By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – When San Diego playwright Janet S. Tiger was a grade-schooler, her mother Pauline Schechter used to take her on buses, trains and subways from Bell Harbor, Long Island, into Manhattan for sightseeing. The rides were long and arduous and to young Janet’s way of thinking, “boring.” But her mother would have none of that.
“Boring!” her mother would exclaim. “Look at all these people! Don’t stare, but you can study them without staring and try to figure out something about them. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can tell many things about the book from its cover. Has it been read a lot? What kind of shoes are they (fellow passengers) wearing? What kind of clothing? What impression do you get of them? When you get older you can start to talk to people and see if your impressions were correct. What is the real story and how does it differ from what you judge? Learn to be intuitive about a person. If you don’t feel good about a person, don’t talk to them – but that is so rare. Most people are good!”
Young Janet’s creativity was stimulated, and by the time she was 11 she already had written her first play, “The Great Piggybank Robbery,” which ran about 20 pages and even had a surprise ending.
When Janet turned 12, the Schechter family moved to San Diego, where Janet grew up with two siblings, Stuart and Harriet, and her parents Pauline and William – both of whom are nonagenarians today. She later went on to San Diego State University, where she studied literature.
Love of playwriting stuck with Janet, and she affiliated with a local group called Script Teasers, writing in 1980 a play called Little Horrors, which even today continues to horrify her. The subject matter, which was Idi Amin’s Uganda, was bad enough. Worse was the length of the play, which grew from 40 pages to 120 pages. One marathon night, Script Teasers put it on, and “within the first five minutes I knew it was too long,” Janet shuddered. Tiger asked one of the leaders of the group, newscaster Jonathan Dunn Rankin, to stop the reading and let her apologize to the audience, but Rankin insisted that she let the reading continue. When it finally, wearily, ended, Dunn Rankin told the audience that Janet already knew that it was far too long, and solicited other comments. Janet said she was surprised that the comments were generally positive. Nevertheless, she decided to leave that play on the shelf.
In 1983, she copyrighted a much better play, Blind Woman’s Bluff, which was so well received it was included in a Canadian anthology of plays for eighth graders. This one had a surprise ending, which is one of Janet’s playwrighting fortes.
In 1986, Janet Schechter married Stanley Tiger, a writer and public relations practitioner. Over the years, she continued to write plays, including one called Renny’s Story, which was about a Holocaust Survivor who hoped against hope that a son whom she gave to another family for protection might still be alive. The play, performed at the Swedenborgian Church, received quite a bit of attention locally, including from the San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage. Click on Link 1 and Link 2 for more about that production.
A few years ago, Janet’s husband Stanley suffered a stroke. Janet became his caregiver. With her father also needing care, Janet has spent much of her time tending to the needs of others. This can be quite stressful – so much so that Janet sought counseling at Jewish Family Service. Her therapist, Linda Levin, asked Janet what she enjoyed doing for herself. “Writing” was the answer. Eventually Janet decided to challenge herself to write a monologue every day.
She started on February 13, 2014 and she has been at it ever since. Under Janet’s rules of procedure, a monologue must be posted on her website, Monologue Mania, before midnight every evening.
“So long as it posts by midnight, I am okay,” she told San Diego Jewish World. She often dictates her monologues into her smart phone while walking for exercise. Then she transcribes the dictation, editing as she goes.
“The first 100 days were difficult,” she recalled. “I thought how will I be able to do this every day? I found that within the first couple of weeks I had a list of 100 ideas, now maybe it is 200. I have done many of those ideas, but I will always have more ideas than days to do it. At one point, I think when I hit 1,000 monologues, I thought maybe I’d end it there – like Arabian Nights. Some people think I am crazy to keep doing this, but after all, it is only one monologue a day, just one, which is not that big a deal when you actually think about it. I don’t want to stop. I am actually enjoying it.”
Self-critical, Janet says of her more than 1,000 monologues, she would rate perhaps 100 as really good ones.
“One that I did last year, Breeding Grounds, which was a five-minute play, I submitted to the Center for Jewish Culture (at the Lawrence Family JCC) and I was first. In a previous year, I submitted another play The Affidavit, which came in second.
Breeding Grounds concerned a couple meeting at a Jewish singles group and one of them being very sick. The Affidavit dealt with a woman who came into a pawn shop to sell something for much less than it was worth. As in many of Janet’s plays, it had a surprise ending. Another play, which she won’t name so as not to influence voting audiences, has been submitted for this year.
“I have two good sounding boards: my husband, who listens to it before I post it, which is a very big help because sometimes he will say, ‘well, that is not clear,’ and then I have a friend Diane Shea, who is very sharp, and can listen to it, and say what needs to be done, like ‘put this paragraph at the top.’ If they both like it, then I’m happy.”
Janet’s work has been included Hannah Logan’s “That 24-Hour Thing,” in which Fringe Festival playwrights are given a prompt on a Saturday morning and are expected to write plays by the end of the day, which then are turned over to actors who have 12 hours to learn and produce them. One year, Janet wrote God’s Coffee Shop. More recently she wrote Locker Room Changes.
Currently, the playwright is the beneficiary of a Creative Catalyst Grant from the San Diego Foundation, a $20,000 award divided between the writer and the production organization. For this program, Janet wrote Caregivers Anonymous, in which a group of caregivers share their experiences—some heartbreaking, others humorous.
In a flyer created for the work, the playwright confides. “I have been a caregiver throughout my life – caring for those dear to me. I helped care for my grandmother, raised two children and now help my father (92) and my husband (a stroke survivor). There are millions of caregivers in this country – some paid, but an estimated 40-60 million who are not. This play is for all of them—all of us!—with a spotlight on caregivers everywhere.”
Performances of Caregivers Anonymous are planned at 4:30 p.m., Sunday, April 30, at the downtown Central Library; 7 p.m., Wednesday, May 3, at Ohr Shalom Synagogue (where the Tigers are members); and at 7 p.m., Saturday, May 6, at the Christ Presbyterian Church in Carlsbad.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via Donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
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