Edit Villarreal: Nurturing Fresh Voices

A new annual publication is being introduced this year at the School of Theater, Film and Television, not a scholarly or professional journal but a collection of original works, named for its contributors: New Playwrights at UCLA. The anthology shines a spotlight on the explosive recent growth of a program that was pretty impressive to begin with.

“One thing you are not going to find here,” says Edit Villarreal, chair of the MFA Playwriting program, “is anything like an identifiable 'UCLA play.’ We do not teach students to write in one particular style. The defining characteristics of UCLA plays are individuality, originality. We want to help each student to develop into a unique artist, into the playwright only they can become, and we want them to surprise us.”

A frequently-produced playwright (“The Language of Flowers”) and screenwriter (“La Carpa”), and TFT Associate Dean, Academic Affairs, Villarreal has, since 1989, shaped the MFA playwriting program into one of the most successful in the country—if you measure success by the numbers of recent graduates who are getting their plays produced or published. “We now have five playwrights working regularly in New York,” Villarreal points out “and another who is already well established in London—as well as many here in LA and across the continent. We have playwrights who are being published and we have graduates who are working as theater managers and literary managers, and all pretty evenly spread out over the past decade.”

It is, she says with a smile, “a nice mix.”

What is it about this particular program that energizes so many young writers to produce work that connects forcefully with play goers? Villarreal resists formulating simple answers, but suggests that TFT itself, the larger institutional context of her program, makes a huge difference. Playwriting co-exists here with many other programs, key components of the School’s fully integrated approach to teaching the performing arts. The playwrights rub elbows on a daily basis with directors and actors and dancers and musicians—and, more importantly, they have many opportunities to collaborate with them.

“It is a crucial part of the learning process for a playwright,” she explains, “to see what happens to your work when it is interpreted by others. That’s really the only way to learn what works on the stage as opposed to the page. The opportunities we offer to collaborate on productions are central to our approach. The Francis Ford Coppola One Acts, the New Play Festival, the Marianne Murphy Women & Philanthropy Play Reading Series. As a student here you are already entrenched in a thriving theater community.

“In the same vein we are very fortunate to have quite a few playwrights who started as actors and came here to enrich their commitment to theater. Just in recent years we’re talking about Annette Lee, Tiffany Antone, Angela Berliner, Laurel Ollstein, all of whom were already immersed in the world of theater as working actors. When they write something they have a practical sense of how the moment will work on stage. They bring a taste of the industry to the classroom, which has the effect of raising the bar for the entire process.”

Although a high level of raw talent has been a constant, Villarreal admits that some of the other qualities she’s noticed in her students have shifted: “What I have found in the last five to ten years is that students are writing characters of other ethnicities without even thinking twice about it. A white student will write an Asian character or a black character. They don’t even think it’s challenging. It’s just part of their world. This is a big change—bigger than even the theater world, I think, and very interesting.

“Another big change is that young writers are much more likely than in the past to be influenced by pop culture, to be interested also in comic books and video games. There are some who admire the classics stage works of the past, and especially the modern greats, such as Pinter and Albee and Mamet. But if you ask them who their favorite writers are they are more likely to mention famous screenwriters. For example, they are very accepting of Quentin Tarantino’s use of street language and his tricks with time sequence. This is especially evident when I teach in the UCLA Arts Camp/Workshops. The high school kids want to do six plots at the same time. They don’t see any reason why they can’t just go everywhere.”

With the greater freedom of structure and locale and scale offered by film, and especially its greater currency—the sense that it’s closer to the center of popular culture—why are ambitious young writers still drawn to an art form as superficially quaint and old-fashioned as live theater?

“Because,” Villarreal insists, “the writer has a stronger position in theater than in film. This is a medium where their voice is king—or their voice is queen. A young screenwriter once told me that he wanted to take my class because playwriting allowed him to write monologs and longer pieces of dialog. He said, 'I want to write things where people talk to each other.’”

Career Updates on Selected Students and Alumni

• First year MFA candidate Ayla Harrison
  An accomplished actress getting deeper into theater
• Third year MFA candidate Annette Lee
  Already winning competitions in New York
• Second year MFA candidate Jerome Parker
  Lorraine Hansberry would be proud of this award-winning “Miracle” worker
• Tiffany Antone ’04, MFA ’08
  LATC’s new Literary Manager is published, produced and on her way to Scotland
• Angela Berliner MFA ’07
  Actors Gang stalwart ranges from edgy adult fare to Shakespeare adaptations for kids
• Michael Vukadinovich MFA ’07
  Widely produced satirist will never have a corporate logo tattooed on his forehead
• Matt Palfrey MFA ’05
  Startling titles attract attention to plays that deliver the goods
• Marlene Shelton MFA ’05
  Playwright-turned-theater manager brings the world of Shakespeare to life.
• Rose Martula MFA ’03
  First “Salsa” on the London theater scene?
• Laurel Ollstein MFA ’03
  Laurel Ollstein’s musical Opa!

AYLA HARRISON

The MFA Playwriting program attracts an unusual number of established theater people, working artists seeking additional creative challenges. A case in point is one of 2008’s incoming MFA playwright Ayla Harrison, who has already worked extensively as an actress, most recently as Ophelia in the Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s well-reviewed production of “Hamlet.” Harrison has also been writing plays, and getting them produced, since her undergraduate days at the University of Central Florida. She won the UCF Ten-Minute Play Contest with “The Progeny,” about the events that inspired Mary Shelley to write “Frankenstein,” and “My 'Gina” was featured in a concert reading at the La Mama Experimental Theatre Company. As an actor she appeared in university and professional productions of “The Miss Firecracker Contest,” “Blithe Spirit,” “West Side Story” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” and in several independent films—including “The Karaoke King,” in which she played a character named Patrick. We’ll have to ask her about that one.

ANNETTE LEE

Third year MFA candidate Annette Lee has already made an impression in New York, New York, the town most playwrights aspire to conquer when they grow up. Her extremely brief “Higher Up,” was featured in “take 10, A Evening of Nine 10 Minute Play,” a program assembled by Aspen’s Theater Masters at the 59E59 Theater. Working her way across the continent, Lee’s play “Happy Talk” made it into Round three of the Last Play Standing competition at the Redwist Theatre in Chicago, and Pavement Productions is presenting “The Bath House,” and “Life Outside the Body” was featured at TFT last year as part of a program called “Random Acts.” “Her ten-minute play featured dogs, played by actors,” recalls Villarreal, “all talking about the new dog in the house while their master sleeps in a chair. You don’t know at first that they are dogs and have to figure it our from their behavior. It’s quite, quite funny.”

JEROME PARKER

At a ceremony in April, 2009, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Jerome Parker’s “Miracle in Monroe” received the 24th Lorraine Hansberry Award, presented in memory of the author of “A Raisin in the Sun” for “the best student-written plays on the subject of the African-American experience.” Meanwhile, Parker’s “Ballad of Sad Young Men,” about a soldier who returns home between two tours of duty in Iraq, was an official selection of New York’s Downtown Urban Theater Festival in June. “Ballad” originated at TFT as a workshop production in the Francis Ford Coppola One Acts series. “Currently,” says Villarreal, “Jerome is at work developing the book for a jazz, musical entitled 'Strange Fellowe,’ as well as a theatrical adaptation of Jean Genet’s 'Querelle.’ He’s a very exciting talent.”

TIFFANY ANTONE

Tiffany Antone began work in June as the Literary Manager of one the Los Angeles area’s most respected theater companies, The New LATC. “I am in charge,” she says, “of all new play submissions and play development programs.” Like many other TFT scribes she began her career in theater as an actor, earning a two-year AA degree from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. When she enrolled at UCLA to complete her undergraduate education, after several years of professional acting gigs, Antone soon fell in love with playwriting. Her play “Ana and the Closet” received a staged reading as part of the “Marianne Murphy New Plays, New Voices” series and received the 2008 Tim Robbins Award for Playwriting. “In the Company of Jane Doe” was a Princess Grace Foundation semi-finalist in 2006, a winner of the Playwrights’ Center’s “New Plays on Campus” series and won the 2008 New Works for Young Women contest at the University of Tulsa. Her work has since been read and performed in Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis, and “The Good Book,” directed by TFT faculty member Jose Luis Valenzuela in New York, will be published this year by Samuel French. Additional awards include the James Pendelton Foundation Prize, the Hal Kanter Award in Comedy Writing, the Dini Ostrov Stage Spirit Award in Playwriting, the Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme Scholarship and the Florence Theil Herrscher Award. To top it all off, Tiffany has won a prestigious British literary award in the form of a Hawthornden Fellowship, and will be traveling to Scotland to complete her residency at Hawthornden Castle in Lasswade. (Links: Official Site)

ANGELA BERLINER

As one would perhaps expect from a performer who earned her BA with a double major in theater and religious studies, the career to date of Angela Berliner’s play-ography is an unusual mixture of edgy adult material such as “Blood Hungary,” about the legendary 17th century “vampire countess” Elizabeth Bathory, and playful Shakespeare adaptations for kids, such as “Titus the Clownicus.” and “King O’Leary”(in which she played number one daughter “Cordelia-Mae”). Plays produced when she was a student included “Mosquito Bites“and a co-adaptation of Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” At the Actors Gang she appeared in “Blood! Love! Madness!,” “Love’s Labors Lost,” “Tartuffe” and “Little,” a play she wrote as a vehicle for herself and her twin sister, Jordana. The siblings have since starred together in an independent horror film, “Strange Girls,” a dark comedy about twins whose twisted relationship turns to murder. The film sold out its opening night screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and won the sisters a shared Jury Prize for Best Actress at the Hoboken International Film Festival. (Links: IMDb Profile, Official Site for Strange Girls)

MICHAEL VUKADINOVICH

While still an MFA playwriting candidate at TFT, Michael Vukadinovich won both the Dini Ostrov Award in Playwriting and the Tim Robbins Playwriting Award for the same work, “Billboard,” in which a recent college graduate, weighed down by student loans, gets paid handsomely to have a corporate logo tattooed on his forehead. The play was also produced off Broadway in 2007, which suggests that the playwright’s own forehead is likely to remain logo-free. Plays that have been produced by companies in New York, Los Angeles and the Netherlands include “The Temperament of Memory,” based on the experiences that inspired W. Somerset Maugham’s classic novel novel “Of Human Bondage,” and “Gilbert, Death by Obituary,” about a frustrated obituary writer in a town where no one dies. “Billboard” will be published in 2008 by Samuel French.

MATT PALFREY

A Visiting Assistant Professor of playwriting at TFT since he graduated from the MFA program in 2005, and a mainstay of the School’s Summer Arts Camp Workshops, Matt Palfrey writes plays that deliver on the promise of attention grabbing titles such as “Cockroach Nation,” “Honkies with Attitude,” “Gore Hounds” and “Jerry Springer is God.” Otherwise they would likely not have been produced by the Actors Theater of Louisville, Roadworks, American Theater of Actors, the (Mostly) Harmless Theater Company and many others. A number of his plays have been published this year, including “Drive Angry” and “Freak Storm“and “An Impending Rupture of the Belly,” which was described by Backstage as “a tragicomic fable of paranoia and violence in suburban America [that] steadily progresses from hilarity to horror, as the tension escalates like an ever-tightening vise.”

MARLENE SHELTON

When Marlene Shelton moved in July to Fayetteville, N.C., to take over as managing director at the Cape Fear Regional Theater, she left a highly successful gig at the BoarsHead Theater, in Lansing Michigan’s Center for the Arts, where she had been both managing director and director of education, a mix of responsibilities. She wrote “If the Shoe Fits,” a children’s play about a boy who runs away to join an Elizabethan theater company, at UCLA, and it had its first production at the Old Globe Playhouse in San Diego where she still is a student. It later became one of the BoarsHead’s most popular productions, staged initially in 2006 and revived the following year.

ROSE MARTULA

The London premiere of Rose Martula’s play “Salsa Saved The Girls,” at the Old Red Lion in 2007, was greeted by rave reviews as a bold and controversial work. (“Martula’s voice is thrillingly unique and theatrically defiant,” said “TimeOut.”) The success of “Salsa” led to the optioning of Martula’s later work “Brooklyn,” by the Kings Head Theatre for production in 2008. Born and raised on the east coast, now based in Los Angeles, Martula describes herself as “an artist who writes to live and lives to write.” Recently named one of 50 playwrights to watch in the “Dramatists Guild Magazine,” and a Lark Fellowship nominee, she says her work has been influenced by Sam Shepard, Tina Howe, Christopher Durang, Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, and Hubert Selby Jr. (Links: Official Site)

LAUREL OLLSTEIN

In her own words: “Laurel Ollstein was born in the wilds of Los Angeles to two therapist parents. In order to survive this, she became an actress. In order to survive that, she started writing.” Ollstein has worked in theater at several levels: in new play development, as an actress, a writer, a director and a teacher. As a member of the Actors’ Gang theater troupe for over ten years, she worked as an actress in “Hysteria,” “Blood Love Madness” and “MMC.” Currently a member of About Productions she collaborated as writer and actor in On “Earth as It Is in Heaven” and is also the project director for AB’s Stages, which transforms senior citizens’ life stories into theatrical monologues. Plays produced around the country include the one woman show “Laughter Hope and a Sock In The Eye” (about Dorothy Parker), performed in Minneapolis, Baltimore, and in Los Angeles and nominated as best one person show by the “LA Weekly.” The Greek-themed musical “Opa!,” for which wrote the book, won rapturous reviews during it’s Off-Broadway run (“Transitions from dialogue to song feel seamless throughout, with the lyrics pushing the story forward at every turn. Thanks to the adept editing of Mari Carras (book/lyrics) and her cohort, Laurel Ollstein (book), plot and subplots carefully unfold, using characters’ yearnings and secrets as bait to keep intrigue and story moving at a pretty pace.“ — IndieTheater.org.). (Links: Official Site for “Opa!”)

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Keywords

"edit villarreal" "new playwrights at ucla" "ayla harrison" "tiffany antone" "angela berliner" "annette lee" "jerome parker" "michael vukadinovich" "matt palfrey" "marlene shelton" "rose martula" "laurel ollstein" 

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