Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

While I can write anywhere, on a plane, at my Beloved’s parents home, in the doctor’s office, on a bus, I love to write in a place that makes me feel good.

Sometimes I write sitting on the living room couch. Sometimes at the public library; a favorite place of mine. Often, I write at a coffee house. I’m fortunate to live in a town that loves coffee houses. A few years ago, a brother writer and I would meet once a week at a different coffee house. The goal was twofold, to write, and to see if we could hit a different coffee house each week. We lasted six months before conflicting commitments kept us from meeting. (Maybe I should pick this up by myself sometime.) As it is, I have a handful of neighborhood coffee houses I regularly rotate writing in. I tend to love routine, which I feel can be stifling to my creativity. What’s that saying, “Put me in a rut and I’ll decorate it.”…? Something to that effect. Nowadays, I love to disrupt that part of myself; to shake myself out of routines, mix things up and find new environments. These environmental changes grease the creative wheel. So I think.

Ultimately, I come back to my writing desk. It’s in the basement of our house. Over the years, I’ve gone from elaborate, heavy desks with lots of drawers and hiding places to a simple, open desk, with only one small drawer, and no place to hide. I love my desk.

Cheers.

The photo above the powerbook is a team photo of the 1911 Philadelphia Athletics and the junk on the right is a temporary holding area while I cleaned my office after seven years of accumulating junk.

The “everyone loved it” concept is not a sound method of playwriting. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this from writers. It’s a mark of amatuer writing. A kind of writing by emotional validation. I have found, for instance, actors are often not a good barameter of what is great writing. I’ve seen in my own workshop, how attached actors can get to characters they are playing, and they will make allowances for the writer instead of pushing the writer to do better. Not all actors. I love actors. Absolutely love ‘em. I just don’t write by how much an actor may love what I have written.

Lately I’ve been delightfully struck how members of my playwrights group have become invested in certain aspects of my current play. And they want a very desolote ending to my tale. Their ideas of where the play should end up, does not reflect what I believe I am writing. Nor would it reflect who I am as a writer. They are expressing how they would write it, reflecting their political, emotional, spiritual bents. In a low moment, I fretted over feeling I was out of sync with my beloved writers. Then I remember I am often out of sync with them. (I am the one, after all, who shamlessly proclaimed Wicked had the best musical book since Gypsy.)

This is the fine, crucial, line. Listening to what works, what doesn’t, and staying true to your own vision.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote,

Hope is the melody of the future. Faith is to dance it.

More me than you, I’m sure. IMHO

Yeah.

Just when I thought I’d completed the re-write, new moments revealed themselves. I realized I had let the play get away from Itself. There was a scene I wrote, early on, which changed an important underlying element of the play.” Everyone loved” this scene. And so it stayed. I tried to trust it. Yet a voice inside tugged at me: “It’s too on the nose. It’s over the top. It’s cheap. It’s too easy. It changes everything.” On and on. I ignored it, temporarily taken with the wisdom of the group over the voice that’s beyond the ego and from someplace else.

Finally hearing something, as the actors read it, knowing that scene had to go. And so it goes. Ripping out that scene and everything related to it. Bringing this particular element back to where it began. Grateful.

So, thanks for asking. The re-write is still in joyfully in progress. For the moment.

There was once a time in between my first discovery of theatre, that moment when I fell in love with it, and the period when I committed myself to my writing. There was once a time when I hated or resented every play I saw, good or bad. This was a kind of limbo time, gestation as a person time, when I did not allow myself to express my art, or when I did, still didn’t believe in myself as an artist. The time before I dared to “own” myself as a writer. That was a painful rite of passage for me, as it is for many of us. These days, I learn more, appreciate more, love more, am interested more, in what I see.

This month’s issue of The Dramatist finds Theresa Rebeck proclaiming, in a sea of mainstream playwrights’ articles, “My interest in storytelling has been, at times, sadly controversial.” I am not in any particular playwright camp about what kinds of play, what kinds of theatre are better than others. The divison among playwrights, or theatre folk, was neatly laid out in the NY Times article, You Must Go On After Beckett. I Can’t Go On After Beckett. Go On. I’m not vested in debating forms, although I also believe it is helpful to “Theatre” when those who desire to enter the fray, to do so. Myself, I believe the proper style, form, length, language for a play is the one the play dictates. Whether we like it or not, the play and its form dictates the audience it receives, as well, for good or bad.

I love a broad range of theatre. I love musicals. I am a Sondheim freak. I broke my teeth on Beckett. I will see anything written by Albee. Or Caryl Churchill. Caridad Svich makes me sit up and take notice. I believe August Wilson is our generation’s Eugene O’Neill. And as much as I love O’Neill, it would take a lot, today, for me to sit through a production of one of his plays.

And why do I insist on writing “theatre” when that’s the anglophile version of “theater?

There’s one thing I find unforgiveable. Okay, two things. What I find unforgivable in a play is a playwright’s reckless disregard for its audience, whether that be, simply enough, poor writing (did he or she not listen to anyone?!), or worse, a belief the audience is too stupid to “get it” and not worthy of the writer’s attention. Again, the play and its form dictates the audience it receives, welcome or not.

I love new work, and I sit down in a theatre believing no ill will is intended by the playwright. It is always my desire to be taken in by the play, and to suspend my “self” and writer’s brain. Often I am pleased. Often I am forgiving, especially if I feel the writer is still finding his or her way through the process. When I cannot suspend myself, it is usually (though not always) the fault of the writer. We are not always a good match for each other. And, I feel, that’s how it should be.