Spring, ah, posting

Very often I have to remind myself that I have this
place on the Internet -- that I am paying a small fee
per year for the privilege -- and so I should keep it up.
I also have to remind myself that there are others on
the internets who might be looking for me to give me
large sums of money (ha!) or to ask me a question
or to just say hello. And so I need to put up a post that's a basic bio and also my email address, wtrieschmann@sbcglobal.net. And so now is the time and here is the bio.




Originally from Hot Springs, Arkansas, Werner Trieschmann's numerous plays -- including Dog Star, Failing the Improv and Disfarmer -- have been staged by Moving Arts in Los Angeles, Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City, The New Theatre in Boston, Mobtown Players in Baltimore, and Red Octopus Productions in Little Rock, Arkansas. In addition to the United States, Werner's plays have been produced in England, Italy, and Romania. Werner was a resident at the Mount Sequoyah New Play Retreat in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and his play Lawn Dart won first prize in the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans New Play Competition.

His full-length comedy You Have to Serve Somebody is published by the Dramatic Publishing Company; several popular one-acts including The Absolute Most Cliched Elevator Play in the History of the Entire Universe are published by Playscripts, Inc.; his dark one-act comedy Killers is published through Original Works Publishing. His monologues have appeared in The Best Women's Stage Monologues 1999 and Audition Arsenal for Women in Their 20s, published by Smith & Kraus. He was the first playwright to receive the Porter Prize, an Arkansas literary award recognizing outstanding achievement by an Arkansas writer.

In addition to playwriting, Werner Trieschmann was an editor and columnist for the Little Rock Free Press and then Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for 18 years. He has written for multiple publications, including The Village Voice, Nashville Scene, Babble, the Boston Pheonix, and American Craft. Werner has an MFA in Playwriting from Boston University and he currently lives in Little Rock with his wife and two wild and crazy boys.

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.