Another Article... from a playwright

01/04/2010

Theatre Takes Place: Why Locally Grown Plays Matter
The second in a series of essays entitled:
Towards a World Class Theatre
Some truths are so self-evident that they can suffer outrageous neglect. One such is that theatre takes place in places. There is nothing virtual about it. Theatre takes place. In four dimensions: one of time, three of space. (Not even my fancy film friends can do that.) So it matters where you originally make a play. Over the last few years I have been having conversations about this subject with my fellow theatre professionals in Seattle: directors, actors, managing and artistic directors, and even arts editors at newspapers; and I have been surprised at how many of them have trouble understanding this fundamental fact of our art form.

The Lone Playwright Fallacy
When it comes to art, I’m an amoralist. Just because it’s new and local doesn’t mean it should get produced. If it’s new and local and good, then fuck yes. If it’s new and local and crap and we’ve got a script that's new and from Missoula and good, then... I choose Missoula. Or New Orleans. Or wherever.

This quote is from a local theatre critic’s email exchange with me. He is suffering from what I call the “The Lone Playwright Fallacy”: the noir filmic image of the archetypal writer holed up in a dank unfurnished flat in the middle of a nihilistic nowhere, supplied only with a carton of cigarettes, a quart of scotch (smudged tumbler optional) and a finicky Underwood. Our dramatist labors in decrepit solitude until he has a complete masterpiece, dog-eared and smeary, which he then wraps in butcher’s paper and tosses over the transom of the nearest literary agency or regional theatre office. (He looks a lot like a cliché novelist, doesn’t he? Why does everyone want to make playwrights into novelists?)

My email reply to my critic pal:

Plays aren't novels or paintings. Just as in biology the myth of the parthenogenic clone is bogus because all genetic material requires an enveloping substrate of organic "soup" in order to replicate, plays require actors, designers, spaces, audiences, and, yes (god help me) maybe even directors, in order to mature beyond the embryonic. It's the reason I have to climb on a plane to LA or NY whenever I want to have a proper workshop with professionals. This notion that they just appear from "Missoula or New Orleans" is a falsehood convenient for ignoramus artistic directors. But you of all people need to know better.

This critic and I have a very loving relationship.

Locally Grown Throughout History
Glancing back through the canon, we realize that this myth is belied by the fact that our favorite dramatists almost always worked intimately with a coterie of actors and other artists for whom, and with whom, they tailored their plays. Shakespeare built his best title roles for Richard Burbage; Moliere cast himself as the Imaginary Invalid, Chekhov’s writing for the stage was reworked and enhanced under Stanislavski’s direction, and Bertolt Brecht had wife and leading lady as a two-for-one- in Helene Weigel, the original Mother Courage. Working with the same actors and directors, over and over, helps build up trust and a shorthand that allows a playwright to go deeper and farther, faster. It locks down the fundamentals of collaboration so that greater innovations are possible.

Beyond palling around with actors and directors, I was curious what other “locally grown” benefits a Shakespeare or Marlowe might have enjoyed; so I asked my friend and fellow playwright, Louis Broome (my go-to expert in all things Elizabethan) to weigh in. “Shakespeare”, he says “Had no choice but be locally grown. London was the world. The King's Men could only exist so long as they were relevant to their audience.” (Relevance to their audience, what a concept!)

Louis goes on:

What’s different now, and what sucks, is that Seattle Rep’s audience is their donor base, not the public at large. Everything about a non-profit theatre is defined by its donors. When it comes to new plays, the Rep’s hands are tied because a non-profit donor base has zero tolerance for risk. Risk isn't built into their culture. They have no experience managing risk. Producing a new work by a playwright or director of note, or a work guaranteed to move to NY, carries no risk. There’s no downside. In Elizabethan England it was impossible for plays to be anything other than a local or regional event. Playwrights entertained and earned revenue from a relatively small pool of ticket buyers by writing a great number of plays. The emphasis in Elizabethan London was on writing plays that put the same butts into the same seats over and over again....

Local Collaboration – It Ain’t Just for Actors
Over the last decade and a half my own Burbage-- the primary actor that served as a siphon on the far end of my personal play development pipeline-- has been the actor William Salyers, a relationship that still runs deep and strong. (For some flavor of it, you can click here.) But it is worth mentioning other ways that local collaboration can lead to uniquely successful theatre. Without the designer Gary Smoot I would never have written at least three of my last five plays. Gary and I had been close friends for years before he began designing for my plays, stunning everyone in 1999 with his evocative minimalistic masterpiece set for the world premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata.



Gary raises to a rarefied art form the long-standing tradition of designers crossing out and ignoring stage directions. I always say that if there is a way Gary can get out of building something, he will find it and make the absence brilliant. By the time we got to attempting the world premiere of An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, I was openly taunting him, demanding an arsenal of increasingly lethal weapons from American History to be used every time a contestant spun the infamous Bardo Wheel. Starting with a Powhattan tomahawk, I quickly worked my way up to a civil war cannon, then a flame thrower, and finally my coup de grâce, a “Tomahawk” ICBM missile, to be launched onstage. Smoot took the demands in stride, even though I would hector him daily running up to tech week: “I want those weapons, Gary. You can cross out all the stage directions you want but I still call them out in the dialogue.” “Oh, we’ll make it work,” was all he’d say. And he did, by painstakingly handcrafting overnight shipping boxes the exact size and shape of each piece. Every night, before each scene, whatever weapon was called for, the box was pumped full of thick stage smoke which would, after the package pieces were pulled apart on stage, momentarily hold the shape of the weapon and then dissipate. From there it was up to the audience to manipulate the meta-object within the space of in their collective imagination. It was a brilliant, engaging, unique, and uniquely theatrical solution, which could only be arrived at through a close and contentious relationship between designer and playwright, bothering each other in the same room together.

This sort of intimate relationship between playwright and set-wright is generally frowned upon in today’s play development superstructure. The alternative model forcefully defended at your favorite regional theater goes something like this: you go to your MFA program, I go to mine. If, based on the recommendation of the well-known playwright who runs my MFA program, said regional theater decides to develop my play, said theater will assign me the MFA grad designer recommended to them by the top-tier MFA design school, most assuredly not the same school as the playwriting program. It is all very polite and respectable, like an arranged marriage without the hot stranger sex. In the very respectable League of Regional Theatres (LORT), playwrights have no business consorting with designers, let alone taunting them into being brilliant.