I am the founder and producing artistic director of Live Girls! Theater, a company that produces and develops new work by women in Seattle. Since most of my adult life has centered around building this company, I often find myself in the middle of debates about the state of women in the theater. And what action should or shouldn’t be taken in response.

A Few Assumptions to Begin With
First, I am writing this with the assumption that new plays matter. That could be the source of a good long argument between theater makers but lets say we are on the same page with that idea. Now for another assumption: to have a robust, exciting and relevant body of new work in the theater, we should have a wide variety of world-views shaping those stories.

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Emerald City has been described as playwright S.P. Miskowski’s love note/break-up letter to Seattle. From traditional Ballard to wacky Fremont, Seattle is a place that inspires passionate responses in all who visit. We asked the cast and crew of Emerald Cityfive questions about their ‘love-affair’ with Seattle.

Prop Designer Robin Macartney shares her Seattle story:

What is your current Seattle relationship status?

A.  Married
B.  In a Relationship
C.  Friends
D.  It’s Complicated
E.   Divorced

How did you meet Seattle?

Through my grandparents, who lived in West Seattle for 20 years.

What very Seattle things do you most love to share?

The West side is the Best side! I love the more nature-y Northwest aspects of Seattle so I take people to the waterfront and to Alki a lot. I also like to get to know the more out of the way neighborhoods (even if I’m still learning all of them).

What very Seattle things could (or did) push you to break up with the city?

The Viaduct, Ballardites, Georgetown hipsters.

Describe Seattle in three words:

Big, weird, artistic.

Emerald City has been described as playwright S.P. Miskowski’s love note/break-up letter to Seattle. From traditional Ballard to wacky Fremont, Seattle is a place that inspires passionate responses in all who visit. We asked the cast and crew of Emerald Cityfive questions about their ‘love-affair’ with Seattle.

Jennifer Pratt, who plays Scarlett, shares her Seattle story:

What is your current Seattle relationship status?

A.  Married
B.  In a Relationship
C.  Friends
D.  It’s Complicated
E.   Divorced

How did you meet Seattle?

When I was a kid we lived in Tacoma.  My mom would take us to Seattle to the Paramount or Fifth Ave to see musicals.  I saw David Cassidy in Little Johnny Jones and Yul Brynner in The King & I.

I thought Seattle was very sinister looking.  The “Box the space needle came in” was a giant BLACK GLASS BUILDING.  Steam came out from manhole covers.  The huge ugly noisy viaduct. I remember my mom telling me about the underground tour so I also had this idea in my head that there was a whole other underground city where people lived and that maybe they climbed up and down from the steaming manhole covers to get in and out. So yeah, Seattle when I was a kid = Nightmare City.

What very Seattle things do you most love to share?

The Fremont Troll. The Ballard Locks (well really just Ballard). Pike Place Market. Pike St Fish Fry. I love sending my family Mountain Bars, smoked salmon and Almond Roca during the holidays.

What very Seattle things could (or did) push you to break up with the city?

February.  Sometimes, February just is so bleak and gray that I can’t even hardly function. I’ve thought about leaving because the schools suck and because it sort of feels like it’s getting too big. We’ve thought about Portland and even SoCal but we always.

Describe Seattle in three words:

Cowboy Meets Octopus

Emerald City has been described as playwright S.P. Miskowski’s love note/break-up letter to Seattle. From traditional Ballard to wacky Fremont, Seattle is a place that inspires passionate responses in all who visit. We asked the cast and crew of Emerald City five questions about their ‘love-affair’ with Seattle.

Megan Ahiers as Lillian, Morgan Rowe as Tina. Photo by Omar Willey.

Megan Ahiers, who plays Lillian, shares her Seattle story:

What is your current Seattle relationship status?

A.  Married
B.  In a Relationship
C.  Friends
D.  It’s Complicated
E.   Divorced

How did you meet Seattle?

I went to college in Tacoma and visited Seattle many times.  Once I graduated, I moved to Seattle.

What very Seattle things do you most love to share?

I love coffee.  I love farmer’s markets.  I love the water.

What very Seattle things could (or did) push you to break up with the city?

Passive-aggressiveness.  And the weather, sometimes.

Describe Seattle in three words:

Wet.  Green.  Home.

Jennifer Pratt as Scarlett. Photo by Omar Willey

Theater presents many paradoxes. One has to do with pacing. When actors speak quickly, the action seems more exciting. Yet if they speak too quickly, so that the audience has to strain or can’t understand every word, time seems to slow down. After that, the faster the actors talk the slower the show seems to the audience. This is because viewers are left outside of the story’s details and can’t catch up, so they become bored.

Another paradox has to do with specificity. The more universal you strive to make your play, the less likely it is that people will feel connected to it. Conversely, the more specific and detailed the play, the more an audience will (usually) take it to heart. People will even say that something similar happened to them once, and swear that this character or that must be based on their aunt or sister or mother. The less universal you aim to be, the more universal the work tends to be, especially if it feels real. If it has texture and nuance, no matter how outlandish the story, it seems like something that really occurred.

And another paradox has to do with autobiographical characters. You would expect a writer to understand such a character better than any other. You would think that such a figure would be more vivid, more layered and convincing.

Yet, as Maria Irene Fornes explained in one of her playwriting workshops, the autobiographical character is easy to spot once you suspect that he exists, because he is the black hole on stage. More often than not he is an empty shell moving between more interesting characters and sucking all the energy out of the play. His motives are murky at best, and when he speaks nothing is as clear as it is when other characters are speaking. Why is this? Perhaps because he is too close to his creator and is typically underwritten and over-justified. His motives and subtext are taken for granted by the writer, and are not made explicit on stage.

What to do, when you spot this character and recognize him? Well, you could kill him. You could remove him from the play and start over. Or you could–as I did, recently–examine this character’s reason for being there in the first place, and find a way to set him (or in my case, her) free.

During the talkback session at a Bakery Series reading of Emerald City someone in the audience asked if I saw myself as the woman who reluctantly returns to Seattle. In that early version of the script this character (Scarlett) was doing research for a dissertation. She had taken this journey to write about the Duwamish people. Her reasons for choosing a subject that would take her back to a city she had once loved were unclear. Her feelings about Seattle, when she arrived, were mixed.

Up to that moment I had not considered Scarlett to be autobiographical. I was writing a play with four characters, and I thought the play itself would convey my ideas. Now I took a closer look and discovered that Scarlett lacked a definite desire or specific fear. She was ambivalent, as I was. One moment she liked the city, and then she would feel the need to leave. In terms of human experience this made sense, and in a novel it could be explicated in a number of ways. But the stage is a place where actions that are not explicit and motives that are not defined (at least privately between writer, director, and actor) can kill the story.

I began to examine each character’s purpose in the story. I asked myself what purpose Scarlett needed to serve, to give the play an engine of its own. Since my love for Seattle and its eccentricities was already expressed by another character, I was overdoing the love by making Scarlett ambivalent. I was ambivalent, but the character did not have to be. In order to balance the story and create opportunities for greater conflict between characters I had to let Scarlett be herself and not me. I had to let her fly away, to her own destiny.

The first time this new Scarlett spoke a line about the city, I knew I was on the right track. She was no longer repeating things I’ve said. She was saying what a woman with her background and disappointments might say. She spoke for all of the people I knew who had achieved extraordinary things only to have them destroyed by changing circumstances. She stopped being an academic (again, the vacillation, the ambivalence) and became a journalist who (like several journalists who are friends of mine) had lost her dream job because the place where she worked went out of business. She wasn’t fired and she didn’t quit. Instead her whole world had disappeared, seemingly overnight. She had to accept freelance gigs to get by. She had to scramble to survive in an era when her talent and experience had become less valuable. She resented this deeply, as any intelligent, ambitious adult would.

This sudden upheaval of one’s whole life plan is something we hope we will not have to face, but every day people do have to face such drastic changes. How do we cope? How do we chart a course and keep hold of what we are and what we know, when all the signposts we counted on have been blown to smithereens?

These are a few of the questions asked by Emerald City. Giving Scarlett her voice, full of righteous anger, filled in a part of the play that had been missing from my too-nice autobiographical version. Set free, Scarlett could hate another character. She could be desperate and funny and heroic in her attempt at saving herself. Just as important, dramaturgically speaking, she could fight with other characters and provide a contrasting opinion of a city we tend to get misty-eyed about, sometimes when we need to be clear.

The paradox of my formerly autobiographical character is that she is superficially more like me, the more I allow her to be what I am not. All of the characters are me and they are not. They are the actors and they are not. On stage together I hope they present a recognizable story of yearning and loss that is by turns moving, crazy, and ridiculous–all of it artificially contrived, and paradoxically very much like life.

Megan Ahiers (Lillian)
Megan is delighted to be returning to LiveGirls! Theater, where she has previously appeared in Quickies (Volumes VIII and X), Circus Tracks, Mud Angel, and 800 Words.  She has also worked with Theater Schmeater, Balagan Theater, Pony World Theater, the Paradise Theater School, and Annex Theater.  Megan is a proud member of the Sandbox Artist’s Collective and is on the Steering Committee for 14/48: the world’s quickest theater festival.

Gretchen Douma (Dot)
Gretchen Douma is thrilled to be working on an S.P. Miskowski script with Live Girls!  (She has had the pleasure of doing both before.) Gretchen has appeared on numerous Seattle stages since her  arrival in the Emerald City a dozen years ago, including work with Annex Theater, 14/48, FringeACT, Arts West, Taproot Theatre, Bellevue Civic Theatre, Driftwood Players, and Mae West Fest, to name  just a few.  She has also appeared in the independent feature films Three Cups of Coffee and Homo Heightsand on the nationally syndicated TV series Unsolved Mysteries. Love to Nina and the  puppies!  And many, many thanks to the entire EC team.

Jennifer Pratt (Scarlett)
Jennifer moved to Seattle right after graduating from Penn State during the Bronze Age. She has had the luxury of performing with many fringe companies including ConWorks, Macha Monkey Productions, Open Circle Theatre, Washington Ensemble Theatre and her beloved Annex Theatre. She has dedicated her career as an artist to new and original work and was Annex Theatre’s Literary Manager for… oh about a thousand years. You most recently missed her cunning turn in Annex’s Cocktails At The Center Of The Earth and her masterful performance in WET’s Milk Milk Lemonade.  Jennifer is also proud to have participated in ACT’s YPP and APP as a reader and also as Annex’s delegated director of their YPP plays’ staged readings. Additionally, she is so glad to finally be able to get involved with Live Girls! as something other than an audience member. I think you know what I mean. Amirightladies?

Morgan Rowe (Tina)
Morgan is proud to be working on her fourth S.P. Miskowski play after The Red Room at Hugo House, Daughter’s of Catastrophe with Mae West Fest, and My New Friends, a solo show that premiered at New City Theater.  Morgan has called the Emerald City home for almost 16 years and has been privileged to work often at Seattle Children’s Theater, 14/48, and ACT Theater, where she will be seen this Spring in The Pitmen Painters.  Morgan is in the process of creating a solo work with her director Jean-Michele Gregory, tentatively titled Part of the Fiasco, which will workshop this summer at ACT.

Shawnmarie Stanton (Mary)
Shawnmarie’s prior appearances with Live Girls include Hardball, Bone Portraits, and Quickies X and XI. She’s also been seen on various other stages around town, includingPrinter’s Devil (Shadow Odyssey), Theater Schmeater (1918 and Twilight Zone MarathonIII), Macha Monkey (The Cowgirl Play), Book-It (Baseball Stories), and 14/48 – TheWorld’s Quickest Theater Festival. Many thanks to Meghan and S.P. & much love to R& D.

“The actor is the one irreducible element of theatrical performance.”

These were the first words from Jack Clay the first time the writers from the graduate program sat in on his master class for actors. I took these words to heart, considered them while writing my way through those rather grueling three years, and have returned to them many times since.

Professor Clay was not favoring the actor out of loyalty to his craft. And he wasn’t trying to insult the playwrights, who already knew that their elevated position in the hierarchy of theater was assured. He was passing along an essential truth that writers of drama ought to recognize before going any further:

You can make a theatrical performance without stagecraft, without technology, without a theater, without a director, without costumes and makeup, and without a script. But without a person, a performer, you have nothing. If you will allow your writing ego to fully understand and accept this precept, then whether your work is highly imagistic or dialog-driven, wildly experimental or well crafted and modern, you’re cooking with gas.

I got into theater in high school as a means to balance an academic load that included geometry, American history, Latin, and mandatory, daily P.E. I needed a laugh. When I bought my books for the semester I spotted a drama text and decided to drop journalism–simple as that. For three years my outlet, my self-therapy was theater. I acted in plays and wrote comedy sketches with my friends. It got me through.

In college I majored in Psychology for a year and then switched to English (with an Anthropology minor) to concentrate on the writing workshops I needed just to maintain the appearance of sanity. I knew I wasn’t talented enough as an actor to make it worthwhile pursuing a career in theater (although a T.A. who heard my rendition of “Makin’ Whoopee” insisted that I could make a living in musical comedy–ha!). I wrote short stories, as I had done since I was eight years old, and now I revised, polished, honed them in workshops so vicious that we joked about hosing down the walls when the bloodletting was over.

Several jobs, several story publications, many literary projects, and a major award later I decided to try my luck at theater again. I was broke, my marriage had just ended, and I needed the same thing I had needed in high school to balance geometry and Latin: fun. I needed fun. If I had known how challenging the graduate program would be I might have reconsidered. Anyway, I jumped in with both feet and the first and most valuable thing I learned, which remained true throughout those sleep-deprived, caffeine-stained years was:

“The actor is the one irreducible element of theatrical performance.”

This statement runs contrary to what most writers and directors–and many actors–believe. Writers in particular like to think that their contribution to theater is the most essential. Time and again I’ve heard writers grind on about “the play” (meaning their latest play) and how everybody who touches it is ruining it. “They don’t get it,” writers will say of the actors struggling to make sense of some jumbo-sized nonsense left over from an earlier draft. “They’re messing it up.”

Two things.

1. There is no ideal production of a good play. If it’s good, it’s open to interpretation. It has nuances and it allows room for delightful accidents to occur. It isn’t a mechanism the actor must fit into or die, crushed between its wheels and rotary blades. It is invisible and organic. It moves and it gives, and it changes every time it is performed. This is part of the very nature of dramatic writing, a built-in factor like earthquake engineering. Your job is to construct a platform on which the actors can run, jump, sing, dance, and hurl furniture. Your job is to build it so it doesn’t break. Your ideas have to be in the foundation, not blowing around on the roof like a windsock.
2. The actors know their characters better than you do. They read the play more carefully than you do. They go on stage each night and–although they represent the playwright, director, designers, technicians, front of      house, and theater management–they are alone out there with an audience. The actor is the irreducible element, and no matter how stunning you think your precious play is, the actor’s butt is the one on the line. You can disown the show. The director can take an assignment in another city and leave. The people who handle lights and props and costumes can commiserate with one another even while the horror goes on under the bright lights, where the actors do everything in their power to make the damn thing work, night after night.

Maria Irene Fornes urges writers in her workshop to be more like actors when we write. Don’t say you can’t do it. An actor stands in the wings in costume, ready to walk on stage. Does he stop and say: “Hey, I’m not really feeling the inspiration tonight. I think I’ll have a beer and watch some Jeopardy.” No. He pulls back that curtain and goes on.

“The actor is the one irreducible element of theatrical performance.”

There are playwrights who will blame others for an inadequately constructed script. I’m not perfect, I’ve done my share of whining, but the more I learn about performance and what does and doesn’t work on stage, the more I see the wisdom of concentrating on the person, the performer.

Yes I have ideas. I have themes. I have a story. But it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got a human being at its heart. Theater is about people, and the people on that stage are the actors. Not the writer. My play is one piece of a much bigger project, one that incorporates the expertise of many artists and craftsmen. The people who build the set are as important as the person who builds the script.

Every element is important, but when the house lights go down and the audience looks up, they see actors and they identify with them–whether they are dressed like lions, speaking in rhyming couplets, pushing a bowling ball across the floor, or carrying on what sounds like a natural conversation. Theater is about people, and the actor is the core of it all. Anyone who says otherwise is probably a playwright.

2/21/12

March 9th – April 7th

GET YOUR TICKETS NOW!

Fri/Sat @ 8pm; Saturday, March 17th @ 2pm; Monday, March 19th @ 8pm
Tickets $5-$18 available @ BrownPaperTickets
Playing at West of Lenin | 203 N. 36th St. | Seattle, WA 98103

Triggered by a conversation between Miskowski and Arnette about Seattle’s ever-changing cultural identity, Emerald City is a haunting love note/ break up letter to the city. Miskowski artfully connects the past and the present as she weaves together history and a personal tale of longing, urban identity and change. A writer is forced to return to Seattle, site of personal and professional ruin, to cover the story of Dorothy Dietrich. Crashing with a college roommate and proprietor of an earnest yet doomed tour business, and surreptitiously followed by a lover whose interest may be swayed by a surprising suitor, her life is once again changed by a trip she didn’t want to take to a city she hoped never to see again.

Emerald City features the local talent of:

Cast:
Megan Ahiers, Gretchen Douma, Jennifer Pratt, Morgan Rowe and Shawnmarie Stanton

Production Team:
Director Meghan Arnette
Asst. Director/Production Manager Meggan Davis
Stage Manager Susan Moon
Scenic Designers Brian Stricklan and Michael Lindgren
Costume Designer Jocelyne Fowler
Props Designer Robin Macartney
Lighting Designer Roberta Christensen
Sound Designer Troy Lund
Composer Shawnmarie Stanton.