Jack Canfora is an actor and screenwriter. He has won two Edgerton Playwriting Awards, for Jericho (2010) and The Source (2018). He won the 2016 Webby Award for Best Writing in a Web Series. Watch the pilot here: www.thesmalltimeseries.com. We talk screenwriting, storytelling and dialogue this show.
Find more about Jack at https://www.jackcanforawriter.com/
See New Normal Rep plays at https://www.NewNormalRep.org. See Jericho for free at https://www.newnormalrep.org/bonus and use the code NNR2022.
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TRANSCRPITION STARTS HERE:
Kat
Hello, Jack Canfora I am super excited to have you with us today. How are you doing?
Jack
I’m doing great. I’m very excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Kat
Yeah. This is a podcast about writing and you have done some writing, but I’m excited to talk to you about theater, because theater is storytelling, right? So before we get into that, would you tell people a little bit about yourself?
Jack
Yeah, well, just in terms of that theater, part of it, I trained as an actor, particularly Shakespearean acting, which I was really into. I know it makes me sound fancy, but as I reach around close to 30, I got married and I was going to have a kid and that kid was, as I say, going to want to eat every single day. And I spoiled him. I sometimes would let him eat more than once a day. It meant sort of having to get a fulltime job, which actually I ended up loving, which is teaching for a while, teaching literature, which was a great way to learn about writing, by the way.
Kat
Right.
Jack
And the way I could stay connected to theater, really, was through writing. And so really, now I’ve been a playwright for 20 years at this point.
Kat
So writing didn’t come into the equation before feeding the child?
Jack
Well, it started to because oddly enough, my two areas where I got any work as an actor was doing some Shakespeare, also doing improv sketch comedy. So I started writing sketch comedy in my late 20s, mid 20s. And I don’t have any formal training as a writer, but it was great training because we would write material and then we would perform it that week. And the audience is the best teacher in the world. So you’d find out what worked and you’d also find out in a very big way what didn’t work. And so eventually you would try and catch on to the difference.
Kat
That’s interesting. So is there a big difference between Shakespeare and comedy sketch?
Jack
It’s just pretty radically different in a lot of ways. Yeah, I think so. I think in a lot of different ways. But the one commonality, I guess the sketches that we tended to write in Shakespeare, believe me, it’s not in terms of quality of language, but it is a reliance on language. Like, we didn’t do wacky characters. We had some usually bizarre premise, and then half the fun of the sketches, if they turned out to be fun, was the language. And so that was always the key for us. We weren’t big on recurring characters or anything like that. I think we were very much influenced by Monty Python, which is incredibly dense and wordy. I guess the overlap between the two, apart from to me, would be that a love of and an enjoyment of language.
Kat
Right. Yeah, that’s true. Because as I think of Shakespeare when I was in high school, it finally clicked when we went to go see people perform it. And the way that they use the language was like, oh, yeah.
Jack
When I would teach Shakespeare, I would never allow them to read out loud in class. The same reason I wouldn’t allow beginning musicians to play Mozart and have that experience be what the class experiences as Mozart. We would always watch it and then we would go back and read the text. Because it takes some training. It takes them knowing what you’re doing with Shakespeare to make it make sense to the modern ear. And listening to a bunch of bored 15 year olds try and, you know, slog their way through it, which is most of our experience in high school with Shakespeare. Nothing you could put in have redneck context that would sound interesting and wouldn’t be confusing.
Kat
Right. I just showed my 15-year-old the Romeo and Juliet from the 90s. But my favorite character in that movie is the cousin because he makes, like, the way that he plays the rhythm on the words is just…
Jack
Well that’s the way to do it. Yeah. I mean, Mercutio yes, Mercutio is the best role. When I was acting, I played Mercutio a lot. And it’s first that he gets all the good lines. He’s got an amazing fight scene, amazing death scene, and then you’re done in intermissions, you can leave. So it’s great.
Kat
I like that. Yes, but I do think there is something about language. So I love language. I love the way I don’t want to sound pretentious, but I like literature, I like the classics, the language. And I do think there’s something missing a little bit these days because we’re so influenced by television and it’s like we’re trying to write the panoramic scene, instead of the dialogue, the language. But if you’re doing sketch, that must be all mostly dialogue, right?
Jack
Well, it was back, and I haven’t done sketch in years, but yeah, it was. And when I do plays, my plays tend to be very language heavy as opposed to visually or image driven, which some playwrights have. But it’s funny, I was just thinking about this today, like, screenplays, which has obviously they have an overlap with stage plays, but they’re very different. And really, I think in modern screenplays, the rule of thumb is that language is a necessary evil. And if you can tell a story, it’s all told visually. And if you even watch a movie from the 70s or 80s, let alone before then, the language is so much more dense. There are so many more scenes where people were just talking. Now, it’s very rare that happens. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but it’s the exception and not the rule. You want to tell the story with pictures the whole time. I mean, it’s called motion pictures for a reason. In stage plays, there are a lot of great writers who rely a lot on image driven text. I don’t, I’m not very good at visualizing things, so it tends to be very dialogue driven, which is more acceptable in plays than it is, say, in movies. So it’s more forgiving of my weaknesses, stagewise.
Kat
Well, you would think, I mean, I don’t get to the theater as often as I would like to, but they’re very constricted by the amount of space they have. And so as far as I have seen, whether it’s a musical or whether it’s just strictly dialogue, the only way that you understand what’s going on, half the time, is through the language.
Jack
Right, well, that’s certainly true. I mean, there are plays that have especially like the high budget ones have dazzling sort of scenery, and the constrictions, even in some ways, though to your point, have become more and more constricting in recent decades. I mean, if you go back and read or I preferably watch a lot of the classic American plays in the 40s and 50s, which in some ways is considered like the height of American theater, although I think that’s a little simplistic. But like Death of a Salesman or certainly Tennessee Williams stuff, there’d be like 15-20 people in the cast. There’d be like four or five main characters. And today, as a writer, as a playwright, you are urged to, if you can make it a two-character play, maybe three or four.
Kat
Wow.
Jack
I had a play that’s been produced a lot, but also theaters come to me saying, we’d love to produce it, but the cast is just simply too big and it’s a six-character play.
Kat
Oh, my gosh. Okay. So you’re being restricted a lot by budget more than anything.
Jack
Exactly, right. And at times, that certainly annoying. But if you try and have the right attitude about it, structures can be also a fun challenge, right? I mean, I guess it’s why poets used to anyway, write sonics, because you have to do it, but you have to do it this way. And so it forces you into making choices, which as a writer is of course, sometimes I think the hardest thing to do is actually commit to a choice. You have to do it.
Kat
You want the paycheck. So what was the first play that you wrote after this sketch comedy?
Jack
And it was a play called Playsitting. And I was lucky enough that the first play I wrote got produced by New Jersey Repertory, which is a small but very well respected rep company in New Jersey. And I look back on it now and I haven’t read it or looked at it in years, but I cringe a little bit at it because it was my first play. But actually I was very lucky. It did very well. So then I also realized that I think I had more of a facility for writing than acting, perhaps. And certainly plays actually are more in demand than actors. Or decent plays, halfway decent plays. Again, it was something I could do while I worked. Well, not while I worked. But as I had a job, I couldn’t go on audition and then land a gig and then be gone for three months and then come back and expecting to find my job waiting there. I started writing plays right after that. And then again, very lucky, I got my first play produced. And from there on in, I’ve had it’s been a little bit easier for me to get produced.
Kat
Okay. So if somebody’s already a writer and they’ve always maybe thought about playwriting, or maybe they haven’t, how different is it to write a play and then, I guess, actually to sell it? But I mean, that would be another step, right?
Jack
Well, selling it is very complicated, and if anyone has any tips, please email me.
Kat
We’ll put your email in the show notes.
Jack
Yeah, please. But if the writing of it and of course, I’ve never written a novel, for example, I’ve written a short story or two and I blog, and that’s a very different animal. And again, there’s so many different types of novel writers and short story writers. You can go from Ernest Hemingway to Tony Morrison, right? And just totally different animals, those works. But plays tend to demand an incredible amount of aerodynasm. You can’t have anything that slows things down. Every word in theory, and I don’t always succeeded at this, but every word literally has to drive the story forward. You can’t be discursive in the least, where sometimes, in some of my favorite novels, for example, the discursive parts can be sort of my favorite, right? You get to see another aspect of a character, right? Or you get to find out more about the environment, the culture wherein the story is set. You have to basically do it all with dialogue and you have to set the exposition up entirely with dialogue. I mean, the set designer and other people come into play, absolutely. But you really have to establish the world of the play just through people talking. And then there’s no room because the difference is you can put a novel down and go and get a bite to eat and then come back to it and feel like it. Audiences are there for 2 hours and so you’ve got to hold your attention. And the way you do that, usually, is just the story is going to propel itself.
Kat
Yeah, that makes sense, though.
Jack
You can’t really take a breath.
Kat
Yeah. You can’t have backstory, right? You really have to bring up the character.
Jack
You can have backstory, but you have to provide it in the presence, in the context of dialogue without sounding really clunky. I mean, you can’t have character show up and say, well, here I am in 1968, and boy, my childhood as the son of an alcoholic lawyer is really haunting me now. I mean, you have to, obviously, but you can’t go into background and explain like I mean, you can have flashbacks, people do all the time, but you have to sort of make it in the present and you sort of glean the past from the from the present.
Kat
That’s curious, because I think that novel writers could learn a thing or two, because most of us teach, if we teach writing within our own editing, our own book, we’re like, okay, you don’t need to go back and say, when he was 24, he did this, I say this. I found a chunk in my draft that I’m working on. You’re like, okay, maybe you wrote that for yourself as an author, but you have to take that out because nobody wants the story to stop to know anything about that. You have to bring it into the story, like you said. And using dialogue is always a piece of advice that we’re given. But it’s not easy. It’s not easy to be like, you’re a journalist, right? Yes, I’m a journalist, went to Harvard.
Jack
Right, exactly. And it’s something that I think that’s sort of the carpentry of it, like the nuts and bolts. That’s the craft aspect of it. And that’s something I think a person gets better at the more they do it. I’m agnostic on the 10,000 hours rule, but I think there’s some validity to it. Yeah. I think that if you don’t have talent, I think you can learn, 10,000 hours can make you okay, but it’s not going to make you great. But you have to put it into working. Because for me, when I write four days out of five, it’s not coming along and the story is writing itself. Those days happen, but they’re not the norm. So more times than not, you’re just trying to plow ahead and find your way through. Especially if you don’t outline, and I do not outline.
Kat
You don’t outline, you don’t use Save the Cat?
Jack
Oh, god, no. And again, there are great writers who do and great writers who don’t, right? So there’s no one right or wrong way. To me, that would be like a homework assignment. To me, that would be like figuring stuff out. Tom Stoppard once said, “if I knew the ending of my plays, why would I bother to finish them?”
Kat
Good point.
Jack
I sort of adhere to that a little bit because when I write, I don’t know necessarily what the play is about, I try not to make the plays consciously about anything at first. I mean, they eventually have to be about something, obviously. But when I start writing a play, when it’s not like a commission or someone saying, please write about this and I do that. For a play, for me to be interested in, it’s almost inevitably in the form of a situation that I think of or read about where it’s some sort of issue or quandary in which I think to myself, well, that’s really interesting. I don’t know what they would do and I don’t know what I would do. I start off based on that question and sort of find out what the characters think about. I mean, for me, I think we all, well, I shouldn’t say plural, I can just speak for myself. Often, especially when I was young, earlier in my career, I would start off saying, I think this story is about this. And that to me is really dangerous and limiting because I think a lot of artists, I don’t think you should know what the story is about when you start writing. I think you should have an impulse and a vague sense of it, but at some point your characters are going to start telling you, no, I want to go this way. And if you start, it’s like walking a dog, in a way. And if you’re trying to write like you’re walking a dog, I think you’re in a lot of problems because the dog may want to go this way and you’re like, no, we have to go this way. That’s good in dog walking, I think it’s bad in telling a story, because the characters generally understand themselves better than you do. I think it’s something mystical, and it’s a lot less romantic than that. But there is a point, if it’s going well, that you do find yourself surprising yourself as you’re writing. And that to me, is usually for me anyway, it’s a good sign.
Kat
Yeah. There’s always this debate with myself on this podcast, on the outline; to outline or not to outline. And prep of this, you’ve surprised me with your answer because in prep of talking with you, I looked back at the Save the Cat beats because I was like, I better know what I’m talking about when I ask him this question. And I was like, oh, I don’t even know. Just looking at it overwhelms me.
Jack
That’s the thing, too, and I’m not trying to disparage the Save the Cat and Robert McKee kind of thing, and I think there’s probably truth in what they’re saying. But if you’re learning it as a formula, how can that not come across as formulaic?
Kat
I think for some of us, it just doesn’t work.
Jack
Yeah, it doesn’t work. Again, it would start to sound to me or feel to me like homework. Well, I didn’t hit this beat on this page and I didn’t do this beat on this page. And I’m sure there’s great truth to what they’re saying, but if you arrive at it because it’s been prescribed to you, I don’t see how that’s going to feel very fresh or interesting. But again, that’s just for me. There are many writers who feel differently to me. I’m sorry.
Kat
Go ahead. I think there’s problems with both, right? No matter what you are outliner, you might come on to very contrived scenes that you’re going to have to go back and fix, and us non-outliners might have to delete half of this.
Jack
Yeah, and I’m okay with that. First of all, I’m horribly guilty of being an overwriter, and I’m okay with that when I’m writing it, because I know that there’s a delete key. I mean, I think I would literally be a different type of writer if I had started to write in the age of typewriters.
Jack
Yeah, it’s so true. Because I don’t even know. Some people have asked me, well, how many drafts do you write? And I have no idea, probably 800-900. Because I will constantly go back and tweak things, especially when I’m like, having a moment where I don’t know where it’s going. And some editors and writers would say, never do that. But for me, if I’m sort of percolating and waiting for something to come, I’ll just go back and look and edit as I’m going along. Like every morning, I’m going to edit and then change things, on the computer. I mean, the one rule I’ve always sort of had for myself and found to be sort of a useful guide is to be unbelievably forgiving and kind to yourself when you’re writing and just to be brutal to yourself when you’re editing. For me, anyway, I try and compartmentalize it and say, be kind to yourself, Jack. And I say it in that voice and don’t even care, just get out what you’re trying to get out. Because in a few minutes you’re going to get a cup of tea and you’re going to come back and you’re just going to be the biggest jerk in the world to your writing. And you say, I want to know what the hell this means and where is this going? And the more brutal you are to myself, I am I found one I’m writing, the less brutal the people who are listening to it will be afterwards to me. So that, to me, is sort of a paradoxical approach for me.
Kat
Right. I think we all have our ways of writing, and I think that the only advice I can always give people is just to keep doing it. You got to try different things. Sometimes it comes easy, some stories come easy, and stories just don’t. And I don’t know what to do about that with people, we always try something new, I guess. As you were writing these plays, I want to talk about your online theater company.
Jack
Well, yes, that would be lovely to talk about.
Kat
Because, first of all, theater is changing, COVID changed everything, right? I spoke to a woman out in San Francisco, and she was devastated by how the theater world out there just shut down, and she wasn’t sure it was going to come back.
Jack
And San Francisco has some great theater out there, ACT in particular. But yeah, I mean, it just brutalized theater. And so a lot of my friends are actors and writers. And around April, I just reached out to a bunch of people who are A) good actors, and B) people. I really just enjoyed being around, that was almost more important. And said, why don’t we just meet every week and have a zoom, read a play on zoom every week? It can be anything we did, like Shakespeare, Neil Simon, you name it. And anyone can play any role they want, and it’s just going to be fun. And first of all, it helped us keep our muscles flexed in shape a little bit, and it also was just, for me, just a sanctuary. One of the founders of our online company, New Normal Rep, which can be found NewNormalRep.org, she put it really beautifully. She said that those readings were a little campfire in the dark of the pandemic, and a few months into it, we realized that we actually really have a very strong core of actors and that the pandemic, thank God, is ebbed, it’ll probably never entirely go away. And this medium of people started doing play readings online all the time, and even the best of them were a little you, had to really want to watch it. And so we thought, well, we know what the limits of this medium are, but there are probably benefits to it as well. We tried to lean into it and figure it out as we’ve been along, and so we tried to develop a sort of aesthetic. So the first season, we produced four plays, and they were four, like, fully produced plays. In other words, you didn’t see people reading from a script. And we had green screens, and so it looked like people were in the same room. Obviously, the viewer knows that they’re not in the same room, right? And that’s okay. Just like when you’re watching TV, you know that the people aren’t actually that small. You just sort of get over that because you become conditioned to it a little bit. Our aesthetic was more, I guess, like a zoom meeting, unfortunately, in that the characters would be looking right at you, even though they would be talking to other actors, the other characters, as we recorded it, they can see the other actors and what that sort of started to create, and a lot of viewers commented on this, said that felt like they were actually in the scene in a way that they’ve never experienced before. So there’s a sort of intensity and intimacy to it. And so I think it’s a new medium. I’m not comparing it to theater or television or anything like that, but I think it’s a new thing. And to us, one of the key advantages of this is that it’s so inexpensive for the viewer and it democratizes it. As long as you have access to Internet, you can watch theater anywhere. Like you were saying, you don’t get to the theater as much as you’d like to, and you’re not alone, and you live in a major cosmopolitan, with lots of good theaters. Most people in the world don’t. And I think it’s just not on most people’s radar, to go to the theater. And if they do, it’s once a year to a splashy musical and I’m not against splashy musicals, but there’s a whole other world of really good drama and comedy and blah, blah, blah.
Kat
Right, there is that problem. As much as we scroll through Netflix, we’re going to go to the play bill and be like, I don’t even know.
Jack
Exactly. Right, exactly. And so one of the things we’re very excited about with this company and that’s why one of the reasons we’re really intent on maintaining it, is because the idea that you can find a new way of telling a story is very exciting, and also that you can reach people. And even if you live in a major metropolitan area, going to the theater without taking out a second mortgage is sometimes very hard to do, become prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, except a very thin cohort. And I think that’s sort of a shame, because I don’t think theater and I don’t think art is a luxury, unfortunately. It’s probably an essential nutrient, and many of us aren’t getting it.
Kat
Right. It used to be for the masses, right? And now it’s become this thing. I looked into going to see Music Man. I’ll have to sell one child to go see this. Yeah, I mean it’s New York, so I get it. But I would have to get a hotel and all that. But yeah, it used to be the television for people, so that you get to go and you get to see this. And there’s something really special about theater when it’s done. Well, like you said, even the way that you guys have it when they’re looking straight at you, there’s something different about that than watching television.
Jack
Yeah, absolutely. Listen, television is amazing and does certain things brilliantly and particularly well. And film is great. I’m not, believe me, I’m big fans of them both. And what we’re doing isn’t exactly theater, and we don’t pretend it is, but it’s a theatrical experience. It also allows us we were talking earlier about language and the amount of language. Plays sort of allow language to breathe more because you need a lot of it, and this does just as much, if not more so. So it’s a different experience, but yeah, I mean, even off Broadway plays now are very expensive, and it’s very hard for plays to be performed. Certainly it’s impossible on Broadway and all, but impossible off Broadway, without having some sort of star involved. It’s just good to have access to plays. We do new and or underproduced work from a whole host of different writers of different worldviews, different points of view, different cultures and ethnic groups, and we just want a real diversity of viewpoints. The common denominator is that we all have to think that they’re good plays.
Kat
Okay. In this way, you guys only have to live in the same city. You guys get together, you practice online, you record online. And I can imagine that this would be so much better for the literature teacher. You’re looking back at your life as a literature teacher, like, okay, here’s the play.
Jack
Right. Well, that’s it. When I was teaching, whenever I taught novels, too, and obviously we would read the novels, and to me, the novels, I would almost never show any movie that was based on the novel, too, because that’s a very different animal. We would study the novel, but plays, I mean, the text and this is both a drawback and a plus, if you’re a playwright, the text isn’t the whole story. Whereas the novelist, every inch of that is on you. As a playwright, I’ve provided the basic structure and the blueprint. And now other really, hopefully, smart, talented people are coming in and adding their own spin to it. Even if they’re saying the exact same words. Two actors will give you very different feelings about a character or what’s being said. And so if you’re lucky enough and one of the relatively few smart things I’ve done in my life, is that when I’ve worked with actors whom I really respected very much, is I’ve worked very hard to keep them in my life artistically. And that company is essentially based and made up of a lot of those actors and really good actors, just like maybe a really good editor would. But a good, really good actor is no matter how good you think your story is, they’re going to make it better, they’re going to elevate it.
Kat
So you can’t be super possessive, I guess, of your story. As a playwright, you have to allow that room for the actor to take the character and maybe even make them different than what you thought.
Jack
Well, just like when you’re writing, you have to be open to the idea of, well, this isn’t what I thought it was, but that’s probably a good sign. And let me go with that. Yeah, I mean, the nice thing about being a playwright is that they can’t change like a comma without your express approval, and that’s their gift to you for not really paying you very much. I think I’d be an idiot not to be open to different ideas and different suggestions and different thoughts. But I also do get the final say. And so it’s a fine line of being having you have to have enough confidence in your work to be open to it being wrong, if that makes any sense. Like in this audio play, Step 9, it’s out now on all podcast platforms. There was one scene in particular. This was rare for me. There was a scene that I wrote, and all the actors in the play, I think, without exception, told me, and I all trust and respect these people, said, that scene does not land, that does not do what you think. Usually when that does happen, I’ll think, oh, yeah, you’re right. And I thought to myself, really? No, I think it’s landing. And whereas there are times where as long as I think it’s landing, I will say, no, we’re going to keep it this way. But at some point when seven really smart people say to you, no, this isn’t working. I’d have to be an unbelievable idiot and egomaniac, and I’m only moderately both those things to say, well, maybe they’re right and I’m wrong. And so I ended up going back and rewriting the scene in a very different context, in a very different way. What I liked about the scene, I was able to keep. But everything they had objections to about the scene, because the way I rejiggered it, they were okay with it. Now the scene works for them. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have done that. And I think the play would have been the worst for it.
Kat
Right. You almost got, like you said, seven very smart people editing that one scene. Sometimes that hurts our ego, for sure, but there are sometimes that would be nice, instead of getting that bad review on Amazon.
Jack
Yeah, exactly. It’s always better in the rehearsal room than in the online comment section. It’s a weird thing. It’s a mixture of humility and a certain amount of confidence. I mean, obviously, if I’ve written a story and I’ve given it to anyone else to read, obviously I have to have some confidence because you’re risking doing that. So I have to have confidence in the story and I have to have enough confidence that what I’m going to do is going to work, that I can therefore listen to other smart people and see how we can improve it. We all have the same goal. And I think the more insecure you are as a writer, the less open you are to be, if that makes sense.
Kat
Yeah, that’s a good point. I do want to talk about the podcast platform because about Step 9 and what made you decide to do is it only audio, then?
Jack
It’s only audio. It’s a radio play. They used to call radio plays.
Kat
Oh, my gosh, I love old radio plays.
Jack
Yeah, it’s it’s a radio play. And in the UK, for example, they’ve done that all the time. It’s very much just a part of their culture. They’ll say like two or three times a week on BBC Radio or whatever. They’ll be a comedy or a drama radio play. Yeah. And we sort of got rid of that. It’s sort of making a comeback a little bit, but yeah, it’s an audio play, so it’s a play. I mean, there’s a soundscape and all these things very minimal, almost no stage direction, only sort of in the beginnings and ends of scene to kind of orient you. And we chose this play, and it happens to be a play of mine, and I just want everyone to get the impression that we just do my plays. We do many other writers, but we did this play because, like I said earlier, there’s seven characters in it. And that would make it almost impossible to produce by today’s theatrical standards, which is crazy. It’s also a little long-ish. I mean, I think it’s as long as it needs to be to tell the story. So that lent itself to breaking it up into episodes. You can listen to it all at once if you want, but you also can listen to it in discrete episodes. There are eight of them all together. Now. If we were really clever, we would have made them nine episodes, but we couldn’t really get there dramatically.
Kat
You didn’t want to just like, squeeze it into. Yeah, sometimes it just karma. Doesn’t work like that. So it’s called Step 9. Do they just look for that on the podcast?
Jack
Yeah. Step 9. And then they would also be wise to put in New Normal Rep on any podcast platform and it will pop up.
Kat
So then how did you guys like the experience of podcast? Or like, I guess radio podcasting basically is almost like radio a little bit, versus the visual medium.
Jack
We found that we loved it. And it was a little bold of us, a little gutsy of us because we working under relatively constrained budget. And so we recorded the whole thing in one day, which afterwards, the sound engineer who was at the studio, who did the sound for us, had said to us, boy, you you guys really, that’s rare. It’s almost impossible to do that and so I think, had we known that, that’s an example too, of like, following these rulebooks. Had we followed this rulebook, we would have been told, well, you can’t do that, right? But we found out that we could, and we loved it. First of all, the company is two years old, or was over two years old at that point. We had never met many, a lot of us have never met in person. I had met everyone in person just about, but a lot of the people hadn’t. So that was fun. And we got to act in the same room with each other, which was an immense amount of fun.
Kat
So you actually got together for this one?
Jack
Yeah, and it’s a podcast studio, in fact, and I think we started recording it like 12, 1 o’clock and we had to be done by 9, there was a hard out and we got finished at 8:45. We rehearsed it a lot ahead of time, so we felt confident.
Kat
Yeah, and you guys are professionals, you get me in there and I’d be like, hey, sorry.
Jack
But it was funny, though, because our director, Eleanor Handley, who’s a brilliant actor, this is her first time directing, but she’s an amazing director as well, which is unsurprising to me, but a lot of it too, that speaks to the value of a repertory company, because we all knew each other, we worked with each other a lot. So there’s a sort of shorthand, but nonetheless, Carol Todd, who plays the lead, often we do a scene, like in one take and Owen or would be like, that’s it, we got it. And Carol and other actors too, would be panicky, no, no, no, no I was just warming up, that’s not the one I want. But like a writer and an editor, very often an actor and a director, the director will know better. When I was acting a lot, I’m actually acting in this too, but I don’t act that much anymore. But inevitably, the moments when I thought I come off the stage and think, oh man, I really nailed it, people would come up to me and say, “are you okay? What happened there?” So it’s usually a sign, I think, with writers, too, when you feel great about something, sometimes it’s a sign you’re being a little self indulgent.
Kat
So true and you should go back and get it edited. It probably helps that being theater actors like you do have to go out there and you have to perform, right? Whether you’re on or off.
Jack
Totally. Absolutely. That’s a huge advantage to us. Boy, it took a long time for me to think of that word.
Kat
And how was it together with that being the first time. Do you guys want to do it again?
Jack
We loved it. We definitely want to do it again. We certainly had a very nice time at the bar afterwards, which half the reason actors get into acting in the first place. But it was great, it was great. It’s a very heavy, without spoiling anything but the basic premise, it’s called Step 9 because in recovery, drug and alcohol recovery, there are twelve steps, famously. And the ninth step is making amends, reaching out to people you’ve wronged. One of the characters in this play is doing at it. However, the ninth step says explicitly, if reaching out to that person is going to traumatize them and be bad for them, you can’t do that. But this person didn’t get that memo. This is based on a real story, the premise, anyway, is based on a real story, which is a woman who was in college, was raped, and was back in the late 80s and 90s, and, you know, she wasn’t able to really get anywhere. The perpetrator wasn’t really punished in any way. And unfortunately, it’s a very familiar story in that sense. And then she went on to live her life as best she could, and 30 years later she gets a letter from her rapist apologizing. Yeah, that really happened, that part is true. And at that point I said, I don’t want to know any more about the story because it’s such a great story, such a great premise for a play. And so I then proceeded on my own way, and it ends up being my character, the central character is a woman named Emily, who is a writer herself, she’s a poet. She believes that she is fundamentally brilliant at compartmentalizing her life. People around her don’t quite agree with her. Once this comes to light, she has a mother who is a very sharp lawyer and and a daughter who’s a very smart college student, activist. They’re all staunch feminists, but they’re from three different generations. And part of the interesting thing about the play, which I had no idea the play would be about when I started writing it, it’s really in many ways about how do these three generations of women view how to solve this, and what’s the best response? Turns out they’re all very different responses. And so that’s having said that, it’s not I mean, there’s also a lot of jokes. It’s also hopefully entertaining and funny along the way. So it’s not just this oh, my god, incredibly depressing, grim, bleak thing. It’s dealing about a very hard, heavy subject. But it’s doing so in a way I hope is without being glib, entertaining, and you want to get to know and like these characters. I hope you do.
Kat
Yeah. I hope that you guys put out more radio plays, podcast plays, whatever we call them now. I hope more people do it. I mean, I think it’s an excellent medium. There is audio books are becoming a bigger deal. The biggest problem with audio is paying the actors. It’s like the amount of money you have to pay.
Jack
Yeah, it is. Definitely is. Audio, the actual company, Audio, started doing a lot of commissioning, a lot of dramatic work and plays unique and original to Audible. I said Audio before, I meant Audible. And that was sort of the hint to me, was sort of like the opposite of a canary in the coal mine. It was sort of a thing that something is blossoming. And so that gave us the idea to push ahead with it. Yeah, I love the experience.
Kat
I think it’s awesome. Like you said, even with the medium of bringing people together on sort of the zoom and doing theater that way, this brings theater to people who don’t live near a theater.
Jack
It’s absolutely free. We wanted this to be free because we really felt most of the world unfortunately, not all of it, but most of the world has access to podcasts and so we want to give them. We’re very proud of the product. And so we want to allow as many people as possible to hear it and to sort of discover that there are such things as audio dramas and then to go on to find other things in that capacity. And our online plays, generally, we always try to keep the cost down. I think the cost was like $20, but if you were a student or a fellow theater person, you could get it for $10. We really just wanted to make it available to people. And speaking of which, if I can plug one of our plays and again, it’s a play of mine, and I’m almost embarrassed by that, but because of union rules, it was much cheaper for us to do one of mine. From our place in the original season called ‘Jericho’. It’s available to listeners of this podcast. They would just have to go to NewNormalRep.org/bonus, and then it’ll ask you for a password. And that password is capital letters “NNR2022”. And then you can watch the whole play. Directed by Marcia Mason, it was pretty thrilling.
Kat
I’ll put that in the show notes as well. But that’s NewNormalRep.org/bonus. And “NNR2022”. That’s very cool. I think the arts, unfortunately, always suffer every time the economy goes, whatever it’s doing. And unfortunately, it looks like some sort of world, something happening. So, I mean, the arts should stick together more than anything. And if we have to finagle different art forms or bring back, it’s almost like bringing back the old radio ones and putting it into a new medium. There’s always a way to move forward, right? And to bring art to other people. I think this is amazing.
Jack
Again, to me, I think formulas can be good guideposts, but I think that they shouldn’t be walls. And I think that there’s no reason you can’t mix media, and evolve with whatever the times demand.
Kat
Absolutely. And I know quite a few novelists that I work with, struggle with dialogue. And as you talk, I think more than anything, listening to plays or watching plays would help that because it’s really, like you said, you’re using specific words, as few as you can, and then they have to perform it so it can’t sound canned. Otherwise, that’s boring and everyone to leave at halftime or what do we call that?
Jack
Yeah, exactly, right. And they’re also great. I’m not a huge fan. This makes me sound very uneducated, but I’m not a huge fan of Hemingway’s novels, really, at all. But some of his shorts I used to when I taught writing, I would give my students a lot of his short stories because he was a master of dialogue for a short story writer, even like him, playwriting classes, I’d make him read like The Killers or Hills like White Elephants. And those stories are almost entirely dialogue. And in that dialogue, almost nothing explicit is said, and yet everything is just under the surface. And that’s another way of I mean, if you can get that across as a writer, we talked about clunky exposition, like, oh, here I am in 1968. That’s a masterclass in the opposite of that, where if you paying attention and, you know, and like a reader, too, for novels, if you make the audience sort of lean in a little bit. So, first of all, you have to be interesting and compelling. But if you make them lean in and sort of meet them halfway and have to make them meet you halfway, you’ve got them.
Kat
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that before, we used to always be part of the arts. Right now, I feel like I don’t know about theater people, but novelists are in their little closets trying to pound out their novels and then getting writer’s block. If you would just get out to another art form, you might actually find more creativity.
Jack
Oh, yeah. To me, it’s just reading everything. Read everything and get your hands on because that will A) be inspiring and B) it’ll inform you. I love to read novels, and I love to read them just for the pleasure of reading them, but inevitably, it’s influenced my storytelling.
Kat
Right. And if we see more plays or listen to more plays, it’ll influence our storytelling as well. So New Normal Rep has the visual online theater company. You also have the podcast, the audio. So do you guys have anything else?
Jack
We have a regular podcast, which is right now, the audioplay is on that regular podcast channel. So we haven’t done any interview podcast in a while just because we want this to give the play room to breathe. We’ll be getting back to that. We have a YouTube channel which has some additional materials, like short monologues and plays, and we have a couple of sketches and extra, basically free material. We’re just trying to spread the word.
Kat
Yeah, absolutely. So is that New Normal Rep on YouTube as well?
Jack
Yes, that’s our YouTube channel.
Kat
So there’s all these different places that we can go and get more into theater, which I love, and plays. And I do think, I say this genuinely, I think that as writers, whatever medium it is, we can learn from each other. And if anyone’s really good at dialogue and doesn’t really like the prose part, maybe try your hand at playwriting.
Jack
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, my sense of language has been developed as much by Elvis Costello as any playwright I can think of, you know, so, yeah, it’s just anything that works for you, steal it shamelessly, and then hopefully it’ll become your own. Otherwise you’ve got a plagiarism case.
Kat
This is true. So we have two websites for people to find you at, and of course, the links will be in the show notes. We have NewNormalRep.org and then JackCanforaWriter.com. They probably cross over, so you can probably find, I see the podcast, your plays, your writing coaching. So all these different things we will have in the show notes as well as the bonus “NNR2022” so people can go listen, is it watch?
Jack
Watch that online. Yeah.
Kat
Going to do this while I make dinner because I’m always looking for something to listen to.
Jack
Oh, yeah, great.
Kat
Because I can’t see my television, which is a blessing and a curse. Well, thank you so much, Jack, for coming on. It’s been really interesting talking to you.
Jack
Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.