The Dark Room (workshop)

Self w/Katherine Nash (Jan 2024)

So, the thing is, right … I’m kind of between writer’s groups right now? It’s not that I’m afraid of commitment, I just haven’t found the right ensemble of people to be with yet.

One great advantage of being a member of a writers’ group is that it creates for you a deadline. If you are on your own, you set your own timeline for creation. If you meet with colleagues – once a week, once every two weeks, once a month – you may be expected to produce a certain number of pages. And so you have a responsibility outside of yourself, you have homework.

Twenty or so years ago, my wife invited me to join her writers’ group. They met at the Case Campus Arabica (now The Coffee House at University Circle) and it was with this ensemble that I began work on what became I Hate This (a play without the baby). Sharing individual scenes from a larger work, as I was composing it, this was a new experience to me. It was a supportive ensemble and extremely rewarding.

Some years later, after this team had amicably parted ways, I tried starting a writers’ group on my own, which lasted two weeks. We had infant children and I wasn’t in the right place to be managing anything that would take up so much time outside of work. I didn’t want to run a writers’ group, you know? I wanted to be in one. I’d just ended a theater company, I still wanted to create things, I was done with running them.

By 2008, I had been invited to join the (former) Playwrights’ Unit at the Cleveland Play House, and that was when my work started to take off. We were required to bring ten pages every two weeks, and that’s when I really started writing them plays. I developed well over a dozen full length plays and several more short works before the Unit folded nine years later.

Since that time I have been a much more consistent writer, continuing to write plays on my own time. When a draft is complete, I will host a private reading to hear how it sounds and to receive comments. What I do miss, however, is receiving feedback as the work progresses.

So I have been going to the Dark Room.

The Dark Room is like an “open mic” for playwrights, to hear their work read aloud. It started about twenty years ago, a program of the (former) Cleveland Theater Collective, an organization created to foster and support collaboration between all area theaters.

Management and maintenance of the Dark Room was turned over to Mindy Childress Herman in 2007, John Busser signed on to co-manage two years later, and they have shepherded the program ever since, in various sites on the campus of Cleveland Public Theatre. It’s a free event, the second Tuesday of the month folks gather to have their work read, to read the works of others, or just to witness.

Paul Manganello (Feb 2017)

I’ve had the Dark Room as a repeating date on my Google calendar for years without ever attending. I mean, I had attended a couple of times. I can even remember them. I read a piece from And Then You Die (How I Ran a Marathon in 26.2 Years) in 2008. In 2017, I brought an actor from Michigan I was working with and he read a new work. But I didn’t make it a habit. I live in Cleveland Heights, it’s a Tuesday, I have kids, and so on. And I already had a writers group.

You know that list of things you say you’ll get to, but never do? Since our youngest headed off to school, I have found myself actually doing those things. And one of those things is the Dark Room.

There’s this thing I’ve been working on, I won’t go too far into it, it’s inspired by a lot of recent discoveries I’ve made, about my family, about my life. I got an idea for a structure, a family story told in reverse chronology. So I’ve been bringing pieces to the Dark Room since November, to read them in actual chronological order, to hear how folks respond to them, and the response has been pretty positive.

Better than that, however, has been listening to the other works. It's a good time! And the community, this Cleveland theater community, folks I see sporadically — or every fucking day on Facebook but that’s not the same, you know? I’ve grown accustomed to, or made myself accustomed to the familial solitude mandated by the quarantine, and I’ve always had a degree of social anxiety, anyway.

But sweet are the uses of community. I am glad for such company.

Special thanks to Mindy and John for their contributions to this post.

Cleveland Public Theatre presents the Dark Room the second Tuesday of every month (except September).

This Is Not The Play (workshop)

One year (it was 2008) we were conducting a summer camp for CMSD middle school aged kids, and each member of our team chose one discipline to focus on; we had our dance captain, visual art instructor, music director, acting coach. I was to teach creative writing. I had never taught writing before in my life.

In preparation, I requested only two supply items; a Moleskine for each camper and an inexhaustible supply of pens. Yes, the kids could have used spiral bound notebooks, or even lined, loose-leaf paper. But I figured it this way, if they were going to take writing – during the summer – seriously, I wanted them to have something special to write in.

It was a good experience. We played with rhetorical devices. A “ya mama” joke is just a metaphor, right? We flipped that and wrote metaphors about ourselves, comparisons which could be amusing in their grandiose self-confidence. "I'm so cool they put me in lemonade." We also wrote poems and other bits of prose.

Of course, for some campers the time we spent together was torturous. Some people just don’t want to write, they definitely don’t want to write during summer vacation. I don’t blame them. Some were so resistant to the idea of writing I just sent them to work with another one of the instructors. It was a camp, it was supposed to be fun.

The company I work for has been hosting a different summer arts camp in another part of greater Cleveland since 2010, but I never considered suggesting I teach writing again until last year. We made it elective; there was time mapped out for visual arts, you could do that or you could write. I didn’t want to have a single person engaged in the writing workshop who didn’t want to be there.

It was just a one hour block. I began our second day of camp making the offer; anyone who wanted to write instead of do art, even if it’s just one person, I would be happy to work with them. Most chose art, I got six people. That was perfect.

We found an area of quietude, camp can be pretty noisy with kids from elementary to high school all over the place. It was a relief in the late morning to be able to concentrate with our small cadre. We sat around a table in the house of the auditorium, the lights were dimmer than the brightness of the stage. I played instrumental jazz on my phone, or noise for focusing from an app I'd discovered.

My lesson plan was mostly the same each day, and inspired by the daily writing ritual I had employed to create the short play project. Unlike with my solitary, quarantine era writing, however, each brief writing period with the campers included the opportunity for a debrief and reflection.

1. Free Write (10 min.)

Debrief:

• How was that?
• What did you discover?
• What surprised you?

2. Single Word Prompt (10 min.)
They were asked to choose one from three suggested one-word prompts.*
Examples:

• Darkness - what we can’t see
• Normal - what does that mean to you?
• Frozen - a moment in your life you wish you could freeze and preserve and keep

Similar debrief questions, adding, "Would you like to share what you wrote about?"

3. Dialogue (10 min.)
Choose a central question inspired by your response to the previous prompt.

• Create dialogue between two characters, no names, no specific gender, no stage directions (Unless you feel any of these things are necessary, then go ahead. It’s your work.)

Sharing the work, al fresco.

That was the first lesson. The next day, when we broke into these groups, I made it clear that if you changed your mind and would rather create visual art than writing, that was cool. And also that if anyone else wanted to try the writing, that would be cool, too.

To my delight, we pretty much had six people each day for the rest of camp. Five were committed, the sixth was usually someone new who tried it out once, maybe twice.

From the second day forward, the third ten minutes could be for creating something new from that day’s chosen prompt, or campers could continue or rewrite something they had previously written.

By the end of the first week we had a name for the writing group. Early on, when I proposed writing from a prompt, one of the campers asked, “Is this the play? Are we writing the play?”

“This is not the play,” I told them, which struck them as amusing, the way I said it. It became a daily reminder about the free writing periods. “This is not the play.”

We also wrote some poems, we read our work aloud. I encouraged them to choose one piece to polish, type up and share with the rest of the middle and high school age campers, and to get other kids to read and perform their new scripts.

During our last session together, at the end of camp, we talked about submissions, competitions, their writing aspirations. We recently announced the dates for this year’s camp. I’m looking forward to it. I think there will be writing.

*Source: Think Written | 365 Creative Writing Prompts

The Toothpaste Millionaire (book)

The Toothpaste Millionaire by Jean Merrill was published in 1972, and it was a book I treasured when I was in elementary school. It is the story of an intrepid sixth grader from East Cleveland who creates and successfully markets a new brand of toothpaste.

I’ve always loved stories of independent young people making their own way through the world. Also, from a young age I was fascinated with making and selling things. Growing up, the corner counter in our kitchen had been transformed by me, so many times, into supermarkets, post offices, computer warehouses, medical centers, greeting card stores, that my parents and brothers just casually referred to that counter as my shop.

“Where should I set this stack of magazines?”

“Put them on Karl’s Shop.”

They used to call me Karl.

I saw the ABC After School Special adaptation of The Toothpaste Millionaire, maybe not when it first aired in 1974, but surely upon one of its many reruns, and that further inspired my interest in the original text.

Another thing that compelled me was the setting, East Cleveland. We Clevelanders do love it when people recognize and acknowledge our existence. Jean Merrill, who died in 2012, spent some of her early years living in the Cleveland area where her father was employed by Republic Steel. Most of her childhood, however, was lived in upstate New York.

Like a lot of folks, I think Merrill had heard of “East Cleveland” and assumed it was the name of a neighborhood on the east side of the city of Cleveland, and was unaware of the particular transformation that was taking place in the inner-ring suburb of East Cleveland just as she was writing this brief novel.

In any event, I have now written a stage adaptation of The Toothpaste Millionaire for Talespinner Children’s Theatre, and it absolutely takes place in East Cleveland, circa 1970. Last week we held the first official reading, and it was an evening of pure joy. Both then and also at a private reading I held late last year, it was delightful to hear a room of adults laugh from dialogue which was intended for an elementary school audience. I think anyone from the age of eight and up will be engaged, amused and inspired by the story of Rufus Mayflower and his friends when it hits the stage in May.

Source: The Toothpaste Millionaire, 35th Anniversary Edition, Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006

This post was updated on February 6, 2024, and now includes information about Jean Merrill which was generously provided by her estate.