It’s refreshing to know that there is a theatre company in Denver that wants new faces, both on and off stage, especially when it comes to the playwrights they look for. Celebrationworks is a theatre arts organization established by playwright Carol Roper.
Carol has worked with and written for Robin Williams and for various television and feature films. She trained as a playwright in New York City, where her full length play “The Current Rage” won the Office for Advanced Drama Research Rockefeller Honorarium.
She taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California, and play and novel writing at the University of California, San Diego. She is a member of the American Academy of Poets, the Colorado Theatre Guild, the Writers Guild of America and the founder of Celebrationworks.
I had a chance to sit down with her and ask about Celebrationworks, what she looks for in good writing, and how it impacts plays and movies:
H: Tell me a little about Celebrationworks.
C: We did our first production last December and we did that at the Vintage Theatre. It was called "Humbug". We had six different playwrights, they were short plays that ran from 12 to 30 minutes, and that was a lot of fun.
H: When I was in college we did a program called Touché’ Theatriks, and Celebrationworks sounds like the same concept. It was student produced, student written, student directed and student acted. So it was all new and they were ten minute plays.
C: Yes, and we tend to use what I call accomplished playwrights so they may not be famous, you may not have heard of them but they are published.
H: I saw from your bio that you spent a lot of time in Hollywood.
C: I really didn’t mean to spend that much time there, but I kind of got caught up in it and I learned a great deal from it. Their technique is very sharp. When you’re doing movies the standards are always so very high, but the material may be a little dicey. It is so expensive to produce a movie, and there are so many contracts, that you don’t dare cancel. Because the bonds, the insurance people, they all come after you.
H: While I was looking for stories to do for an article, I happened to stumble onto your bio through Write Angle, and saw that you were involved with that.
C: When I came back to Colorado, Write Angle is where I started. And so I was with them in 2006 and they used to produce what they called Quickies, which was a short play festival, and they haven’t produced anything since then. I was getting a little antsy, I wanted to do some plays, I had Celebrationworks, and I turned it into a production company at that point. I love screenwriting, but I also love the theatre more because the theatre is live. You know, you and I can go to the theatre and find, Casablanca, and Humphrey Bogart, you know, still doing the same thing he was then. It’ll never change. You go to the theatre, it changes minute by minute. Which I think is what’s so exciting about the theatre. The live audience makes the whole thing come together. We are not really having a play without an audience, we’re just rehearsing.
H: From all the plays I’ve seen, it is so important for the script to be good. Because you could have the best caliber actors and the best techies, but if the script is no good, it’s almost impossible to save.
C: I saw a play by the Arvada Center last year, which had a famous actress, and the actors just beat the ban, they did everything they could but the play was very soggy, and would never have been produced if that person wasn’t famous. In fact, Neil Simon, they just put him in revival in New York, and they just closed. The audience cannot be fooled anymore. Those plays were great when they were written, you know we’re living in a really different time, audiences are more tuned to “Rent” or “Spring Awakening”, we really are wanting more challenging work. I mean there’s still going to be those big, big musicals, but for the most part, real theatre lovers want to see what’s interesting.
H: There are some people who don’t always go to the smaller theatres because they’re so used to what they see on the big screen, the big spectacle that when they see something that’s very character driven, they are bored. It’s like, if there are no explosions or girls taking off their clothes, then what’s the point?
C: Theatre is a different experience but it’s also a valid experience. Movies lie. You could have someone on screen whose parents’ just died and they’re singing about how happy they are. It is very hard to pull that off in the theatre where someone on stage has had a personal tragedy in their life and they have to carry on. You can feel the energy from them where film is very cold. That’s why you can see all these bloody horrible things, like the invasion of Normandy and you’re not that moved by it. You see one person get shot on stage and you’re like, ‘Whoa, oh God.’
H: So like you said Celebrationworks is all local but established.
C: Yes. We have a pretty high standard. I think if anyone is paying more than a donation, then they really deserve to see a show. And so we do professional quality theatre, on a very tight budget, and a low ticket price, I don’t want to charge anyone more than 12 dollars because I don’t want them to think, ‘oh gosh we can’t afford that.’ They can go to a movie for 10 or 12 bucks. It would be nice for them to come see live theatre. We do mostly comedies. They have some serious moments, but they’re fun to watch. We pay the actors, directors, and the playwrights even if they are not published through the ticket money. The tickets do not cover the cost of a production, and that’s why we ask for donations. I think it’s an exciting time to be in theatre.
H: What are you looking for as far as playwriting material is concerned?
C: I’m always looking for new material, you can go to my website and I have guidelines. If it’s a full length play I ask people send only the first ten pages. For my taste, I love that characters get on stage and for a good fifteen or twenty minutes they go at whatever it is their doing. That is the art of the theatre. Can you make people, can you get us into your world, for the next twenty minutes? One thing I am not crazy about is foul language, not because I’m sensitive to it, but because foul language dates your plays. People from your generation tend to say ‘sweet’ where as my generation says ‘groovy’. Those are words that make material dated for its time. Shows like “Rent” are moving timelessly, “West Side Story” moves timelessly, these plays are moving through generations because they are not stuck in a certain period.
H: There is this undercurrent of frustration among new actors and writers, that they can’t get their stuff noticed, because all these other people who have been doing it get everything. Or people say, ‘well you’re not published so we don’t even want to look at it.’
C: The reason why some of these theatres can’t afford to bring in actors they don’t know or playwrights they don’t know is because how are they going to sell a forty five dollar ticket to their audience? So they’re looking at their marketing and their overhead and they have a huge overhead, and I simply looked at it and said what I want to be worried about is how fabulous and exciting the work is that we’re doing. In New York there were people who came through the ensemble that you’d never heard of who are now famous, and I’d like to be that kind of theatre. That is my dream for the people who are here.
H: What is a good way for people starting out to get into areas like filming and writing, if they want to go into the movie industry for example?
C: Music videos. They have a huge demand for people who make them, edit them. Because it’s short, it’s going to show your versatility as a director. It’s easier for young people to get to do stuff like that, because they trust you. That is traditionally one of the best ways for a director or an actor to get noticed. And you can do more now with putting short videos on YouTube.
H: What are some of the opportunities you want to offer to people getting into writing, or just theatre in general?
C: I am trying to start a playwriting group. And I’d like to get together in January to start that, I really like writers who really want to write. I understand the desire to do it as a part time thing, or as a hobby, but we’re not the right place for that. It would be free. So that way the people really want to be there. I also need directors. I need directors who have the ability to pull the cast together. So we’ll see.
Celebrationworks’ upcoming show is “Your Dilly Dilly Heart” by Scott Gibson. It will be directed by Bernie Cardell in January 2010. For more information on Celebrationworks and their season check out their website at: http://www.celebrationworks.org.
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If you like this article, and want to know more about what’s going on around Denver, check out this preview of an upcoming show at the Aurora Fox: http://www.examiner.com/x-29074-Aurora-Theater-Examiner~y2009m11d14-Its-great-to-be-Fully-Committed-at-the-Aurora-Fox-Theatre
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