During the G20 Summit, when every other artistic institution and many businesses shut down, Bricolage, in the heart of downtown’s theatre district and steps away from the global discussions happening at the Convention Center, kept their doors open. Instead of joining in the screaming, anarchist poop-throwing dumpster-rolling protests, Tami (who had participated in her share of protests during her time as an actress in New York and as a steering committee member of THAW Theatres Against War) wanted people to shut up and write it down. So they created a haven, a place of quiet reflection, covering the walls and floors with white paper. At least one word on the wall was the price of admission.  Three hundred people came, including diplomats writing in their different languages.  The next day protestors from those countries responded in kind. Tami was even featured on Chinese television saying, “we need less talking, more listening.” While the protesters rolled dumpsters down Baum Boulvevard, Bricolage was hosting a “global conversation” on Liberty Avenue.

This is just one example of the spontaneous, open-door, responsive spirit of Bricolage.  Past events have included readings, workshops, or productions, which they’ve either hosted or produced. They’ve also included stand up comedy, concerts, and artist installations, such a workshop for local artists with Guillermo Gomez-Pena of La Pocha Nostra during the Three River Arts Festival. They are used to thinking outside the box—so far outside the box that their Midnight Radio Series was not reviewed by local critics, despite being one of the best-attended events this summer, because the critics didn’t know how to categorize the performance. A series of nine radio dramas written by local playwrights (including Guild members Sloan McRae, Robert Isenberg, and myself) were staged in a competition over the summer in front of a live audience, which culminated in a “Smackdown” for the audience favorite. (You can hear the winning radio play by Wali Jamal as a podcast on the Bricolage website). The theatre hopes to continue the series as an ongoing part of their programming.

When our conversation turns to In The Raw, the latest in their free programming, watching Tami and Jeffrey brainstorm is a lesson in how one “makes artful use of what’s at hand.” As they threw ideas back and forth, building and revising off of each other, Jeffrey suddenly turned to me and asked, “What do you think?” My response became part of the bricolage. Essentially a play lab that evolved out of their previous reading series, In the Raw is an on-going exploration of how to best help the artists that they care about. Tami and Jeffrey see themselves as a “resource,” helping local artists help themselves.  They offer space as well as promotional assistance through their website and connections with their solid audience base, who are always ready to come to the next free event. But they remain open to other, yet-to-be-imagined ways of moving playwrights and their work to the next stage, of giving them a start and then sending them out into the world.

In the four years that Bricolage has been at the 937 space, it’s developed not only an audience, but also a cadre of artists and projects to support. The next big production,  Great White, by Matt Morrow, is a twelve-person opera, inspired by the events of the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks. Bricolage is also hospitable to new friends who knock at their door. In November, they enthusiastically hosted the Dramatists Guild town hall meeting and our first PlaySlam. Hearing the diversity of voices and recognizing the spark of creative energy in the room, both Tami and Jeffrey expressed an interest in hosting future Slams. In short, what they’ve started with Bricolage is an ongoing, multi-partnered conversation with the community. I invite you to go downtown to Bricolage, introduce yourself, see what’s going on, and involve yourself in the conversation.

For more information about Bricolage, 937 Liberty Avenue:  www.webbricolage.org

Tammy Ryan
tryan@dramatistsguild.com

“I’m a playwright, but I was always more than just a playwright,” he begins, describing his background in fundraising and how he came to be managing director for 13P, “I like to make things happen.”  13P developed after a group of playwrights Handel knew from the O’Neill Theater Conference got together to complain as playwrights do (“we were whining”) about the lack of production opportunity in New York.  Along with encouragement from his wife, poet and teacher Joy Katz, “to be more of a positive force in the world,” Handel and his group decided they wouldn’t “develop plays” instead, they’d “produce them.”  (For more information on 13P see the Jul/Aug 2009 issue of The Dramatist or go to www.13P.com) 

Handel demonstrates an alternative model: instead of an NEA grant for a reading series, how about a grant to do good cheap productions, so people would see they were good, helping many of these productions move to more visible and prestigious theatres.  For playwrights who live in a city such as Pittsburgh where local theatres don’t widely produce their own playwrights, Handel’s idea is instructive.  First bit of advice: hire a producer, second, hire a fundraiser, then allow the playwrights, while supporting each other by coming to each production, to otherwise just be playwrights.  

Since the last of the thirteen playwrights will be produced in 2011, Handel was looking for the next opportunity to steer the course of American Theatre and “the best way to do that is to help guide future playwrights.”  Handel wants to create more opportunities for playwrights to collaborate with other theatre artists while encouraging them to be more ambitious and daring in their writing.  In his classes he focuses on formal issues like structure and “the mechanics of communication” rather than content.   He also believes it’s important to teach students about the world they are in and where their plays belong in it.  Are you writing plays for the regional theatre, or do you take a “rock n roll approach” to making theatre?    Once you decide where you belong, then you need to learn how to make that happen. 

Departing from the usual profile for people in this job, Handel is setting down some roots.  He’s brought his family with him and bought a house in Point Breeze.  Handel thinks it’s an exciting time for new writers and he wants his students to “get out of their garrets” and into the world.  Pittsburgh playwrights can learn from him too.

tryan@dramatistsguild.com

The Three Rivers Arts Festival, now celebrating its 50^th anniversary, presents Pittsburgh PlayWorks’ (PPW) Play Development Lab series, featuring staged readings of original plays by award-winning and emerging playwrights.  From June 7^th through June 14^th, 2009, eight new plays will be read by professional actors, exposing the playwright’s craft and creative process for theatre professionals and audience members alike. 

Six PPW playwrights, all of whom are members of the Dramatists Guild, will participate in the Festival this year.  Scott Frank, aka T.S. Frank, a theatre professor and storyteller who has seen his plays produced locally, nationally and internationally, pens “Three Women,” a unique work about a selkie striving to retrieve her seals skin from two daughters who have stolen it.  His academic counterpart, William Cameron, winner of the 2007 Julie Harris Playwriting Award, addresses plagiarism in “Cheating History,” wherein a disgruntled professor explores the flip side of academia upon his involvement in a cheating scheme and examines the relational effects of grief in “Not Fade Away” as shifting alliances, disintegrating intimacies and fading love corral a group of longstanding friends.

Denise Pullen, the third of three theatre professors in the core group and recipient of both state and national playwriting awards and honors, illuminates autism, more specifically the journey of a young man who upon flight from his family and in the midst of raging traffic confronts an unsuspecting saint in a sandwich suit.  Sheila Kelly, a mother, wife and former psychotherapist recently on the boards with a world premiere, addresses the power struggle between fate and choice in “Runaways” during which time a group of characters exert their mental and physical powers with an eye toward maintaining their lives upon the unexpected death of their author.

Ginny Cunningham, a writer of fiction, memoir, non-fiction and plays, illuminates the life of “Mother Marian,” a nun transcending inner conflict and social condemnation in order to confront issues that define herself, her religious community, and her world during a period of historic change.  Jozef Wawrzyniec Spychala, Artistic Director of Pittsburgh PlayWorks, underscores the impact of urban renewal upon a group of Pennsylvania sex workers, circa 1951, in “Chancing Liberty,” and highlights an ailing mother’s desperation as she strives to find care for her adult children, one with Tourette’s Syndrome and the other with autism, in “Stilling the Storm.”

PPW builds on the processes of theatre labs from the sixties in New York City.  These groups were committed to bringing forth diverse artistic voices and positioning the collaboration of playwrights, directors and actors as vital to the development of top-quality theatrical experiences, and many in service of social justice and change.

Finally, Pittsburgh PlayWorks recognizes that the ultimate theatrical experience is one where the playwright’s words and actions as well as the characters who communicate them, the artists who actualize them, and the audience members who bear witness to them germinate and reverberate from that empathic space within our beings – the human mirror neuron system – and, as such, becomes our wellspring from which understanding, validation and change emerge and flow.  Pittsburgh PlayWorks dedicates itself to fostering a playwriting collective to do just that.

JozefSpychalaPhD@gmail.com