:30 EST

Where: Teleconference – Sign-up here.

Cost: It’s free except maybe the cost of your phone call.

Come join us for our last meditation!

In the Spirit of the coming abundant Thanksgiving holiday we opted to provide three meditations instead of one. The file is larger than normal and may take longer to load.

Listen to the November 9 meditation: Harvesting: A Trio of Different Voices

Want to know more about our OMCCB meditation? Read here.

Keep on creating your Art and Entertainment!

The next meditation will be held Monday, November 9, 7:30 PST/10:30 EST.

This will be our second to last meditation for our 2009 experimental series. In honor of the love, warmth, abundance Spirit of Thanksgiving we will do a 3-minute meditation instead of the usual 1-minute.

Three of us will create a kind of meditation sandwich, and since one of us is calling in from a theme park who knows what will happen! We only know it will be fun to do. Maybe even fun to listen to.

Please sign-up if you are so inspired. We’d love to have you on the teleconference with us!

We hope you have an extraordinarily creative day and that you are shining your light as brightly as you can.