3 Girls Put Work On Stage

By Linda Ayres-Frederick

The recently formed 3 Girls Theatre Company celebrated Women’s History Month all March at the Thick House with runs of two fully produced plays plus several free readings, seminars and single performances by predominantly women writers. Their motto is “putting women’s work onstage where it belongs”. Interviewed below are responses from the founders of the group, Lee Brady, Suze Allen and Alisa J Baker, plus two of their guests: solo writer/performer Margery Kreitman and playwright Patricia Milton. Additional work by writer/performer Mary Knoll, collaborating playwrights Robin Bradford and Joe Wolff completed the month long program along with seminars about getting work produced.

Linda AF: What inspired you to form this company?
Lee Brady: Friendship. In theatre if you’re not working on a project together, you never see your friends.
Suze Allen: I know that my work is not main stream and I felt I had to make a place for it. I’m 50. I do not want to wait for permission to put my work on stage. After meeting Alisa in 2010 and knowing Lee for over 20 years, I knew we were an alchemic blend. And as we talked, our love for collaboration, promoting women’s voices of all ages, backgrounds and ethnicities with or without political or feminist pull.
Alisa J. Baker: It was a perfect storm of inspiration, frustration and enthusiasm! Conversation[s about] the hurdles for women playwrights--particularly “women of a certain age”-- in getting our voices heard on stage, and on how that could be remedied…One night, the idea to form a company that would focus on presenting the work of women writers was actually spoken aloud--and it was as though the wheels of fate clicked into place. After that, there was no turning back and 3Girls Theatre was born.

LAF: What do you love most about writing/performing?
LB: Writing keeps me sane, it’s better than therapy, and I love being in an audience watching my work being done.
SA: The conversation – the direct connection with fellow actors and audience. The immediacy and the ever evolving and changing nature of the art form. Being right here, right now as a person riding a journey that anyone in the audience can reach out and touch.
AJB: Writing not just to tell your story to an audience, but to create a vehicle for other artists to explore. It’s magical to turn your script over and watch your play rise from the page.
Patricia Milton: I love to share my intimate knowledge and private questions with an audience and to make people laugh. The sound of laughter is my favorite sound in the world. I love to create people and worlds of the imagination that are in conversation with our own world.



LAF: What do you consider to be your strengths as a writer/performer?
LB: My curiosity about people, how they relate, what makes them tick.
SA:I feel the heart of a play whether I write it, dramaturge it, direct it or act in it. I want the words and the story to be true to the writer and I can usually find her voice and her premise.
AJB: I think all writers need to shut out the “real world” and daydream, and that’s something I’m pretty good at.
Margery Kreitman: My humor, characters, dialogue, and drawing from my own life.
PM: I have a good ear for dialogue and a love (and bias) for building a strong structure. My characters are multi-dimensional, I think, and my women characters, even in my romantic comedies, have other things on their mind besides just romance. A deep sympathy for the foibles of human nature at the same time I enjoy skewering them. A perseverance and an eagerness to keep rewriting to bring out the heart of the play, and I’m a generous and process-savvy collaborator.

LAF: What of your professional accomplishments are you most proud of?
LB: Being hired as a theatre critic for the Edinburgh Scotsman for the Fringe in 2001. Writing about the work of international theatre groups let me know that I had finally left Oklahoma!
SA: I directed my one-woman show Hanging on Your Every Word at the SF Fringe and the Edinburgh Fringe as a reinterpretation for my adult acting students. It’s based on real life stories of survivors of depression and suicide.
AJB: At this very moment my play The Right Thing is having its world premiere at Thick House. It’s my first full production. I’m pretty jazzed about that!
MK: My play Picture Me with many requests from young girls to use a monologue from it for auditions in schools, and acting schools. Also, my first play and first lesbian play Wait for the Beep which has had several productions in LA and NYC and was very well received by the gay community. And my solo works. My last one was a comedy with four characters and a lot of fun.
PM: My most recent play, Reduction in Force, was voted “Best Local Play” in the 2011 Broadway World SF Theatre Awards.

LAF: When you run out of ideas, if ever, where do you seek inspiration?’
LB: Start with anything, a title, a character, a song, a random thought and sit down and see where it takes me. SA: My work tends to intersect motherhood and mental health, which has a wealth of possibilities. I also like to explore the “why” behind true and impossible stories. My upbringing, my sense of humor and sense of wonder.
AJB: That daydreaming thing is an endless source of ideas for me. I try to carve out time to just lie still, close my eyes, and listen to the universe with an open heart.
MK: Life, dreams, journals, films, plays, other performers. Life!
PM: Yeah, that hasn’t been a problem for me.

LAF: Who would you say has helped you most?
Professionally?
LB: Robert Woodruff and Michelle Swanson who made the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival in the 80’s a wonderful playground and learning place.
SA: Improviser Keith Johnstone, Anna Deveare Smith, Paula Vogel, Claire Chafee, and John Guare and my students from Maine to California to Alaska.
AJB: My partners Suze and Lee, of course. And playwright/teacher Will Dunne--a wonderful mentor to all his students. Playwrights who aren’t afraid to use their voices to tell difficult stories in bold ways, e.g. Margaret Edson, Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel.
MK: I had two teachers at NYU who influenced me, Lowell and Nancy Swortzell.
PM: For theatricality, I look to Shakespeare. For out-of-the-box structure, Caryl Churchill. But, frankly, I admit a lot of my work is like Kaufman and Hart’s.

LAF: Personally?
LB: My son, Joe, who is a playwright even though he knows, from watching my struggle, how very hard it is to get the work up.
SA: My grandmother – the tiny French Meme who loved me unconditionally and lived a very ordinary and fulfilled long life.
AFB: My mom, Phyllis Baker, a visual artist who brought creative grace to everything she did. She instilled in me…the absolute conviction that if you follow your heart, it makes no difference what other people think.
PM: I’ve received wonderful support from Gary Graves at Central Works, Morgan Ludlow at Wily West Productions, and Suze Allen at 3girlsTheatre. I also have received wonderful support from Andrew Black (my writing partner) and Playwrights Center of San Francisco.

LAF: Who are your heroes?
LB: Tennessee Williams who still touches my Southern heart.
Edward Albee, I love his wicked wit.
SA: My collaborators Lee and Alisa; Jeanne Darrah, Kristin Weiderholt, Jnana Gowan, and Lisa Stathoplos, my best friend of 30 plus years who works tirelessly, passionately in small theatres in Maine and with emotionally disturbed teenagers. And my Mom, who perseveres through the severest obstacles and my sister who teaches toddlers to have fun and be themselves. Kate Brown, a dear friend and Hospice Chaplain.
AFB: There are many public figures I admire, but my real heroes are definitely my parents. My dad, Howard, is an American success story… came from a very poor, difficult immigrant family and through smarts, perseverance and integrity built a wonderful life. My mother, Phyllis, was an artist who managed to keep a creative flame burning in everything she did. Together, they moved mountains.
MK: Of late the people who top my list are Spalding Gray, David Sedaris, Dennis Potter, Tony Kushner, Lily Tomlin and Jayne Wagner- also comedians Will Farrell, Mel Brooks, Tina Fey, Ellen, Wanda Sykes, Larry David, and many others I can't think of at the moment.
PM: Every woman playwright who perseveres in spite of the difficulties inherent in getting her work onto the stage.

LAF: If you were to give advice to someone wanting to be a writer performer today, what words of encouragement and/or warning would you offer him or her?
LB: If you can stop, do so. But if you can’t, give it all you’ve got.
SA: Follow the voice within you! Don’t follow the norm if you don’t want to. And don’t get advice on your play too early.
AJB: If you “want to be a writer” and you aren’t one, what’s stopping you? Go for it!
MK: Trust yourself and your own voice. Find and stick with people who support your work. There are many highs as well as lows in the process of writing and creating, performing, working solo or collaborating, and in finding theaters who accept your work. It is all part of being a writer.
PM: Advance yourself by seeing and reading lots of plays, and take advantage of the many wonderful playwriting workshops available locally. Build relationships with theatres. I never watch television and rarely watch movies, because the forms are different and I’m easily influenced to start thinking in those terms. Don’t sit around in your room staring at your play. Put it out there, in readings, and listen for what is clear and what isn’t.

LAF: If there were one thing you would want to be remembered for, what would that be?
LB: Supporting the work and workers in the theatre community, there is no way to claim individual fame, except as part of a group doing good work (like 3Girls!). And for writing “Mississippi Medea,” a fifteen minute monologue that says everything there is to say about southernmotherlove.
SA: For being true to my heart and the heart of others whose plays that I direct, dramaturge or produce. For being a good mother and friend.
AJB: I hope it’s too soon to know.
MK: I'd like to be remembered for creating funny and poignant plays about lesbian life, and autobiographical solo works and stories that were entertaining, moving and thought provoking.
PM: She wrote great roles for women.

LAF: What's up next?
LB: I’m currently working on a play called Henrietta English inspired by Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. If Hedda thought Norway was boring, she shoulda lived in Lawton, Oklahoma! And building 3Girls into a theatre company like Steppenwolf.
SA: 3GT is on the cusp of building our Go Girl! Theatre, an after school playwriting and producing program for disenfranchised teenage girls. Also starting the 3GT Theatre Lab for intermediate and advanced playwrights. Can’t wait!
AJB: Thrilled with the support and enthusiasm from the community for our mission and our work, now we have to sit down, absorb everything we’ve learned, and take the company to the next step. For me personally, I can’t wait to get back to writing my next play!
MK: I just did a reading/performance of my new solo A Singular Story produced by 3 Girls Theater at the Thick House on March 28. In May my solo piece Payday at Pukalani plays at the Maui Fringe Festival in Hawaii.
PM: In May, a short play in Scheherazade at StageWerx in SF, produced by Playwrights Center of SF and Wily West. In August: Wily West is premiering Believers, a post-apocalyptic romantic comedy about love, drugs, and unexpected side effects also at StageWerx. Also in August, Strange Bedfellows, co-authored with Andrew Black, premieres at Theatre Out in Santa Ana, CA. A reading of my new work about the Greek goddess Demeter will be featured in the Olympians Festival December 8. I’m happily busy!

3 Girls Theatre continues their inaugural programming that includes AJ Baker’s The Right Thing and Lee Brady’s What About Ben? through April 1st at Thick House, Potrero Hill, 1695 18th Street in San Francisco. For information, go to www.3girlstheatre.org. or www.brownpapertickets.com.