Playwright: Robin Rice Lichtig
Place of Residence: New York
Web site: www.dramamama.net

Education: Antioch College (‘64); University of Massachusetts (‘65); Ramapo College (‘74); Antioch University (‘91). A mixed bag of B.A.s and M.A.s in political science, fine arts, and playwriting.

Selected Titles: Humans Remain, Harmony, Embracing The Undertoad, Necessary Geography, Women Without Walls, Play Nice!, Frontier, and Lola and The Planet of Glorious Diversity.

Selected awards: Winner or finalist: Maxim Mazumdar, Jane Chambers, Smith Prize, Samuel French, Drury, Karamu House, Kernodle, Bailiwick, Stepping Stone, Moondance, Reverie, Reva Shiner, Coe, Six Figures, Finborough (England). Residencies: Cleveland Public, The Lark.

Last October, playwright Robin Rice Lichtig traveled overseas to run a week-long playwriting intensive in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, titled “How to Write a Ten-Minute Play.”

Lichtig experienced several challenges, including teaching with a translator and not knowing the students’ writing experience or educational backgrounds.

“A major roadblock was that the class wouldn’t speak or understand English, and I definitely don’t know Mongolian,” she says. “I would never actually hear the plays they were writing in English. How could I give them feedback?”

Lichtig decided to turn that negative into a positive.

“They wouldn’t be tempted to write for me. My judgment was taken out of the equation. This was good,” she says. “I learned a lot about letting go of control because of the language barrier!”

With a large lesson plan containing 30 pages of lecture notes and 29 playwriting exercises, Lichtig prepared for her trip.

“I put myself in the shoes of Mongolians and tried to see if what I was saying was too colloquial, too Western, too something-or-other for them to grasp,” she says. “I read (Hearing Birds Fly), watched movies (The Story of the Weeping Camel, The Cave of the Yellow Dog, Ghengis Blues), memorized guide books, Googled, took out an online subscription to the Ulaanbaatar newspaper… tried to get some kind of a hold on understanding the people I would be trying to communicate with. I had never been to the Far East. When I accepted this challenge I didn’t even know the difference between Inner and Outer Mongolia.”

The experience yielded several surprises. The first was the realization that the students, who ranged in age from 20s to 50s, were schooled in communist writing theory.

“I started talking about plot when one of the students, a man in his 50s who was a Russian-trained actor and director, jumped to his feet and began pounding on the table, vehemently shouting something in Mongolian,” Lichtig says. “Although Mongolia became a parliamentary democracy in 1990, the education system is still run by communist-era educators who themselves grew up before 1990. Apparently Aristotle was tossed out bag and baggage when the Communists came into power. They literally rewrote the book on dramatic writing. The communist book is packed with complicated terms, dense with directives, difficult to fight ones way through.”

She adds, “I had put a great deal of time into making my lesson plan clear and simple. I had even made up my own terms when the commonly used terms (such as ‘action’) might be confusing. I was teaching basic structure, which is essentially the same for ten-minute plays as for full-lengths, as well as all the tools which result in a textured, engaging play. They loved it. They loved the clarity. They adored the exercises, especially the one I called ‘eavesdropping’ where they brought back to class each day a conversation they had overheard and the class would discuss what the situation was, who the characters were and so forth just from hearing the dialogue. They loved lists (kinds of non-verbal moments, types of goals and what I called ‘moves’—methods of reaching goals, etc.). Most important, I insisted that each come up with a summary sentence stating what their protagonist wanted and what was the main obstacle. This wasn’t easy, but I stuck to my guns. By the end of the day Thursday, each student had a play ready to hand over to a director. Each was smiling broadly, even the young woman who had frowned mightily all week. What she had written for one of the exercises turned out to be a gem of an absurdist play.”

The students’ emotional responses to a free-writing exercise was another surprise.

“I wanted them to write something that tapped into their emotions before we got into all the structural work that engages the brain. I was afraid they wouldn’t understand what I wanted, but I plunged in, telling them to write for an hour, to write something they needed to write, something that they felt strongly about. I told them it wouldn’t necessarily be part of their plays and it wouldn’t be read by anyone,” she says. “This freedom to write what they wanted caused one woman to leave the room in tears and another had tears running down her cheeks by the end of the hour. The flood of emotion released in that room was palpable. I didn’t know the dam had been built so high.”

On Friday evening of that week, several of Lichtig’s plays and the students’ plays were read onstage at the State Academic Drama Theatre.

“First, three ten-minute plays of my own which had been translated into Mongolian were read. The actors were tumbling all over the stage. The blocking was elaborate. Suddenly, from the back of the crowded auditorium, a man stood up and began shouting at the actors. I sunk down in my seat, afraid that my play had incensed him. After five minutes, he sat down and the actors resumed, less vigorously than before,” she says. “I found out that the man was the director of the play and he was unhappy with the performance. I got the impression that his interruption wasn’t unusual.”

The performance was the first public staged reading in Mongolia, Lichtig asserts. “Although the audiences don’t react during plays as much as Americans, they applaud vigorously at the end. I was presented with flowers and gifts, kisses and hugs. I have left part of my heart with those writers,” she says. “Now if someone would only translate one of our fine playwriting texts into Mongolian! Although Shakespeare, Chekhov and other classics are performed there, they are starved for new plays.”

Lichtig, a native of Williamstown, Mass., has been writing plays for about 15 years. She is a fine artist who began designing sets for community theater projects in New Jersey.  “I naturally segued over into helping with the scripts, finally writing them on my own (and directing and horsing around on stage when they twisted my arm). My first career was as a newspaper reporter. I think I had always been trying to get back to writing,” she says.  Later, she studied with Milan Stitt, who wrote The Runner Stumbles, and the late William Packard, of New York’s HB Studio.

She is a member of the International Centre for Women Playwrights and was contacted by fellow member Naranjargal Hashhuu, a Mongolian woman who is the founder and president of a Mongolian NGO (Globe International), about the possibility of teaching a class in Mongolia.  Lichtig then wrote a lesson-plan outline, which Hashhuu submitted along with a grant proposal to the Arts Council of Mongolia. The grant was awarded and provided funds for Lichtig’s services, a translator, directors, and actors.

Her teaching experience includes teaching art at the high school and college level briefly before leaving to do her own printmaking.

In Mongolia, the main piece of advice she gave her students was: Don’t bore the audience.
“The most desirable way to teach is, of course, not to talk AT the students but to teach THROUGH the script they are writing and the exercises they are experiencing,” she says. “I was delighted to find that by Tuesday I could lay aside my fat lesson plan and let about 70 percent of the information they needed flow from the discussions.”

Sandra Hosking’s plays have been produced in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Canada, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the International Centre for Women Playwrights.

Read more about Robin’s time in Mongolia on her blog: http://dramamama1.homestead.com/STORY.html.