My Own Art — blog — Danielle Mohlman

Making Time to Eat

Last year I wrote a big story for American Theatre magazine.

You can read it here. I’m pretty proud of it. To prepare, I interviewed seven playwrights who don’t have MFAs — artists who’ve made a career and a life for themselves without the three years in a university and the student loan debt that comes with it. I walked away from those phone calls with what is quite possibly the biggest lesson of my career so far: you have to keep challenging yourself, whether you have that degree or not.

Life in Seattle, My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanFebruary 26, 2020Test Kitchen, actors, dinner, new play, new pages, community, writing, playwritingComment

She Plays Younger

I play younger than I am in almost every customer service interaction I have.

And for many reasons, I’m happy to be out of that profession — at least for the time being. The youth emerged this morning, while I was buying bread at a grocery store. I was using self checkout, there was no reason for me to interact with anyone other than the robot I was handing my credit card to. And yet, for no reason and at a register higher than my natural speaking voice, I turned to an employee near the store’s exit and walk and talked the following phrase, “Thank you so much for your help! Have a great day!” And then, subconsciously, thank you for not catching me in a lie I didn’t tell. I am a child, I am a child, I am a child.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanJanuary 20, 2020FrankensteinComment

Creating Some Distance

It’s unfair to compare the two experiences, but my brain can’t help it.

While the Rushing workshop was all about resolving the distance between the play that was in my head and what I put on paper — and eventually the stage — the Voyagers workshop was all about creating distance between what I thought this play was and what this play actually wants to be.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanSeptember 30, 2019VoyagersComment

Resolving the Distance

When people ask me what I’m working on, 90% of the time I lead with Rushing.

I’m proud of it, for one. I’m proud of how much work and research I put into this play — and how beautiful the whole thing functioned in my mind for basically the entire writing process. And I’m an insecure writer. I need a lot of outside validation that the thing I’m working on is worth the mental gymnastics that almost always go dark. But it’s also worth saying that this beautiful play in my head just wasn’t making its way onto the actual page. Until literally last month.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanSeptember 23, 2019RushingComment

Turn My Stomach

I’m reading and writing a lot these days about a subject that turns my stomach.

Before I go on, I want to say that today’s blog post is about the fanaticism of college football and, more importantly and more disturbingly, the pattern of rape that many Division I teams cover up. I’m not trying to trigger folks. That’s the last thing I want to do. But please know the general outline of this content before you keep reading.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanJuly 29, 2019RushingComment

Not My Life

Last night I said something that would have ruined my 25-year-old self.

Last night I got a text from a producer at 9:45PM, a text that the victim-blaming society that lives inside of me would say I asked for. I’d exchanged numbers with this producer at the top of the year, I justified. It made sense that he was using it. But it didn’t make sense that he was using it, not really. Phone numbers are for friends, not for texts from work contacts. They’re for pre-planned phone meetings, not for questions that could be answered in an email. And they’re certainly not for 10PM last minute meetings on Sunday nights.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanJuly 15, 2019setting boundariesComment

You Can't Copyright An Idea

There are four plays about the Voyager mission.

The first one is mine, but it clearly wasn’t the first one. Because to be first implies that I completed a draft before anyone else. In November 2016, full of pain and only just finally being able to crawl out of bed — I was freelance, or “freelance,” and in more pain than I had the right to be in — I reconnected with Maureen Monterubio. She wanted to submit something to the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, something with a bite of hope, something to get us moving and creating.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanJune 24, 2019VoyagersComment

Capturing Myself in My Own Image

I went to a photoshoot this morning.

It was a photoshoot for a secret secret project that I can tell y’all about next month. It was a photoshoot for a play that makes me want to scream and laugh and read and share and keep working and keep working and keep working. But all of these thoughts and feelings and joys and frustrations come from working on the script, conversing with the characters, being alone in my apartment as I type into the void that is my computer.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanJune 17, 2019Rushing, VoyagersComment

Finishing the Draft

I’ve been working on Voyagers since November 2016.

Maybe you’ve heard me talk about it. Maybe you’ve sat down with me as you try to share good news with me and all I can talk about is how the play isn’t working. Or how hard it is for me to write about hope. Or how little hope I was willing to share with my audiences. Maybe you came to the staged reading in September 2017, an event that coincided with my birthday despite my desperate drive to ignore the celebration. (My director Maureen brought cupcakes to rehearsal. Everyone sang. I loved it.) Maybe you were in the staged reading. Y’all wouldn’t recognize it today.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanJune 3, 2019VoyagersComment

Killing My Darlings

The photo above is deceiving.

It’s a stock photo, of course. I like the idea of it: throwing out the old to make literal room for what works. In my reality, my cuts are digital. I tuck old drafts away in a different file, a different folder, a hidden section of my playwriting software. When I cut something that’s in a notebook, I keep that page in tact. I revisit my notebooks once a decade, it seems, so there’s no danger that the cut idea will bury it’s way into my line of vision and go from being a bad idea to a bad idea that just doesn’t work.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanMay 13, 2019Dust, VoyagersComment

Keeping A Notebook

Last week, I spent a couple hours going through a decade of notebooks.

Okay, so I knew that there would be a decade of notebooks. I’ve been writing plays for ten years and I am pretty much the ultimate nerd. Of course I carry a notebook with me everywhere I go. Of course I got down lines of dialogue and scenes and notes on a script and pitches and outlines and and and. I can’t remember a single original thought until I’ve written it down. My brain’s just funny that way.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanApril 1, 2019keeping a notebook, writingComment

Writing My Own Ending

I talk about Frankenstein a lot. If you know me IRL, this isn’t news. I’ve been talking non-stop about Mary Shelley, The Creature, and her mother since November. I followed a rigorous “can I adapt a novel in two months and still work at my other jobs?” schedule, turning down anything that wasn’t work or Frankenstein (which, in itself, was also work) for the rest of 2018. I clocked 500 words a day on that project alone, not because I was inspired, but because I couldn’t afford not to. I wrote my ten thousandth word on a flight home from Christmas. I was absolutely no fun to be around.

My Own ArtDanielle MohlmanMarch 11, 2019Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, The Creature, Victor FrankensteinComment