Grantwriting 101 With Claire Willett

DATES & TIME:   Mondays in September, 7-9 p.m.

LOCATION: 5917 NE 60th Avenue Portland, 97218

COST: “Grants For Organizations” – $200, 4 classes (9/12, 9/19, 9/26, 10/3); “Grants For Individuals” (10/10)

OVERVIEW: The “Grants For Organizations” program includes four two-hour classes.  During the first hour, we will cover a comprehensive overview of the grantwriting/submission process and tools needed to put a grant together (see below for class topics). During the second hour, we will break into small groups for a hands-on project where each organization will work together to prepare a general operating grant for their organization to submit.  (Unaffiliated individuals will be assigned to the organization groups.)  The “Grants For Individuals” program is a two-hour class covering the basics of submitting an individual artist or project grant, and will primarily focus on local government grants.  We will also cover alternative fundraising tools like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter.

Topics

Monday, September 12th: What’s In a Grant?

In this introductory session, we’ll go over the basics of writing a basic operating grant from start to finish.  We’ll also cover supporting documents you’ll need for your grants, from accurate financials to a juicy mission statement, and the main numbers and statistics you’ll need to be able to lay your hands on (What’s your EIN?  How many of your subscribers are donors?  What’s your percentage of board giving?)

Monday, September 19th: Foundations 101

An overview of the regional and national arts funding community, with a list of recommended foundations every nonprofit arts organization should apply to.  We’ll discuss foundations vs. corporations vs. government grants.  We’ll also cover how to create an annual grants calendar, how to match a project to a funder, how to do prospect research on the cheap (HINT: you really don’t need an expensive subscription to that foundation research website!), do’s and don’ts for foundation trustee meetings and site visits, and what they’re really looking for when they’re reading your grant, including some of the most common reasons your grant might be declined. 

Monday, September 26th: Participant Q&A

In this class we will go over the participant-submitted questions (see form below) and discuss some of the commonly-held misconceptions about grants, grantwriting and fundraising in general.

Monday, October 3rd: Project Presentations

Each group will have an opportunity to share an excerpt from their grant.

So 2amtheatre.com, a national idea-sharing blog community focused on new play development and innovation in the theatre, asked me to share my reflections on my recent writing residency in Connecticut. Click here for cool photos of my residency with ruminations on creativity, how much I hate writing stage directions, why I loved my artist housemates so much, what I’m REALLY doing when I say I’m “writing,” and why I’ll never be Coco Chanel.

PAGE COUNT: 18

The first time I met Gilberto Del Campo, he came into my office at Artists Rep to tell me I had misspelled his name in the Take Me Out playbill.  I looked at this tall, dark, handsome actor that all the girls in the office had been swooning over for weeks, and I thought, “Great.  He thinks I’m racist and can’t spell Mexican names.  Now he’s never going to marry me.”

That was in the spring of 2005.  And if you had told Claire-From-Five-Years-Ago that a day would come when 90% of her texting would be to and from Gilberto, well, first she would probably say “What the hell is texting?” because she was not very tech-savvy in those days, but then she would tell you that you were out of your mind.  It was not an auspicious beginning, and we did not seem destined to be BFFs.

Gilberto is essentially my exact polar opposite in many, many ways.  He is tall, handsome and, as my mother once put it, “smoldering,” like someone who should play Heathcliff or star in a telenovela.  I am giggly and loud and have a giant Polish nose, and it would be charitable to call me “medium height.”  We’re both Catholic, but we wear it differently.  He needs a little bit of a kick in the ass sometimes to be sociable, while I make new friends in like ten seconds.  He’s more serious than I am; for example, right now he is reading Matterhorn, a book about the Vietnam War, while I am re-reading Right Ho, Jeeves! for the five hundredth time.  I’m from Portland (real Portland, grew-up-within-the-city-limits Portland, not I’m-saying-Portland-but-really-I-mean-Beaverton), and I see my family at least once or twice a week.  He’s from a small-town in Mexico and all his family still lives there.  He worked for years as a baker, so he’s by nature a morning person, whereas I don’t like to go to bed before 2 and am reliably 20 minutes late whenever we meet for coffee in the morning if he sets the time before 11 a.m.  He hates when people talk about his looks; when I’m dressed up and looking good, I shamelessly fish for compliments.  (“Tell me how cute I look!”)  In moments of extreme emotion, he cries and I laugh.  I’m the brain.  He’s the heart.  It’s an odd partnership, but it works.

Gilberto auditioned for my last play, How the Light Gets In, and my director Jessica and I were absolutely beside ourselves with delight when he came in to read, because he was magically perfect for the one crucial role where we had absolutely no idea who to cast.  As Brother Magnus, the good-looking and thoughtful Benedictine monk who befriends and counsels the troubled Molly, Gilberto was warm and funny and lovely and magnetic, and we all fell a little bit in love with him.  Magnus was secretly my favorite character, and Gilberto made him even better.  So when, a month or so after the show closed, he emailed me with a potential project idea, I was happy to help.  He had written a short story about a trip he had taken to Mexico to see his family, and he wanted help turning it into a play.  Quite frankly, because I liked him, I probably would have said yes even if the story was terrible.  But it turned out that he’s not just a terrific actor.  He can also write.  The story was fantastic.  The more we talked about it, the more excited I got.

So, here we are.  Writing a play.  Together.  18 pages and counting, and we both think it’s turning out pretty great.

This isn’t to say there haven’t been complications.  For one thing, he’s never written a play before, and I’ve never written with anyone.  It’s his story, and it’s a nonfiction piece about his family, so I feel an incredible obligation not to, like, make shit up that does a disservice to real living people.  I do feel, however, that at a certain point, in turning a 3 page short story into a full-length play, you have to kind of take some liberties, and he’s getting more comfortable letting me off the leash a little bit.  But we still do our best work when we’re in the room together and talking through it.  Which is troublesome, because we are like the two people with the world’s most ridiculous schedules.  Another challenge of this process has been trying to restrain everyone’s enthusiasm a little bit; he told his family about the play, and they were all really excited, which was great, and are working on pulling some strings with the cultural affairs office in their county to get funding for a production of it in Mexico.  Which is, you know, awesome.  Except we have like twelve pages written.  But everyone wants to see a finished play.  Which we do not have.  No pressure . . .

I’m very sensitive to the fact that this is Gilberto’s story.  His heart is in it to a completely different degree than mine.  It’s a strange feeling to have someone pour their heart out to you on paper, and then you go through and edit and move things around and say “I know, but structurally it works much better if he says that here instead of here.”  So weird.  I also know I’m one of those people who needs to forcibly prevent herself from completely taking over other people’s projects.  So I’ve been trying really hard to find ways for us both to be involved in the writing process together.  One of the things we tried, which actually worked really well, was kind of a he-said/she-said thing.  We took the main couple of the story – Leo and Rose – and picked a scene we had more or less outlined, and had discussed at length, but had not begun writing yet.  Then we sat on the couch in my living room with our coffee and wrote the scene together.  I wrote all of Rose’s lines, and he wrote Leo’s.  The catch?  We couldn’t talk to each other or communicate in any other way except through the character’s dialogue.  It was definitely a challenge.  Figuring out how to end it was the hardest part, actually; I kept writing “I’m wrapping up this conversation” lines and Gilberto would just ask a new question.  And there were a few times where he (Leo) would ask a question and I (Rose) would deflect it, and I could sense his (Gilberto’s) frustration.  It was really interesting.  What I liked best about it, though, was it gave me a whole new level of insight into how he viewed those characters, so it helped flesh out the picture in my head.

Tonight’s exercise was similar.  We’ve been talking about a couple different places to use a split-stage effect, where two scenes overlap; he worked on a letter Leo writes to Rose, which will be heard in voice-over while Rose is in a different part of the stage world, talking to her mother (which I wrote).  Then we swapped, read each other’s stuff, and I tackled the weighty task of smushing the two scenes into one so they flow.  Lest you think I’m doing all the work and letting Gilberto off the hook, you should know that every time we finish a scene he takes it home and translates the whole thing into Spanish.  (Note to self: if we’re doing a play in Mexico I’m really going to have to learn to speak Spanish.)
It’s interesting that, considering how different we are, our writing styles match very well.  Below are two lines from the script, one that I wrote and one that he wrote.  See if you can guess whose is whose.

A) My stomach turns and I feel like I’ve eaten something dead, unnatural, and it’s spoiling inside of me, drying me like salted fish in the sun.

B) There’s something beautiful and terrifying about the ocean at night.  When you’re walking along the shore and you can hear it out there – you can feel it pulling you but you can’t see it.  It’s just a blacker blackness than the sky.

No, I’m not going to tell you.  You’re just going to have to come see it.

FIRST LINE: It wasn’t given to Chiara Offreduccio to know how her story would end while she was still living it, just as it is not given to any of us to know, when we are born into the world, what will become of our lives.

LAST LINE: Free.

———

PLAY #2 – “To Draw Back the Veil” (the Catholic school kids play)

FIRST LINE: The clock struck thirteen. That was the first thing that went wrong. But only Francesca heard it.

LAST LINE: He who believes in Me, even if he die, shall live; and whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.

———

PLAY #3 – “That Was the River, This Was the Sea” (the Gilberto play)

FIRST LINE: My mom told me once that we never understand the important things in our lives while they’re actually happening to us.

LAST LINE: Because the only thing stronger than gravity is the heart, and because we need to remember.

The first time I ever went to the Drammys I was nineteen years old.  I was an intern at Portland Center Stage during Chris Coleman’s very first season as artistic director.  I remember exactly what I wore – a red dress and a floor-length satin leopard-print duster.  Because that was how I dressed for special occasions back in college.  (And still would, if my mother hadn’t forced me to quit leopard print cold turkey.)  I was giddy and starstruck and even though I had only seen a handful of shows (and thus did not have terribly strong opinions), I was thrilled to be there.  My clearest memory (besides what I wore) was of coming home late at night and finding my mom reading in the kitchen; she liked to wait up for us when we were out doing fun things so she could get the gossip when we came home.  The kettle was on for tea – she had a kind of sixth sense about making tea so the hot water was always ready when needed – and we sat at the kitchen table and I told her all about it, and she said, “Someday that’s going to be you up there.”  So if it ever is, we will all know that Theresa Willett called it first, ten years ago, when I was a college freshman with nary a stage credit to my name outside of high school.

When I worked at Artists Repertory Theatre, I never missed the Drammys.  Artists Rep always bought a table, so we had great seats, and it was usually the party kids (me, Katy, Trisha) who attended rather than the grownups (Allen and Jill), so we were plenty lively.  I longed for the day when we would win an award and there would be no one from the company there to accept it so Katy and I could go up onstage, but unfortunately, Stephanie Mulligan usually beat me to it, and Literary Director trumps Grants Manager.  Sad times.  But even if we didn’t win anything, I loved it.  Nearly everyone in the room last night I knew, I knew from my years at Artists Rep.  I was the girl who stalked actors to collect their bios and headshots for the playbill, who staffed them and occasionally art-directed on photo shoots, who ran around carrying wine crates in high heels at opening nights.  I got to know a lot of actors and designers through that process, and it made me a little sad and self-pitying when I moved to writing grants full-time and no longer really had any involvement with cast or crew outside of parties.  I hold a special place in my heart for the Artists Rep actors who still know who I am even though they have had no obligation to remember my name in like five years (the Chrises Murray and Harder, Kirk Mouser, Todd Van Voris . . . )

Artists Rep took some (in my opinion) undeserved slams last night implying it was essentially theatre for the elderly.  As a longtime fan of their work – and a girl still on the right side of thirty – I call bullshit.  Let’s not perpetuate the lame stereotype that the classics are only for old people.  No one would do Shakespeare and Arthur Miller and Chekhov anymore if they weren’t relevant.  I came up at Artists Rep; that’s where I cut my teeth in the Portland theatre, so I’m very protective of Allen Nause and Jon Kretzu and their artistic vision.  And even though I did laugh out loud at the joke last night about their capital campaign (“They built a $28 million staircase!  You can walk up AND down it!”  Hilarious), I draw the line at slams against their artistic product.  Did you see Allen Nause in Death of a Salesman?  No?  Then shut up.

(End of rant.  I swear.)

Interestingly, the theatre whose work I’ve seen the most this year was neither PCS nor Artists Rep (where I can occasionally score free tickets), but Miracle Theatre.  I am ashamed to say I had never seen a Miracle production until this year (I know!  I know!  I’m horrible!), but I saw both El Quijote and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents this year, as well as their reading of Oedipus El Rey with Classic Greek Theatre, and those three productions were three of the best things I saw all year.  It says a lot about how much I loved Quijote when I tell you that I had to switch seats at intermission because I was getting RAINED ON IN MY SEAT, but I liked it so much I didn’t want to leave even though they offered me comps to come back another day.  (By the way, may I just add by way of a side note that I think Miracle has some of the best customer service of any theatre in town.)  Though I was hoping my date/writing partner/friend/pretend boyfriend Gilberto Del Campo would snag a Best Actor for his stellar work as Don Quijote, and disappointed that he didn’t, I was thrilled to see them pick up solidly well-deserved accolades for that show’s awesome set and costume designs, as well as two awards with money attached – $1500 for new tech equipment and $5000 to send Marketing Director Tim Krause to an international theatre festival in Chile.

My favorite part of the Drammys – actually, my favorite part of any awards show – is the acceptance speeches that really come from the heart, the ones where you know that person genuinely had no idea they were going to win, and are absolutely beside themselves with excitement and gratitude and joy.  Even my cold dead heart was melted when the lovely Maureen Porter broke down in tears because her award for Outstanding Actress In a Lead Role was presented to her by actor Isaac Lamb, who happens to be her godson . . . or when the tiny adorable little girl who starred in that awesome production of Pinocchio everyone’s been talking about all year got up to the microphone and just giggled for like five straight minutes because she was so excited . . . or when Spencer Conway sprinted down from the balcony, drink in hand, to accept his Best Supporting award with the air of someone who was so sure they weren’t going to win that they’re already drunk fifteen minutes into the award presentations.  I didn’t see 4.48 psychosis at defunkt, but they absolutely CLEANED UP last night and you could tell that the company was absolutely jumping out of their skins with giddy excitement and pride, and it was really nice to see such a giant heap of awards bestowed upon a comparatively tiny theatre company.  It says a lot about how egalitarian the Drammy committee really is when you realize that the two “Outstanding Production” winners were from the city’s largest company and one of its smallest.

During the last Fertile Ground Festival, I got a lot of press and visibility around my play How the Light Gets In – far more than I did with my previous year’s show Upon Waking. Most of the Portland theatre artists who know who I am, know me as a grantwriter or from when I used to do PR and development at Artists Rep, so throughout the festival I kept waiting for somebody to make a snarky comment or make me feel unwelcome at the cool kids’ table because I was an admin person.  “Oh, how cute, Office Girl thinks she’s an artist.”  But absolutely nobody did.  In fact, the exact opposite happened.  Stellar actors I’ve looked up to for years emailed me saying things like, “I can’t wait to see your show, I had no idea you were a playwright too!” or “Let me know what your next project is, I’d love to audition for you!”  I felt wholly embraced and welcomed into the community as an artist.  I used to feel like it was presumptuous of me to say I was a playwright, but when I’m in a room with those people they treat me like I’m an artist.  Of all the Drammys ceremonies I’ve attended, as an employee of various arts organizations, this is the first one where I’ve felt like I genuinely belonged there on my own merits.  Every time a friend introduced me to someone, they didn’t say, “This is Claire, she’s a grantwriter,” or “This is Claire, she used to work for A.R.T.”  They said, “This is Claire.  She’s a playwright.”

One day, Mom.  I swear.

Like most people, I remember the details of that day incredibly clearly.  Half-awake, and wearing one of my tawdry polyester Mrs. Robinson nightgowns, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom I shared with my housemate Evan when he banged on the door and yelled something about the World Trade Towers, which I barely understood, and I did not come out to the living room to ask him because of the tawdriness of the aforementioned nightgown.  I didn’t actually get what had happened until later.  My morning class, Oceanography 101, was canceled; we all just sat in the auditorium in Olin Hall and watched the news on the giant projector screen.  People were walking around in a daze, they were talking about Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, and all I kept thinking was, “I’m supposed to understand what’s happening here but I don’t.”  It didn’t feel real.

My afternoon class that day was Playwriting, with a visiting professor from New Jersey named Chuck Evered.  Nobody could figure out whether or not class was canceled – some professors were canceling and some weren’t – so we all just decided to go anyway.  Chuck was several minutes late to class but the second he walked in we figured out why.  I had forgotten until that moment that he was a naval reserve officer.  He had cut his hair and was wearing his uniform, because his unit had been deployed to Ground Zero and he was leaving that afternoon.  He couldn’t even stay until the end of class.  Suddenly, then it was real, because a person I knew and cared about was going there and could get hurt.  He told us he didn’t know how long he was going to be there.  Somebody asked him, “What do you want us to do while you’re gone?”  And he just said, “Write about it.”

Write about what?  Everybody hated this assignment.  It was too fresh and painful for some people, too distant and alien for others.  We all agreed that none of us had any business trying to craft a story out of something this huge and significant.  We had no right.  We had nothing to say.  We had nothing to contribute to the national dialogue.  We were playwriting students.  This was beyond us.  People were angry – so, quite frankly, their plays weren’t very good.

I was crazy about Chuck Evered and I didn’t want to let him down, but I also knew that I was not capable of completing the assignment he had given without writing something that was terrible.  So I tried something different.  Over the next couple weeks while Chuck was gone, I sketched out a short play, in seven brief scenes, about a young Catholic schoolgirl in the Bronx named Francesca, whose best friend Dominic had been killed in the Trade Tower attacks.  It was only given the briefest of mentions, because the bulk of the story was really about Francesca’s grief; she had visions of Dominic’s ghost while sitting in chapel, and the parish priest believed she was experiencing the divine while her mother was afraid she was having a nervous breakdown.  My play was by far the longest, and by far the least connected to the actual events of 9/11, but I thought parts of it worked pretty well, and Chuck liked it a lot.   When he came back from New York and read it, he told me, “You need to keep working on this.  This is a real play.”  So I dived in, and for the rest of the semester this was my project.  Chuck was, and still is, one of my greatest mentors as a writer, and if this play ever goes anywhere it’s due in large part to the way he pushed me to keep going on it.  Even though there were times when the response from other students sometimes made me feel like there was no place in the theatre world for the kind of stories I wanted to tell – stories about faith and ordinary families and people just muddling through and trying to do the best they can – Chuck believed in me from the get-go.  And he was a real writer, so that meant a lot.  I haven’t seen him in years and we rarely talk, but he’s still my guy and I’m a writer today because of him.

As soon as it was no longer a class assignment, but a real play I was writing, I scrapped the 9/11 connection, and changed the story so Dominic was killed in a car accident.  It gave me more room to breathe.  I also felt, as I fleshed out the characters, that the story was too constricted, and also too sad; I wanted to open it up a little bit more.  So I interspersed the scenes of Fran and her family with the story of Saint Francis and Saint Clare in 12^th-century Assisi, Italy, to parallel the relationship between Fran and Dominic.  The play was called Requiem: God Breathing, and when I finished it that semester it was about 40 pages long – very short for a full-length play, but long for a one act.  I submitted it to the Whitman College One Act Festival anyway, and held my breath.  I found out later that, although everyone knew it was too long, mine was the only play the entire faculty panel agreed on, and even though it came in 3^rd at the festival itself (it was crippled by the cuts we had to make), it was the panel’s favorite by a long shot.  My cast and my director were terrific, but I was studying abroad in Ireland when the play was produced so I never saw it myself and wasn’t there to make script cuts.  In retrospect this may have been a good thing, since in the back of my mind I never viewed the cuts as permanent.  Everyone who read it the way I wrote it understood the story and liked it.  People who saw it cut down to 25 minutes had a harder time.  I did a staged reading of the full version when I came back from Ireland the next year and I heard from a number of people that the play improved vastly when they heard the whole uncut version.

Ever since then, every 3 years or so I would pick the script back up again, fiddle with it, change some things, and mess around, then toss it aside again in favor of a new project.  But in the back of my mind it was always there; I would hear a song and think, “Oh, this would be perfect in Requiem,” or I would have an idea for some great camera shot and decide I should turn the whole thing into a screenplay.  But it never went anywhere, so I just had about 400 different drafts and versions of the same six-character play.

Then, a month or so ago, while waiting for Gilberto to finish the play he was in so we could get back to work on Script #1, I decided I needed a writing project to play around with in the interim so I could try and force myself to be more disciplined with my writing.  Because it seemed easier than starting something new from scratch, I went back to Requiem again, although by now it had long been re-titled to Where There Is Darkness, Light – a line from the famous Prayer of Saint Francis.  I brought in the weakest, roughest, earliest, most full-of-terrible-lines draft I could find to my playwriting group and let them go to town on it, and came home with pages and pages of notes and a stack of feedback forms from the writers in my group.  After lots of coffee, lots of Beatles music, lots of late nights in front of the computer, and lots of prayer, I finally decided to do something terrifying and risky and potentially insane – turn it into two plays.

This is not going to sound nearly as freaky to you as it feels to me.  I have lived with this script for 9 years as a story where two plot lines intersect and inform each other, where one depends on the other one.  It feels a little bit like separating Siamese twins at this point.  Whole huge chunks of story are going to have to be carefully unstitched and rebuilt.  But I think it’s the only way for it to work without being fifteen hours long.  I want to fully develop Francesca’s story, and make her a real teenager with a real life; I work with teenagers now, so I know more about them than I did when I was 19.  I really want to flesh out the story of a grieving 13-year-old girl and the way love and faith and family intersect in her life, her relationship with her atheist mother, her mother’s relationship with the parish priest and their slowly developing friendship/trust for each other, and the reality of what it’s like to be a young person in the Catholic Church today.  There’s a full-length play in that, for sure.

But I also want to go to town on Saint Francis and Saint Clare a little more.  I feel like their lives are fascinating.  Did you know he was essentially the male Paris Hilton of his day?  He was a rich man’s son, a lazy boozehound manwhore troublemaker who ran with a crowd of drunk asshole rich boys, until God appeared to him while he was a prisoner of war and he began the long slow process of conversion.  And did you know Saint Clare was a rich nobleman’s daughter who ran away from home to join Francis?  She was the most beautiful girl in Assisi but she made Francis cut off her hair when she joined the order so she would no longer be vain about her good looks.  Oh, also, she outlived Francis by like 30 years and went head-to-head with like 5 different Popes in her lifetime to convince them that women were as capable of living in poverty as men were (at the time, male monastic orders often wandered around barefoot and poor like Francis’ brothers, but nuns lived in swanky posh convents doing lady work like embroidery and illuminating manuscripts because living simply was too hard on their fragile lady physiques and delicate lady sensibilities.  Saint Clare of Assisi, former hot rich girl, is almost single-handedly responsible for reforming women’s monastic orders.  They’re fascinating people, and their relationship is fascinating – were they friends?  Was it a partnership?  Were they like brother and sister?  Were they in love with each other but sworn to celibacy?  Was it some other kind of love there isn’t really a name for?  You see my dilemma.  There’s a full-length play in this story too.

So here are the options I’m contemplating, which you will see fleshed out here on this blog:

OPTION A: two completely separate plays

OPTION B: two separate, linked plays that are intended to run in rep

OPTION C: one long, two-part play

OPTION D: I throw myself down a well

We’ll see what happens.

Gilberto:

ME:

Gilberto wrote a short story about a trip he took to visit his family in Queretaro, Mexico, and after we worked together on How the Light Gets In, he asked me if I would be interested in collaborating on turning it into a script, and of course, because I have been a fan of Gilberto’s since my Artists Rep days, I said yes.  It’s a great story, and we’ve been having a lot of fun working on it.   It’s an interesting process because all the characters are real people from his family, and the story and relationships aren’t ones that I created, so it’s a little bit like acting, in a way, where you try to find your way around inside a character that someone else created and that you can’t totally control.  It’s a crazy, up-and-down process but I think our brains are really in sync and it’s going to turn out pretty well.  If God continues to be on my side, this might be my first play that gets an actual production; Gilberto’s family are working on helping us get some funds from the local government in Mexico to produce the show there after Gilberto translates it into Spanish.  We’ve also gotten some great feedback here in town from Olga Sanchez, Artistic Director of Miracle Theatre and one of my favorite Portland theatre people.  We’re super excited.

Anyway, watch this space for more information as the play progresses.  It’s gonna be good times.

So, some of you know that I started this blog with the intention of posting an update every day for 100 days leading up to the opening night of my play How the Light Gets In. If you know that, you also know that I definitely did not make it all 100 days.  But what I did write seemed to be more or less interesting-ish to the small group of people who think my life is entertaining, and I like the idea of blogging the playwriting process so people can track the development of a particular project.  So, without further ado, I introduce you to THE JESUS PLAYS 2.0, wherein I will share random thoughts and events on the journey to creating the three new projects I’m currently working on.

I know, dudes.  I’m excited too.

Well.  Lots to tell today.

So I met for the first time with Jessica, my director.  SO EXCITING.  Jess directed my play Upon Waking in last year’s Fertile Ground Festival, and we were both very skittish; neither of us had done it in awhile and we were sort of clinging to each other and panicking.  We both feel more confident this time around.  I’m really looking forward to letting go of this script a little more; last year we sometimes did an awkward dance around certain artistic decisions that lived in a gray area between both of us, because I felt more timid about the script and felt the need to constantly explain stuff.  I think – and everyone else so far agrees – that this script is stronger by any objective measure.  I feel way farther along than I was at this time last year and Jessica’s directed on a way bigger scale since then, so we’re both more secure in what we’re going to be doing.

We talked a lot about casting, and are hashing out whether we think, with a 5-night run, we can possibly afford to cast an Equity actor.  It doesn’t really look like it, but I’ve got my hopes on one for Magnus so I’m reeeeally hoping we can make it work . . . And she’s got some great ideas for other roles too.  Lots to think about, lots to work with.

Oh, I killed off another character.  R.I.P. Brother Stephen.  Jess is hugely relieved, since he was 90 and she was way stressing about how to cast him.  I kind of liked him – he was a crazy old firebreather who quoted from Revelations and said crazy crap about the end times and hated women and young people – sort of the monastery’s “hey you kids get off my lawn” guy.  I really wanted to keep him, but he had to get the axe.  The good news is the play is now down to under 75 pages.

That’s right.

FIFTY PAGES SHORTER BITCHES.

Jess and I are so relieved we don’t have to worry about it being two and a half hours long.  I think not panicking about length will free us up to play around more with pacing, since we won’t be trying to clock through everything as fast as possible to get done before 10 p.m.

The other fun part about tonight was giving Jess her Catholicism 101 homework.  She is now the proud owner (well, borrower) of a stack of books ranging from C.S. Lewis to the teachings of the ancient Cistercian desert fathers – with a side of Leonard Cohen and the Book of Psalms.  We’re planning a field trip to Mount Angel Abbey to meet some monks, and I’m taking her to Mass with me.  Yay!

–Halloween
–Work
–the Halloween party at work
–Napping
–Planning for a beach trip
–Making rosaries for a youth group fundraiser
–watching The West Wing

. . . and other such vital activities.  So I haven’t done much on the script in a little while.  But today I finally made it back to my playwrights’ group and – oh, I haven’t told you about my playwrights’ group.  Because I haven’t been in like a month and a half.  So I’m in this playwriting group.  I came once, volunteered to help them organize all their stuff for Fertile Ground, and then life exploded and I had nary a free Tuesday night for like months.  But tonight I cleared the old schedule-a-roo so I could make sure I had time.  We covered a lot of Fertile Ground logistics tonight, but usually we just read each other’s stuff out loud and talk about it.  I brought two Molly and Magnus scenes that I feel are mostly solid but have been longing to hear out loud to see how they sound.  Obviously it’s not entirely the same as hearing it from the actor who is going to actually inhabit that role, but it’s a huge step up from just reading it on the page.  No one else had stuff to read, so the floor was all mine, BWAHAHAHAHA, and it was awesome.  They liked the scenes, they had good comments and notes, but mostly it was great because I got to talk about Magnus.

I love Magnus.  He is so by far my favorite character.  Rebecca, one of the other writers, said, “I don’t know a lot about Catholicism, and I’ve never met a monk or a priest, but I would imagine if they were doing their job exactly right, this is what they would be like.”  Which is my greatest hope for that character.  Andrew, another one of the writers, agreed but said that he doesn’t fall victim to “good-guy syndrome,” and that you warm to him immediately but he still feels real.  They had some great thoughts about the way the conversation flows between him and Molly – like, how long can he talk without losing her?  If he has a little moment of soliloquizing every once in awhile, which I think he’s entitled to have, what keeps her paying attention to him?  I think it’s important that he be a really appealing, magnetic, warm character; there has to be something about him which pulls Molly in, so she can open up to him.  Anyway, it warmed my cold dead heart that the other writers in the group responded so enthusiastically to him.

It’s funny how Magnus came about.  Originally the main monk was Father Pascal, who was going to be loosely based on a real priest that I know (also named Paschal) who has my absolute dream job, which is teaching Shakespeare at Mount Angel Seminary.  I would gnaw off my own arm for that job.  And Father Paschal is one of the most delightful human beings on the planet, and the kind of person about whom plays should be written – a jolly, witty, urbane, highly literary Benedictine monk with a Santa Claus laugh and a deep, heartfelt love for the quirks and foibles of human nature.  I absolutely adore him.  He was a good friend of my mother’s; I saw him once after she died, and he told me he prayed for her every day.  Still.  Even though she was gone.  Every day at 6 in the morning, he prays for my mother.  Because that’s what monks do.  So anyway, the genesis of the play was going to be the relationship between a Father Paschal-ish character and this girl whose mother used to be his friend.  But I figured pretty quickly that I am not one of those people who has the gift of writing a fictional character that resembles a real person.  I couldn’t get it right, and I felt so limited and constrained by trying to figure out what Paschal would say or do that the character was sort of a mush and had no real vitality or individualism.  He wasn’t developing as a character on his own.  So Pascal and Dominic sort of receded into the background, leaving the field open for a new main character.

Then I thought maybe the main character should be Leo.  I love Leo.  I like the idea of this monk who is brand-new to the monastic life, and full of zeal and joy and giddy enthusiasm for what that means, while still not quite being able to shed his old life.  So he likes Molly because she has tattoos, and she curses, and she doesn’t give a crap what anyone thinks of her, and she’s both a completely alien creature to him and a little bit of an echo of the basketball-playing, beer-drinking dude he was before he became a monk.  So I thought maybe Leo was going to be her guy.  But Leo’s young; he couldn’t have known her mother.  And the monk that would be her guide and her mentor and pull her out of the pit would have to be someone who could tell her what really happened to her parents, otherwise the mystery wouldn’t unfold properly.  For awhile I was weighing having a cute single guy in school at the seminary getting a theology degree, who wasn’t studying to be a priest or monk but was friends with Leo, and they would fall in love blah blah blah . . . but as my astute friend Jenny rightly observed, “You can’t have the end of the play be, like, ‘the right man came along and fixed her.’”  So true.  So goodbye Nicholas I-can’t-even-remember-your-last-name-because-you-were-only-in-the-script-for-like-a-week.

So through all this, there was Magnus the librarian – a character not based on someone (like Pascal) or created to fit a specific archetype (like Dominic or Stephen or the Abbot) or needed to fill another role (like Leo).  I was working busily away on the final scene of the play where Molly is trying to get the truth out of her dad, and Pascal was driving all the action, just kind of hammering away in this interrogation of Molly’s dad Ray, and then all of a sudden this happened:

PASCAL
Molly, you’ve been carrying around this burden for far too long, and you need to hear the truth from your father.  And from us.

ABBOT GEORGE
Pascal, I don’t think . . .

BROTHER MAGNUS
No, she needs to know.  (They all look at him.) Quit yelling at Pascal, Ray.  I’m the one you should be mad at.

Which was like the first time he’d spoken in the whole scene.  And I did not plan that, it just popped out.  It felt like one of those moments where like you’re in a crowd and someone says something and everyone’s head swivels to look at them at the same moment.  Or like in a Western (or, more accurately, in a Sesame Street spoof of a Western starring Forgetful Jones) (which I totally just referenced so I could use my “muppets” blog tag a second time), where a stranger walks into a saloon and everyone turns to look and the piano player stops playing.  Like, “Who’s this guy? What’s he about to say?”  I had no idea.  And then all of a sudden, from that moment, it was like, “Okay.  This is Magnus’ show.  He’s going to be the one who knows the truth, and he’s going to be the one who finally tells her.”  Which meant that Magnus emerged out of nowhere as the main character, the one who was going to be guiding Molly on her path.  Magnus wasn’t based on anyone or created to accomplish a specific purpose.  He just kind of . . . showed up.  I think that’s why I like him.  He, more than any other character in the story, created himself with the least help from me.  So he immediately and instantaneously felt real.  It took a long time, pages and pages of cuts, hours of rewrites, and a lot of work to make Dominic and Pascal fully-realized characters.  And the abbot too, to some extent.  But Magnus just was.

I hope everyone loves Magnus like I do.  Here are some of my personal favorite Magnus moments to entice you to come see the play and hear more.

#1.  MAGNUS AND MOLLY DISCUSS THE NAME OF THE ROSE, UMBERTO ECO’S MURDER MYSTERY ABOUT MONKS

MAGNUS
(Thoughtfully) He got a lot right though, Umberto Eco.  I mean, he did his homework for sure.  And there’s something about the idea of a serial killer murdering monks because of a forbidden book which is  . . . I don’t know.

MOLLY
Tempting?

MAGNUS
Good grief, no.  Not directly.  But the lure of knowledge . . . purely for its own sake . . . it’s still such a part of who we are.  I would like to believe that in Heaven I’ll get to read all the books that were lost when the library of Alexandria burned.  (Wistfully) I dream about it sometimes.  I’m a man of books.  That’s who I am.  And if someone said to me, Magnus, I’ve unearthed one of the lost works of Cicero, and you’ll be the first to read it in five thousand years . . . Not to have it or own it, but just to read it . . . Yes, it would be hard to say no to that.  Would I murder for it?  I cannot imagine that I would.  But would I commit other sins for it?  Would I lie, cheat, steal?  I don’t know.  I would like to believe that I would not.  But if the alternative was that the book be destroyed, or hidden away where no one could read it?  I don’t know what I might do.

MOLLY
Really.

MAGNUS
I’m a monk.  Not a saint.

#2.  MAGNUS EXPLAINS WHAT REAL LOVE MEANS

MAGNUS
You strip everything else away.  You’re blank and empty.  Then you can start over, to let yourself be filled.  To come to God for renewal is like standing before a great and terrible mirror.  Everything shows.  You want to hide, but you force yourself to stand there and look . . . Then you realize that God sees those things too, sees straight through to the core of you, and madly, passionately loves you anyway.  Right there in the dark, inside your brokenness.  Not in spite of those dark places – not by ignoring them – not on the condition that you erase them – but because of them.

MOLLY
Don’t.  This is bullshit, Magnus.

MAGNUS
No.  It’s the only thing in the world that isn’t bullshit.  You are loved, Molly.  With passion, with fire, with deep devotion.  Jesus doesn’t want to pat you on the head and say, “What a good girl.”  He wants to kick the door down to pull you out of the burning building.  (MOLLY looks away, unable to meet his eyes.  MAGNUS slowly lifts a hand to her face, cradling her cheek.  MOLLY closes her eyes.) He wants to be the light in your darkness.  He wants to be the broken piece of wood you cling to after the shipwreck.  That’s love.  That’s who Christ is.  And if you’ve never felt that way yourself, then you’ve never loved anyone.

#3.  MAGNUS AND LEO MEET JEREMY, MOLLY’S JERK EX-BOYFRIEND

MAGNUS
You dated this creep for five years?

MOLLY
Yeah.

MAGNUS
Were you high the whole time?

MOLLY
More or less.

JEREMY
Who the hell is this guy?  Are you fucking him?

MOLLY
Wow.  It’s like every time you open your mouth you turn into a bigger pig.

JEREMY
If I find out that you’re boning this guy after you accused me of –

MOLLY
He’s a monk, you shithead.  He’s celibate.  He doesn’t have sex.  He’s a Latin-chanting, no-sex-having librarian monk, and he’s still a hundred times more man than you will ever be.

LEO
(Laughing) Oh man.  That is cold.

Moral of the Story: Monks are awesome.