Greg Romero
the pulse:
resides in:
Philadelphia, PA
contact by:
gregoryromero@yahoo.com
their site:
http://www.gregromero.blogspot.com
plays by Greg
Artistic Vision:
Playwright Daniel Alexander Jones described something to me that I’ll never forget. We were talking about writing, theatre, and the “Jazz esthetic”. Daniel spoke to me about “Jook Joints”. He described the energy of the jook joint in full, sweaty, and glorious detail.
A house, packed with people. Live music playing loudly. Energy pulsing through the room. People moving—dancing, stomping the ground, rattling the floorboards and shaking the rafters. The heat of communitas breaking open the spirit and souls of the people in motion. A live conversation—a call and response in real-time between the event of the music and the event of the audience. And as the sweat pours down off of your face, the earth shifts just a little bit—blurring yet heightening the reality of your experience. That blurred, heightened piece of live, vibrating time is what’s called the “Jook Point”.
It is my purpose to create work that brings us to the “Jook Point”.
The Jook Point, I’ve learned, is not an easy destination to reach—to get there demands my best work possible.
Throughout my experiences as a writer, I have learned that I do my best work when three directives are present in my process:
1) I am taking risks that scare me to death 2) I am working closely with collaborators who elevate my game 3) I am writing as much and as rigorously as possible
It is my mission to maintain contact with all three of these directives for the rest of my time as a writer.
Risks that Scare Me to Death is a writing space I’ve come into contact with recently and will never leave. With my pen moving across the paper, I dare myself to write the most electrifying things possible. And then I try to top myself. This is a terrifying space that keeps a live current of energy pulsing through my writing. It is the antidote to complacency. My play, “The Most Beautiful Lullaby You’ve Ever Heard” was the first work of mine written largely through this process and it very easily became the best work I had ever done. I have found my best place to write from and it is a piece of space beyond the edge of my own comfort zone.
Working Closely with Collaborators who Elevate My Game is necessary to create live, theatrically satisfying three-dimensional work. A play that works best on the page is a play I hope to never write. For me, the page is merely a placeholder—a temporary dwelling until the play can live in its rightful home: Three-Dimensional space. The success of this three-dimensionalization is dependant on creative, intelligent, sensitive collaborators (directors, actors, dramaturgs, designers) who have vision, experience, and passion. After working with artists whose skills range the full spectrum of ability, I have made a commitment to myself to work only with artists whose artistic and personal integrity I respect and who will motivate and inspire me to work even harder at my art.
Writing as Much and as Rigorously as Possible is the most successful way to keep my skills and ability sharp and focused. Like any skill, continued engagement and practice is necessary for me to stay at top form. I have honored my recent commitment to write every day and through this commitment I have learned that virtuosity is only possible through a sustained and thoughtful rigor of work.
In my writing, I apply these three directives towards my own artistic esthetic, which is guided by four specific principles. Namely, I believe theatre is most powerful when it does these things:
· Maximizes the imaginative possibilities of an empty space · Creates opportunity for transformation · Compels live participation · Offers its hospitality
My writing adheres to these principals through the exploration of dreams (dreams tell stories in wildly imaginative and transformative ways—dreaming is when we’re most awake); the exploration of space (in my plays, space can change in an instant and the settings of my plays are often within the imagination of its characters. In my work, the performance space is everything including the space between performer and participant); the exploration of reality (I believe in placing multiple times and realities in the same space—many of my works take place during a moment when time overlaps and characters are confronted with past, present, and future all at once. In my work, an expectant mother can sit next to the elder version of the child she’s carrying); and the exploration of action and visual language (actions speak louder than words. Actions speak across languages and cultures. My plays are driven by action, image and visual language. My characters might express love by folding a piece of paper into a sailboat or by breaking a bottle over their loved one’s head).
Through my esthetic goals and the directives for realizing my vision, I seek to create work that has purpose, life, and can shift the room by shifting something inside of each person participating in the live event. I aspire to create theatre events that are alive, immediate, and necessary. I aspire to rattle the floorboards and to shake the rafters, placing us all in a live, vibrating space of time inside the heart of the Jook Point.
Playwriting Biography:
Greg Romero is a writer, performer, and dramaturg, originally from Louisiana. Currently based in Philadelphia, his works have been produced off-off Broadway by City Attic Theatre, and Working Man’s Clothes Productions, and across the country by Salvage Vanguard Theater, Rude Mechanicals Theatre Collective, Theater In My Basement, Specific Gravity Ensemble, Little Fish Theatre, City Theater Company, Gobotrick Theatre Company, and Audacity Productions.
Romero’s full-length play, THE SHELTER, was selected as a semi-finalist for the 2003 National Playwright’s Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and his ten-minute play, TWO BUBBLES, was a finalist for the 2004 Heideman Award given by Actors Theater of Louisville. His play, THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LULLABY YOU'VE EVER HEARD, won City Attic Theatre’s 2006 Playwriting Competition and was a semi-finalist for the 2007 Princess Grace Award.
His collaboration with composer Michael Vernusky, THE EULOGY PROJECT, was selected as “Best of the Fest” during FronteraFest (Austin) and was based on Romero’s one-man piece, THE EULOGY, published in Monologues For Men By Men (Vol 2) (Heinemann Press).
Romero has been commissioned by The Cardboard Box Collaborative (Philadelphia), and Austin Script Works, and is a member of the Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, and The Dramatists Guild of America.
Romero received a BA from the Louisiana Scholars College and an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas-Austin where he held the James A. Michener Fellowship.
Romero currently works as a Resident Artist with The Cardboard Box Collaborative in Philadelphia and teaches at The University of the Arts.
Awards & Fellowships:
· 2007 Semi-Finalist; Princess Grace Award; New York NY · 2006 Winner; City Attic Theatre Playwriting Competition; New York NY · 2006 Best of the Fest; FronteraFest; Austin TX · 2004 Best of the Fest; FronteraFest; Austin TX · 2003 Finalist; Heideman Award; Actors Theatre of Louisville; KY · 2003 Semi-Finalist; The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center/National Playwright’s Conference · 2002 Finalist; Lamia Ink! International One Page Play Award; New York NY
Commissions:
· 2006 Austin Script Works; Austin TX · 2006 Cardboard Box Collaborative; Philadelphia PA · 2005 Austin Script Works; Austin TX
Education:
· MFA in Theatre (Playwriting); The University of Texas-Austin; May 2006
· BA in Liberal Arts; Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University; May 1999
GregRomero's Blog
9 Assumptions about Writing Plays
by Greg Romero
posted: 2009-01-01 17:33:28
Dear PDC Colleagues,
I posted the following up on my personal blog and it's received a wonderful response from fellow artists. I figured I'd share with you as well. I've re-posted the information below, but feel free to view the original.
Rock on:
..........................
To end the year 2008, I'm posting an in-class assignment I gave myself and my UArts students. In response to Jose Rivera's "36 Assumptions about Writing Plays", each of us came up with nine of our own. I offer mine (and would love to know yours):
1. The play must be impossible to exist in any other form.
2. The play must make us all experience pain in some kind of satisfying, delightful, intense and memorable way.
3. It should have an elephant in it.
4. People who see it should revisit the play in their dreams.
5. If it creates anything less than a riot (internally or externally) the play is a failure.
6. Every play should risk everything.
7. It should be written free of embarrassment, but instead, a proclaiming of everything the writer is ashamed of loving deeply.
8. It is not a play if there is no death or birth.
9. The form of the play follows the content, which obeys the characters-- a chambered nautilus, ever expansive, working itself from the inside out.
.............................
ROMERO
Comments:
Donald Drake said on 2009-01-03:
Greg’s and Brian’s “assumptions about playwriting” are interesting checklists, but they are best used after the first draft of the play has been written -- to see if your play is achieving all that it should. Thinking about these criteria during the writing or worst yet, during conception, can lead to terminal writer’s block.
The checklist I use is far less specific and intimidating to me.
You must create characters the audience will care about. The audience doesn’t have to like all of them, but it can’t be indifferent to what happens to them.
The play must be a compelling yarn that leads to a satisfying or disturbing climax. I know plays with beginnings, middles and ends are currently out of favor, but I am convinced that good story telling will once again be revived as it has been so many times in the past.
Ideally the play should engage the audience both emotionally and intellectually so that people leave the theater with new insight about the people and the world about them. They should leave the theater talking about the play, not bitching about the high price of tickets or the long wait to get their car.
Brian Grace-Duff said on 2009-01-01:
- What is written is only a blueprint. What is rehearsed are only materials. The actual play is built live in the audience's mind from these things.
- There is one True form to every play, discover it or walk away.
- The process is self-guided but must contain unimaginable discovery, otherwise it is only an exercise in being clever.
- Economy of language is everything.
- Style is dictated by the story, and must enfold the language used into every aspect of the script.
- Everything is a clue.
- Something dear must be sacrificed to give a script life.
- Discomfort is a sign of growth.
- Comedy cannot be planned, it can only be discovered in the moment.