Power in a Union

Happy to receive my Writers Guild of America welcome pack this week and call myself a proud associate member of the WGA.

I feel the sense of legitimacy and keen kind of power that comes with being part of a union. While I’m currently not a voting member, I’m excited to see the WGA flexing its muscles and demanding more from the agencies that represent writers in negotiations about a new code of conduct. I’m totally into what this guy says about the whole situation.

Excited to go to more WGA events and participate in a community of writers.

Sheepish Year-End Awards Close Call Round Up

Had some close calls with my screenplay Sheepish. Happy to hear my little script about a scientist who studies gay sheep has had some traction here and there. Here’s the run down of what’s up:

• It was a a finalist for the Hamptons International Film Festival Screenwriters Lab.

• It was a semi-finalist for the SF Indie Film Festival Screenwriting Prize.

• It one second place in the Stanford in Entertainment Screenwriting Prize.

It’s encouraging to get this kind of feedback. I won’t throw this script away.

The Sisyphi Table Read with Trap Street

My play The Sisyphi, a play of absurdist vignettes about meaningless, futility, and pushing a gigantic boulder up a hill (it’s fun, I swear!), had a partial table reading with Trap Street Theater. The response in the backroom of the bar The Pikey was fantastic and gave me a lot of material to work with as I keep working on this project. The reading included the acting talent of Katie Pelensky, Chad Eschman, Faith D'Amato, Anne Berkowitz, Thi Nguyen, Kimberly Alexander, and Toni Maddocks. It was featured in a night of other work with the playwrights Tony Werner, Katie Markovich, Siobhan Gilbert, and Tracy Potter.

New Member of Playground LA Writers Pool

This fall, I was selected to join Playground LA Writers Pool. Every month, the Writers Pool gets a prompt and has three days to produce a ten-minute play. Six are selected for a staged reading and then another six will get a full production as part of a best of night. It’s been fun to ditch preciousness and just produce some stuff.

This month the prompt was “Fall Down, Get Up” and my short play “A Small Breach in Protocol at Big Rick’s Rockin’ Skydive Academy” was selected for a staged reading. It’s a play about what one thinks about when plummeting from the sky. The reading was great. Directed by Paris McCarthy, the reading featured the acting talent of Krystal Mosley, Tobin Mitnick, Carolyn Deskin, and Nick Barnes.

Sheepish wins Alfred P. Sloan Screenwriting Prize

I'm happy to announce that my screenplay Sheepish won first prize in the Alfred P. Sloan Screenwriting Prize. It's a $15,000 prize which I hope to use to a) help pay off some of those damn student loans and b) save up for the future development of this project.

Sheepish is a screenplay about how a scientist struggles to communicate his research to the greater public. When you study "gay sheep" things can get kind of hard to explain. The Museum of the Moving Image's Science on Film blog did an interview with me after I won. You can read it here.

ID, Please Press Round Up

I’m back from London after Tete-a-Tete. It was an incredible experience. But don’t take my word for it, check out all this press from the past couple of months!

REVIEWS 

"A future classic." - The Evening Standard

"Imaginatively Handled." - Composition Today

"Sartre-esque purgatory" - The Guardian

ADDITIONAL PRESS

"The opera shining a spotlight on Trump’s travel ban" - Huck

"Don't Miss: ID, Please" - Schmopera

"Art mirroring life: Soosan Lolavar's 'ID Please'" - Planet Hugill

"5 Questions for Soosan Lolavar" - If You Care to Listen

"British composer must rethink plans for her opera in Pittsburgh" - The Times (UK)

"British Composer Missing Rehearsals of Her Opera — About Immigration — Due to Trump's Ban" - The Hollywood Reporter

"British Composer is Barred Br Trump From Seeing Her Opera" - Slipped Disc

"British-Iranian composer nearly banned from her debut opera on immigration" - The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

ID, Please to join Tête à Tête opera festival in London

This summer, ID, Please lives up to its internationalist themes by having an international premiere in London. Along with a whole slew of exciting new, contemporary opera, ID, Please joins Tête à Tête Opera Festival for a performance on July 25. Much of the original team that worked on the show in Pittsburgh will hop on a plane to London to remount our opera about international border crossing. Soosan and I will also participate in a panel discussion about how and why we made the opera.

If you happen to find yourself in London this summer, tickets and details are here.

Roguish Machine opens at Carnegie Mellon New Works Festival

Roguish Machine, a play about technology, work, and smashing machines with hammers opened this week at Carnegie Mellon School of Drama New Works Festival. More details here.

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ID, Please Premieres as part of CMU's CoOpera Festival with press coverage

ID, Please, the opera for which I wrote the libretto, opens this week as part of CoOpera, a festival of new opera, which is a collaboration between the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, Music and Heinz School of Management, as well as Pittsburgh Opera.

Written with composer Soosan Lolavar, ID, Please is an opera about immigration and border security. Which has been a topical theme of late... and a personal one. Earlier this year, President Trump's "muslim ban" meant that for a few days it looked like Soosan wouldn't be able to return because she is a dual citizen in the UK and Iran. It's been a crazy couple of weeks.

Given the international and timely nature of the story behind our opera, Soosan and our opera were featured last month in the Times of London, The Hollywood Reporter, The BBC, and the Associated Press (see below). Most recently, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette covered the opening of CoOpera and interviewed Soosan upon her triumphant return to the US to see the premiere of our opera:

“Parts of her libretto poignantly express her own anxiety in traveling. “I clutch my passport so hard my hand hurts / I’m never going back to where I’m from / I do not like the way you look at me like that.””

— Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Cherry Pie opens at Briefs Festival, gets shout out in American Theater Magazine

My ten-minute play Last Night at the Cherry Pie opens this weekend as part of St. Louis's That Uppity Theatre Company's Briefs Festival of LGBT short plays. I'm really pleased to be part of this effort (even though it's been a remote collaboration), because from what I can tell Briefs has been a bit of a gay institution in St. Louis, and this is unfortunately it's final year. The festival is also a raising funds for the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis.

American Theatre Magazine covered the festival and did a nice write up.

““I feel that it is really important that we have community as much as we can, especially now,” says Joan Lipkin, producing artistic director of That Uppity Theatre Company.

The plays cover different aspects of LGBTQ experience. Shannon Geier’s Twenty Questions follows a family as they adapt to the transition of a transgender family member. When Oprah Says Goodbye, by Dan Berkowitz, is about an unlikely friendship between an African-American lesbian and her roommate at an elder-care facility. Daniel Hirsch’s Last Night at the Cherry Pie takes place at a gay bar that will be closed because of gentrification. Theresa Masters’s Danny Boy follows a gay man who takes care of his ailing, homophobic father. Lipkin’s Our Friends, which has toured the country as part of the After Orlando project, addresses the Pulse nightclub massacre.”

— American Theatre Magazine