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Kelly Stuart, aka Granny Groomer
There's more than meets the eye (perhaps too much) |
So, who is Kelly Stuart? Why does she have a problem with people who do not look like her? Why does she harass mothers and fathers, patriots and professionals, everyday citizens who care about children, who want to protect young people and their health, and who want to restore basic civil rights and liberties to all Californians?
I have written a number of blog posts exposing her hate, for sure.
But let's see what she has to say about herself.
From her LinkedIn profile:
Kelly Stuart is a playwright, photographer, and
videographer. Her production photos of theatre have appeared in the New York
Times among other papers. Because of her experience as a playwright, she has a
theatrical and narrative sensibility when creating images. Favorite clients include
Target Margin Theatre, Dances for a Variable Population and The Tank. She has
taught playwriting at Columbia University, University of Iowa, The New School,
and UCSD. Her play BELONGING TO THE SKY won the Saroyan Award for Playwriting
in 2013. Some of her plays include SHADOW LANGUAGE (about the Kurdish situation
in Turkey) at Theatre 503 in London, directed by Tim Stark, (originally
commissioned by the Guthrie Theatre). MAYHEM at the Evidence Room in Los
Angeles directed by Bart DeLorenzo, at Manchester's Royal Exchange directed by
Tim Stark, and at the Summer play festival directed by Melissa Kievman, in
Romania as Overdose at Teatrul Ariel's Underground. DEMONOLOGY at Playwrights
Horizons & The Mark Taper Forum, as well as at the Padua Hills Playwrights
Festival, and Sledgehammer Theatre directed by Kirsten Brandt. THE LIFE OF
SPIDERS at the Culture Project Downstairs, and FURIOUS BLOOD (also at
Sledgehammer, directed by Kirsten Brandt). She has received the Whiting
Fellowship, a Jerome Travel fellowship, grants from New York State Council for
the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Specialties: Photography, Videography, Playwriting,
Screenwriting Dramaturgy, Teaching and running writing workshops, working
knowledge of Turkish and Spanish.
Here's a snapshot of her current resume:
"Self-employed" meaning "unemployed" or "useless busybody" sounds more appropriate.
Also, there is one key word missing from the lists above.
FAILED.
She is a FAILED playwright. Winning in a tinny, tiny little award from a playhouse festival means nothing. Self-serving leftists engage in this self-congratulatory nonsense all the time.
She takes photos. And? Lots of people take better photos, and they don't even bother charging, so that should give you a sense of how little she actually makes.
The New York Times has used her photos? That shows their shoddy quality, since hardly anyone reads the New York Times anymore.
She used to teach in universities. Why did they let her go? She loves to project shameful allegations against other people. One has to wonder happened to her at those colleges. Did it have something to do with the students?
An LA Times article features her from almost thirty years ago, and may give us a little more insight into her empty, collapsing world:
I Work, Ergo, I Write : Taxi dancer, waitress, you name it,Kelly Stuart has worked it--and worked it into her writing.
BY JAN BRESLAUER
JULY 16, 1995 12 AM PT
Waitress, hostess, taxi dancer, temp. The minimum-wage jobs
that Los Angeles has to offer may be nothing to write home about. But they’re
fodder for Kelly Stuart’s weirdly wacky plays.
For decades, Kelly Stuart has been a second-rate loser. She works nothing but minimum wage jobs.
A Valley girl by birth and an absurdist at heart, she has a
knack for turning the existential comedy of low-pay L.A. into a poetry of the
perverse. But stylish as her plays may often be, they never seem to lose touch
with their source of inspiration.
Yes, she is absurd. No one would argue that.
Nor, for that matter, does the playwright.
“Almost all of my plays come from crummy jobs that I’ve
had,” says Stuart, 34, over lunch in a dim sum restaurant near the Chinatown
home she shares with stage director Robert Glaudini and their two young
daughters.
Nothing has really changed for her. She is still a crummy person, and she works crummy jobs. That's probably why she harasses every other successful man and woman who actually has a job, works for a living, etc.
“I used to write at McDonald’s and overhear conversations,
and that gave me material too. Now I write at the train station. But I have
enough memories of dumb jobs to last me forever.”
She eavesdrops on people. Creepy!
Stuart does not, however, simply re-create the quirky
workplaces of her pre-career past. She reinvents the dives and the drudgery,
along with the scrappy men and women who work there, adding broad physical
comedy and other unusual elements to the mix.
Consequently, her scripts run the gamut from verite to
vaudeville.
Her life is all vaudeville, ne verite. She wouldn't know the truth if it hit her in the face (and that might be an improvement)
“Her work has an Expressionistic sense of humor and certain
vaudevillian elements,” says Murray Mednick, the Padua Hills Playwrights
Festival artistic director, who has mentored Stuart since she was a teen-ager.
“It has a sophisticated irony that’s not common from someone her age.”
Creepy stranger-danger vibes "Mentored Stuart since she was a teen-ager ..."
Stuart’s latest work, “Demonology,” will be presented as
part of this year’s 16th Padua festival, which offers six new works on two
separate bills of three each, playing in repertory beginning Friday at USC’s
Bing Auditorium. The other writers whose plays will be staged are Mednick,
Maria Irene Fornes, Gil Kofman, Marlene Mayer and John O’Keefe.
So, she's into demons too. No wonder she's such a Karen:
Stuart, a veteran of many Padua festivals, says her piece
this year is comparatively upbeat:
“I used to be a lot more negative. I’m a lot more hopeful
now. I’m more interested in characters who are just trying, however they can,
to make some kind of life despite [lousy] circumstances.”
She's definitely more negative now. The hatred she has for innocent children is really startling.
Stuart’s own circumstances have often been less than ideal.
Stuart’s teacher father and police officer mother divorced when she was young.
She grew up with her mother in the Valley and El Segundo.
She has daddy issues. Now it's starting to make some sense. She never had a father figure. Is that why she's obsessed with me?
In high school, Stuart was a jock. She had a talent for
swimming but little interest in the arts and had no idea what she wanted to do
with her life.
She still doesn't have a life.
Then, when she was an 18-year-old student at the University
of La Verne, Stuart signed up for one of playwright Mednick’s writing classes.
“I was a Valley girl,” she says. “I didn’t know anything
about theater.”
Oh, she's an airhead, too? Like, O My God!
Mednick, a veteran of a decade in New York’s Off Off
Broadway scene, had been teaching at La Verne for a few years, during which
time he founded the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival.
Although the festival started in 1978 as a modest gathering
of some of Mednick’s friends (including such noted writers as Sam Shepard and
Fornes) at a decaying estate in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the
retreat quickly became known as an artist-run nurturing ground for writers.
In 1981, Mednick arranged a Padua scholarship for Stuart.
“I went to Padua and that was it,” she says. “I just knew
that what I was going to do was write plays.”
She's a failed playwright, now. Whoopee.
It gave Stuart not only a vocation but also a new home base.
“It became my place to stay for the summer,” she says. “It
became my family, really. I would plan my life around how I was going to do
Padua the next summer.”
After a couple of years, Stuart left La Verne, a move she
now acknowledges “was probably a big mistake.” She moved to Los Angeles and
took a job as the live-in caretaker of a small Melrose-area theater.
It was the first of a series of low-paying jobs that she
held while pursuing her writing.
Does she have a job now? Does she contribute anything to society? At all?
“All I wanted to do was write, and I didn’t want to go and
work a job,” Stuart says. “I was a taxi dancer and every other horrible job
that you can imagine. I was a waitress and a hostess. I even answered fan mail
for a guy once.”
What a loser!
Stuart did, however, have Padua to look forward to. She
continued to study there--with Mednick, Fornes and others--and became a regular
at the annual gatherings.
She stopped participating in the Padua enclaves in 1987,
when her daughter Kathleen was born. But she did not stop writing.
This woman has children? I feel sorry for them.
In 1988, she had her first production outside of Padua,
although not without the help of festival people. Under the auspices of
Heliogabalus--a theater company founded by Padua veterans John Steppling and
Glaudini--her play “The Secret of Body Language” was staged at the Cast Theatre
in Hollywood.
It was in 1989, however, that Stuart presented what was
perhaps her breakthrough play. “Taxi Dance,” directed by Glaudini, was, Robert
Koehler wrote in The Times, a “hypnotic descent into female hell . . . more
interesting than much of [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder’s work.”
She's an expert on "female hell," certainly.
The material for “Taxi Dance” came from Stuart’s stint as a
partner for hire in a pay-per-dance parlor. And although her subsequent plays
have tended to be more comic, they too draw on the playwright’s brushes with
the workplace at its worst.
In 1990, the year her daughter Isabelle was born, Stuart
returned to Padua, where she cast her new infant in her play. Not surprisingly,
given her proclivity for dramatizing her own labors, “Ball and Chain” features
a central character who takes care of children (specifically, a preschool
director).
She exploited her own daughter for a play. How sick can one get?!
“Stuart balances great empathy with a broad comic sense,”
Koehler wrote of “Ball and Chain.” “She shifts her central characters . . .
from a place of ridicule to one of sympathy.”
Stuart’s 1991 Padua entry, “The Interpreter of Horror,”
again focused on a job from her past. It featured a waitress named Horror at
work in a divey coffee shop.
A part from Padua, Stuart has also found a base of sorts at
the Mark Taper Forum. She has twice been presented at the theater’s New Work
Festival (in 1989 and 1993) and has been a member of the Taper’s Mentor Playwrights
Project since 1992.
Yet despite support from Padua and the Taper, full
productions have been harder for Stuart to come by. Aside from a small,
self-produced staging of her play “Shoot” at the Cast last spring, Stuart’s
work has been getting more attention out of town.
“The Peacock Screams When the Lights Go Out” was staged by
Sledgehammer Theater in San Diego last year. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s
Michael Phillips called the script--about a shoe salesclerk who faces nutsy
customers, nightmarish memories and breast cancer--"a harsh journey,
edgier but not unrelated to mainstream black-comic odysseys.”
The same play was also given a reading at the Public Theatre
in New York in May. But a full staging of this or any of her other works at a
major regional theater still seems elusive.
“It’s very frustrating if you’re a woman and you’re not
writing a certain kind of play,” she says. “There’s a reason why Wendy
Wasserstein is the Woman Playwright.”
As Stuart sees it, her own work can’t simply waltz down the
Wasserstein path: “My work isn’t going to go into regional theaters easily.
It’s too weird. I love absurdism, but the theaters are not interested in it at
all.
How about "It's too terrible," or "It's too trashy"? I think that better describes the failure that is Kelly Stuart.
“I’m having to struggle between my whimsical-absurdist thing
and what they consider ‘deeper’ and more important. But I’m trying to find a
way to get that stuff in there without them really knowing what it is.”
Kelly Granny Groomer is absurd. That's all you need to know.
Nonetheless, Stuart continues to be encouraged by Padua and
the New York-based New Dramatists, an organization to which she was recently
admitted. The latter is an artist-run organization, like Padua, although it
doesn’t actually stage works.
“They don’t produce you, but they do talk your work up to other
people,” Stuart says. "[Both Padua and New Dramatists] are
playwright-driven organizations. They give you a place to stay and you arrange
readings and do what you want.”
And that, she says, is the invaluable room of one’s own that
a writer most needs.
“I go there every three months or so and it’s like a
vacation,” she says. “Sometimes they just need to leave you alone. I wish more
play development was like that."*
Here are some other interesting links about Kreepy Karen Kelly:
Whiting
She won some rinky-dinky self-congratulatory awards from other playwrights. Nothing says loser like "five other people like me"!
Going Through Glass
She has an obsessive need to take pictures of young children. Really disturbing.
The Rest I Make Up
She needs more make-up -- LOTS MORE MAKE UP!!!
At one point, she threw a GoFundMe to raise money for a cat.
She is OK with children being abused in the classroom with LGBT ideology. She thinks that black people are welfare queens. She runs around harassing women and children who want to protect themselves from harmful racism and bigotry in the classroom
But she has time to fundraise for a cat? Notice also that she could not raise the money. Apparently, even her supporters don't really ... support her!
