Jefe's House

My 10-week spring semester course for adults, Playwriting I: The Fundamentals at NYU School of Continuing & Professional Studies begins on Wednesday 2/8. This noncredit, ungraded lecture and playwriting workshop covers the exact same dramatic writing and theatre history content I teach to matriculated undergrad students in my similar 3-credit, full semester courses at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and now also at Drexel University Westphal College of Media Arts & Design in Philadelphia, only it’s much more affordable. You will write a lot, you will learn a lot, you will have fun. Learn more and enroll.

See you there.

Can’t wait to see Vincent D’Onofrio‘s directorial debut, the horror musical DON’T GO IN THE WOODS with screenplay by my good friend Joe Vinciguerra and music by the one and only Sam Bisbee. ABC news clip here.

[images via facebook and zimbo.com]

I speak from first-hand experience when I highly recommend Daniel Student’s Superheroes Who Are Super! show dropping into Brooklyn from Philly on 12/17-18. It’s hilarious, it’s smart, you’ll have a blast. Dan is also the artistic director of Plays & Players Theatre in Philly where I’m currently a playwright-in-residence, and he directed my Philly Fringe show Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead which got raves. If you make it to Superheroes be sure to say hi to Dan; he’s a gem and a real talent.

Oh yeah? Well you tell James Franco for me that I’ve ALREADY contacted Tennessee Williams on a Ouija board and he told me to tell him to step off.

James Franco Will Conduct a Séance to Speak to Tennessee Williams

by Kyle Buchanan, NYmag.com

James Franco’s obsession with dead queer icons shows no signs of abating. Now the actor-artist (who previously played Allen Ginsberg in Howl, directed a movie about Sal Mineo, and recut River Phoenix’s performance in My Own Private Idaho) has announced  that as part of Performa, the biannual NYC performance art festival, he’ll be co-conducting a séance to get in touch with playwright Tennessee Williams via Ouija board. CONT’D>>

Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead

Dig the Om lapels.

Go, iTunes for showing the Concert for Bangladesh free this past weekend to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the concert held on August 1, 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York.  I’ve had the triple album on vinyl for years but had never seen the movie.

Highlights include George Harrison having to explain up front what a sitar is, and for the audience to behave during the Indian music part led by Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Alla Rakha. Just shows how culturally far the US has come musically since 1971.  Today instruments like the sitar and the sarod are commonplace in American rock and folk music.

Then there are the ubiquitous Coke cans (I’m guessing Coke donated refreshments backstage or footed part of the bill for the MSG rental?). It’s hard to believe the product placement is accidental. Billy Preston’s seen with one just before hopping up from his keyboard to go into a dance frenzy (must have been the caffeine), then Leon Russell’s seen with one at his keyboard just before belting Jumpin’ Jack Flash.  There are just these Coke cans sitting around on the stage everywhere that get nicely framed by the cameras when they go in for closeups of the artists.

Also amazing is how many of them are smoking (tobacco) cigarettes. Today they’d probably have to hide that from the cameras to keep the film from getting an NC-17 rating.

Eric Clapton is humble as usual.  For the most part the musical performances aren’t stellar (the simplest and most polished-sounding was George and Eric’s duet on Here Comes the Sun) but that wasn’t the point.  The concert was quickly thrown together and they all did it for free to raise money to aid the grim humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh brought about by their war to break away from Pakistan (who can blame them?) and by the world’s largest tropical cyclone hitting them at the worst possible time.

If you download the concert (the album, not the movie) from iTunes they’ll make a donation to the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF.  Or just go to concertforbangladesh.com and donate any amount there. For the month of August all funds raised will go toward famine relief in the Horn of Africa. That’s the famine in Somalia you’ve been seeing on the TV news every night for days.  Why not chip in a little and help them out?  It’s what George and Ravi and Eric and Billy and Leon and Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan and Badfinger would want you to do.

[image via concertforbangladesh.com]

Last night I stumbled upon this blast from the past, a short promo video I cut together for in-house use as a preshow warmup  before the premiere screening of Lady in a Box in 2006.  This short music video is assembled from rehearsal outtakes and on-set bloopers.  Featuring Sarita Choudhury, Sean Hayden, Luke Rosen, John Lordan, myself, and behind the camera Peter Olsen.

http://www.brain-on-fire.com/lady/breathless

Enjoy.

My new show Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is staggering to its feet again this Thursday at 3:30pm at Plays & Players in Philadelphia. Please feel free to sit in on this free workshop of a work-in-progress and offer your feedback.

Back in Feb the Philadelphia City Paper’s Critical Mass arts blog sed nice things about it,  so you should probably come:

Theatre Preview by Matt Cantor
“It’s a one-man show, but award-winning playwright Jeffrey Stanley isn’t the only one in it. At least, he hopes not. Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a 60-minute ‘autobiographical black comedy’ whose supporting cast is made up of ghosts — if they’re willing to make an appearance, Stanley says. An adjunct faculty member at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, Stanley is workshopping this free work-in-progress in Philadelphia — his new home — at the historic Plays & Players theater.

“Years in the making, the new play combines elements of earlier works, including another black comedy Stanley performed in New York at the Gershwin Hotel under the curation of Andy Warhol pal Neke Carson. Mix that with ‘inept dream interpretation,’ family history, and a Ouija tent, and the result is Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. The play is ‘about communication between family members while they’re alive and maybe even after they’re dead,’ Stanley says. Expect humor, but also ‘a lot of death, a lot of suffering, a lot of human misery.’

One-man shows or otherwise, Stanley’s works focus on shared experience: in performing his CONT’D AT CITY PAPER>>

I’ll be appearing next Tuesday, March 8th at 6:30pm at the NYU Bookstore at 726 Broadway, New York City, corner of Waverly Place, to give a free, 30-minute talk on the fine art of subtext and writing naturalistic dialogue (in fiction as well as film and theatre) and signing copies of my previous plays Tesla’s Letters and Medicine, Man, both of which will be on sale at the bookstore.  I was asked to do this by NYU’s most excellent School of Continuing & Professional Studies to help promote their writing program where I often teach Playwriting I: The Fundamentals and The Art & Craft of Dialogue as an Associate Professor in Creative Writing, in addition to my screenwriting courses across the street at my alma mater NYU Tisch School of the Arts.  Don’t be a stranger now.  More info HERE.

If you liked The Golden Horseshoe: A Lecture on Tragedy, you’ll love the followup, Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. Join me as I try to resurrect a hidden and dangerous history. Which of you will dare to enter the terrifying Ouija tent of the damned and open a channel to the Other Side for me, live onstage?

Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a surreal, 60-minute, autobiographical show about the impact of ghosts – the real kind — and of dream interpretation — the inept kind — on one’s past, present and future.  It’s tragic, and it’s also hilarious.

It’s also a work-in-progress. I’ll be performing it with limited set, script partially in hand, followed by a Q&A, one night only, with support from my friends at the historic Plays & Players in Philadelphia.   The Philadelphia City Paper’s ultra-cool Critical Mass arts blog sez it’s probably going to be good, and they’re probably right, so you should probably come.

City Paper Critical Mass Theatre Preview by Matt Cantor
“It’s a one-man show, but award-winning playwright Jeffrey Stanley isn’t the only one in it. At least, he hopes not. Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a 60-minute ‘autobiographical black comedy’ whose supporting cast is made up of ghosts  — if they’re willing to make an appearance, Stanley says. An adjunct faculty member at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, Stanley is workshopping this free work-in-progress in Philadelphia — his new home — at the historic Plays & Players theater.

“Years in the making, the new play combines elements of earlier works, including another black comedy Stanley performed in New York at the Gershwin Hotel under the curation of Andy Warhol pal Neke Carson. Mix that with ‘inept dream interpretation,’ family history, and a Ouija tent, and the result is Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. The play is ‘about communication between family members while they’re alive and maybe even after they’re dead,’ Stanley says. Expect humor, but also ‘a lot of death, a lot of suffering, a lot of human misery.’

One-man shows or otherwise, Stanley’s works focus on shared experience: in performing his CONT’D AT CITY PAPER>>