To Tweet or Not to Tweet

This morning I want to direct your attention to the Playwrights' Perspective blog, an excellent blog dedicated to the plays and playwrights coming out of the Boston University MFA program (naturally, I am one of those).

The excellent blog is run by playwight Alexa Mavromatis and today she has posted a column about the idea of selling "tweet seats" for theatre shows. These are seats where patrons can let fly with Twitter posts while they are watching a show. She has rounded up several playwrights (including myself) to offer up opinion about this development.

I am very interested in the relationship between audiences and the performance on stage -- my interest has been fueled by the Intro to Theatre classes that I teach. I also adore -- and I mean adore -- Twitter. (@wernertplays if you didn't know already). Today we have a theatre where audiences are asked to be quiet and respectful upon pain of death. It wasn't always this way. Are we losing something in the mix of community that is theatre when the performers are to be treated like hothouse flowers? Or should we fight like crazy to preserve the victory of audience attention? I won't pretend that I have the answer. But the question is a fascinating one.

Hello New Year, So Long Guilt

2011 is about to come to an end and everybody in my house is either asleep or reading a book. What that means is the wheels have stopped long enough where I can post something on this blog. It's sort of all or nothing with this blog for me. Lately, it's been nothing but then I check in and see that some people have visited this site -- and even left welcome comments -- despite my lack of activity.

Normally, this is where I would vow to change my ways and make this place all lively with regular postings. But I am not going to do that this time. I am just going to post an update on my little life. It certainly seems like an appropriate thing to do at the end of the year and it will aliveate a bit of my blogger guilt.

In last 12 months my plays -- which are published through Dramatic Publishing and Playscripts -- have been produced at a pretty regular clip. This year my play The Clawfoot Interviews was done in Romania. My comedy All I Really Need to Know I Learned by Being in a Bad Play was performed in Ireland.

I wrote a new short play called We're Your Friends for an anthology about bullying. Certainly one of the highlights of my year was having my play Disfarmer as part of the Arkansas New Play Fest at Fayetteville's terrific TheatreSquared.

I've also taken on new work that I haven't talked much about, in part because I haven't found an appropriate time. Starting in September, I've been the dramaturg at Arkansas' largest professional theatre, Arkansas Repertory Theatre . The most visible face of that work is in my postings on the Rep's blog. So I guess you could say that I've been doing some blogging this year.

Meanwhile, the main occupyer of my time is being an adjunct professor at Hendrix College, UALR and Pulaski Technical College. Somewhere in all of that I continue to write freelance pieces -- mostly about music -- for my old employer The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The end of this year also brought more good news on the writing front, a project I will talk in detail about later. I've said enough about me and it's less than an hour away from the new year. Maybe I'll turn off this computer and listen to the fireworks go off around this house.

New look

So a guy -- OK, me -- goes out for pizza and my talented wife redesigns my blog.

Thoughts?

More shameless self-promotion -- Random Acts of Comedy

The very smart people over at Playscripts have put together a collection of one-act comedies for high school students. I am quite happy to be included in the brand new Random Acts of Comedy with my comedy, The Absolute Most Cliched Elevator Play in the History of the Entire Universe.

The other playwrights in this volume have huge hits in the high school market. Jonathan Rand, one of the brothers who started Playscripts, has his Check Please comedy included. Check Please has had (and I am not kidding) over a 1,000 productions alone. If you are looking for a high school one-act to produce, this is the place to start.

The Bully Plays -- now published

A while back I mentioned that I had been commissioned to write a short play about bullying for a new collection to be published by Dramatic Publishing Company. I was particularly excited because of the other writers included, a very well known and much-produced group.

The Bully Plays is now out. It's an impressive group of plays, taking on the subject of bullying from a lot of different angles. My play is called "We're Your Friends" and deals with three high school girls, two of which prey on the third out of misguided sense of friendship.

Any high school or middle school looking to perform work that deals with this timely subject would do well to check out this collection.

Now in French!

This is a photo from a recent production of The Absolute Most Cliched Elevator Play in the History of the Entire Universe. The play was performed at Ecole Secondaire Catholique Trillium in Canada. The reason this production was special is because the play was translated into French, which is a first for me.

Disfarmer at the New Play Festival in Fayetteville and Little Rock

I'm happy to announce that my play Disfarmer -- a newer and hopefully more improved version -- is going to be part of TheatreSquared's Arkansas New Play Festival in May.

The very, very cool thing about the New Play Festival this year is that TheatreSquared is sharing the festival with the Arkansas Repertory Theatre. So the reading of Disfarmer -- as well as three other exciting-looking new plays --will happen in Fayetteville and Little Rock.

Below is the release and the details of the shows. I'll have more about Disfarmer later.

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Arkansas Repertory Theatre presents TheatreSquared’s 2011 Arkansas New Play Fest on Saturday, May 21 and Sunday, May 22 at Argenta Community Theatre in North Little Rock. The Arkansas New Play Fest features professional staged readings of four original plays. Each script is rehearsed, staged and performed by professional artists , script in hand, for the public and playwright. Following each reading, there will be a talkback session with the playwright and the cast.

Saturday, May 21
4:00 p.m. They Want by Alan Berks
8:00 p.m. Disfarmer by Werner Trieschmann

Sunday, May 22
3:00 p.m. In The Book Of by John Walch
7:00 p.m. Look Away by Robert Ford

Argenta Community Theatre (ACT)
405 Main Street North Little Rock

Tickets are $7 per reading or $20 for all four readings.
Call The Rep Box Office (501) 378-0405.

Featured Plays

They Want by Alan M. Berks
Directed by Robert Ford
This modern retelling of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, dramatically explores the internal dynamics of a powerful family during a time of war. The play revolves around the debt of vengeance forged by fateful choices made by the powerful “Minister of War” and head of the household. When a journalist is invited into the family's inner sanctum, a delicate balance is disturbed, unleashing a dangerous chain of events. This play forces us to question what we think we know about family, war, patriotism and ultimately our relationship with truth.


Disfarmer by Werner Trieschmann
Directed by Kate Frank
In the small mountain town of Heber Springs, Arkansas, the portrait artist known as Disfarmer captured the lives and emotions of the people of rural America between 1939and 1945. To the townspeople he was an eccentric recluse. But decades later, critics hailed his remarkable black and white portraits as works "of artistic genius" and "a classical episode in the history of American photography." Depicting the often comic clash of urban and rural cultures, this play captures the artist at work – and the feeding frenzy that occurred much later when New York gallery owners fought to acquire his photographs.


In The Book Of by John Walch
Directed by Amy Herzberg
This engaging new play re-imagines the biblical book of Ruth, in which Naomi and Anisah are reeling from the losses of their husbands in contemporary Afghanistan. Naomi, a U.S. Army Lieutenant stationed near Kabul, is discharged and prepares to return to the States when Anisah, her Afghan translator, unexpectedly asks to go with her. A simple leap of faith brings this unlikely pair to a small town in Mississippi, where love and tolerance struggle to overcome hatred and fear as the two try to rebuild their lives.


Look Away by Robert Ford
Directed by Robert Ford
In rural Arkansas in the 1930s, we meet Matty and Alonzo, African American teenagers who've narrowly escaped a lynch mob by slipping into the kitchen of the Wilson Company plantation house where Alonzo’s mother is head housekeeper. They plan to persuade Roy Wilson, head of this powerful, eccentric family, to defend them after they have been accused of raping two white girls. Prejudice battles family loyalty, childhood friendship and love in this provocative new drama based on true events.