It's the Intermission
A Creative Coffee Break

The model for the play workshops I’ve participated in have essentially followed the outline below. Certainly, what follows is not the only model. It’s merely the one I’m familiar with.1

1. The playwright brings ten to twenty pages to Group.
2. Actors read the pages.
3. Playwright hears words out loud.
4. If she has any, the playwright asks the Group specific questions about the work.
5. Regardless of questions, the Group’s feedback on the pages ensues.2
6. Finally, the playwright returns to the pages, to re-write or move on to new ones.
7. The process repeats itself at the next Group meeting with re-written or new pages.3

The limitation of this model is that at some point you need to hear the entire play in one piece. It all depends on what stage you’re at with your play, and your own personal development as a writer. The last group I was a part of would schedule an evening specifically to hear a complete draft whenever a writer was ready. This was a very informal evening, much like the regular “pages” kind of night, except the focus was on one playwright’s complete play. When the writer wanted a more public, more formal reading, we were fortunate to have a relationship with a theatre that allowed us to hold readings in their space.

I’m cutting this installment short. Am off to Chicago to see Superior Donuts.

Why, some of you ask, do I harp on about learning “structure?” My major reasons are

• Structure imposes limitations, and limitations forced us to stretch our creative muscles.
• It teaches you to purposely use all the elements you put into a play, and to discard meaningless indulgences. As Chekhov wrote,

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.

• It teaches you the nomenclature of playwriting, like “foreshadow,” “inciting event,” “character arc,” so that you can converse with others.
• Often, the answer to why your play isn’t working is found in understanding the structure of your play, whether you’ve followed tradition or not.

While I believe the following things cannot be taught, I feel, if you have a natural affinity for them, they can be honed:

• Voice
• Imagination
• An ear for dialogue
• A sense of theatre

This cannot be said enough: Theatre is not the same as a novel, television, or a movie. It should not be; although (‘nother sigh) there are those who continue to bring us the movie of the week live at your local playhouse.

IMHO, it is not enough for a story to be on the stage. It must be theatrical by making use of the stage, its limitations, its realizations, and its immediate connection with an audience. On stage, Sweeney Todd’s bloody barberous moments can be depicted quite chillingly with red light, with red ribbons, or (big sigh), if you must go for realism, stage blood. On film, the blood becomes “real” in its depiction, losing its theatrical quality. With enough imagination, everything becomes possible on stage.

Plays are not crafted by the pen, pencil or keyboard alone. Not even by our own sole imaginations. Playwrights know this. Yet how many of us let our work evolve or, worse yet, stagnate without ever hearing it outside of our own heads? How many of us are waiting for the elusive spots at the O’Neill, New Dramatists, or Sundance? How many decent playwrights exist outside of major cities, which may or may not have workshops?

I am not alone in thinking playwrights need to take charge of our own developing work. It’s not a radical idea. It’s an essential part of a playwright’s toolkit. How else do we develop our writer’s ear for what works?

It requires sitting through a ton of readings…

A piece of dialogue, or a line, can feel of such great import as I write it. Then I hear an actor bring my words a different inflection than the one in my head. A different actor brings something else in response to the first. I find what was so important is lost completely, and I go back to the pages, re-write the words or toss them out without mercy. It requires sitting through a ton of readings of your work, and the work of others, to understand the difference between a badly written line and a badly delivered line. Sometimes the two intersect…

Some 15 years ago, four friends, and the one professional actor I knew at the time, read my very first play out loud in my living room. I captured the audio with a microphone plugged into my VCR. I paced in the kitchen until they were done. I hid the tape in a drawer until I could listen to it. The experience was painful, thought provoking, and necessary.

I knew something was wrong with the play. None of the lovely five people who read in my living room could, would, or knew what to tell me. They loved me and thought I was brilliant, brave and talented. Nice thoughts. Just not very helpful. I tried to find, uh, professional help. I called the local theatre association, and was told they had no resources to offer playwrights. I talked with the theatre which had a training program for actors, and got the same response. For a long while, I agonized over going back to school, into more debt, to get an MFA in playwriting. (My M.Ed. did not prepare me for the theatrical arts. For some of us, life is a process, much like playwriting… )

Finally, I found a group of actors and playwrights who met weekly to hear our works in progress. It took another year before I found the man who became my mentor. He taught me the foundations of playwriting, and told me point-blank what was wrong with my play. This was a frickin’ relief, and a major turning point in learning how to craft plays.

Now open!

Post updated 12/25/08: Unable to recover from the downturn in the economy, The Coffee House closed its doors in November 2008. Yeah, that’s it. Uh huh.

While I’m not sure Pierce Brosnan should ever be allowed to sing in public, I loved the film version of Mamma Mia! I was worried because so many film adaptations of musicals fall flat, and even more worried because we ended up at a film house not known for its sound system. I’d see it again even in the same place, as it overcame even a rotten sound system, something Hairspray and (quite sadly) Sweeney Todd could not do.

Several years ago, the Beloved dragged me kicking and not quite screaming to the stage show in S.F., prior to its Broadway debut. She has a thing for Abba. Apparently a lot of people do. I was pleasantly won over by the musical’s infectious good-nature, surprised by a basic plot line that kinda worked, and thrilled to see so many women on stage in primary roles. I discovered that I, too, knew the words to most of the songs. (Oh dear, when and how did that happen?)

The book of the musical was written by Catherine Johnson, a British playwright. In an American Theater Wing symposium, Catherine said, prior to Mamma Mia! she said, “my work previously has always been in fringe theatre, and its sort of four actors and a budget of about 450 pounds.” She got to write the screenplay, too, and did an outstanding adaptation of her own work. She made it even funnier.

Nothing fancy. Tried to keep the space clean and simple.

The new site should work with the current flock of browsers, having been tested with FireFox, IE 7, Safari 3.x, and Opera 9.1 The site should work fine for those browsers. I wasn’t able to test for earlier versions of Safari, so let me know, uh nicely, if there are issues. Older browsers will likely face display problems. I have created an alternate menu system for older browsers, yet was unable to accommodate other possible weirdness, especially for any Mac IE5 readers. The page number navigation system totally bombs Mac IE5.

Moving the site has given me ample thought time to reflect on my original intentions for this space. Some of them will be self-evident, and some I’ll be writing about over the next few journal entries.

For now, please kick back and mess up the furniture. Just don’t tear the house down!