Plotting the Neon Curves: Women Writing in Las Vegas

Spearminted, the twisted love story between a stripper and an amnesiac, is playing to a packed house at the Las Vegas Little Theatre. Nestled anxiously in the back row is Erica Griffin, the author, who says it's the first time she's seen the play performed live. Typically, she's far more involved in the process of getting one of her shows onto the stage. Erin Marie Sullivan, who plays the character Piph, is performing a strip tease on stage while women in the audience applaud and cheer her on. Some of the men are trying hard not to stare at her naked breasts; after all, this isn't really a strip club. Actors and audiences always seem to have a good time during an Erica Griffin play. But those seeking a meaningful emotional connection with fictional creations should beware: her plays are populated with psychotics, murderers and crazy people. She writes situational comedy that pushes the boundaries of the possible by using characters that live on the edge of reality. Hilarious, slightly disturbing and completely unexpected, her plays have been titillating audiences in Las Vegas for almost a decade. No doubt she'll be titillating them for years to come. Her newest play, Roles For Women, will be presented by Table 8 Productions in June as part of the Las Vegas Fringe Festival.

Las Vegas Little Theatre to present New Works Competition winner

By F. Andrew Taylor
VIEW STAFF WRITER

 

The Las Vegas Little Theatre is heating up its 34th season with "Spearminted," a play by local playwright Erica Griffin that is anything but ordinary, and that's just what the theater's organizers hoped.

The play is the winner of the theater's fourth New Works Competition. "We had about 20 entries this year," said Walter Niejadlik, president of the board of directors of the Las Vegas Little Theatre. "That's less than some years, but the competition was really solid. It was really hard to choose from the last three or four."

The play features 11, a young slacker who earns his living as a sign twirler and cares for his disabled grandmother, and PIPH, a headstrong stripper who was recently demoted to the morning shift. Both characters have dreams of escaping their depressing existence and meet when PIPH accidentally hits 11 with her car, which causes 11 to lose his memory. As PIPH helps him recover, an unlikely romance develops, which is threatened by his returning memories. The play features partial nudity.
"It was written as a two-person play, but I've added a third person as what I'm calling a chorus," said director Shawn Hackler. "It's sort of a scene change logistics thing."

Griffin hasn't been able to be as involved with the production of the play as either she or Hackler would prefer, but they've kept communicating, mostly via email.

"There's a certain amount of trust you've got to put into the director of a premiere," Griffin said. "Those first reviews have the power to determine if a play has a life beyond the first staging or not."
For Hackler, the prospect of working on a new play was both daunting and exhilarating.
"You've got nothing to go off of from former productions, so you have a tremendous amount of leeway to explore the text completely independent of anything else," Hackler said. "You get to sort of rack your brain and the cast's brain and work directly with the playwright."

Hackler said he's still fairly new to directing, although he directed the first New Works Competition play and has directed for Insurgo Theater and his own production company. He agreed to direct the play before he had a chance to read it, based on Griffin's previous work he had seen and read.
"I like her work. I like her style. I like her brain," Hackler said.

Familiarity with Griffin didn't help her win the competition as the three-person panel that initially reads all the submissions does so without knowing the identity of the author.

"They have a score sheet and judge the plays on things like creativity, originality, theme and other factors," Niejadlik said. "There are points added for being a local, too, because we want to encourage local writers. We tally up the scores, and the highest five come to the final judge, which was me this year."

The competition seeks plays that can be told in a black box theater, with minimal sets and props. They're also looking for works geared toward a younger audience ranging from 18 to 40.
The play was something that had been percolating for years. Griffin originally conceived the characters while living at the Katherine Gianaclis Park for the Arts and hosting weekly workshops in the center's black box.

"I wanted to create these two characters who made a living on the periphery of things, like sign twirling and stripping," Griffin said. "I wanted them to have nothing in common except the fact that they both moved their body for strangers to make a living. I wanted them to meet because of an accident, one hitting the other with their car, and see what would happen."

Later, while watching a reading of the Johnna Adams play "Nurture," winner of the Sin City New Play Contest at the Onyx Theatre, Griffin figured out how she wanted to tell the characters' story.
"Her play was a revelation," Griffin said. "It had only two characters, but it kept moving along and had constant surprises. I went home that very night and wrote furiously - well, only when my toddler was sleeping - for two months straight and came up with 'Spearminted.' "

Griffin described the play as a quirky, dark comedy set in modern-day Las Vegas that examines the differences between the fantasy world and the real world of the sexes and that confusing place in between.

"Spearminted" is scheduled to open Friday and run through May 15 in the Las Vegas Little Theatre Black Box at 3920 Schiff Drive. Performances are scheduled at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $15 for adults and $14 for seniors and students. For more information, visit lvlt.org or call the box office at 362-7996.

Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 380-4532.

Write-Face!

Las Vegas playwrights are on the march to add new voices to local theater

By Steve Bornfeld

New words to say, new characters to interpret them, new ideas to challenge us. No Felix and Oscar, no Willy and Biff, no Romeo, oh Romeo. Can you handle that, theatergoers?

“Finding original voices in this city is vital to getting us on the national theater map,” says Erica Griffin, one of numerous Las Vegas-based playwrights in a city where community theater isn’t an easy sell.

Perhaps that is about to change. Culture commands this city’s attention now as The Smith Center for the Performing Arts delivers a raft of Broadway musicals to entertain even those who never thought they could be mesmerized by (insert exaggerated elitist accent here) “The Theater.” What better time, then, to cultivate and appreciate the grittier side to high-gloss theater and discover the pleasures therein?

Topics and genres vary greatly among our home-bred wordsmiths. Ernest Hemmings’ bulky résumé encompasses what he calls “absurd to parody to brutal realism” in plays such as The Shande of Rabbi Schlemazel, about a rabbi’s affair with a transgender prostitute. Author of six short plays, Dave Surratt also penned the full-length Listen, about a medical research analyst fired for using music therapy to aid cancer patients.

Drawn to dark comedy, Griffin finds funny beats in murder, suicide, mental illness and abuse. Among her 18 plays, Casa De Nada, about a band of homeless people living in a tent city in a rich woman’s back yard, won Las Vegas Little Theater’s “Best Of” prize at its Fringe Festival.
“There seems to be a good amount of new plays in Las Vegas from local writers,” says Walter Niejadlik, president of Las Vegas Little Theatre, which provides new playwrights a platform, including a New Works Competition. “Hopefully the audience will grow. New works are vital, or there is no growth of the art.”

Playwright-in-residence programs would also bolster the profile of Vegas dramatists. “We have a free weekly workshop that we run for six months, then produce scripts from that effort in the remaining six months,” says John Beane, director of Insurgo Theater Movement. “We’re currently in the producing phase with three scripts chosen.”

Yet growth includes growing pains, and sometimes setbacks. The craft took a painful hit locally when UNLV, sucker-punched by state budget cuts, suspended its post-grad playwriting program. Swept away along with it were productions of student works in the university’s Black Box Theatre. Long gone are the greatly missed Katherine Gianaclis Park for the Arts and its cutting-edge cultural presentations, as well as Hemmings’ downtown SEAT (Social Experimentation and Absurd Theater). Adventurous venues remain, though, to nurture new work: Onyx Theatre at the Commercial Center, Insurgo Theater Movement at the Plaza, Theatre 7 and Cockroach Theatre.

Opinions vary among local playwrights, though, about the receptiveness to their scripts. “Las Vegas is a great place to start,” says Surratt, whose playwriting career was preceded by three years as a theater critic with Las Vegas CityLife. “Given the relative lack of entrenched cliques and grim gatekeepers to the scene, it’s not hard for an aspiring playwright with any talent or ambition to be heard.”

Others’ experiences have been different. “Usually playwrights are turned away or ignored unless there is an actual call for them to submit,” Hemmings says, “or if the playwright is in with the theater company in question and happens to have a finished play to be produced.”

Once a playwright has grabbed a theater’s attention, though, other obstacles loom. “You think you’re going to make your money back on production costs with a play written by a nobody? You might as well show foreign films in Montana,” Hemmings says. “But—and this is a very big ‘but’—if you are good with marketing and you pick content you know will push the right buttons with your base, then you could easily come out ahead.”

Whether by William Shakespeare or Neil Simon, established plays are safer bets to bring in paying customers. Unknown authors need to work within narrower budget margins. “If you are a nobody like me, it is really important to keep in mind how much it would cost to do your show,” says Hemmings, whose work was produced at his own SEAT and Gianaclis Park, as well at the Cleveland Public Theatre in Ohio and Los Angeles’ Riprap Studio. “You better have fewer than four characters and give producers a reason to think they’ll be able to market it easily. Sex, violence, politics—that stuff is easy to market.”

Theater’s status as popular entertainment has declined over the decades, leaving a largely older, nostalgia-loving fan base with a suspicion of novelty. Keeping the doors open often requires theater companies to cater to patrons’ sentimental attachments by staging classic plays. “It’s kind of like sitting around and listening for the thousandth time to the great old Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin of one’s youth, rather than take the time to discover the new guard of Radiohead and Queens of the Stone Age,” Surratt says. “An important difference [is] that there are far fewer theater fans than rock fans.”

Yet local playwright and actor Ernie Curcio is optimistic about the evolution of audiences. “The Vegas audience of the past will soon pass and so will their season tickets and their grip on deadly theater,” Curcio says. Among his 26 plays, staged in Vegas and New York City, are Warmouth and the deeply personal Unfinished and Sundrops, both partially prompted by the 2008 suicide of his first wife, local theater veteran Barbara Ann Rollins. “A new audience will emerge from the ashes, and they’ll have no appetite for stale plays.”

Would plays specifically addressing Las Vegas and its pinwheel of eccentric characters up the odds for engaging local audiences? Griffin is a one-playwright juggernaut for that cause. Consider her catalog:

Inbred focuses on a Boulder City cover musician drawn by a groupie into a strange reality (and a shack near Hoover Dam). Opening April 27 at Las Vegas Little Theatre after winning its New Works Competition, Spearminted tells of a romance between a stripper and a street sign-twirler after she accidentally hits him with her car.

“You could say I’m more creatively obsessed with Las Vegas folk,” Griffin says. “I want to write about bartenders and showgirls and chefs and executives. I want to write about dealers and musicians and clowns and union workers and tourists, too. There is something so fascinating about the people who choose to live here and the way they do or don’t adapt. I feel like I can give a voice to them, unique to this time and place.”