Fringe World Debrief
We had a fantastic season of The Same Paige and Janey Does Stand-Up in The Blue Room Summer Nights as part of the awesome Fringe World Festival. Theatre is such a collaborate thing and we couldn’t have done it without a number of key people to whom I’m extremely grateful. First, the wonderful and talented cast, Summer Williams, Rose McKenna, Kym Bidstrup, Melanie Bennett, Kathy Shields and Jackson Wimhurst. They were all a complete joy to work with. Thanks also to the lovely Summer Williams who made the challenging role of costume design look impossibly simple and incredibly inexpensive thanks to her intimate relationship with a place in Balcatta we call ‘le tip’.
I also got a lot of help from a number of good friends. Peter Finkle who always manages to make the images inside my head look even better shot a lot of the stills and video we used as backdrops to denote scene changes in Janey Does Stand-Up. My good friend Erica Martin let me use her kitchen and also her Canon. Iain Dawson, Christine Lethlean and David Hyams took our great publicity stills. Big thanks to David Rafique who put together our fantastic little ‘London Pride’ clip which helped set the scene and place us in post-GFC London for Janey. Thanks also to the lovely Violette Ayad who fulfilled all our technical requirements with intelligence and flair, and to Chris (Fatty) Donnelly who supported Violette and did our lighting design. Thanks to Cathy Prastides who designed our show posters and flyers and also our spoof show posters for Janey Does Stand-Up.
We got the spoof posters made to help with a gag that we weren’t sure was going to work. When Janey’s agent, Marilyn (Summer Williams) 
is trying to convince Janey (Rose Mckenna) that she should do stand-up she refers to a previous show of Janey’s as ‘misstep’. ‘I can’t believe none of us realised an Islamic version of Yentl would be considered offensive’, she continues. And despite Janey’s protestations that the show ‘was misinterpreted’ and that she was ‘trying to build a bridge,’ they both then shudder at the memory of ‘that beard’. The gag is that the Islamic version of Yentl ‘managed to offend both Muslims and Jews,’ partly because Janey’s character, when disguised as a man, looked so much like Osama Bin Laden. The strand is revisited in a later scene when Amber, Janey’s daughter, has a seance and raises Osama Bin Laden from the dead who tells her that he is her father. But the joke was so deeply embedded in the text, or perhaps just too esoteric, that nobody who read the script got it. Even with the poster I’m not sure many people got the whole joke but we all got a buzz out of the poster and it’s just a bloody funny image. Got a text the following day from a friend who had seen the play, ‘Still laughing about Rose as the bearded Yentl.’
We managed to fill the theatre on all but opening night and with such a high volume of shows on at the same time and in the absence of any significant publicity campaign, (apart from the great publicity The Blue Room and Fringe World did for all shows) this was quite an achievement. We got a couple of good reviews including one at Aussie Theatre.com. Currently we’re exploring the possibility of a pub show for The Same Paige so that the audience we had to turn away (and there were a number) will have a chance to see it. Don’t think we’ll be doing Janey in a pub as it’s too technically complex, but watch this space for possible upcoming productions of The Same Paige.
Crazy ramblings of a writer/director
Rose McKenna as Janey
We are now in the thick of rehearsals for our Fringe World shows which are coming up in the last week of the festival 13-18 Feb. Having put The Same Paige on a number of times, and knowing what works and doesn’t work when it comes to this play, I am not too concerned about that one. But Janey Does Stand-up is a very different story that poses a lot of challenges for a director. It’s not much fun being a writer/director because you can’t get pissed off and complain about the writer. Well you can, but it sounds like self-abuse, or like you’re fishing for someone to say, ‘No, really it’s a very good script’. I have to admit to having indulged in a few crazy self-abusive ramblings of late.
I wrote Janey Does Stand-up to enter in the UK Sitcom Trials 2010, the year after I’d had success with The Same Paige. The Same Paige was originally written as a one-off theatre piece, so squeezing it into a 15-minute television pilot that could also be performed on stage (which is the brief for the Sitcom Trials) was quite challenging. Because I LOVED being involved in the Sitcom Trials I wanted to submit something the following year and was keen to write something specifically for the competition so I didn’t have to worry about adapting it to fit the brief. I had a couple of ideas but the Janey idea was more developed so when I sat down to write, it just kind of flowed out of me.
Janey didn’t get into the Sitcom Trials and now with putting it on at The Blue Room I find myself being faced with the mirror image problem I had with trying to adapt a play (The Same Paige) to a television pilot. I am now having to adapt a television pilot (Janey Does Stand-up) to a play. Although the Sitcom Trial entries need to be performed on stage, there is an understanding that depsite this, they are written for radio/television so I think there is a bit of leeway given to the shows. There is no such leeway when you are putting on a play as part of a fringe theatre festival so I have had to be a bit creative when thinking about how to convey Janey on stage.
I decided to use photo and video screens to convey scene changes. In this way Janey Does Stand-up will be a bit of a stage/screen hybrid. I like this kind of theatre and I also like to get a chance to use my filmmaking skills whenever I can. I have asked the talented London-based filmmaker Dave Rafique to put together a video montage for us to play at the start of the play to help place the audience in Janey’s world of post-GFC London. Then we have a number of settings or scenes that take place in Janey’s house, Marilyn, her agent’s office, a pub and a church. This would all be quite straight forward to convey through photos/video if it weren’t for one scene, which even just the thought of, sends my inner-voice into a rant of ‘What were you thinking?’ Oh, how nice it would be if there were some other impractical writer to blame, but it’s all my doing. There is a fire. Who the hell writes a fire on stage?!? For TV this would be fine and I have tried to re-write it, but I just haven’t been able to work out an alternative. So I’m stuck with it.
We are going to use video, sound effects etc. and I’m sure it will work out, but still, I’d like to be able to blame this on someone else or better still, have some other poor sucker of a director try to work out how to do it. Not this time I’m afraid.
If you’re in Perth in Feb come along to The Blue Room and check out this fun double bill!
Fringe World Festival
Last summer when I returned to Perth it was so exciting to see all the events around the Fringe World Festival. I felt like I was in another city, or that Perth had finally found its creative heart. There was the urban orchard with fake grass, cocktails and live bands. There was the colourful Spiegeltent and seemingly endless shows to see at The Blue Room and beyond. So I was really thrilled to get a chance to put on some theatre and be part of this great summer festival this year. The Blue Room offered me a season of The Same Paige in their studio space. This is great as the play has been performed all over the place, both in Oz and the UK, yet has had very limited exposure in Perth. In 2005 the inaugural season was as part of Pocket Theatre’s One-act festival which was a great way to get something new up but I knew even back then that Paige was destined for greater things than the basement of the Swan Hotel. And she has fulfilled her promise, having been performed in the UK Sitcom trials, Equinox Drama’s New Comedy Scene Festival in Merton Abbey Mills and in a number of other venues in Australia and beyond.
I was still more excited when the Blue Room needed a companion piece for The Same Paige and they decided on Janey Does Stand-Up, a short play that I wrote for the Sitcom Trials 2010. It didn’t get into the trials but it’s a really fun little piece of theatre nonetheless. It’s about a really posh British actress who takes herself SO seriously and whose outrageous Chav of an agent insists that she do stand-up comedy. It was interesting to immerse myself in the British theatre and screenwriting scene for a while and see that there are people out there who do take themselves extremely seriously, something that I think many Australians find hard to comprehend as not only do we have the cultural cringe, but we also have this tall poppy syndrome so you better bloody not take yourself too seriously or someone’s sure to take you down a few pegs.
I wanted to use the cast of The Same Paige for Janey Does Stand-up and I have mostly been able to except that instead of two young women, Janey Does Stand-up has a young woman and a young man. This threw me into a dilemma. I had to choose between Melanie Bennett and Kathy Shields, two gorgeous and talented young women I have been working with on The Same Paige. Only one of them could be cast as Amber, Janey’s intense and depressed daughter. Casting can be difficult at the best of times but when you have two people, both of whom you know can play a role with their eyes shut, both of whom are a joy to know and work with, it is even more difficult. It took me ages to decide, I wrote pro and con lists, spoke to everyone about it ad nauseum and basically just procrastinated a lot. Finally I decided to go with Kathy, primarily because she has quite a minor role in The Same Paige, so I felt she would appreciate having a bit more to do and that the audience may like to see a bit more of her as well. I also had to cast someone to play Freddie, Amber’s outrageous gay boyfriend. Rose McKenna introduced me to Jackson Wimhurst and I cast him in the pub on the spot. So now in addition to my two great leading ladies: Summer Williams and Rose McKenna, I have a stellar supporting cast consisting of Kym Bidstrup, Melanie Bennett, Kathy Shields and Jackson Wimhurst. I have also found an awesome producer, Patrick Aguirre, who I felt an immediate connection with. One amazing coincidence is that we went to the same film school, The New York Film Academy on Union Square. Pat is the first person I have met in Perth who went to NYFA so that has been pretty cool.
Anyway, if you’re in Perth in Feb, please come and catch The Same Paige and Janey Does Stand-up as part of the Blue Room Theatre’s Summer Nights and Fringe World Festival.
Webfest Competition Like Going Back to School…
It has been interesting entering The Same Paige in Movie Extra Webfest Competition. I have been really surprised by how difficult it has been to get votes. If someone tells me about a contest they have entered online and asks me to vote, assuming voting is relatively easy, I don’t even think about it, I just do it. Obviously lots of people don’t think like that as getting votes has felt a little bit like trying to get blood from a stone. A couple of weeks ago it was particularly painful as the tally seemed to be stuck on 73, like cyber lock-jaw.
There do seem to be a couple of contributing factors. One is that often people are saying that they have voted but the tally hasn’t moved. Not sure why this is. Also there are people that baulk at the Movie Extra Webfest app which asks to be able to access their private data. This has put some people off voting, which is fair enough I guess, but I figure if you’re on facebook people can access your stuff anyway, so what’s the big deal?
We finally passed the 100 mark this weekend which was a relief, especially as there are a number of entries that are over 500 and the leading entry is probably close to 1000 now. Does make you wonder how they’ve done it, but I suspect if you have a team of people working on it, or even just one person dedicated to it, like a publicist, it would be a lot easier. On Facebook it has mostly just been me and a few kind helpers, Richard Hyde, Guy Finklestein in Israel and Kym Bidstrup, who have been working it and of course many of my other friends have voted and shared the link, photos I’m posting etc. and I’m really grateful to all of them.
Nevertheless it has seemed like very hard work, not just how time consuming it is but also I think it’s actually very unnatural for the creator to be the promoter. You feel like a particularly needy stage-mother asking people to like your creative outputs. I guess this is why producers normally take up this role. It is, I have found, a lot easier to promote someone else’s work. Your own work is too close to your heart and sense of self-worth. Perhaps this is why the producer/writer joint role is not taken up so often. It’s felt a little like going back to school and trying to get in with the popular kids. Watching the votes sit inert at 73 while the leading entries seemed to click up interminably like Eveready Bunnies felt a bit like going back to school and realising that no matter what I’m going to do with my hair, my clothes, my attitude, I am just not going to be one of the popular kids. Pretty confronting stuff…
Interestingly, on a tangential note, a lot of my old high school friends are the ones who have been voting! There is still time, votes close in a week. Please vote for The Same Paige in Movie Extra Webfest.
Writer’s block re-frame
I have a serious case of writer’s block which has lasted for about two years. The last thing I wrote, apart from poems which don’t really count as I’m not a poet, was Janey Does Stand-up. This is a short comic play that, along with The Same Paige, is going on at The Blue Room as part of their Summer Nights Festival, in February. I often lament my inability to settle down and focus on one thing as I think that if I could just concentrate on writing or filmmaking…or theatre….or acting that perhaps I would achieve a greater degree of ‘success’. But one good thing about having a number of interests is that when I am blocked in one area like this, I can change my focus to another. This year has been a big filmmaking year, perhaps partly enabled by my seeming inability to write anything new.
At the start of the year I wrote and directed an educational video about Aboriginal culture for JPs produced by the Attorney General’s Department and TAFEWA. The project was one of the recommendations of the Ward Inquiry and was written in consultation with Noongar Elder, Glenys Collard. Working on set with the TAFE students was one of the highlights of my year. Mid-year I made a video for the Drug and Alcohol Office of WA (DAO) explaining the new cannabis laws, which was included in the Cannabis Law Reform Community Support Kit that was sent to health services across the State. In addition to this I am currently in pre-production for another DVD for DAO that is exploring the journeys from addiction to abstinence of three ex-users. I know that there are many in the film industry that look down on educational videos but I really like making them. The projects that I like the best are often what would be called advocacy DVDs rather than straight educational DVDs. I also see each one as a great opportunity to hone my filmmaking skills.
And of course we have shot the The Same Paige and cut the trailer to enter in Movie Extra Webfest. Please check out the trailer and vote for The Same Paige.
Although we’re lagging behind in the votes I am still hoping that we get to make the series somehow. And we have our first pilot episode in the can and ready to be cut. Perhaps writer’s block for someone like me is just a nudge in a different direction because it’s been great to have so many opportunities to get back on set this year.
The Same Paige: The Series
When we first put The Same Paige play on in 2005 some audience members said they thought it was filmic. Rose McKenna, who plays Zara and who stepped up as producer for the recent trailer shoot, said that it reminded her of the Book Group, that quirky comedy series about an uptight American in Glasgow who starts a book group as a way to make friends. I think the seed for a series was planted then.
I started to think seriously about The Same Paige as a series when I entered a 15-minute version in the UK Sit-com Trials. This got shortlisted out of over 500 entries and at that point I started fleshing out episodes. Around the same time, Screenwest was calling for TV series ideas for a screenwriting prize. I wrote a pilot 30-minute episode for TV and polished my episode outline. The Same Paige was shortlisted for the Screenwest prize but unfortunately the prize was a script report that wasn’t all that helpful, but that’s another story.
The story operates on 2 levels. There is the real world of Paige and Rob. In this world, the couple have moved to Rob’s hometown, Perth, so that he can reap the rewards of the mining boom. Paige gave up an emerging career as a screenwriter in Sydney to move to Perth. But Rob doesn’t understand Paige or the creative process and at times simply thinks she’s nuts. Paige doesn’t like Rob’s money motivated friends and his family are always interfering in their lives. Paige struggles to be understood and to find a voice in the relationship. Her life challenges are mirrored in her written work and are reflected in the titles of the episodes. Episode 1, for example, is ‘Finding a Voice.’
Gladys, Zara, Star and Bruce start out on Paige’s page but become more real as the series goes on. She meets them in the writer’s group from which they eject her. For any writer who has ever felt their story railroaded by the characters, this may ring a bell. But then, everywhere Paige goes, she bumps into these characters. Her life becomes more and more intertwined with theirs, they cause her great embarrassment and shame (they are, after all elements of her unconscious) but they also step in to help her in awkward social situations and when her relationship with Rob gets difficult.
Star is a nymphomaniac who likes dating men from different cultures. She’s also an eccentric artist who uses many different media but the subject is always the same: genitalia. She comes into her own mid-series as she coins her own artistic genre, ‘Gynaecologica’. Gladys is the member of an evangelical church where she dances, plays the tambourine and talks in tongues (not all at the same time). She is incredibly judgemental and repressed so struggles with a lot of Star’s antics, but must be “supportive” at all times. Political activist Zara becomes extremely passionate about all manner of causes, but as time goes on we come to realise it’s more about having a cause, than the cause iself, and the absurdity of her causes coupled with the intensity with which she fights them will make people chuckle. And last but not least is Bruce who thinks he’s a woman but is clearly a man. Extremely confused and trying to find himself, he lurches from ‘lesbian’ scat singing to writing autobiographical poetry about ‘female’ circumcision, hmmm.
The series will not be like anything anyone has ever seen before and although it may sound esoteric, on the surface it’s full of wonderful cringe-worthy comedy that deals with taboo subjects like seniors sex, S & M and the V word (Vaginas).
Please Vote for The Same Paige in Movie Extra Webfest
The Same Paige on Screen…finally
The play, The Same Paige, was written back in 2005 and produced as part of Pocket Theatre’s one-act festival. Since then it has been performed all over the place including at the Leicester Square Theatre in the UK Sitcom Trials, at the Riverland Youth Arts Festival in South Australia, and as part of Equinox Drama’s New Comedy Scene Festival at the Colourhouse Theatre in Merton Abbey Mills. Ever since the original production in the basement of the Swan Hotel in Fremantle I have wanted to film it. A couple of months ago Movie Extra Webfest Competition was calling for entries again. I knew about this competition because I’m a huge fan of Henry and Aaron and their brilliant 7 Steps to Superstardom which won the competition last year. I saw that you only needed a one-minute trailer to enter, the prize being $50,000 to make a series. Since then the prize money has gone up to $100,000.
I am really lucky to work with an incredibly talented cinematographer, Peter Finkle, and equally awesome sound recordist, Steve Trowbridge. Most of the stuff I’ve shot recently has been educational videos so it was both fantastic but also quite daunting to shoot a comedy again. It was great to work with two of the original cast members, Summer Williams who plays writer, Paige (and also did costume design) and Rose McKenna who plays political activist, Zara and is co-producing. After a couple of casting catastrophes (including an actor pulling out 2 days before the shoot) I ended up with the most excellent cast; Mel Bennett who plays fundamental Christian, Gladys, Kathy Shields who plays hippy-dippy multi-cultural serial-monogamist, Star and Kym Bidstrup who plays the gender dysmorphic, Bruce. Benj D’Addario came on board to play Rob, Paige’s partner, a conservative engineer who finds the WA mining boom more alluring than Paige. I feel very fortunate to have been surrounded by such talented cast and crew.
I figured that if we were going to shoot the trailer we might as well shoot the whole thing. Rose found a great location, the library of North Balga Primary School. We shot the whole play with bookends of Paige at home in the real world with Rob (I’ll explain this in my next post). So far we have only cut the trailer thanks to talented editors, Mandy Glen and Henry Inglis. The trailer has some great music composed by Mark Ralph.
There is something really humbling about working on a film or a play, especially when people are volunteering their time. I tried to explain it recently to someone who doesn’t work in the arts. Before you make it, the film is a series of images in your head, like a dream. Then these people join you to help make this, your dream, come true. Of course it gets a bit inter-mingled with their dreams and visions and this is part of the excitement and joy of it. This is such an incredible gift and why I think those creative relationships are so unique and special.
Please click the link below, watch the trailer and…
Post-hacking post
You may be wondering why it’s been such a long time between posts…well turns out that my website was hacked by Russians and a whole heap of my posts – from end of ’09 until now – got lost. As I said to Ed, who, like a geek in shining armor, came to my rescue and fixed it, fortunately they probably weren’t Nobel prize winning posts, so I’m not too worried.
So I have just finished making yet another educational video, this time for the Drug and Alcohol Office about the new cannabis laws that came into effect this month. Prior to this I worked with TAFEWA for the Attorney General’s Department on a training DVD for JPs and others who work in legal settings about Aboriginal culture.
Now that these two DVDs are pretty much out of the way it’s time to get down and focus on my PhD again which is acting as something of a bottle-neck in terms of my creativity. It has given me a huge case of writer’s block and although I have considered withdrawing from it, I feel I’m so close now that quitting would be dumb. So it’s onwards and upwards with the exegesis – the novel is pretty much finished and it’s just 25,000 words of boring, inane literary theory that I have to write…Hmm perhaps I have an attitude problem…
Flight 48
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2F90ez4NOQ
Check out the link above to see Dave Rafique’s film about Douglas Cairns’ record breaking flight around the US. This was a great little project I blogged about a while ago that I worked on with Dougie and Dave a few months ago in London.
I’m currently staying at the Katherine Susanna Pritchard (KSP) Writer’s centre up in Greenmount trying to get as much of my PhD written as possible. Its such a fantastic place for a writer to be and I encourage anybody who wants to get some serious work done in supportive surroundings to go and stay there. Or even just go and check it out, its a fantastic writer’s hub in hills of Perth. Last night I joined The Thursday night group, one of the many writers groups that convene there and got to read some work and hear the work of others. It was very cool!
Road trip to Northam
Last month I had the joy of seeing one of my plays, The Same Paige, performed by Link Theatre in Northam as part of a night of one-act comedies called Short n Curly. They have a really good set-up in Northam, Link has converted a church into a gorgeous little theatre and they have some really talented and committed artists there. The Same Paige was on after two short plays by Alan Ayckbourne. It was a really good production and I really enjoyed seeing the choices the director, Rhonda Oliver, and the actors made. They had given so much thought to the text and the characters and I was really impressed. The audience response was really positive. I surprised the cast by popping up at the end of the show and saying hi and it was so much fun to meet them all. Here is an article in the local paper about it.
http://www.avonadvocate.com.au/news/local/news/general/cast-surprised-by-play-author/1632438.aspx
Thanks to everyone at Link Theatre and to Alan Payne and Iain Dawson for convincing me I should make the road trip to Northam…
