Actors of the Pacific Playwrights Festival: Being Part of Something Amazing

Pacific Playwrights Festival participants meet-n-greet in 2015.

Hundreds of actors have helped new works come to life at the Pacific Playwrights Festival (PPF) for the past 19 years. Each loves getting a phone call from Joanne DeNaut, SCR’s casting director, because the festival is where s/he can “work on exciting text, with an incredible artistic team, in one of the very best theatres in the country.” We caught up with four PPF veteran actors and talked about their love for the festival.

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Matthew Arkin
2016 PPF: A Perfect Circle by Noah Haidle (reading)
Past PPF: Our Mother's Brief Affair by Richard Greenberg (production); The Prince of Atlantis by Steven Druckman (reading and production); Hope and Gravity by Michael Hollinger (reading); The Whistleblower by Itamar Moses (reading)

Best experience: Working on a new play at an initial reading is one of my favorite parts of being an actor. There is little that is as rewarding as being in on the development of a new piece, working cheek-by-jowl with the playwright and a director as you test and probe the plot, the characters, and their motivations. It really becomes about the text, mining what works, finding out what doesn't, and watching a new work go through its birth pangs as it transforms, ultimately, one hopes, into something that really speaks to an audience.

Favorite festival memory: Working with my brother Adam on the PPF reading of The Prince of Atlantis. Getting to play brother to my brother was so easy and natural, and we know each other so well that I felt it brought a depth to the relationship and the humor that's pretty rare to experience.

Best part of PPF: There's nothing better than grown-up actor camp, getting to spend a week working, socializing and catching up with so many incredible talents from our industry and getting the chance to see their work and learn from them all.

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Emily Bergl
2016 PPF: Wink by Jen Silverman (reading)
Past PPF: The Hiding Place by Jeff Whitty (workshop); Ridiculous Fraud by Beth Henley (reading); Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight by Lauren Gunderson (reading); Kin by Bathsheba Doran (reading)

Favorite memory: My favorite memory of PPF is from when I was doing a reading of Jeff Whitty's The Hiding Place and was in the middle of a very plaintive, quiet monologue. During a pause an old lady in the audience exclaimed, "She has a great nose!" I couldn't really be offended.



The festival’s special quality: I know this word is overused, but PPF is a wonderful reminder that we are part of a community. It's easy to get bogged down with the day-to-day trials and tribulations in the business, but when you walk across that plaza at PPF and bump into so many people that you respect and actually know, you can't help but feel grateful.

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Corey Brill
2016 PPF: Office Hour by Julia Cho (production)
Past PPF: Smokefall by Noah Haidle (production); Five Mile Lake by Rachel Bonds (production); Of Good Stock by Melissa Ross (production)

Inaugurating a role: I've been so lucky to be a part of—so far!—four consecutive PPFs! The festival has allowed me to play a reluctant fetus, a doctoral student in crises, a reluctant fiancé and now a concerned adjunct professor. One of the coolest opportunities for an actor is to work on an original script with the playwright's input, to be a part of the development of a play from the start is kind of an actor's dream. (Plus, nobody can say that they've seen the role portrayed better!)

Favorite festival memory: During the run of Smokefall by Noah Haidle, an important scene transition had a problem: a staircase that was supposed to retract refused to budge and there was no way to continue with the scene. After an apologetic announcement from the stage manager's booth, the great Orson Bean (who played The Colonel in the play) said "I've got this!" and came onstage from the wings. He entertained everyone with about 10 minutes of his classic vaudeville jokes until the problem had been solved! It was so cool to see a master in his element like that!

Importance of the festival: Every play on Broadway or the West End or at the local community theatre was shared with an audience for the first time once. I always think of the audience as the final character and the very first performance as the moment that a "script" becomes a "play." PPF has given me opportunities to be a part of that really special metamorphosis. Each play is unique, but at SCR I've found these things to be constant: you work on exciting text with an incredible artistic team in one of the very best theatres in the country. I'll always be proud to have been involved.

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Linda Gehringer
2016 PPF: A Perfect Circle by Noah Haidle
Past PPF: The Mechanics by Chris Van Groningen (reading); The Butterfly Collection by Theresa Rebeck (reading); Getting Frankie Married—and Afterwards by Horton Foote (production); Lobster Face by Magdalena Gomez (reading); The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones (production); A Naked Girl on the Appian Way by Richard Greenberg (production); The Piano Teacher by Julia Cho (reading); Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight by Lauren Gunderson (reading); The Language Archive by Julia Cho (production); Kin by Bathsheba Doran (reading); The Few by Samuel D. Hunter (reading); The Parisian Woman by Beau Willimon (production); Future Thinking by Eliza Clark (reading)

The festival community: Working on new plays is always exciting but doing it in an atmosphere where there are artists from all over the country who are doing the same thing and then performing the play for the first time in front of an audience of artists and patrons who feel so deeply about new play development is simply thrilling.

Favorite festival moment: One of my favorite PPF stories is when I read Julia Cho's The Piano Teacher. So much of the dialogue was mine it was the first time I realized the fate of this play could be in my hands and I was terrified! I was shaking and couldn't even think straight before I walked on stage, but the warm, wise and welcoming audience just rode the wave of Julia’s beautiful play and they all stood and applauded at the end of that reading on a very early Sunday morning. I just started crying because my sense of relief was so profound. It also was the beginning of an addiction to feeling that passionate about new work.

Best memory: The very first Pacific Playwrights Festival took place in the beginning stages of my relationship with SCR and I was invited to read a play called The Mechanics that Andrew Robinson directed. I remember there were all these tables set up and we were having drinks after some reading or function…..and there were people I knew from around the country and people I was meeting for the first time and, honestly, I felt like I was with the cool kids……and I still do! I keep my fingers crossed every year that Joanne DeNaut, our casting director, will call.

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Rob Nagle
2016 PPF: A Perfect Circle by Noah Haidle
Past PPF: Rest by Samuel D. Hunter; Of Good Stock by Melissa Ross; The Whistleblower by Itamar Moses

Importance of working on a new play: There is nothing like being in the rehearsal room with a writer as the story is being made, or perhaps "found" is a better word. The sense of exploration, discovery, play and collaboration is tremendously exciting—and it doesn't matter if we're crossing out lines or being handed new pages; it always feels like I'm part of something vital and bigger than me.

Favorite roles: Well, in the last two PPFs, I was fortunate enough to be performing in the shows running on the Segerstrom Stage. In 2014, it was Samuel D. Hunter's Rest and in 2015, it was Melissa Ross' Of Good Stock. So last year, it was a real treat when I got to be part of the reading of Itamar Moses' The Whistleblower.

Taking part in PPF means: That I'm on the frontlines of some of the most exciting theatre being created in this country. To have this treasure in our Southern California backyard is profound, and I am so very grateful for it.

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Learn more about the 2016 Pacific Playwrights Festival and purchase tickets.

Literary Low Down: Pacific Playwrights Festival

Playwrights (L to R) Jen Silverman, Kemp Powers, Meg Miroshnik, Noah Haidle and Rachel Bonds

South Coast Repertory's Pacific Playwrights Festival (PPF) has been a launching pad for many plays and playwrights, including David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize winning Rabbit Hole, Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime, Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, and last year's Vietgone by Qui Nguyen.

This year's festival will bring the total number of plays presented in PPF to 12​3, including many that have become mainstays of contemporary American theatre. This year's group of playwrights range from SCR newcomers Jen Silverman and Kemp Powers to returning playwrights Meg Miroshnik (The Droll), Noah Haidle (Smokefall) and Rachel Bonds (Five Mile Lake). The five playwrights in this case, took sometime to share parts of their literary lives and a glimpse into their writing spaces.

Jen Silverman
Wink

Why is this your writing space?
I like walls and corners. And alligators.

What’s the story you read in secret?
My parents love books, and our house was always full of them. Nothing felt that secret. I remember finding and reading Nabokov’s Lolita when I was 10 or 11. I told this to someone once and they were so freaked out that my parents hadn’t stopped me. But the thing my parents always got is that kids ignore the stuff they don’t have the tools to understand….which was clear to me when I reread the book years later. I was like, “Oh, this is about pedophilia? I thought this was about a road-trip!”

When did you know you wanted to be a playwright?
I stumbled into playwriting as a freshman at Brown University. Emily O’Dell was getting her MFA at the time and was responsible for teaching/corrupting the freshman. She was behind so much amazing madness, including a bizarre night of plays from which the only image I retain is a glorious bohemian creature whispering “syphilis” into a cordless mic. Needless to say, hooked for life.

What play changed your life?
Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Caryl Churchill’s Faraway, Basil Kreimendahl’s Orange Julius. At different moments and in different ways, but indelibly.

Kemp Powers
Little Black Shadows

Why is this your writing space?
I primarily write at my dining room table. Largely because the dining room is easily flooded with natural light, which is my preferred lighting method. I'm much more of a daytime than nighttime writer.

What’s the story you read in secret?
Judy Blume's Blubber.

When did you know you wanted to be a playwright?
There wasn't a single "aha" moment. I've always been a storyteller, in one form or another. I guess after spending more than 15 years as a journalist and realizing the stories I now longed to tell were not meant for that medium, I knew it was time to make a change. I'd always been a tremendous theater enthusiast, but I viewed it as the art form that "other people got to do." I started off doing storytelling, and that morphed into a one-man show, which helped me realize I had zero desire to be a performer. Then I started writing for short play and 24 hour play festivals until eventually, someone asked if I had any play ideas of my own that I wanted to write.

What plays changed your life?
A Soldier's Play. Cabaret. The Tempest. My first trip overseas in my early 20s was a spur-of-the-moment flight to London to catch a production of The Tempest at the Barbican. I still have the framed poster from that production. It's a gigantic photo of Prospero.

Meg Miroshnik
Lady Tattoo

Why is this your writing space?
I finally got unpacked from a recent move!

What’s the story you read in secret?
Besides sneaking in a little V.C. Andrews here and there, I think the most important secretive storytelling experience I've ever had was surreptitiously renting a VHS copy of Thelma and Louise. It's a great fricking movie, but I think having snuck in my first viewing has caused me to remember it even more fondly.

When did you know you wanted to be a playwright?
I did a lot of acting as a kid in Minneapolis and, when I was 17, I booked my dream job: the role of Meg in a production of Little Women. It felt like destiny! After all, I'd been named after the character. There was just one moment that I found difficult. I had to laugh at the actor playing Amy and I always found myself getting nervous before that moment, anxious that I might not be able to do it. I was so worried about staying present enough to laugh that I couldn't possibly relax and laugh. It got so bad that matinee school groups would start laughing at me trying to laugh at Amy. After that experience, I knew. I was not an actor. But I was still in love with theater and still wanted a way in. I could write and imagine a moment of pure, uninhibited laughing, but I would need to let others actually live it.

What play changed your life?
Mud by Maria Irene Fornes. I've never actually seen a production of it, but I remember pulling a copy off the library shelf and having that moment where the top of my head kind of lifted off. That play just opened up my sense of what makes a play a play. And it was the first play I remember reading in which a character told a story within a story. I am a sucker for the story within a story. I'm already three-quarters of the way toward liking something if a  character says "once upon a time."  

Noah Haidle
A Perfect Circle

Why is this your writing space?
It’s close to the refrigerator.

What’s the story you read in secret?
If I said it wouldn’t be a secret. If nothing else I hope I’m a man of some discretion.

What play changed your life and coincidentally was the moment that made you want to be a playwright?
My brother was in some murder mystery in the high school cafeteria. I can ask my Mom as to its exact title, but safe to say something along the lines of Gadzooks the Cook is Dead. Here’s a truly dime store psychological profile of my life: my brother is 4 years older than me, was a really really smart kid (PhD Organic Chemistry, Harvard). This was in a small Midwestern public school—he was special—I had every teacher he had, and they all looked at me askance, “So you’re Andrew Haidle’s little brother, huh?”  He played soccer, I played soccer, he played tennis, I played tennis, he was captain of the quizbowl team (group jeopardy for nerds), I was captain of the quizbowl team.  But when I auditioned for Gadzooks the Cook is Dead, or its equivalent, I failed so epically I’ve never tried acting again but became a playwright instead.

Rachel Bonds
Curve of Departure

Why is this your writing space?
I used to write in our apartment in Greenpoint, but that got to be too distracting. Last year I started renting a desk at Brooklyn Writers’ Space in Cobble Hill, which was life-changing. There was something about having to do the 20-minute commute every day, and the absolute quiet there, and just the empty desk with a single lamp that helped my productivity and focus enormously. Plus no one is allowed to talk to you. It’s wonderful.

What’s the story you read in secret?
I would always hide Sweet Valley High books in the pile that my mom would check out for me from the library, which was typically full of actual literature written by esteemed writers. She did not approve of Sweet Valley High. Which, now that I think about it, and look at Google images of the book covers featuring tiny, tan, blue-eyed blond girls, makes a lot of sense.

When did you know you wanted to be a playwright?
I don’t know that there was one moment when I realized the whole thought. I think I learned bit by bit, in almost imperceptible ways, over the two years after I graduated college. I was trying to be an actor, but also writing both prose and plays. At some point I noticed that the people whose successes I would feel jealous of were always writers. There was also one night, very early on in our relationship, when my husband, said to me “I think that acting is ultimately going to make you shrink, and writing is going to make you expand.” He was right. I knew he was right. After that, I slowly let my acting pursuits fall away. I didn’t miss them. And I shifted all of my focus to writing, which felt hard and terrifying, and also discouraging at times, but also right.

What play changed your life?
When I was in college, I saw this play by Forced Entertainment, I think at PS 122, that consisted of Tim Etchells sitting at a table and reading stories and showing videos people had sent to him.  It was called Instructions for Forgetting. I still think about it all the time. I would add Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s No Dice to this list.  And more recently, An Octoroon.

Learn more and buy tickets to the Pacific Playwrights Festival