About the Play:
One member of an aspiring rap duo decides to go rogue in order to write love songs, thereby jeopardizing a life-long friendship and since-snack-time collaboration. RUNNING TIME: 14 minutes
Pluck & Tenacity will be presented Thursday, July 21 at 6:30 PM.
Pluck & Tenacity will be presented at the Festival Finals, Sunday, July 24 at 2:30 PM.
Daniella Shoshan is a New York (formerly of New Jersey) playwright. Upcoming works: An Improvised Explosive Device: an MTV war story (FringeNYC 2011); Jack Perry Is Alive [and Dating] (NYMF 2011). Recent projects include: Yes We Can (Down Payment Productions, dir. Alec Strum, Walkerspace); Ya Heard Me (Samuel French OOB Festival 2010, dir. Grant Boyd); They Call Him Young Lou (MFA Thesis Productions, dir. Pirrone Yousefzadeh, The Cherry Pit); Pluck & Tenacity (MFA Ten Minute Play Festival, dir. Kim Weild, Second Stage); Tell It To Me Slowly (FringeNYC 2009). MFA: Columbia University, 2010; BFA: NYU, 2006. She has been mentored by Kia Corthron and Stephen Adly Guirgis. She bakes crazy delicious cookies.
OOB Festival: Where do you come from (home state, state of mind, or both)?
Daniella: Home for me is a magical realm: a hodge-podge, span-the-gamut state, inexplicably charming yet maddening in its wildlife.
Maybe you’ve heard of it?
It has all the creature comforts – guidos, funnel cake, corruption – and signifying factors – my mom still makes sandwiches there – of a true homeland.
I’m also at home in my apartment.
And in library books and coffee mugs.
And in a combined state of anxiety, fear, and reluctant optimism.
These are my coordinates.
OOB Festival: Give us five words that describe who you are as a playwright.
Daniella: Rhythm
Authentic
Search
Self-sabotage
Salvation?
OOB Festival: Talk about your entry to this year’s Festival. How did you come to write this play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation?
Daniella: The humble beginning of this play is a song that I randomly wrote called Ice Cream Soup (Gotta Have You Like). It’s quite sweet, no pun intended. And it demands to be sung on a summer stoop to a fine young thing. So, that was sort of living in abeyance in my mind. Also corralled in the recesses of my brain, was an awesome (or so I deemed it) name for a rap-duo, Pluck & Tenacity. I had already sort of come up with imagined personas for these two guys, but had yet to find a world for them to live in. When I started thinking about a short piece that could work in Columbia’s MFA Thesis season’s ten-minute play festival, these two separate idea-bubbles finally merged into what I hope is an engaging little Venn diagram.
OOB Festival: What is one thing you hope audiences will take away from your Festival piece? Is there any information you would like them to know before they watch your work performed?
Daniella: Even in its super-short form, Pluck & Tenacity deals with many of the notions I like to explore in my plays: an authentic, specific life of language; the way people who share the same space, same blood, or same sense of root-less-ness search for a form of self-location in the back and forth of speech and story. Beyond its playful antics and adolescent angst, at heart Pluck & Tenacity is about a small moment in which the nature of a partnership suddenly and completely changes, thereby throwing into question the way each of the boys understands himself. And I dig the way that kind of sneaks up on them, and on myself, too.
OOB Festival: What/who are some of the major influences on your writing? What’s the most unconventional place/thing that you’ve taken inspiration from?
Daniella: I think what usually comes first to me, in terms of both what I’m inspired by and where I start writing a piece, is the language. The way people speak, really speak, and the way that correlates with or contrasts from what they really mean to say. Perhaps the most “unconventional” place I take inspiration from is eavesdropping…which isn’t so much unconventional as it is rude. But listening to someone on the bus talk on their cell phone to an unseen someone as they plan dinner, or rag on their boss, or have an argument in hushed-tones, detecting their exact speech patterns, their turns of phrases, and noting how this differs between neighborhoods, generations, genders…this is what I am hungry for. And this is why I most love Kia Corthron and Stephen Adly Guirgis, because they write voices that seem the most true to me – no matter who the characters are or where they’re from. They write people who seem like people, who seem like my people, even, and from that point of connection I am willing to be with them, get hurt, be surprised, go anywhere.
OOB Festival: What is your “dream play”–that is, if the more restrictive elements of production (budget, space, casting, and technical elements) were not a consideration, what type of theatre piece would you create?
Daniella: This is a nearly impossible question. And also mildly depressing, because, alas, sigh, tear, will this ever be true for any of us?! I would write the plays I am writing now, and hope to always want to write. But they would have like, weather elements. Like rain. And pools and oceans. I don’t know why, I’m not typically very nautical. But I feel like a lack of budget or set restrictions equals water to me. And James Gandolfini. And a score by Jay-Z and Barbra Streisand.
OOB Festival: If someone saw you on the street, what’s one fact that they would never guess about you?
Daniella: I have my own line of elegant yet affordable cookware I sell on QVC…
…God, I wish that was true.