NOTEPAD:from the desk of the LAB PRODUCER

We are thrilled to launch our 2009-2010 season with Dominic

Orlando’s The Sense of What Should Be, a sharp look at power

spun out of control in the hands of a precious 16-year-old boy.

Dominic expertly weaves together humor and social critique as

the play asks questions about politics, religion, and the power of

pop culture to inform a worldview.

Workhaus Collective, our resident company, will produce the

play this season, so come see the Ruth Easton New Play Series

reading on October 5th to get the inside perspective on how it

develops from the page to the stage.

HAYLEY FINNResident Director & Lab ProducerThe Playwrights’ Center

RUTHEASTONNEW PLAY

SERIES

THE SENSE OF WHAT SHOULD BEBY DOMINIC ORLANDOMONDAY, OCT. 5 • 7 P.M. • at the PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER

What might happen if a high school student put on a supervillain costume and tried to take over the world? 16-year-old Adam Parker believes all the lessons he needs for worldly success can be found on the pages of comic books. This thrilling adventure story looks at what happens to our children when the transmission of values and traditions is surrendered to popular culture.

The Sense of What Should Be was written at the Corporation of Yaddo.

Tickets are FREE: 612.332.7481 • INFO@PWCENTER.ORG

IN YOUR OWN WORDS, WHAT IS The SenSe of WhaT Should Be ABOUT?

It’s about a 16-year-old boy, a high school student. He’s a big comic book fan, and he

decides he’s going to take over the world—the play takes that as seriously as possible.

We see him from the very beginning of this scheme as he goes step by step trying to

implement it, basically trying to raise the money to begin his career as a supervillain.

First he’s going to take over his small town, then the world.

WHERE DID THE IDEA FOR THE PLAY COME FROM?

I had an image of the main character with the prettiest girl in school tied up

somewhere—she was a prisoner of his—and they were having this intense

conversation. That scene was in my head for a while, and then my girlfriend and I took

a trip to the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest, and she told me some stories about

herself growing up, because that’s where she was from. She was telling me this story

about a local reverend who had left his wife for a young woman and was completely

unapologetic, and still wanted to keep his position at the church, and couldn’t

understand why nobody would back him up. Something about this unrepentant

reverend went really well with the supervillain kid—they end up as a team in the play.

And we passed several small dams that provide power to Seattle, and somehow all

these stories of her Northwest adolescence made the play come together in my mind.

WHAT IS THE MEANINg OF THE TITLE?

I think that all the characters in the play do have a sense of what should be, of what

the world should be like. Most of them are very young, so they all have plans of what

they’re going to do. So the play’s somewhat about the hopes these young people have,

and the sad reality that there doesn’t seem to be anyone guiding or helping them.

I don’t know if it’s my age or my own upbringing but I’m really getting interested in the

idea of parenting, both on an individual and societal level—everybody seems obsessed

with children, but at the same time I feel like we’re abdicating the responsibility of

raising them and teaching, leaving them prey to forces that may just want to exploit

WE SAT DOWN WITH PLAYWRIGHT DOMINIC ORLANDO IN ADVANCE OF HIS OCTOBER 5TH READING AT THE PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER.

them. So maybe it’s also a sense of what the world should be to and for young people

as they’re struggling to become adults.

THE PLAY IS BEINg PRODUCED BY WORkHAUS COLLECTIvE IN NOvEMBER.

COULD YOU ExPLAIN WHAT WORkHAUS COLLECTIvE IS?

Trista Baldwin and I cooked up the Workhaus Collective when we realized we were

going to be here for a while, and we wanted to create a place to put on work.

Minneapolis is amazingly supportive of playwrights. It’s not as supportive of new work.

There are a couple places doing new work, but not a lot, and most of them are doing

what I would call approved new work—you know, they’re doing new work that people

are doing around the country, or they’re doing devised work, which is not really

text/playwright-based. There’s a few smaller companies doing new work as well, but

Trista and I both felt like, well, we could just have our own small company, in that case.

And I think that’s a lot of where Workhaus came from.

WHAT DOES WORkHAUS OFFER YOU AS A PLAYWRIgHT?

Well, it offers—we don’t want to call them workshops, but it’s not really a production

in the sense of if the Children’s Theatre or the Guthrie were doing a play. It’s more like

a “workshop production,” but such a thing doesn’t really exist, so we call it—it’s just

a workhouse. It’s a way to see the play up and complete, but you’re still going to be

working on it. And what Workhaus does, which I think is unique in the whole country,

is: there is nobody choosing the play. There’s no hierarchy of choice. The writer chooses.

So we have to have tremendous faith in each other’s work, because we can’t say, “Oh,

no, not that one. Don’t do that one.” So it yanks the plays out of the literary realm and

gets them on their feet with costumes and sound and the risk of an audience.

I LIkE THE FEELING OF HAVING

GONE TO THE GYM AFTER A

NIGHT AT THE THEATER, THE

FEELING OF BEING WRuNG OuT

A LITTLE BIT.

—DOMINIC ORLANDO

YOU’RE DIRECTINg BOTH YOUR WORkSHOP AND THE WORkHAUS

COLLECTIvE PRODUCTION. DO YOU OFTEN DIRECT YOUR OWN WORk?

I do. I actually studied directing in New York with Anne Bogart for a couple of years.

I like it a lot. So I have directed my own work. I go back and forth on it, you know.

Sometimes I like to do it.

I started out running a theater company in New York, a small company, and the first

play I ever sent to anybody was a mess, because I had no concept of the play as a

document apart from the production. In fact, that didn’t really come into focus until I

came here. I usually saw the play as a blueprint for the production, not as a piece of

literature, or something that you could put in an envelope and mail to people. So I’ve

always been more a maker of work than just a writer. But then, after that company

ran out of gas, as far as a wider career I just had to pick. So I picked playwriting over

directing, because—well, I don’t remember why, frankly. But it seems to have gone well.

HOW DID YOU TRANSITION FROM DIRECTOR TO PLAYWRIgHT?

Oh, it would be the Playwrights’ Center, 100%. I was tired of New York, and I applied

for the Jerome Fellowship and came to Minneapolis—I was lucky enough to get in

on my first try—and I can pretty much trace everything that’s happened since then

back to the Center in one way or another. I mean, this new thing that’s happening with

Dominique Serrand and Actors Theatre of Louisville started as just between me and

Dominique, really, and then somehow Polly [Carl, former Producing Artistic Director]

connected Actors Theatre of Louisville to it—I’m still not quite sure how—and it kind

of snowballed. So there are very few things I can’t trace back to the Playwrights’ Center

one way or another.

TELL ME A LITTLE ABOUT THAT PROjECT.

Yes, “The Project,” as it’s called. Basically, Dominique Serrand contacted me about

working with some playwrights, I think mostly because he was impressed with the

Playwrights’ Center, and also because my girlfriend was in Figaro and I happened to be

in California for about six weeks, so I actually hung out with Jeune Lune for quite a bit

of time. And he just wanted to do the Jeune Lune thing with living writers instead of

Moliére and Shakespeare. So we got a commission from Actors Theatre of Louisville

and the Playwrights’ Center, and we went into this room for two weeks last spring and

created this piece, which was an infuriating process, but it seems to have gone well.

WHAT DO YOU LIkE OR DISLIkE IN A PLAY?

You know, I’ve been telling this story because we just had the Playwrights’ Center fellows

retreat, and we were talking about this kind of stuff. I told this story of when I went

to see my first Cynthia Hopkins piece. And I saw the way she had set up the stage,

and there was all this equipment and screens and stuff, and I was like, “Oh, this is really

gonna be bad, bad, bad.” And it was fantastic. And I love Cynthia Hopkins, and I’ve seen

everything of hers. And it sort of awakened me to this idea—I also think part of it is that

I’ve been teaching a lot—that one of the more odious things that’s happening in our field

is this kind of team allegiance to what makes a good play. It’s all the little schools saying

this is what a play should be, and all the other schools are stupid and suck, and which

school do you owe your allegiance to?

I like a play to be good. I like people to take care in the execution, to be rigorous in their

execution. I like it to have integrity and be thoughtful and thought-provoking and also

emotional at the same time. I do think the two camps also split on the intellectual vs.

the emotional. That was one of the things we talked about over the weekend. When a

play is too intellectual, it allows you the luxury of not feeling anything. And if a play is too

sentimental, it allows you the luxury of not thinking anything. So a play needs to be both

thought-provoking and emotional, so it can wake up your whole self.

So I like plays that wake people up, and I like the feeling of having gone to the gym after

a night at the theater, the feeling of being wrung out a little bit. But other than that, it

doesn’t matter what kind of play it is.

ANY LAST THOUgHTS ON YOUR PLAY?

The play is a lot of fun. So I hope people come in the spirit of fun. And I hope no one

is offended by how enjoyable it will be. Because I’ve found sometimes people in the

theater get frightened by things that are just completely enjoyable.

UPCOMINg EvENTS

SPACEBY kELI gARRETTMONDAY, NOV. 2 • 7 P.M. • at the PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER

“I am—we are, finally—neither from here nor there, from then or now.” In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, reporter Kassandra Dupris is taken hostage by a white supremacist group. As the floodwaters rise, reports of rescued puppies compete with underreported stories of loss and devastation. A door opens, and time and place shift between Hurricane Katrina 2005 and the Great Mississippi Floods of 1927.

Tickets are FREE: 612.332.7481 • INFO@PWCENTER.ORG

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FELLOW SHOWCASEFEATURING THE jEROME FELLOWS AND THE jEROME MANY vOICES FELLOWSMONDAY, OCT. 19 • 7 P.M. • at the PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER

Come hear selections from new work by Jerome Fellows Kristoffer Diaz, Virginia Grise, Kevin Anthony Kautzman, Dominic Orlando, and Mat Smart, and Jerome Many Voices Fellows Lorena Duarte, Reginald Edmund, Juma B. Essie, Rebecca Nichloson, and Eric “Pogi” Sumangil.

Tickets are FREE: 612.332.7481 • INFO@PWCENTER.ORG

FELLOWSHOWCASE