The event is called “Repro Rights,” and it’s sponsored by the Playwrights Center of San Francisco. The Call for Submissions is open to all playwrights currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Go here for details.

“Mission: Irresistible” debuts in Sheherezade XII, May 11

In “Mission: Irresistible,” the Russia’s troubled Phobos-Grunt Mars Probe, stuck in the wrong orbit for more than a month, has experienced a fiery and uncontrolled fall back to Earth. The same can be said for NASA administrators Wanda’s and Bill’s relationship. Can a Russian astrophysicist make an emergency repair?

This 10-minute comedy with a wacky, offbeat, and sweet sensibility will lead off an evening of short plays produced by Wily West Productions and The Playwrights Center of San Francisco in “Sheherezade,” May 11-26 at Stagewerx in San Francisco.

Inside Tower Labs, drug researcher Rocky Wise hopes to create a love vaccine so he will never again feel the pain of a bad break-up.  BELIEVERS takes place in a dystopian future at the intersection of pharmaceuticals, religion and romance…delivering a prescription-strength dose of whacked out comedy!

Interested actors should email their headshot and résumé to Producing Director, Quinn Whitaker: quinn.j.whitaker (at) gmail.com to request an appointment.

December 8, my play about the Greek goddess Demeter will have a reading as part of the San Francisco Olympians Festival. It’s on my mind since we have a writers’ meeting coming up April 15.

We’ll be meeting with several artists who will be creating the poster art for our plays.

To me, the “juice” of the play is when Winifred leaves the land of men to journey to the land of women, where she meets Sister Martha. This is the symbolic descent into hell that Persephone made (or makes) in the winter, emerging in the spring with new life. Winifred sheds her bumpy tangerine skin and her new, juicier self emerges.

It seems like that would make a great poster! We’ll see. Here’s a link to the SF Olympians site, and to my page on the site.

I found reading the other playwrights’ insights and aspirations both inspiring and enlightening.  I was happy to get the chance to express some thank-you’s, in particular.

Read the whole thing here.

“Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful. As imaging studies by the U.C.L.A. neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger show, the same areas of the brain that register physical pain are active when someone feels socially rejected. That’s why being spurned by a lover hurts all over the body, but in no place you can point to. Or rather, you’d need to point to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the brain, the front of a collar wrapped around the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers zinging messages between the hemispheres that register both rejection and physical assault.

Whether they speak Armenian or Mandarin, people around the world use the same images of physical pain to describe a broken heart, which they perceive as crushing and crippling. It’s not just a metaphor for an emotional punch. Social pain can trigger the same sort of distress as a stomachache or a broken bone.”

Auditions for Believers are April 28, 2012 at Stage Werx!

“Ever notice ‘What the hell?’ is always the right decision?” ~Marilyn Monroe

So, I’ve been doing research and ruminating on a new play idea, this time about an artist trying to recover from an art controversy. I’ve read up on Robert Mapplethorpe and Sally Mann, and looked at the work of Paulette Phillips: specifically, “The Directed Lie.”

Potential titles include: “An Artistic Bent” and “The Comeback,” or “Moments of Truth.” It’s a comedy (no lie).

Here’s a sketchy outline of the idea:
When a scandal nearly destroys her artistic career, Chloe enlists a couple of old friends, Gerald and Nan, to help her mount a comeback.

Stinging from her arrest for “obscenity” and the abrupt closure of her photographic exhibit in the UK, Chloe shows up at the Indiana university where her friends teach, begging to show some new works. “They will offend no one,” Chloe promises. And in the midst of the early-90′s culture wars, Nan and Gerald need that reassurance.

But the theme of Chloe’s comeback collection, “Moments of Truth,” creates more controversy than anything she’s ever done. Her use of a lie detection device to force her photographic subjects to “face the truth” threatens the three friends’ relationship, upends Gerald and Nan’s marriage, and endangers Chloe’s hopes for a comeback.

Major dramatic question: Can Chloe achieve her comeback without ruining her relationship with Gerald and Nan, and the couple’s relationship with each other?

Themes:
Unrequited love
Censorship and self-censorship
Culture Wars
How much truth can a relationship stand?
The artist’s responsibility to her subjects
Photographers’ ethics
The artist as selfish asshole

The musical play “Not Without Our Women,” by Andrew Black, Caroline Altman, and me, tells the story of a critical episode in the development of rights for women. In the mid 1800s, the radical notion that a woman might vote, hold public office, or own her own property as an unmarried individual was unthinkable. This new musical, based upon real people and events, explores what happened when the territory of Wyoming instituted woman suffrage, attracting independent women to the wild frontier.

Come to a free concert reading of “Not Without Our Women” March 12 or 13, 2012, at Thick House in Portrero Hill. It’s co-produced by 3 Girls Theatre Company, along with my writing partners Andrew Black and composer Caroline Altman.

Central Works’ premiere production of “Reduction in Force” was nominated for several awards in the 2011 Broadway World San Francisco Theatre Awards. The results have been tabulated and are in! Gary Graves: Best Director, Gregory Scharpen: Best Sound Design, and Jan Zvaifler: Best Featured Actress, and Best Play. John Patrick Moore and Kendra Lee Oberhauser were nominated for their performances, as well.

It is a People’s Choice-type awards, where fans nominate, and then vote online for their favorites.

I’m delighted, grateful, and gobsmacked! What a way to start 2012.