SLAM Theater: 'It's Like Throwing Tomatoes'

By Barry Owens
JULY 3, 2006

The first of seven performances on stage one night last month at Collective Unconscious, 279 Church Street, was not working. Everyone in the theater knew it. Still, there was nothing for the actors—performing the scene cold—to do but play it out. The playwright could do little but slink lower into his seat. It would, mercifully, be over in exactly two minutes. “Time!” shouted Zoe Moore, the evening’s host, with a click of her stopwatch. The audience offered sympathetic applause for the actors, who, as a critic in the front row pointed out, “had done the best they could with what they had to work with.” Then came a call from a critic in the back row: “Somebody shoot the writer.” Welcome to SLAM Theatre, a playwriting competition where anyone with a script in hand can get a scene on the stage, anyone who tosses his name into a hat can be an actor, and, of course, everyone is a critic.

“It only takes a thick skin once,” said Jerrod Bogard, an actor, playwright and SLAM regular. “After that, everyone realizes we’re all just out to find what makes beautiful theater.”

Moore, a 24-year-old director who grew up in Tribeca, created SLAM to give writers a forum to try new work, actors a chance to test their chops, and audiences the rare opportunity to see—and comment on—a work in progress. Add an element of competition, a refrigerator full of beer, and a boisterous crowd that is quick to praise or pan peers, and the SLAM amounts to a night of theater unlike any other. “We wanted to expose new work in a forum that would be just as entertaining as the theatre itself,” said Nicholas Gallegos, an actor with the The Tank, a theater group that helped Moore to launch SLAM. He remains a co-producer and co-host. “In a way, it’s audience development,” Moore said, explaining her hope that the show would foster an appreciation for theater as more than passive entertainment.

“The one thing I don’t ever want to hear someone say when they leave here is, ‘Ok, now where should we go for dinner?’” Moore said.

SLAM happens at Collective Unconscious every other month on a Sunday night. It resumes in August. Here is how it works: Playwrights submit their scripts at the door. A scene from each script gets a two-minute cold reading from actors whose names are drawn from a hat.

After each reading, a panel of judges rates the work. The scenes that score highest advance to the next round, when they get a slightly longer reading and the writers get to choose and direct actors. The winner of the final round gets a chance at a full reading at the end of the month. This night’s winner was a piece by 21-year-old Phlip (only his parents call him Phillip) Wilson, titled “Bedpan Humor.” The comic scene, brought to life by actors Kurt Rodeghiero and Sky Seale, featured a pair of old codgers in a nursing home. The scene won points from one judge for its “articulate use of profanity.”

“I wrote it last night between midnight and 2 a.m,” Wilson said. It was the first piece he had submitted to SLAM, an experience he called “just dangerous enough to be fun.”

More seasoned regulars such as playwright John Watts have won a few and lost a few at SLAM. Watts offered this advice for prospective first-timers:
“If you have any problem with ego, you should not try this. It’s a very different experience than a typical workshop. This is a typical, hard-core New York experience. It’s like throwing tomatoes.”

The evening can provoke spirited debates, like the one that transpired between a playwright who put the word “proclaiming” in the mouth of a high school girl, and a judge, a critic from Time Out New York, who suggested that the language was a mistake, at best, and tin-eared writing, at worst.

“I think it pushes playwrights to do better work,” said Stefania Vanin, an actress. “If we were all just here to high-five each other, that wouldn’t happen.”

But there is plenty of high-fiving among the actors who, free from all but the most vague direction, can cut loose with their interpretations.

“They say not to judge the actors, but it still keeps you on your toes,” said actress Leslie N. Holden. “It’s a great exercise.”

“As an actor, I never allow myself to act while drunk,” said Brian Floyd, beer in hand, “so that is fun too.”

After the show, the actors and playwrights often slip over to the bar next door for drinks. There are few sore losers.

“If it were just a competition, I would be pissed off because I lost,” said Janus Surrat, author of “Failure Play,” which, well, failed to advance past the second round. “But I’m not, because I got a chance to hear my work.”