Members of our Youth Company prepare for FreshPlay, which begins on Fri. These workshop performances are not open to the public, but, we hope you’ll make a donation to support this fun and important part of MCC’s work.

Posted by MCC Playwrights’ Coalition member Brooke Berman—

In early 2008,  my play Hunting and Gathering (developed in the MCC Playwrights’ Coalition) was in production, and a writer for the Homes section of The New York Times asked if she might run a feature on me and my “peripatetic” lifestyle.  The play is about an interconnected group of New Yorkers who find themselves in constant real estate flux – as many young New Yorkers do – and their real estate flux is meant to shed light on their emotional flux and issues.  It grew out of an exercise I’d given to my playwriting students in the MCC Theater Youth Company and at Unity, a school that I was teaching in through MCC’s education program.  “The Expert Exercise” is this:  I would ask the students to create a character who was an expert in something they themselves knew a great deal about, and then write a monologue in which the character teaches us, the audience, to do this thing that s/he is an expert in. As an example, I’d list for them all of the apartments I’d lived in around New York City and claimed expertise in packing and moving and finding a place to live.  And when I sat down to start writing a new play that winter, I took my own advice and the character of “Ruth” – an expert in packing, moving, and finding temporary shelter – was born.  Strangely, by the time the play opened,  I was on the move again —  I’d been priced out of my Mott Street 1BR and was camping out in a temporary dorm room on the top floor of a not-for-profit writers organization.  As a result of the Times piece, Random House editor Julia Pastore emailed and asked, “Do you think there’s a book in all of this?”

I’d always dreamed of writing a book; so when Julia suggested that the 30-odd (and they were odd) apartments I’d lived in during my 20 years in New York might be excellent memoir material, I lept at the chance.  I read memoirs and looked at book proposals while in residence at MacDowell that Spring, and then, wrote the sample pages.  Sold the book just less than a year after my initial coffee date with Julia.  Wrote the first draft in two months.

No Place Like Home is a search for roots, rest and dwelling.  It begins with my move to New York City, at 18 years old, to attend Barnard College – a precocious teenager with big dreams and little real world experience – and then, follows my adventures over the next twenty plus years from college honor roll to drop out to struggling downtown performance artist and writer,  through love affairs and road trips and finally, Juilliard where I become a professional playwright —  and then, the struggle to make ends meet while crafting a viable life in the theater.  With each apartment, I learn more about how to create a true home within – how to heal the past, let go of excess, and stay flexible in the search for stability.  My years of involvement with MCC play a big role – both the writers group and the teaching career that came about through my work with the Education programs and the Youth Company.  I hope that you will read it and also, contact me and let me know what you think!

Posted by MCC Playwright-in-Residence, Neil LaBute—

Filthy Talk for Troubled Times came out of my graduate work in Kansas, a collection of scenes and monologues that now seem influenced by everyone from Mr. Mamet to Mr. Shepard to my dad when he had a few drinks in him. Wallace Shawn is in there, too, and hopefully a bit of Christopher Durang (I used to eat his work for breakfast) and probably a dozen others. It was around this time that I had discovered the modern English playwrights as well and their freewheeling sense of structure was a big part of my creative life at the time so a quick tip of the hat to Barker-Bond-Brenton-Churchill-Hare-Pinter-Storey-et al is necessary. And yet, there is the obvious beginning of a ‘me’ stuffed in there also, if only in the margins. Actually, many of the same themes that I continue to write about today—betrayal, gender politics, the isolation of the individual even in close-knit groups, the numbing death that is the workplace, etc.)—are represented in this early work. I also still find a lot of it funny and even a little bit true. It was the first play of mine that got some regional attention and productions would pop up all around the country during the next ten years or so. I didn’t make a lot of money from it but it was the play that made me start to feel like a writer (although I still feel funny putting that on the ‘occupation’ line of most applications or travel documents. I don’t know why). As for my work, I continue to love the monologue form and characters without names and dialogue that overlaps and employs ellipses and for those reasons alone I hope it will be of at least casual interest to the average theatergoer (and the fact that someone once yelled “Kill the playwright!” at me during a production in New York [my Off-Off-Broadway debut] so I almost died for my art because of this play. Sort of.)

Posted by Carol Thea, LCSW—

Myrna Ram, LCSW, Iris Sugarman, LCSW and myself, all of New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, participated in a very lively talkback following a recent performance of Family Week.  Once again Beth Henley takes on the dysfunctional family and once again she speaks through the experience of females. The men are not seen and become the background, though important pieces of the puzzle, in the play.

Many people stayed for the talkback and were very interested in the emotional and psychological aspects of this play. Since the play takes place in a psychiatric facility where recovery of the very depressed woman whose son has died is the focus, questions about the facility and the supposed therapy were many. The play enfolds when family members (this case mother, sister ,daughter) arrive for “family week”.  They are there to help the patient recover, and during this the family dynamics are exposed and played out.  The play begins with the focus on all negative emotions that are to be explored and confronted. It is only when a positive emotion can be spoken from mother to daughter that acceptance of terrible loss (actual and psychic) and possible recovery can begin.

This was an unusual talkback in that we were there to explore the themes and metaphors of the play as professional psychotherapists rather then speak of the play structure, acting, directing, writing as I imagine most talkbacks following a play entail. This was a wonderful experience and fun for us and we hope for the audience that stayed to participate.

Many congrats to Stephin Merritt on his Obie Award win for the music and lyrics to Coraline!  Kudos are also due to MCC alum David Greenspan (Coraline’s Other Mother) for his Sustained Achievement Award. 

Been too long since you’ve had your Coraline fix?  Not to worry — click here for the cast recording from the MCC production. 

“Say hello to MCC’s little friend…” Tyler Caffall, an actor who moonlights as a script reader in our literary department, is getting Al Pacino’s back in The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of The Merchant of Venice. Click here to check out the rest of the rehearsal stills on Playbill.com.

Posted by Executive Director, Blake West—

When the marquee lights on Broadway are dimmed tonight at 7pm in honor of Lynn Redgrave, who died on Sunday night at the age of 67, I will be thinking of how much joy Lynn gave me, and so many others, over the years. 

I am grateful that I, and all of us at MCC Theater, had the opportunity to work with and get to know Lynn when she appeared in our 2008 production of Grace.  She played a woman of great intellect and control who loses her son and, in one particularly wrenching scene at the play’s climax, finally releases her grief and rage in a shocking, almost ghastly, wail.  It is an acting moment etched in my memory.  Lynn was riveting and true.  I was, and am still, in awe.  While at MCC, Lynn was generous with her time.  For us she participated in many talk-backs and patron events, she came to our galas, she signed fundraising letters.  She was a dream.  For many years she dealt with illness, but she did not let it stop her from acting or from her cancer advocacy.  Last year while undergoing treatments yet again, she continued to perform her one-woman play Nightingale at Manhattan Theater Club.  She was the consummate professional actor — the show must go on.  When we heard the news yesterday that Lynn had passed away, everyone at MCC was quite sad — from the artistic and administrative staff right on up to the board. She was amazing.  She was our friend.  We’ll miss her very much.

Adam James took home the first award of the evening last night at The Lucille Lortel Awards, for his performance in The Pride.  Great speech, too - congrats, Adam!