Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

"Can I read your play?"

Over the years, I’ve learned to avoid answering. Unless the person asking, of course, could bring my play to life. No, the people I dodge are the well-meaning friends, acquaintances, strangers, relatives, who upon hearing I write plays, think they want to read them. They don’t. Not really.

What actually happens is these well-meaning people take the script, and it sits somewhere in their house or apartment or car gathering dust. I know this because when they see me, over a period of months or years, they announce, "I haven’t read your play yet." And they never do.I find this a particularly uncomfortable ritual which I now avoid at all costs.

The standard answer I give, is, "Well, it’s a play, and it’s meant to be seen and not read." Even though I don’t necessarily believe that, this statement does work a lot of time, and stops the asking dead on.

Previously, I tried saying, "I’m not comfortable having people read." That statement only worked part of the time, causing people to want to assure me they were really interested, nice readers. The thing was, I wasn’t uncomfortable having people read my plays, and I just ended up making myself uncomfortable with this little lie. (Hey, I’m a sensitive soul.)

Occasionally, undaunted, someone presses on repeating their request to read. Depending on our acquaintance, I sometimes tell them why I don’t let people "read" my plays. If I feel myself weakening, I delineate my expectations. If I give out a copy of one of my plays, I expect the following:  that it will read it sooner not later; that it will be given back to me; and that questions must be asked of me if the play or some aspect of it is not understood. Then, I usually change the subject. Very rarely, the person comes back to The Question, stating they are aware of the reading obligation and are fully prepared to meet it. Only then, do I feel I really have to consider the request, and if it feels good, I give them something to read.

It’s not that people are not sincere in asking. I believe many of them are. A lot of people don’t know how to read plays. (Some of them are literary managers of theatres. Ba-dum-bum!) Once they have the play in their hands, they grow intimated by the thought of actually reading it. That’s one theory I have anyway. I have a ton of ‘em. Theories, that is,

I’ve found a system that works for me, and whatever theories about why people don’t ever read that which they have asked for, well, don’t really matter much. If I seem a little sensitive over The Question, it’s only because it already takes months and months and months for the people who do have the power to bring plays to life to read them.

‘Nuff said.

The fact that comments are turned off, is not because I do not welcome them. I do. Yet, I find the comment system distracting and potentially exhausting. I do not wish anyone to feel obligated to post comments. Nor do I wish to feel obligated to post in turn, in a never ending cycle of posting back and forth. I leave comments on other blogs when I am moved to do so. Obligations so quickly can become burdens, or can so easily sap the time away from writing plays and whatnot. I recognize Intermission is more infrequent public diary than blog. Truth be told, as sociable as I am, and I am a sociable writer, I’m much better one on one than in a group.

If you are moved to share something with me, please so kindly do.

Moments that are satisfying, because these moments do indeed exist, are found when someone understands what I have imagined in my head and conveyed to the page. The ideal someone comes from the audience, watching the play being performed. Yet, clearly, these someones can be directors, actors, dramaturgs, set designers…anyone who after investing their time, discovers their investment has been fruitful, and he or she “gets it.” It, of course, being the play.

People don’t always understand what I’ve laid before them. Usually during the workshop process. I’m able to work with their confusion and make the play as I see it in my head easier for them to hear. Play “development” can be fun when I can see what is not working and fix it. Development is not fun, and becomes incredibly frustrating, when no matter how fast I twirl myself around my pen, nothing in the play seems to work for people hearing it. Including myself. I am not anti-development by any means. I welcome it. I refuse, however, to be perpetually in development, and reserve the right to know my own play, even if I’m the only one who does. (This week, I’m feeling a little Scarlet O’Hara-ish, shaking a fistful of dirt, proclaiming my determination.)

I have long maintained taking in feedback is an art form in and of itself. Developing a play is an imperfect process.

I learn from both good and painful discovery, because, well, my life is process of learning from everything that happens to me, and around me. It is my nature to evaluate, to analyze, to observe, to discard, to glean, to apply, to understand. And as I go along, I find more and more, I know less and less.

I had a very profound experience last week, talking with a literary manager about a play of mine. Since this conversation, I have been pondering a great deal about workshops, development, feedback, critique, plays, productions, no productions, theatres, risk, lasagna,1 on and on ad nauseum.

Two years ago I finished a play that I loved. The play is unwieldy, indirect and mystical. To say the play is theatrical is redundant. All my plays are theatrical. There were some notes I got, from those respected people giving me feedback, that gave me pause because I received them consistently. The notes did not bother me because I felt the issues were part of the play itself. The play has gotten a lot of “reads” and I have gotten some very fine, impressive rejection letters. The play has opened some important doors for me. Yet, here the play still sits, unworkshopped, unproduced, etc., etc., etc. And so, I pulled it back out and decided to apply the notes that remained, to a re-write of the play. Something must indeed be wrong and I must fix it.

Before this re-write, there was the aforementioned literary manager, whose theatre selected this play for a series of staged readings. (These readings come into fruition early in 2007.) I dutifully sent her the re-write when I completed it, and she and others dutifully read it. When we spoke on the phone last week, she very kindly asked me what went into my decision to so radically re-write the play. Because I did. I turned it upside down and around. And after my overconfident relief in re-writing subsided, I knew deep inside my Creative Self, I had made a terrible mistake. I knew I had lost something very special and magical, and that it didn’t matter how well written the revision was, or how I could make it sparkle, it was not the same play by any margin. The literary manager person listened to my intellectual explanation, and then asked me if she could tell me what she saw in the earlier version. Of course. And she did. And I nearly wept, as I was deeply moved by her having been understood my play so clearly; my voice heard. I decided to throw away the newer version.

In The Cat In the Hat Comes Back, solutions are applied to a problem that grows bigger, and more insurmountable with each application. Finally, something we can’t even see comes along and everything is righted again.

I know less and less about my craft.

Deep inside my Creative Self, I feel something has happened to me I cannot yet see, much less name, that is very important to me a playwright. Something has been ‘righted’ in some way. I’m scared. I’m excited. And I can’t wait for what comes next.

Received from LitDept:

At Home – L.A.
December 16, 2006
I’m sending two. That’s because I never really sit anywhere. But when I’m at home, this folding chair does the trick. Usually, I sit, write for about twenty minutes and then I’m up and walking around for another ten.
http://litdept.blogspot.com/

…
Also
…

WGA – L.A.
December 16, 2006

The other place i write is the WGA West library in LA at 3rd and Fairfax. If I ever get a job, that will end, but until then, well.
http://litdept.blogspot.com/

Despite the fact I could whine about a lot of things, I shall restrain myself, because all in all, the evening of staged readings went well.

My toughest, most sophisticated audience member is, always, the Beloved. I confess I feel rather successful when she has understood what I have tried to say, in however long or short a fashion. And tonight when she shed an unexpected tear, I knew the play had hit all its marks.

Yeah. Somethin’ like that.

Peace.

My playwrights’ group is involved in a series of staged "one night only" readings of our plays. We’re each taking an evening individually, and this month, being December, we are doing an evening with something from each of us. A loose holiday theme. Adults only, I’m sure.

I don’t have a stock of short plays. That meant I had to write one for this month’s evening. Recently, another group member had written a stark, compelling portrayal of a Christian fundamentalist family grieving over their son, literally ripped apart in Iraq. It’s his Iraq anti-war play. His play inspired my short play, about a couple whose only daughter, a soldier, is killed in a meaningless accident in Iraq.

Short plays are hard to write. I used a ten minute play format, a la Gary Garrison’s The Perfect 10. The first draft, I’m sure, was more a kind of tone poem than a play. I knew I had hit on something, however, during the first cold read of the play, and the group was clearly moved. I re-worked the play several times until I felt I had as close to a play as I could muster for ten minutes. I’m not entirely satisfied I’ve written a play. I am sure the audience will pay attention, if only for the compelling performance by the lead actor.

I wrote the play for two of the group actors. One, a seasoned actor in his 80’s. The other a very unseasoned, young woman in her 20’s. I wrote to both of their sensibilities, strengths and weaknesses. The younger actor’s lack of range serves the piece well. And the older actor’s emotional depth serves the grief and occasioned humor perfectly. They are a dynamite combination. It is great fun to occasionally write for actors you know.

We had the first rehearsal yesterday. As the director took the two actors through their first read through of the play, the older actor kept stopping expressing a lot of concern about the audience having to work too hard. The panic appeared in my gut, and rose to my throat, and I contemplated running from the room, ripping the script from his hands. Instead I sat and watched the director calmly and firmly take him through the script to the end. And then through again, and again. The actor became calmer as he went through his paces, and the panic in me left. I realized I had never, in the few years I’ve known him, seen him behave so insecurely before. He was worried about his performance. Because I love this man, I made two changes to the script, adding a total of eight words, to make him more comfortable. The changes accommodate the script-in-hand reading, and I don’t think, yet reserve the right to change my mind, I would use them for a fully staged production. While we have lights and sound for the reading, we (thankfully) have no props except for tables and chairs as needed. By the end of rehearsal, I was feeling great about my cast, and thankful for a serene director. Watching actors get their footing with a script, in preparing for a performance or a production, is quite nerve racking. For me, anyway. The script necessarily comes apart in that early part of the actor’s process. I haven’t gotten used to it yet, and don’t know if I will.

One more rehearsal, then tech, then the performance.

In an evening of mostly comedic plays, mine is the serious one. That tells you everything you need to know about me.

Last night, the Beloved and I saw Jersey Boys. It’s what the Beloved calls "a thirty dollar musical," something fun and not to be taken seriously as musical theatre. We sat behind Bob Guadio. We watched Bob watch Bob on stage. We agreed the musical would not have been as fun without Bob to watch.

I could say it’s the Beloved who drags me to these things. If you’ve been reading this blog at all, you know that’s not fair. I have a soft spot for musicals. It’s true.

The main element I appreciate about musicals is how they compress time on stage. A dramatic event can be relayed in very few minutes, and in that extremely short time I know exactly what a character wants and a how the story has moved forward to another place.

How to utilize time and space on stage consumes me. In a happy way. I try to find ways to tell a lot in a short period of time, in the most concise way I can. As a result, my more recent plays are not linear. Women don’t think linearly, you know. We experience things more mosiacally. The new play I’m writing is a mosaic in structure. Kind of like a musical without music.

My favorite musicals are Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, and Sunday in the Park with George. Well, okay, pretty much anything written by Sondheim. I didn’t say this before:  when we saw the horrible Mary Poppins in London, the next night we cleansed our stage palettes with Les Misérables. There’s nothing like a good rousing anthem about overcoming oppression.

Thanks to Malachy for alerting me that my eMail was down. Believe it works. Apologies to all who tried to write and were met with the dreaded bounce-back.

Cheers, my dears.

Twice last night, I had to get up from bed to write down ideas I did not want to lose. A good thing, too, as I had forgotten these important ideas completely until I walked into my office this morning, saw my scribbles on the white-board, and two emails I’d written myself in my inbox.

I’m in the middle of finishing up a re-write of another play, written a year ago. It’s been a year of something nagging at me, telling me something was not quite right. As a staged reading for this play has been looming, and I was struggling for how to approach the re-write, I sent the play to an accomplished playwright. In fifteen minutes, I had the answer for how to find my way into the re-write. Whether that was her wisdom, or my willingness to hear, doesn’t really matter. I suspect both. The problems she pointed out, made me laugh at myself, and she noted that a dramaturg is often a kind of therapist to the script. Well, that’s a paraphrase of sorts. Worked for me, and I am grateful to her.

The re-write meant I combined two characters into one, and brought another character into more prominence within the story. These changes strengthened the main character, and I believe, the play as a whole. As a result, some of the mysticism present in the script had to go, and I was very sad about that. Also, an idea about family formed through friendships was necessarily diluted. And, yes, a lot of little things changed, and minor moments even became bigger ones. I found several areas where choices made were given to secondary characters instead of main characters, and those areas were also corrected. (I hate that I do that! I think I’m finally learning…)

The night before I left for London, I sent the re-write to MBH. This is the testament of a friend, who in the midst of his own projects and great time pressures, read my play and gave me detailed notes on my return home. I could tell, while he thought the re-writes were good and strong, he missed the mysticism of the last draft. (And so he told me.) I miss it too. It no longer is the same script, and the mysticism does not fit the story.

MBH pointed out a couple of places where I ended a scene late, and diluted what the characters were going for. I kept a log of his notes in my Notetaker file for the play. In the process of transcribing those notes, more inspired ideas came to me and I tracked those as well. At this point, I keep a check-off list in Notetaker, to ensure I hit all the notes I want to hit.

I’m excited about the new version of this play, the nagging feeling now
put to rest. It is the play I meant to write the first time out with it. Here’s hoping the theatre putting up the staged reading
will feel the same way, after I send them the revision in a few
short days.

It is easy to remove beloved ideas, lines, characters from one play when you know they can be resurrected into another.

So it always feels whenever I see theatre outside of my beloved home town. Although in this case, the grass literally was green everywhere. With the impending rains, our grass soon will be.

Entering London, the inspector (you know that person at the airport you must speak to and explain why you want to be in their fair country), when discovering we had theatre plans, opined the current production of Tom and Viv was not as good as the original. I pondered the likelihood of someone entering the US and having a similar encounter.

London is my new favorite City, after New York. And, okay, San Francisco, as we still know how to stage things up here, if only on the streets at Halloween. For a history buff, wondering the streets are a joy. Visiting off-season, there were no lines anywhere we went. At Westminister Abby, I was able to take time to enjoy moments, such as seeing Elizabeth I’s tomb, and her likeness carved from her death mask. I did not expect to be awestruck by Stonehenge, yet I was by this place-looking-so-much-like-an-outdoor-stage.

Standing outside Bow Street Magistrates Court, I could see Oscar Wilde entering this building, on his way to be tried for "gross indecencies." This court shut down earlier this year, and rumor has it will become a hotel. It was at Bow Street, on this date in 1928, that the great Radclyffe Hall found her novel, The Well of Loneliness, banned as obscene. Despite selling over nine million copies during her day, the book would not be published in Britain until 1949, several years after her death.

An absolutely thrilling play was Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, by Caryl Churchill, one of my all time favorite playwrights. I also very much enjoyed Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n Roll. A few years back, I dragged the Beloved to a revival of Jumpers, which she, sadly, hated. There was much at stake in proving to her Stoppard was enjoyable and understandable. I am glad to say Rock ‘n Roll managed to purge her previous misgivings. And gave me opportunity, later over dinner, to wax on about Václav Havel.

My Beloved loves musicals, and so we saw Mary Poppins, which was not as bad as (why do people think Elton can write musicals?) Lestat, but close enough. Maybe that’s too harsh. Poppins was awful. I figure the rave reviews for Poppins is a cultural thing I do not understand. *ahem* And yes, there is a double standard. I pay dearly for dragging the Beloved to bad plays, yet she does not pay so in return for dragging me to a bad musical. That is the nature of our relationship.

Okay, and confessing we did see Wicked, which makes five times we’ve seen this show. (You have to, uh, understand, we saw this before it ever reached Broadway.) The London production was the best of the lot, complete with a great, one of a kind, theatrical moment, when the curtain came down abruptly near the end of Act 1. Right after, "One Short Day," for those of you in the know. An announcement was made that Idina Menzel was ill and unable to finish the show. The teenager in front of us, burst into tears at this news, and I don’t think recovered enough to watch Idina’s standby, Kerry Ellis, finish Act 1 with the best performance of "Defying Gravity" ever witnessed. (Well,outside of Idina.) By the end of Act 2, said teenager meekly conceded a standing ovation for Ms. Ellis.

Two things I enjoyed in London theatre. The applause, when deserved (well, except for Poppins, I still do not understand, go see the movie instead) was always enthusiastic delivered. What a joy to sit in a theatre with audiences who do not stand up and cheer actors for showing up and breathing. Also, the pacing of shows, while they did not seem slow at all, did seem to be slower than what happens on American stages. And I could hear every word being said. The productions I saw did not seem to be afraid of silence, or of taking a breath now and then.

My body and brain are still trying to determine what time zone I’m in.

An outstanding post today by Jane Espenson on "too much."

I hoped that it would encourage [gay people] in general to declare themselves, to face up to a hostile world in their true colours, and this with dignity and courage.

Radclyffe Hall, on one of the reasons why she wrote The Well of Loneliness.

My first acting gig was when I was eight years old. I played “The Blue Fairy” in my third grade production of Pinocchio. I was cast for my looks, certainly not my talent. Besides, I wanted to play the puppet boy. Sure, I looked awfully pretty in the blue dress my mother slaved over for me, and I was the only actor allowed to wear shoes because mine sparkled. Looks alone, however, could not carry me through part. Sadly, suffering from grave stage fright, I could not laugh on cue. And, it’s true, I still cannot. A few years ago, I hung out with an actors group who got together to read plays. They let me read the stage directions. I’m pretty sure they still meet secretly without me. I am a bad actor, and I remain in awe of those who can bring characters to life.

My first play in a real theatre was circa 1972, on a high school outing to see Cyrano de Bergerac, at ACT in San Francisco. I was swept away with Cyrano, Christian and Roxane, and thought, “I want to do this.” No, definitely not act. “This” as in create the experience for those of us watching the stage. Soon afterwards, I read Albee’s The Zoo Story for the first time, which cemented my desire to write plays. Two very different theatrical experiences, indeed.

It would, however, be many years before I finally turned to writing plays with any seriousness. Is there a contradiction there, somewhere? Plays and seriousness?

Cheers…I am off to London to mark a birthday.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Born 152 years ago today.

When we were in Paris a few years ago, The Beloved and I paid homage to Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise cemetary. These words are inscribed on his tombstone:

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

MBH insists the only perfect play ever written is The Importance of Being Ernest.