Two of my full-length scripts are getting staged readings at really cool companies this month  (“The Actual Stuff” at SF Playhouse, and “Joe Ryan” at Impact Theater).

CLICK FOR LOGISTICS:

MARCH 18th – The Actual Stuff.

MARCH 24th– Joe Ryan.

Each one, I’m paired with a director I’ve never worked with before, who I’m really excited about.  Each one, I’m paired with some killer actors (Stacy Ross?!?!) whose work I’ve seen and admired.  Each one is for a script that I’ve been working on for a long time. (The first draft of “Joe Ryan” was in 2011; I started outlining “Actual” way back in 2006.)

So, how great is all that, right?  Totally great.  I’m sitting here, looking at a full day of rehearsal before tomorrow’s reading, and knowing that a few days later I’ll be able to jump right into another really tantalizing opportunity.
I’m thrilled.
I’m also simply, honestly, and completely ready to throw up.
Throw up? No way.  Haha, just kidding!  NO REALLY, I might.  Don’t worry, though, I’ll be fine; I’m not nervous or worried really, I’m just excited.  You know, like a kid on Christmas Eve!  Or like a playwright who’s about to unbutton her shirt and then unzip her ribcage, pull out her flabby and gooey and imperfectly human soul, and then rub it all over a bunch of people going “Does this work?  Does this work for you?  Do you like this view of the world?  Is this boring?”
‘Cause when you’re a playwright sharing a work-in-progress, you do just that– then you pause for a minute, and into the silence you whisper “And… is the pacing okay?”

It’s gonna be REAL, you guys!  You should come; everything’s free, and there are lots of jokes in both of these scripts, soaring poetry to give you feelings, plus there’s some death and even a bit of sex, too!  I am nauseous now, but on the day of either reading, I’ll be in a great mood, giving hugs and high fives, because once I get in the room I’ll stop being scared and self-absorbed and start enjoying the work of all the killer artists who are part of these evenings of theater.  Come enjoy it with me.

ONE MORE TIME – CLICK FOR LOGISTICS:

MARCH 18th – The Actual Stuff.

MARCH 24th– Joe Ryan.

xoxo, Megan

The night will be social, creative, collaborative.  Come to an 8:30 mixer followed by a 9:00 writing sprint where any brave writers in the house have 30 minutes to generate original monologues based around that night’s pre-selected subjects. We cast actors from the crowd, then at 9:30, they perform the work on stage in the café for an on-the-spot, one-night-only instant new works theater festival!

If you’re a writer or actor working in San Francisco, or you just want to make (or see) something cool on a Saturday night, there’s no barrier to entry; just show up and join us for this indie theater collaboration.  You can come alone to meet cool people, or come on a date with a honey who you want to impress with your artsyness.

Stuart Bousel and I are really excited to be co-founders and co-hosts for this event, which is supported by co-producers The San Francisco Theater Pub and The Exit Theater.

8:30pm, March 23rd at the Exit Theater Café, 156 Eddy St, San Francisco, CA.  It’s the first one.  Come see how it goes, nobody knows yet, but I think it’s going to be really fun.  It sounds fun, right?  Here’s the Facebook Event Page, RSVP if you want or just show up.  Tell your friends.

–xoxo Megan

Oh, Megan Cohen. So good. So prolific. ZEUS is probably my favorite script ever to come from Meg’s crazy, fabulous mind.

For me, it strikes a balance of all her trademarks, namely intellectual postulation on the meaning of life, quirky turns of phrases, and bottomless pop culture allusions and thefts. By turns very funny and very sad, there is an emotional and intellectual maturity to this script that set it apart, for me, from all the scripts at this year’s Olympians festival, and the many many great new scripts I encountered in the broader scene over the course of the year.

Threading her dialogue together from mis-quoted song lyrics to chronicle mankind’s separation from the divine consciousness, she managed to make what in reality is a theological discussion, into a compelling tragi-comedic character portrait of both GOD and HUMANITY. What is perhaps the greatest accomplishment, she may be the only playwright to ask not only, “What does it mean to live in a world where there is no God?” but also, “What does it mean to be a God in a world where there is no Mankind?”

Truly pushing intellectual and aesthetic boundaries, this piece is perfect for a festival or black box production, and should be snatched up and performed wherever and whenever it can be.

It’s the presence of scripts like this, and writers like Meg Cohen, that make the case for why the Bay Area should be perceived as the hotbed of creative talent that it is.
- Stuart Bousel

In his leadership roles at the SF Olympians Festival and SF Theater Pub, Stuart has shown support for my work many times already, but I promise that knowing him personally didn’t make me blush any less at reading the above quote.  Aw shucks, what a flattering start to the year!

(If you’ve got the hunger burning deep inside you, check out my Zeus page for more about the play itself.)

- xoxo Megan

Well.  Check it out.  Here’s the zoo:

Chaos reigns in the Tiny Zoo.

What a mess!  Dishes, coffee cups, a glitter skull, empty beer, unopened champagne, two water bottles, papers everywhere, three different notebooks, a headband I’ve only worn once, a green box tied up with an orange satin ribbon, an alphabet that fell off the wall, a couple of glossy promo postcards, and… sriracha hot sauce?  Jesus Christ.  Where’s Waldo?

It ain’t pretty, but it sure is lively.  Here’s what’s escaped from the zoo in the three months since I set it up:

*An entirely new full-length play, Megan Cohen’s Great American Revolution, or The Hubbub of Wub, Blicket, and Dax.  I pounded out a first draft, and then a second, and then fixed the second a little, and now it’s resting for a minute.  It’s probably the craziest thing I’ve ever written– two hours, two acts, and no characters– an anti-play, which includes bombs, bees, a slant-rhymed pledge of allegiance, and the secret of where words come from.

* Two one-minute plays for the One Minute Play Festival, Dec 15 & 16, 2012 at Playwrights Foundation.  I loved writing for this last year, was super-flattered to be invited again, and can’t wait to see my pieces directed by Amy Clare Tasker and Desdemona Chiang.

* Most of my new 50-minute play Zeus, which will have a reading Dec 20, 2012, in the San Francisco Olympians festival.

* A bunch of levels and cutscenes for more than one game, including both commercial work for hire and a spec project I’m really excited about but can’t discuss in print yet.

* Dialogue fragments representing the end of unworried drafting, and the beginning of serious knuckle-biting revision, on The Helen Project, which will be workshopped May 2013 at DIVAfest.

* Some grant applications and blah blah blah whatever… plus my one-night sprint of writing 15 microplays in 158 minutes… and some super-nascent passages for the translation project I’ve been brainstorming on… and a couple of pitches and outlines… you know, little stuff here and there.

* The other big writing project was an unexpected new draft of a really old piece, the first full-length play I ever wrote, which I was never totally happy with.  I started the plot outline five and half years ago, wrote the last scene in 2007, and called it “Action-Packed!”  It’s a story about four people, and what happens when they live and die.  So, O.K., with all these other projects and deadlines looming, why was I working on a random play from, like, 2006-7?

Out of the quartet of people in that script, one of the four characters had never quite smelled right to me.  She was an idea and not a person, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it… until I realized I was doing “one of my things,” you know, every writer has some “things” that they do over and over and don’t catch themselves doing, and mine is to shorthand the work on a certain type of character.  I will consistently just flat-out forget or fail to write, to really write, the character who is the most like me.

I do this because I am:
A) Lazy
B) Chicken
C) Modest
D) A dull subject for theater, because who wants to hear about my emotional life when they could hear about, like, dragons or a mafia boss.
E) Narrow-minded enough to assume everyone will just “get” the character.  I “get” the character, because the character is just like me… so everyone else will get it, too, because everyone who’s seeing the play will be just like me, too.  Right?
F) All of the above.

Anyway, there’s no piece more glaring in this respect than “Action-Packed.”  I’ve gotten better about this over the years– but I’d still rather write a teenage boy, a dancing bear, anything other than a big-talking, big-thinking, dreamy, easily frustrated, fundamentally gentle but occasionally painfully sharp introverted woman in her late 20s, who almost always simultaneously wants two rather precisely conflicting things (like adventure and stability, or independence and connection).  This is basically how I see myself… but this is not a figure you will often see in my plays in a literal sense.  (Which makes me the opposite of many many playwrights, who you can obviously spot strutting the stage in their own work… usually in flattering self-portraits which are a few years older or younger, a few degrees more clever, and about 20 pounds thinner.)

So, about a month ago, I finished writing Hubbub.  The craziest, most open, most uncertain play I’ve ever made– difficult, obtuse, maybe totally fruitless– but done, at least for now.  Time to celebrate with ice cream and a day off!  Or not.  Thirty minutes later, I picked up “Action-Packed,” and I just totally dug-the-fuck in.  Something about Hubbub broke it wide open– by taking those aesthetic risks, I had somehow given myself permission to do anything I wanted, and apparently I wanted to do this.

I wrote that character all week, that one young woman I couldn’t get at before.  It was hella rough, you guys.  I cried at the desk.  I cried on the porch.  I cried for the person I’d been when I wrote that play, almost six years ago, and for the person I wasn’t ready to be then.  I cried for the person I am now, a melodramatic idiot who writes a sad story and makes herself for-real sad over nothing, over a dream, a made-up imaginary fantasy– aw, who’s a silly widdle emo kid?  But, hey– it’s part of the process sometimes– you just have to keep going.  I wrote that character all week, and followed the ripples she made through the rest of the play.  I wrote, rewrote, and changed the title of the play to The Actual Stuff.  Because now, it was a play about the actual stuff– the real stuff– the messy stuff.  Shit got personal.  I edited it all later, of course, but I didn’t clean it up.  I let that character be a lively, conflicted mess.  Then I sent it out.  Maybe it’ll get a developmental reading or two, maybe it won’t… maybe I’ll need to come back to it and fix something else five years from now… but I brought as much realness as I could, then let it go out the door.

Share the mess.  Share the mess.  The messy mind, the messy self, the messy desk.

(Boom, bringing it back to the topic at hand, ’cause that’s how I do.  Structure, homies, structure.)

In short, the zoo has gone totally savage.  Which is fine.  At least the potted plant is still alive!  – XOXO Megan
PS. If you’re wondering what’s in the green box with the orange ribbon, it’s full of scraps of paper with Oblique Fucking Strategies written on them– totally useful when you feel stuck creatively– highly recommended.

Here’s quick snapshot, and some thoughts about Why These Things, and Why This Way, and the weird voodoo (and pseudo-voodoo) elements of having a dedicated workspace:

My Bedroom Office: Where The Magic Happens

I have always written in random places.  I write at cafes, like a cliche of a creative person; I write at the kitchen table while my roommate chops onions six inches away; I write in bed, wearing pajamas; I’ve written in a bar, in an airport, and even in an airport bar.

I wrote a one-act in the noon sun of crowded Dolores Park, waiting for my friend to come meet me after he got a haircut.  I wrote a one-act in the midnight dark of the creepy living room of a hostel run by Quakers in a 19th-century Brownstone in Boston, when everyone else in the building was asleep.

One time, like a sort of awkwardly on-the-nose parody of a playwright, I wrote a monologue in the back row of a theater during a rehearsal, scrawling handwritten notes by the light of a phone while the actors went on with the rest of the play.

It’s always been a badge of honor that I could write anywhere, any time, under any conditions– traffic noise, hunger, hangover, on a moving horse, whatever– as an artist, I wanted to be able to survive in any climate, like a cockroach.  UNTIL TODAY.  Desk day!

Here’s what’s at the desk:

* I’ve got a real plant with real flowers, to remind me about things being real.
* I’ve got a fake plant, with paper flowers, to remind me about things being pretend.
* I’ve got a couple of athletic trophies, to remind me how much practice and sweat it takes to be good at stuff.
* I’ve got an ERS coffee mug, to remind me that being good at stuff is worthwhile.
* I’ve got a tiny dinosaur hiding in the foliage to remind me that things are hilarious.
* I’ve got a Munny hiding in the foliage, so the dinosaur doesn’t get lonely.

Last but not least, I’ve got the alphabet hanging on the wall.  All the letters; there are so few, it is kind of shocking how much we can make out of them.  They are hanging there to remind me that if the Tiny Zoo explodes in some kind of firestorm, the alphabet is really all I need to do my work.  So, that’s the What of the area… as for the Why…

Question: Why set up a writing area?  Why the sudden sanctified and dedicated corner of the bedroom?  Why put the dangerous ideas in a Tiny Zoo at all?

Answer: Because they are dangerous!

Dangerous?  Yes, dangerous.  How are they dangerous?  Well, without some kind of containment zone, the writing tries to take over everything in my life… and it is very aggressive about it.  When I know I can write anywhere, then I feel like I have to.  Whether I’m in a park or a cafe or in bed or on a plane, no matter what I’m doing, I feel like I should be writing ALL THE TIME, and like if I’m not writing ALL THE TIME, I am failing as a writer.

Without containment, there’s no getting away from work.  Imagine a doctor who lives in an ambulance.

(You may say “Well, that makes sense, but why do you need space to contain your work?  Why don’t you just write from 10am to noon every day, or something?  Megan, just have a rational schedule, like a rational person might have.”

Well, yeah, but… it’s about trying to contain my writing without limiting it.

I think of designated space as a thing for temples, baseball diamonds, liquor licenses, and public parks.  I think of scheduled hours as a thing for school, the military, an hourly-pay job, or prison.

So, I’d rather have a where then a when, because there’s something about keeping set hours that just doesn’t smell right to me… but everyone has a different system, and plenty of fabulous writers do use a schedule as their containment tactic, so your question was excellent and absolutely on point, and don’t worry, you’re lovely.)

I struggle with containment.  I want it, but I fight it.  I am going to try it.  Writing happens at the desk.  Not-writing happens not-at the desk.  We’ll see.

I’m here right now, in the Zoo, trying it out for the first time.  I’ll let you know how it goes. – XOXO Megan

• Interview with me (and fellow festival playwright Sunil Patel) about our scripts and writing process.

• Interview with director Meg O’Connor (and fellow festival director Neil Higgins) about their methods and schemes.

• Director Meg O’Connor also wrote a totally bearable article about how she worked together with actor Allison Page to make this solo showcase of a script into a living breathing animal.  It’s called Bear With Me and has lots of great photos of the bear as captured by Erin Maxon.

(If you haven’t read my earlier post about audience reactions to BEEEEAAR, you might want to check that out for the full bear-blog experience.)

Closing night tonight.  It’s been awesome, the bear roared all month for Pint-Sized at Cafe Royale, and made additional appearances in special shows at the Plough and Stars as well as at ERA Art Bar in Oakland; I wish this bear could growl forever!

XOXO -Megan

Allison Page as The Bear.
(Photo by Erin Maxon, http://www.erintatemaxon.com/)

Okay, if you are near San Francisco, you should just seriously really come to SF Theater Pub’s Pint-Sized Plays, July 16-31.

It’s free, it’s in a bar, and I’m super-duper happy with how the team did my script “BEEEEEAAR!” (a solo play about a dancing bear who drinks beer).  My piece is one of 10 shorts that make for a very lively evening of theater.

Rather than tell you how much I love Allison Page’s performance as the titular Bear, or how Meg O’Connor is the ideal director for this play, I’ll let other people do it for me… here are a few actual audience reactions from yesterday’s opening night show.

We got the bystander, we got the heavenly shout-out, and we got a killer review.  Check it:

* We got the bystander.  The dude innocently running the pop-up BBQ concession at the show (he does a weekly food night at the bar, and so was captive audience, although not affiliated with the theater event at all) liked our play so much that he asked actor Allison Page for her autograph!  He had that beer-drinking bear on the brain so hard, he even went home and tweeted “It waz a Beer! Bear! ROCKN Nite!”

* We got the heavenly shout-out.  During a tonal shift in the piece, the room fell from laughter to a complete hush… well, complete but for a single voice.  Out of the silence, (like the lone “Who” that Horton heard), a single small voice emerged from an audience member, who said two little words of surprised woe: “Oh, Jesus.”
Nice try; Jesus can’t help you now, honey, you’re in Bear country.

* We got a killer review.  Check out this cool review of the Pint-Sized Plays by blogger, playwright, and artsy-gal-about-town Rachel Bublitz.  Sweet!

Pretty good opening night, huh?  Doesn’t it all make you want to come see one of the 4 remaining performances (July 17, 18, 30, 31)?

You can read all about the festival, including more about all 10 plays (killer directing and acting talent, and scripts by awesome playwrights like Stuart Bousel, Tim Bauer, William Bivins, and Marissa Skudlarek) at the SF Theater Pub Website.  I’ll be at some of the performances, come say hi!

Along with the text below, I’m sharing a quick blurry snapshot of the actual handwritten page, so you can get the full-on “11-year-old-emo-kid-under-the-bedclothes-with-a-flashlight” vibe, which is perhaps the main appeal of a document like this.   Do you have any documents like this?  You probably have some.

Check it:

text Things Worth Doing 1.writing a book 2. having a family (of any kind) 3. going to the ocean 4. reading something reallllly old 5. helping someone’s life suck less, especially someone whose life realllllly sucks 6. deciding that what matters to someone else as “important” doesn’t have to be what matters to you. 7. not being a dickhead 8. dealing with living in a saggy & finite body… which is what makes any-and-all of this possible… & being glad somehow for its limitations & its exhaustions, its shocks & frustrations, because it is not just what houses you, it IS you.  And if it were other, you would be other, and would not be able to understand what things you understand, or make what things you make, or see what has passed before you & guess at what comes after… in the way that only you, now, seeing what only you see individually, can do.

So, that’s what’s up in my house right now.  I’m not even stoned, I promise!

Now of course, I am not running around doing all these things constantly like some kind of uber-life-coached creature of pure light.  I am sometimes a dickhead, and despite #5 I don’t go helping people every day, hugging orphans and generally behaving like some kind of filthy starry-eyed hippie who never takes the last piece of pizza… this is a list of the things I think are worth doing, not the things I necessarily do.

But, it’s fairly comprehensive– most things I legit find worth doing fall under one of these 8 headings.  (None of them say “theater,” even though I’m a playwright… but of course, playwrighting is there, in #2, in #5, in #8… actually, most of my life probably falls under #8– but, please note that it says “dealing with” and not “successfully having figured out how to deal with.”)

What’s here is all shorthand– that’s what lists are for– obviously “a family” could mean a hundred different things, as could “a book.”  A book?  Hmm.  Let’s talk about that #1 thing right there.

A book?!  I was genuinely surprised that was the first thing I thought of, but on reflection, you know, duh.  I write in/for a lot of mediums, but I’ve read more books than anything else, and I honestly think writing a book might be the single coolest creative thing a person can do– there’s almost no barrier to entry, you need only the most basic technologies of language, which nearly anyone who’s really dedicated could obtain in some fashion– and just the act of being part of “all the books ever written by humanity” is awesome, regardless of whether anyone actually reads the thing… or, even less likely, enjoys reading it… in other words, I think everyone should go write a book, but please don’t make me read them all.

Anyway, if this list is an accurate assessment of what I think is Worth Doing, it mostly it turns out I’m into trying to do a weird blend of “things that suggest I’m totally unimportant” (i.e., staring into the endless sea) and “things that suggest I’m incredibly important” (i.e., telling everyone how I feel about it.)  So, that’s pretty human I guess, right?  And so MODERN.

Xoxo -Megan

So, okay, you’ll see why I’m asking about this in a minute, but how many times have you heard a writer say something like “I write in the morning, when it’s quiet” or “I like to write in cafes” or “I still write by hand, with a pencil?”  If you ever listen to writers, you’ve probably heard this kind of thing pretty often.  Now, have you ever heard a writer say something like “I edit first thing, before anyone else in the house is awake” or “I like a cup of chamomile tea when I’m editing” or “I still edit by hand with white-out, because that’s how I learned my craft?”  Probably not.  Writing is romantic, and editing is kind of gross.  In books about writing, in interviews on NPR, and even when teaching classes and workshops, most writers don’t talk much about editing their work… because it’s gross.  Here’s some proof:

Example A: Talking about writing is fun and romantic.

Writer: I wrote ten pages today– the ideas were just pouring out– I think I’ve had a major breakthrough!  The ending just came to me, I don’t know from where, a passing muse must have kissed me on the cheek and everything was just flowing.  I took an empty page and filled it, I’ve made something out of nothing… like a wizard!

Friend: Wow, you sound really gifted.

Writer: I am! I’m fabulous! Let’s drink champagne and make a baby!

Example B: Talking about editing is gross.

Writer: I was up until 3am, deleting half the book, just thwacking my “backspace” key around like a bludgeon and murdering all these stupid, pointless ideas that I used to love… it’s all kind of a blur… half-baked themes… gratuitous sub-plots… I think I got them all, but they were everywhere… :shudder:… everywhere… I think I got them all… it’s over now… but I can’t stop seeing them, the pictures in my mind… let’s just say it turns out that a lot of what I write is trash, and nobody should ever have to see it, and it’s not that I’m ashamed of my ideas exactly it’s more like they are pointless and deranged and hollow and totally poisonous and should be burned to ash with a blowtorch...

Friend: Wow, you sound like a psycho. When was the last time you went to a party or something… or, like, had a meal?

Writer: I don’t deserve meals.

So, okay, why am I showing you this seamy underbelly?  Because it’s a classic example of editing.  The moment you decide that you’d rather brag to a friend about your writing than kvetch to that friend about your editing, you’ve shown that you’re a natural born editor– you know which part of your story to focus on– you’d rather sing with joy than bitch or moan.

But, that’s not the right choice– it’s just a choice.  (In fact, if you’re me, you choose the opposite, and you decide you’d rather talk about the editing than about the writing; you find rhapsodic celebration dull, and prefer the challenge of making the gross thing acceptable.)

The key thing here though is, as you can see, people naturally edit the way they talk about writing.  In fact, you naturally edit the way you talk, and think, about everything.  How do you know “what to cut” when you talk to a romantic partner about your day at work?  How do you know “what to cut” when you reminisce about a wonderful trip you took a few years ago, and it seems magical and perfect?  When you’re in a bad mood, how do you know “what to cut” so the world seems dark and unfavorable to match your funk?  You and your brain edit your experiences constantly.

So, cut your writing the same way.  Listen to your first draft, take what’s most interesting and feels most relevant to your goal, and brush away the flecks of everything else that’s stuck to it.  Don’t be scared.  You do this every day in life.  You’ve done it every day constantly pretty much since you were born.

What’s the worst that happens?  Maybe after making a lot of cuts, your piece “hangs together less well” than it did before you started chopping.  So what?  That doesn’t mean you cut your piece wrong– it means you cut it to be your piece.  Maybe your perspective doesn’t make sense, is messy, isn’t tidy– it’s better to be honest than to be “right” anyway.  If you don’t love the text, write more, then cut it all again.

What’s the worst that happens?  Maybe after making a lot of cuts, your piece is more boring, flatter and less interesting than when you started chopping.  So what?  If your piece is boring, wouldn’t you rather know that now instead of after it gets published?  If you don’t love the text, write more, then cut it all again.

What’s the worst that happens?  Some of your brilliant ideas get cut, get shoved in a drawer, and nobody hugs you or pays you for them.  So what?  You’ll have more ideas, and probably better ones.  If you manage to somehow stay obsessed with an idea that you’ve cut, it can be the starting point for another writing project later… and if you don’t stay obsessed with it, then it wasn’t a big loss, eh?  If you don’t love the way something fits into your text, cut it, and if you want to, you can invite it to the party for another project at another time.

Remember: you already know how to edit.  You were born for this.

I’m adapting Sophocles’ “Ode to Man” and mashing it up with a bunch of contemporary Top 40 pop songs for the backbone of the play’s text.  Here’s a quote from my Zeus page about why:

“Have you ever watched people falling in real love on a real date at a McDonalds?  It happens every day.  You can see this everywhere– this human tenacity, this ability to make real life happen in a plastic landscape.  This is, to me, part of what Sophocles is talking about when he talks about what humans do– we yoke the beasts to carry our burdens, we flip the bird at the gods, and we take any landscape and make it into what we need.”

The remix play is the most exciting format I can think of for telling a story about the relationship between Zeus, humanity, and nature, and I have kind of a lot to say about why.  Check out videos of the original sources, and some more info on what I’m making and what’s in my brain about it, on the new page for my Zeus play.