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Post by filmnoir5 on Jul 18, 2006 21:33:26 GMT -5
Source : Rocky Mountain News
"'After Ashley' takes on the culture of public grieving
By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News April 10, 2006
The writer of an acid-inked play like After Ashley should be caustic, brutal, maybe even arrogant.
But Gina Gionfriddo is none of that. The petite brunette is quiet and polite. At the 2004 Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., where her play made its debut, the reaction was electric. Gionfriddo, however, skirted the edges of the after-show bar scene as people sought her out.
That night heralded After Ashley as the play to see. Tackling a culture of victimization and public grieving, it tells the story of a sardonic teen boy disgusted by how the world around him reacts to his personal tragedy.
That night in Louisville was one that theater people live for.
"Theater's like a chemical reaction, or cooking," Gionfriddo says recently in a phone call from her home in New York. "You throw a bunch of things together and there's a certain amount of 'you can't control what happens or doesn't happen.' It's been suggested to me that there was something in Louisville, that there was something magical to it."
The magic didn't carry on to New York, where a production led by Kieran Culkin and Anna Paquin brought mediocre reviews, particularly in The New York Times. It was still the best-selling play in the Vineyard Theatre's history, but without the reviews, there wasn't enough money to move it to a larger venue.
"There are sort of different theories, one of which is that when a play does well regionally, there's often a sense coming into New York, as someone described it to me, that New Yorkers like to feel they make their own judgments and they're a little squirrelly about stuff that's already had a stamp of endorsement out of town. I sort of was warned about that," Gionfriddo says.
Now Gionfriddo, a native of Washington, D.C., is a New Yorker herself. Even when After Ashley wowed them in Louisville, she continued teaching freshman composition classes at the University of Rhode Island. Then she was hired last year to write for Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
"I never made a living from my playwriting, and that wasn't in the offing," she says. "I had to make a living somehow, and I was happier doing (television) than teaching, much happier."
Criminal Intent's writing staff is stacked with playwrights: Warren Leight (Side Man), Diana Son (Stop Kiss) and Marlene Meyer (The Mystery of Attraction). And it's more plot-oriented than the sensationalism of Special Victims Unit, which would seem to be the very sort of sensationalism that After Ashley decries.
"The plots tend to be very complicated stories and very character-centered," Gionfriddo says of the series. "I always worry about our show because it's not a music video, like I think some of the other shows are."
After Ashley has its own shocking plot twist. That and the satire make this a tricky play to direct. Go too far in one direction and it's a comedy sketch, too far in the other and the audience drowns in bathos.
"I think that where it can go wrong is where the other play, U.S. Drag, went wrong. Which is when you see an actor or a director has made a choice that one or more of the characters are comic characters, it starts to seem very one-dimensional or sitcom-y," she says.
"Even the characters that we find one-dimensional - they believe what they're doing, they think it's God's work."
Although the plot has nothing to do with Sept. 11, 2001, the impulse to write it did.
"I started getting very nervous about my own reaction to 9/11. I felt like I had a pure reaction and then at a certain point the quality of the language was so syrupy that I couldn't have a genuine reaction anymore," she says.
"U2 did this tour, and they scrolled the names of the victims, and Bono had an American flag lining his coat, and I don't know if I'm just a cynic, but I don't feel like that's a pure gesture."
In After Ashley, the family tragedy becomes a part of the popular culture. Justin, the teen, calls emergency services and the recording has him nationally known as "the 911 kid." His father happily writes a book and makes the talk-show rounds. Justin dreams of a return to the days when people suffered in silence.
The mind immediately goes to the likes of Dr. Phil.
"I've been sucked into Dr. Phil, too," Gionfriddo says. "I can't stand him, but if he's on I get sucked into it in spite of myself. I think it's the drill-sergeant quality. A lot of people pretty much know what it is they're doing to screw up their lives."
Since After Ashley, Gionfriddo has been loath to start a new play. The project, for her, was unique.
"It's weird to say, because it's my play, but I am really fond of that play, and for me personally it feels like a tough act to follow," she says.
"I really was incredibly excited and juiced when I was sitting down to write that play. I think there were some issues in the media and some personal issues of mine that came together in a nice way as I was writing After Ashley. I'm not as clear on what my next obsession is."
Storyteller
Gina Gionfriddo is an award-winning writer for stage and TV:
Plays
• U.S. Drag: A comedy about urban paranoia, where vigilante gangs form in response to a friendly serial killer. (2001)
• After Ashley: A dark satire about turning a family tragedy into pop culture. (2003)
TV
Two episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent:
• Prisoner: first aired Oct. 9, 2005.
A prison warden is found brutalized after dropping off the ransom for his kidnapped wife and he turns out not to be as innocent as he seems.
• Dollhouse: first aired Jan. 8, 2006.
A woman has been blackmailing six different men, claiming they each fathered her child.
Awards
• Susan Smith Blackburn Prize
• Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights
• Lucille Lortel Fellowship
• Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship "
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Post by Patcat on Jul 19, 2006 11:17:25 GMT -5
Filmnoir; Thanks for posting this, and the profile of the other writer. I found Ms. Gionfriddo's comments about LOCI being character driven very true, and I've always noted that the LOCI writing staff is heavy with playwrights.
Patcat
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Post by filmnoir5 on Jul 19, 2006 19:19:08 GMT -5
I just find it fascinating that many of the current writers of L&O:CI are playwrights. They also seem to have experience writing comedy or satire which could explain why L&O:CI has several episodes that either contain dark humor or satire. I need to look for the episode of Cold Case that she wrote before she joined the L&O:CI writing staff. I believe the older Cold Case episodes air on TNT one weeknight. "Schadenfreude A man claims that he was wrongfully convicted of the 1982 murder of his rich wife. The case is reopened when the victim's rare ring is discovered worn by a recently deceased junkie. Writer: Gina Gionfriddo " Source : www.epguides.com or www.tv.com"
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Post by Techguy on Jul 20, 2006 1:38:50 GMT -5
I just find it fascinating that many of the current writers of L&O:CI are playwrights. And now Eric Bogosian will add a playwright's POV to the acting mix when he joins the CI cast.
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Post by DNA on Oct 30, 2006 4:05:10 GMT -5
Boston Globe.comA dark comedy for dark times.By Catherine Foster
Playwright asks: Would you go on TV if your relative was murdered?On the face of it, Gina Gionfriddo's play "After Ashley" doesn't sound much like a comedy, even a dark one. The Ashley in question was raped and murdered by a homeless man that her husband, Alden, had hired to do odd jobs. Three years later, her teenage son Justin is still grieving and angry. But Alden has blithely moved on, writing a best seller about the experience and hosting his own sex-crime TV talk show. But "After Ashley" -- which is being presented by Company One at Boston Center for the Arts -- is funny: bitterly, scathingly, disturbingly funny. Gionfriddo seems to have written this play with knives attached to her fingers. At one point, when Alden takes his son on another TV talk show hosted by David Gavin, the father of a murdered child, Justin's behavior is less than ideal. Justin: Just to sort of paraphrase, if I could, David. Our story, like yours, is not without a message, but we want to be very clear on what that message is. Alden: Justin, I couldn't have said that better -- Justin: David, you said your message was 'Don't postpone love.' Ours is 'Don't hire healthy, skilled workers for jobs a homeless person can perform for a fraction of the cost.' The fact that the man we hired killed my mother should not deter anyone from bringing the homeless home. And that's our message at its most pithy: 'Bring the homeless home.' Alden: Can we stop taping? David: We can edit. "I think the dark comedy is definitely my style," Gionfriddo says by phone from her New York office at "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," where she is a writer. "I would say the sense of humor is the same in my other plays, and the satire." But one difference, she says, is the real-world background of increasingly graphic TV crime shows and such phenomena as 9/11 widow Lisa Beamer making the rounds of the media. Gionfriddo, 37, says this was her post-Sept. 11 play. After the terrorist attacks, "there was initially this reverence and restraint in media coverage," she says. "But it wasn't sustained. It became cheesier, cheaper, more exploitive. I fixated on the question of: 'If we keep showing the towers falling, are we going to ultimately numb people out? Are the images not going to have power anymore if we abuse them?' That's what I started to run on." Then her thinking turned more personal. In her play, Ashley is no sainted mother. She's involved with drugs and kinky sex, facts that her husband leaves out as he sanitizes Ashley's image for a national audience. "I kept thinking about this family," Gionfriddo says. "What if the image in question is your mom and you feel you've lost control of her story and her image?" In the play, Justin calls 911 for help when he hears his mother being attacked. He refuses to leave the house, and that courage garners him a national reputation as the "911 Kid." Later, while drowning his sorrows in a bar, Justin meets a young woman named Julie, who at first seems to him just a tragedy groupie, interested only in him as the "911 Kid." But their initially prickly relationship -- Justin seems to have no other kind -- warms up. She joins him in his fight to wrest control of his mother's story from his father. Shawn LaCount , the artistic director of Company One who is directing "After Ashley," says, "What makes the play so intriguing now is that it's dealing with the power of media, which has become what America is all about, versus the power of family, which has become much more of a struggle to keep alive and healthy." Gionfriddo, a Washington, D.C., native, moved to Providence in 1995 for Brown University's MFA playwriting program. Then she stayed in Rhode Island for 10 years, writing plays and teaching composition at Providence College. She was among 14 playwrights selected for the 2003 Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Conn., where "After Ashley" was given a staged reading . The play, which was commissioned by Philadelphia Theatre Company, was a big hit at Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2004. It subsequently played off-Broadway at the Vineyard Playhouse, with Kieran Culkin as Justin and Anna Paquin as Julie. This cast features Jonathan Orsini as Justin and Ana Nogueira as Julie, as well as Ed Hoopman, Kelly Lawman, Lonnie McAdoo, and Naheem Allah. LaCount says the play is "one of the smartest pieces I've read in a long time. She [puts her characters] in situations that are extreme but probable, and because they all have a level of intelligence and complexity, the humor works organically."
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Post by filmnoir5 on Jan 14, 2007 15:02:23 GMT -5
The Cold Case episode "Schadenfreude" episode that she wrote in 2005 around the time she also wrote her first episode of CI "Beast" will air this Tuesday, Jan. 16 at 11 p.m. on TNT.
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Post by annabelleleigh on Dec 30, 2008 12:31:14 GMT -5
As most know, playwright Gina Gionfriddo was hired at CI by creator Rene Balcer as a writer and executive story editor and subsequently followed him back to the mothership. See Mr. Balcer's remarks, below. Boldfaces mine. AL ------------------- Onstage, Tackling Ambition and Crime by Patricia Cohen The New York TimesDecember 30, 2008 Excerpt: “Serial killers are really not that interesting,” Gina Gionfriddo remarked matter-of-factly. She was picking at a salad in the back of a Midtown restaurant about a block away from Second Stage Theater, where she has just come from a rehearsal for her new play, “Becky Shaw.” Ms. Gionfriddo considers herself “an absolute encyclopedia of true crime” — a handy characteristic for someone who writes for television’s “Law & Order” — and in her experienced eye, crimes motivated by money, power and status are the most compelling and transgressive. “I feel we’re so squeamish about class in this country,” she said. “It’s more taboo than sexuality.” In her new work there is a crime — a robbery — but social ambition provides the engine and the theme. For readers of Victorian literature, the name Becky Shaw brings to mind another famous social climber: Thackeray’s Becky Sharp. There are lots of Becky Sharp-like characters in 19th-century literature, Ms. Gionfriddo says, and for the most part they are vilified and punished for refusing to stay in their place. Thackeray’s Sharp is described as “monstrous” and “serpentine.” “There’s a need for women to be put in their place” for being too aggressive, Ms. Gionfriddo said... ...Ms. Gionfriddo’s play, which opens Jan. 8, there are no consummate villains or heroes. “I wanted my Becky to be a figure that is out of her class and trying to break in,” she said. “I didn’t want her to be a viper, just someone who at 35 made a lot of mistakes and didn’t have many options.” In the play the seemingly forlorn Becky ( Annie Parisse) is brought into a muddle of family relations when she is set up on a blind date by a well-meaning co-worker, Andrew (Thomas Sadoski). The date is with Max (David Wilson Barnes), the acerbic adopted brother of Andrew’s new wife, Suzanna (Emily Bergl). Writing about the debut of “Becky Shaw” this spring at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theater of Louisville, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called it “a thoroughly enjoyable play, suspenseful, witty and infused with an unsettling sense of the potential for psychic disaster inherent in almost any close relationship.”... ...The playwright Adam Rapp, a friend of Ms. Gionfriddo’s, considers her work to have both edge and insight. “She certainly writes about savagery and the way we co-opt each other and destroy each other and pretend to love each other. She does that so well,” he said. Yet, he added, “Her characters still root their feet on the ground no matter how wacky her premise might be.” The two met at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, which staged a workshop production of her first play, “After Ashley,” in 2003, and presented Mr. Rapp’s “Finer Noble Gases.” “Hers was by far my favorite play there,” he said. Ms. Gionfriddo first became interested in theater at Georgetown Day School in Washington, where she ended up after a “loathsome” stint in Catholic school. Even then the stories that fascinated her were about crime. “When I was in high school, other people were reading romance novels; I was reading the Ted Bundy books,” she said. “I’ve never been sure if it was the anxiety that violence would be done to me or that I would do violence,” she added, noting that the very thought of being locked up in prison could start her hyperventilating. “That’s the sophisticated explanation,” she added. “I may just be a ghoul.” By the time she went to Barnard College in New York, she had settled on acting as a career. New York offered a welcome if harsh dose of reality. In an acting class the students were lined up and the professors went down the row, declaring what sort of parts each person could play. “I wasn’t the ingénue,” Ms. Gionfriddo recalled. “I could play the ethnic teenager.” A job at Primary Stages gave her another view of how directors analyzed actors, often dismissing or choosing someone for vague, indefinable reasons. “I figured out very quickly that I didn’t have what it takes,” she said about acting. But she was intrigued by the process of getting a play into shape. After graduating from college, she worked as an Off Off Broadway general manager and met the playwright Mac Wellman. He read some of her work and urged her to go back to school to study playwriting. She did, attending Brown, where the Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel teaches. Is playwriting something anyone can learn? “I think things like structure you can learn,” she said. “If you have a tin ear for dialogue, though, it’s tough.” It is Ms. Gionfriddo’s feel for dialogue that has gotten her noticed. Rene Balcer, the head writer and executive producer of “Law & Order” and its spinoff “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” hired Ms. Gionfriddo after reading “After Ashley.”“She really has an ear for the dialogue of everyday Americans and the quirkiness of everyday Americans,” Mr. Balcer said, “the kind of people you see being interviewed on Nancy Grace.” As it turns out, Mr. Balcer has hired a number of playwrights, many of them women. “I think women write crime better than men do,” he said. “Men tend to play it safe, relying on an old-boys’ network. Women feel freer. They swing for the bleachers.” If her gender has been a boon on television crime dramas, it hasn’t helped in the New York theater world, in Ms. Gionfriddo’s view. She, along with dozens of other female playwrights, recently protested the relatively small number of plays by women that are produced in New York. Producers, directors and perhaps audiences, she said, seem much more willing to accept unappealing male characters than unappealing women. In “Becky Shaw” there are plenty of unappealing characteristics to go around. Ms. Gionfriddo remembers the varying ways audience members at Humana reacted to the characters. Is Becky a victim or a manipulator? Is Andrew nurturing or annoying? Is Max brutally honest or just brutal? Ms. Gionfriddo found that often viewers’ romantic history was a guide to whom they considered good or bad. The play is “a journey of moral discovery,” she said, and the characters are “people who are wrestling with their best and worst selves, and who keep lapsing into something they don’t want to be.” The full article at www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/theater/30gina.html?_r=1&ref=theater&pagewanted=print
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Post by Patcat on Dec 30, 2008 13:19:27 GMT -5
AL--Ah, you beat me to posting this interview. I've always found it fascinating that there are so many gifted playwrights, and female ones at that, writing for the L&O series, especially LOCI.
Patcat
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Post by annabelleleigh on Jan 6, 2009 12:21:26 GMT -5
Now, with her new play in production, it may not be the right time to ask, but wouldn't you love it, PC, if Ms. Gionfriddo consented to a fansite interview?
AL
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Post by Patcat on Jan 6, 2009 14:21:09 GMT -5
I love it whenever anyone involved with the show does an interview.
Patcat
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Post by Patcat on Jan 9, 2009 8:49:40 GMT -5
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Post by annabelleleigh on Jan 9, 2009 13:16:16 GMT -5
Thanks, PC, for posting Charles Isherwood's review of "Becky Shaw": "...as engrossing as it is ferociously funny..." These kinds of nights Off-Broadway are what I miss most about leaving NYC.
And hearty congratulations to Ms. Gionfriddo! Word for word, she couldn't have received a better notice had she written it herself.
AL
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Post by annabelleleigh on Mar 12, 2009 23:22:44 GMT -5
To help us formulate our questions for the Gina Gionfriddo interview I've put together something of a short, comprehensive bio of her career (from various sources) with an emphasis on her work for the L&O franchise. Of course you can read more about Gina Gionfriddo in other posts in this thread. AL ---------------------- About Gina GionfriddoPlaywright Gina Gionfriddo writes to provoke. Her edgy theatrical satires bristle with dark comic dialogue, exposing and excoriating human behavior in the contexts of sexuality, gender relations, social class, popular culture, and public and private morality. One thing about all of them is abundantly clear: About issues for which she feels fiercely Gionfriddo aims to take no prisoners, cut no one slack. She’s been doing so for about a decade, even before graduating with an M.F.A. in playwriting from Brown University, even prior to her first one-acter. Recently Gionfriddo reached a new pinnacle of her playwriting career with “Becky Shaw,” now in its final weeks in New York -- the jewel of the current season at the highly respected theatrical company Second Stage. A piece described as “a tangled tale of love, sex, and ethics among a quartet of men and women in their thirties,” it has won extravagant critical acclaim. The New York Times called it “a big box of fireworks fizzing and crackling across the stage from its first moments to its last." In New York, those who review, produce and patronize the theater seem to be taking new notice of Gina Gionfriddo. This up-and-coming playwright – a former Guggenheim Fellow, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner (in 2002, for “U.S. Drag”) and an Outer Critics Circle awardee who wowed audiences at one of the country’s most important regional theater festivals (in 2004, with “After Ashley”) – may have finally arrived. Yet only for a relative few has writing for the theater been a lucrative, full-time profession. All playwrights do something else for a living. Gina Gionfriddo writes and produces for TV’s Law & Order franchise. It’s a job that’s been helping to support her playwriting since 2005 when she joined Law & Order: Criminal Intent as one of several playwrights – mostly women -- whom CI creator Rene Balcer drafted for the series. Her work continues at the mothership, where she has been a writer/producer since the beginning of 2008, helping Balcer to revitalize television’s longest-running crime drama. For more than five years Gina Gionfriddo has played a key role in shaping the characters and stories for two TV dramas with hardcore, opinionated, devoted fan followings. People like us. While at Criminal Intent Gionfriddo contributed to 18 episodes, as a writer, a story editor and later as executive story editor. Her CI term started toward the end of Season 4 (the result of Balcer reading “After Ashley” and marveling at her gift for “the dialogue of everyday people”); continued through the changes brought on in Season 5 by the split cast; and ended shortly after production of the Season 6 episode “Bombshell.” During that time she wrote scripts for both the Goren/Eames and Logan detective teams, first in collaboration with Rene Balcer and later with his showrunner-successor (playwright) Warren Leight. Her CI body of writing includes: At original Law & Order Gionfriddo has helped produce 33 episodes and has teamed with an L&O veteran, co-executive producer and one-time New York public defender Richard Sweren to write: Just as they have helped to subsidize her playwriting, the L&O shows have also provided Gionfriddo with a venue to practice her craft and to write to her passions. Evident across her scripts – structured, as with all L&O scenarios, as abbreviated, multi-act plays -- are her major playwriting themes, her sympathy for fighters and outsiders who won’t stay put in their place, and her outrage at the hypocrites and pretenders who try to keep them there. In the verisimilitude of the L&O universe, in Gionfriddo’s suspenseful, well-paced episodes, the former always triumph over the latter. And they always do it, as they must, in under 45 minutes. ### You can find reviews of "After Ashley" and "Becky Shaw" earlier in this thread. You can find descriptions of Gina Gionfriddo’s episodes for CI and L&O at www.imdb.comYou can learn more about her published plays (and where to buy them) at www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsG/gionfriddo-gina.htmlGionfriddo’s latest play– commissioned for last fall’s Spin series at Off-Broadway’s stageFARM – is a short work called “America’s Got Tragedy” about a reality show in which a dead soldier competes with a pop starlet whose train wreck life upstaged his war.
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Post by jeffan on Mar 13, 2009 8:32:50 GMT -5
Thank you AL for synthesizing Ms Gionfriddo's theatrical and television resume. Is there a cut-off date for questions?
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Post by Patcat on Mar 13, 2009 8:38:44 GMT -5
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