TRICKS OF THE TRADE

Hello and welcome from another Saturday at the Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica.

It’s a gloomy Saturday at the beach, hardly in feeling, but definitely cloudy with a high today of 63 chilly degrees. Not that you can tell by everyone on the sand. There are a lot of young kids today. A small group of boys are playing touch football and the volleyball courts seem to be ruled by a women’s team from a local college. All the bikes from the rental stand are out, so it just goes to show you the resiliency and can-do spirit of Angelenos who would consider this weather ‘storm watch’. We have rain expected next week and you would think it was the tornado that took Dorothy away from the talk at the Du-Par’s early this morning at the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax. I actually heard someone sigh with disappointed concession, “I’ll have to close the windows”. Such is life in paradise. Even my own aged mother was prophesizing, “Ow, my arthritis – there’s a storm coming!”

I find writing here quite comforting. On Saturdays there are small groups of people who traipse through the office on a guided docent tour. I seem to be the tail end of the tour because after a look in at my marvelous tiled 1927 restroom, the docent will talk about when Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst died. There is usually a strange judgement pause when the guests figure out how different in age these lovers were. I guess you can say that my office is the sobering moment of the tour. I am the last thing you see before the video presentation, so there is always one stray who will come back and take another look at the room again after having seen it in its 1927 glory on screen.

The other interesting facet of being here is having everyone ask me what writers do.

In some ways they want to know how I live, make money, whether I sit there for eight hours, etc. But what I think they really want to know is ‘how’ I write.

I’m not one for not having ideas. I try my best to stay full of inquiry in my life. I still do that try to learn a new word a day trick. I save every interesting article and I believe that every great play starts with a really great character. All great characters have great stories attached to them, versus great stories that sometimes lack really interesting people telling them. So, I do a lot of tricks around who people are. I love a book about acting by the great Joseph Chaikin that contains a series of essential questions one should ask a character as they attempt to build one. ‘The Presence of the Actor’ is what it is called. He asks a question that always informs the quality and interest in my characters; what is the one thing that people cannot see when they look at you? I find that question so interesting because each one of us has a series of events, secrets, stories that live in us that make up not only how we live, but how we will move on. In similar fashion, he asks ‘Is there a part of you that has not lived yet and what would it take to make it happen?’

Suddenly, there are mysterious to be solved in plays and how people live in them. I love the amount of information that a character will give you, if you let them. I also love this way of working because I never lose interest in the character or the story. I am always trying to unpack something, to the very end.

Oh, I have a ton of these kinds of exercises and they always come in handy when one needs inspiration, a new way forward or just a trick to get going again.

Especially on an overcast day in Santa Monica.

-Luis Alfaro, 2/10/18

Hello Friends,

Greetings from the Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica where my residency continues.

It’s Saturday and I am sitting out here on the porch watching the water, the volleyball games and a gigantic group of what look like High School kids try and do a human pyramid. To the human spirit!

Or to beach culture, at least.

I live about thirty minutes from here, but it never fails to surprise me, week after week, how this is another world unto itself. The beach, nature, does something to you, it opens things; pores, lungs and mind. There is such a lovely sense of community next to the water, no one can really own something as large as the Pacific Ocean. It equalizes one and all.

It’s a chilly, freezing California 68 degrees today, but still, the transplants are treating it like a summer day. Lots of folks are playing volleyball and the towels are all laid out on the sand.

I am having an amazing time. It’s been a productive period, generating a lot of material. Not all of it good, of course.

Writing is a lot like cooking; you throw a bunch of seemingly compatible items in the pot and hope for depth, innovation and taste, but a good deal of the time it’s more like; ‘wait I’ve had this before’ or ‘my casserole has become mush’. Nevertheless, the process is the point here and if I knew where I was going, I probably wouldn’t go.

I love writing.

Lately, I have been writing all through the night and sleeping during the day. Maybe because I am writing about the culture of what happens overnight, I seem to have just gravitated to those hours. It’s a mess on my system, as I still have daylight duties, but naps are coming in very handy.

I continue to investigate the state of homelessness in Los Angeles County. The statistics do not lie. According to the Los Angeles Times; “The number of those living in the streets and shelters of the city of L.A. and most of the county surged 75% — to roughly 55,000 from about 32,000 — in the last six years. (Including Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach, which conduct their own homeless counts, the total is nearly 58,000.)”

So, what does the Beach House have anything to do with that?

The beach house is as much a refuge as it is an experiment for me. It is giving me an opportunity to research, to write, but most important of all, something we never get to do, and that is to dream.

The meditative space. The space for clear and practical thinking. It is one of the most essential elements of art making – the conceptualization period – but one we in our culture don’t give much time to. Partly, because there is so little time!

So, when I come here, I slow down. I sit and think. I look at the art. I look at the sky. I look at the water. And I am in a state of wonder, literally, a kind of dream state of asking. Full of inquiry.

I love the way time passes here. It seems eternal. And yet, there are always people moving through here, on a tour, so they stop time, and stop me, which I find healthy and good. They make me articulate who I am and what I am doing here. I personally think it’s good to name yourself and your process, so I find it refreshing. Lord knows, I ask visitors to talk about themselves all the time.

So, when you come visit; come dream. And don’t feel bad about interrupting me. That’s part of the ball game here. This is a public space, so graciously donated by the Annenberg Foundation and run by the City of Santa Monica.

I feel grateful here. It’s not at all what I expected.

And that’s one of the joys of making art.