We call this workshop What’s the Story? because when we approach the raw material of personal experience, that’s always the question:
Which story do I want to tell and Why?
HOW IT BEGAN: SOLO PERFORMANCE
Twenty years ago, I set out to write a solo play about my great-grandfather—the patriarch who first came to the US at the turn of the 20th century—about whom nobody would ever speak. Clearly something terrible and shameful and delicious must have happened, and I was obsessed with finding out what it was. When Looking for Louie opened in LA in 2000, it got a lot of attention.
I was on the performance faculty at the USC theatre school, so I was known as a teacher, and people started asking me if I would work with them on their solo plays, based on personal material. I didn't have a group, so I worked with them one-on-one. After a while, I noticed that—because it was just us—they were writing for my sensibility, and it was hard to figure what they wanted to say.
I was asked to teach an undergraduate solo class at USC. There were fifteen people in the room. It occurred to me that I might be able to invite and guide students' response to one another's work in a way that kept the response constructive, utterly generous and, above all, useful.
And it worked. Writers got a broad spectrum of response—not just mine. I watched, I listened. And I got a sense of what the writers were up to, what they wanted to say. I offered my response through that lens. And, since writers were finding their own way into their own material, they went places with the work that none of us expected to go.
I called the people I'd been working with one-on-one and suggested we try again, in the context of a group process. They agreed, and that was the birth of What's the Story?
PERFORMING SOLO
Solo performance is an odd animal. Over the years, I've figured out ways to work freely in direct address with an audience that is honest and intentional, generous, and story-centric. And there are ways to offer even the strongest of personal narratives in such a way that they belong — not only to us— but to all of us. Our job is to work moment-to-moment, in real time, with a new scene partner every time we go out. That's something we'll sort out, as we develop the text, so text and performance are seamlessly bound.
VENTURING INTO OTHER GENRES
Originally trained as an actress, my expertise was performance and writing for performance. So people came to me for that. As time went on, writers started bringing in work for the page: memoir; novels; songs; screenplays; poems. And the process worked, because the question was always the same: What's the Story?
Since that time, I, too, have expanded to writing prose. In 2016, I got an MFA in Creative Writing: Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles), and am nose-deep in a book-length memoir about the time I spent working in Rwanda.
Twenty years ago, I set out to write a solo play about my great-grandfather—the patriarch who first came to the US at the turn of the 20th century—about whom nobody would ever speak. Clearly something terrible and shameful and delicious must have happened, and I was obsessed with finding out what it was. When Looking for Louie opened in LA in 2000, it got a lot of attention.
I was on the performance faculty at the USC theatre school, so I was known as a teacher, and people started asking me if I would work with them on their solo plays, based on personal material. I didn't have a group, so I worked with them one-on-one. After a while, I noticed that—because it was just us—they were writing for my sensibility, and it was hard to figure what they wanted to say.
I was asked to teach an undergraduate solo class at USC. There were fifteen people in the room. It occurred to me that I might be able to invite and guide students' response to one another's work in a way that kept the response constructive, utterly generous and, above all, useful.
And it worked. Writers got a broad spectrum of response—not just mine. I watched, I listened. And I got a sense of what the writers were up to, what they wanted to say. I offered my response through that lens. And, since writers were finding their own way into their own material, they went places with the work that none of us expected to go.
I called the people I'd been working with one-on-one and suggested we try again, in the context of a group process. They agreed, and that was the birth of What's the Story?
PERFORMING SOLO
Solo performance is an odd animal. Over the years, I've figured out ways to work freely in direct address with an audience that is honest and intentional, generous, and story-centric. And there are ways to offer even the strongest of personal narratives in such a way that they belong — not only to us— but to all of us. Our job is to work moment-to-moment, in real time, with a new scene partner every time we go out. That's something we'll sort out, as we develop the text, so text and performance are seamlessly bound.
VENTURING INTO OTHER GENRES
Originally trained as an actress, my expertise was performance and writing for performance. So people came to me for that. As time went on, writers started bringing in work for the page: memoir; novels; songs; screenplays; poems. And the process worked, because the question was always the same: What's the Story?
Since that time, I, too, have expanded to writing prose. In 2016, I got an MFA in Creative Writing: Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles), and am nose-deep in a book-length memoir about the time I spent working in Rwanda.
What students say...“Stacie has the touch of a magician in her ability to extract the very best from her students. She is unwaveringly supportive and has a keen eye and ear for “what works” dramatically.” |
“My writing coach Stacie Chaiken, helped me find the story’s structure and define its characters through her “wild brain” exercises, which freed me from my mental cul de sacs and allowed me to turn out a remarkably clean first draft.” — Gina Keating, Netflixed. |
It's like no writing class I've ever taken... It's not about words, or technique; it's about you. What do you want to say, and why? |
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