Miami Herald , FL
July 11 2004
Playwrights up for Downstage
BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
The men and women clustered around a table in the cozy old Band
Cottage on the Ransom-Everglades campus are, just like the ones
meeting across the street in a cramped upstairs apartment at the
Coconut Grove Playhouse, both daring and vulnerable.
All of them are writers looking for guidance and feedback. Not
journalists, novelists, short story writers or poets but playwrights,
people who tell stories through drama and dialogue. They summon
worlds from their imaginations, invent characters to live in those
worlds, then (if they are both skilled and fortunate) begin the
collaborative process of bringing their play to life on a stage.
Developing scripts so that they’re ready for that last step is what
Downstage Miami — the program that has brought those men and women,
Miami playwrights and their mentors, together — is all about.
”Downstage Miami allows a group of people to investigate what they
have to say in an environment that can guide them, so they don’t keep
their writing in drawers,” says Leslie Ayvazian, author of Nine
Armenians, High Dive and other works, and one of the program’s mentor
playwrights.
“In these situations, you learn as much as you teach. I’m delighted
by the way their work has leapt forward, through their own discipline
and the way they have learned to critique each other. It’s kind and
generous feedback and criticism. Not harmful.”
HELPING HANDS
This protected, purposeful nurturing of South Florida playwrights and
their scripts in professionally led workshops was the brainchild of
Rem Cabrera, chief of cultural development for Miami-Dade County’s
Department of Cultural Affairs and the Downstage Miami program
administrator.
When he was studying for his master’s degree in creative writing at
Florida International University, he recalls, “I tried to write a
play and had no one to help me. Our theater community here has just
exploded over the last 10 to 15 years, and new works have to arise
from this community. There wasn’t any support structure.”
After consulting with theater folks and the leadership of the Theatre
League of South Florida, Cabrera launched the program in 2001. Former
Theatre League head Barry Steinman suggested the name Downstage
Miami; to Cabrera, it represents “the spotlight at the center edge
of the stage, like the bow of a ship. It signifies a high focus of
attention. It connotes progress and forward movement.”
And in this still-early stage in its evolution, the program seems to
be living up to its title.
Already, it has attracted some of the biggest names in play-writing
— including Pulitzer Prize winners Edward Albee (who commented, when
Cabrera shared that his dog had destroyed his copy of Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, ”Yes, everybody’s a critic”) and Nilo Cruz, as
well as Arthur Kopit, A.R. Gurney, Eduardo Machado, María Irene
Fornés, Jeffrey Sweet and Ayvazian — as mentors.
Kopit, mentor to the 2004 writers, has found the city “a very, very
rich dramatic and cultural broth to dip into … something you don’t
have in Toledo or Buffalo or even New York. It brings in so many
conflicting sensibilities.”
Its dramatic stories, he says, “have to do with the essence of the
United States as a melting pot. With corruption, dreams, commitment
to culture and the changing of cultures. … The background of
someone who’s lived in Miami, whether they’re Latino or not, is
influenced [by that]. That’s very powerful, enriching and
stimulating.”
The past and present participating Miami playwrights, chosen in a
”blind” process in which their submitted writing samples are
considered without identifying information attached, have backgrounds
as different as their scripts — stories about foreign adoption,
young love, an incestuous affair, a lesbian couple dealing with a
troubled grown son, a daughter yearning to flee her wealthy Cuban
father’s tyranny.
Susi Westfall, for example, is a founder of City Theatre, formerly
one of its producing artistic directors and a play-writing teacher at
the New World School of the Arts. Lauren Feldman is a young actress
and playwright whose work is being performed (she’s also part of the
acting company) in City Theatre’s Summer Shorts Festival at the
Broward Center through mid-July.
Actor-dancer-playwright Ricky J. Martinez is appearing in King Lear
and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at New Theatre this summer, and there
are plans for a New York production of his Downstage Miami play, Sin
Full Heaven, in late spring of 2005.
Buck Fever, the first play by actor Juan C. Sanchez, is making it to
New York even sooner. Sanchez, who pays his bills by working as an
assistant house manager at the Coconut Grove Playhouse and whipping
up drinks in the café at Books & Books on Lincoln Road, is getting a
production of his play by the terraNOVAcollective at Manhattan’s Blue
Heron Arts Center Oct. 29-Nov. 20. Of Downstage Miami, Sanchez says
simply, “I think the program made me a playwright. Leslie [Ayvazian]
was the first person who called me a playwright. I walked into [this]
with 15 pages of a first play and 25 years of desire. It’s obviously
very important and life-affirming.”
Dancer-choreographer and New World faculty member Gerard Ebitz, who
says of his fellow writers ”I trust these people,” became a
Downstage playwright. So did Arnold Mercado, poet, playwright,
screenwriter and fencing instructor who writes in both English and
Spanish; David Caudle, whose Feet of Clay just won the Samuel French
One-Act Competition; and actor-playwright David Cirone, who has
monologues from his Downstage-developed play The Lucky Believe
included in the just-published Best Men’s Monologues of 2003 and Best
Women’s Monologues of 2003.
STAYING POWER
At first, mentor playwrights came in for one weekend each. But
Ayvazian has kept working with her group, e-mailing back and forth,
commenting on revisions, returning to Miami in late June for another
round of work with them at Ransom-Everglades. And Kopit has led all
of this year’s sessions, even arranging for a June reading of
Feldman’s Penguins on Parade at New York’s Lark Theater, where he
runs a play-writing workshop.
”It was her first full-length play, so when she was finished, she
wasn’t sure it was good. It was important that she hear it quickly,”
says Kopit, who wanted to get her some fresh reactions.
“I’m in New York, and it was convenient for me and a useful and
essential thing for her. … I could get some people whose opinions I
value to come, like [playwrights] David Ives and Jenny Lynn Bader —
people whose judgment I trust and who know what not to say. You’re
not there to tell the writer how to fix the play; there’s always
something that’s not working, and the writer is very vulnerable.”
True enough, but Feldman intends to do a significant rewrite before
her fall reading in South Florida and believes what she got at the
Lark was “tons of exquisite feedback, and the whole experience was
nothing short of extraordinary. … I never expected an opportunity
like this could exist for a young Miami playwright.”
While Kopit was in Miami in late June, Caudle got to hear his play
Visiting Ours read in that borrowed Coconut Grove Playhouse apartment
space by some of South Florida’s best actors: Pamela Roza, Angie
Radosh, Tara Vodihn, Marjorie O’Neill-Butler and Ian Hersey.
Afterwards, Kopit solicited reaction from Caudle’s fellow playwrights
and the actors, guiding the discussion, offering his own
observations, giving Caudle lots to contemplate.
And whether the playwrights are doing writing exercises, reading
their own scripts aloud, getting feedback from their mentors and
fellow playwrights, hearing actors read their scripts or opening the
work up to public readings at places like New Theatre and GableStage,
it’s all part of the Downstage Miami process, a process designed to
let Miami voices enter theater’s mainstream.
And that, says Kopit, is a great thing.
”These are all really good writers who are working on very
interesting subjects. This isn’t about getting something right so
you’ll have a hit play; it’s about the process of learning how you
write,” he says. “A good play is so idiosyncratic [that]
playwrights aren’t jealous of each other’s success. When you see a
good play, it excites you. It reminds you of why you do it.”