Liz Ellison is a Chicago-based playwright. She is a 2012-2013 Core Apprentice at the Playwrights’ Center. Her screenplay FAULT ZONE won a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and her plays have been developed and produced in Chicago, New York, Omaha, Aspen, and Ypsilanti, MI. She has been a semifinalist for the Princess Grace Award and a two-time O’Neill National Playwrights Conference semifinalist. Her work appears in the Vintage Books anthology SHORTER, FASTER, FUNNIER. She is a member of Courier 12 Collective, Chicago Writers Bloc, and the Nest at Halcyon Theatre. Liz holds a B.A. in theater and English from Dartmouth College and an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a recipient of the Steven Bochco Fellowship.
Liz on...
The ProcessI tend to be most productive either early in the morning or late at night. When I'm working on a new script, I try to churn out pages without agonizing too much about them, and then when I have something like a first draft, it's in revising, rewriting, and connecting the pieces that I do most of the work of building the play. Focusing on getting the scenes written as soon as I can helps keep me from getting stuck for too long in one place.
Satisfaction I never stop being surprised by what happens to my scripts when other theater artists become involved. You spend so much time typing alone, imagining what it will all look and sound like, but I think when a play is actually on its feet it's never quite what you expect. I love being surprised by what performers and directors and designers decide to bring to something I wrote.
Knowing For a long time I only wanted to be a fiction writer. I didn't turn toward theater at all until midway through college. It was a pretty big shift, a new vocabulary for storytelling that I had to learn. The play I usually cite as my "God play" is a show called KOMMER (Grief) by a Dutch company that combines film and theater. They happened to be touring through New England and performed at my college, and really it was just the greatest thing I ever saw in my entire life. So after that I first started thinking about writing for the stage. Some of the first playwrights I loved: Lorca, Brecht, Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard, Chuck Mee.
The First Time In high school I won an award for my nonfiction writing portfolio through the Scholastic Awards. The ceremony was at Carnegie Hall, and that night the organizers told me that they had chosen the statement of purpose I'd written to be performed by an actor, as a sort of opening monolog for the program. It's probably a good thing they didn't tell me any sooner than that. So this lovely young lady performed an essay I had written, basically talking about why I loved writing and how I had discovered it was what I wanted to do, alone onstage at Carnegie Hall for all the parents of the high school award winners. I think Rosie O'Donnell was there too. It was so laughably absurd to me that someone had memorized my words and turned them into a performance. But then when I was in the audience watching and heard people behind me laugh, I thought, well, maybe this does make some sense.
On the other hand, my work was performed at Carnegie Hall when I was eighteen, so it's really all been downhill since then.
Advice I've gotten TONS of great advice from playwrights over the years. Back when I was applying to grad school, a playwriting professor discouraged me so strongly from heading to an M.F.A. program right after college. I ended up deciding to go anyway, but it still haunts me somehow to think that I might have taken his advice! Getting an M.F.A. was the best thing I could have possibly done at that time for my writing. I think it's important to remember that you know your goals and your reasons for them better than anyone else does. Also, I was lucky enough to come to playwriting having done some acting, directing, and stage managing, but I don't think playwrights are always encouraged enough to get acquainted with every aspect of putting up a show. I can't imagine writing scripts if I didn't feel pretty comfortable doing a bunch of other things in a theater too.
For more on Liz's past, present, and future endeavors, check out her website.