Annenberg Beach House Artist in Residence

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