Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

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.

Friday the 13th is just a day on my calendar. Much like a lot of other days. My mother would refuse to leave the  house on these Fridays. I confess I tend to do the opposite of what my mother did.

My buddy Dr. Deb, however, has me thinking about what superstitions I employ as a playwright. I don’t really have any. Really.

Except that, when a play is being performed for the first time, don’t tell me “it’s going to be great.” What kind of comfort is that? You wanna jinx everything? Jeez, step ten feet away from me, now!

Rituals are another matter. Like, again, on the aforementioned “first time,” please don’t talk to me. Or expect me to talk back. I’m trying not to puke, and it takes a lot of concentration.

One time, as a member of a deeply troubled group, I instigated a secret cleansing of our theatre space, when She Who Sucked The Life Out Of Us went to Edinborough to suck the life out of the Scots. We burned sage, and uh, danced in a circle or something. Fully clothed. Uh huh. Yeah, something like that. Pushed out all the Negativity in the theatre, so that the next production would have a fighting chance. It was cool. We bonded.

I don’t have the superstition that insists, “I do not talk about what I’m writing about.” If I don’t talk about it, it’s because I just don’t like to, more often than not. I want all my creative thought focused on writing, not on talking about writing. Sometimes you can talk your story to death and bore even yourself. Once I have a story frame, and the play is set in my own mind, I talk about it to MBH, of course. Also when I’m workshopping the work, weekly. How can you not?

Sometimes I wish I had a ritual like Paul Shelden did. He’d light a cigar and drink champagne at the end of completing his novel. I’m more likely to see an afternoon matinee, or eat a double chunk chocolate cookie.

I might have private “creation” rituals when I start a new project. I just might. Yes, indeed. Rituals, however, unlike superstitions don’t require implementation. Nothing bad happens to me if I don’t perform them. A superstition requires attention or else you invite disaster. Like, or example purposes only, if you don’t kiss your script and sprinkle it with glitter, before handing it over the Postal Service, you can kiss that particular opportunity good-bye for sure.

Some theatre superstitions are outlined here:

• Steppenwolf’s Archive
• Superstitions and Saints

• AT RISE:
  It’s yesterday. I’m in the dining room, on the phone, talking to a Great Friend. The doorbell rings.
• ME
• Hang on, UPS is here.
• Opening the door, my skin shivers as I see three SWAT guys holding AK-somethings.
• SWAT GUY
• Ma’am, we need access to your backyard.
• I step aside, and, voiceless, motion them through to the back of the house.
• ME
• There are cops with guns here. I’ll call you back.
• I hang up the phone, and take my dog upstairs and lock her safely in the bedroom. From the window, I see dozens of SWAT guys with AK-whatevers, positioning themselves around a house catty-corner to mine. I return downstairs, as the three SWAT guys tromp back out the front door.
• SWAT GUY
• Thank you, we’re fine.

• This is not a play, p.2
• They exit. I return upstairs, to let the dog out and watch a SWAT conference in my next door neighbor’s yard, down below. The doorbell rings again. I retrieve the dog again. One single SWAT guy holding an AK-whatever stands on my front porch.
• LONE SWAT GUY
• Did anyone tell you what’s going on?
• ME
• (shaking head ‘no’)
• LONE SWAT GUY
• There was a shooting in Bay View, and we tracked the shooter to a house behind you.
• ME
• Thanks for telling me.
• Lone Swat Guy walks through my house, out onto the deck, and into the backyard. I dial my Beloved at work. As she answers, the doorbell rings. Panicked, I only say one thing.
• ME
• I have to call you back.
• UNIFORMED COP
• We’re evacuating you and your neighbors.
• I grab my cell phone, wallet, a small notepad, keys, and my dog. My pen is already around my neck. It hangs on a chain. The four other writers in our little enclave, working at home, are also ‘evactuated to street level.’

• This is not a play, p.3
• FAVORITE NEIGHBOR
• I head the dogs barking and the shouting, but I assumed it was the construction guys.
• ME
• The guy got into the house with the pit bulls in the yard?
• Over the next couple of hours, one by one, my writer neighbors leave to run errands and wait the siege out elsewhere. My sweet dog helps ease me into conversations with cops. A couple of animal control officers show up to check on the pit bulls. They cannot get to the dogs without getting in between guns, so they wait along with me for the all clear.
• The ordeal lasts over five hours. I cannot leave, and wonder why the other writers complain about the inconvenience. For one writer, this event is old hat to him. He’s a former Special Forces type of guy. I wonder about the other writers who leave. I wonder why I don’t, and why I don’t take my normal walk down to the cafe. I cannot leave. I am obsessed with people’s behavior. I observe my neighbors, the cops, the animal control people, and my own behavior, reactions and thoughts.

• This is not a play, p.4
• My dog gets treats, water, and I’m offered, but decline, a hot dog. A cop shows me a photo of his ever-so-pregnant wife posing with their cute labrador retriever.
• No one wants to tell me why the Bomb Sqaud is parked at the corner.
• A loud POP occurs when a smoke bomb is fired into our neighbor’s house, exploding their windows, trying to drive the shooter out.
• More time passes, as the cops search the house. The four o’clock wind has risen up, and it’s getting cold. They do not find the shooter. They search more houses. A cop walks through mine.
• COP
• All clear.
• Me and the dog are allowed back inside. The Beloved, who has natural dramatic timing, arrives home five minutes later. The dog and I are exhausted and soon are asleep.
• These are the basic events.
• It’s the behavior observe, which I will use in a myriad of ways down the road.
• I observe behavior. This, I often think, is what makes me a playwright.

The story stands at this: Whatever, whenever, the O’Neill is not going to take money from playwrights’ proceeds.

Updates are here:

Playwright Jason Grote – O’Neill Controversy That Almost Was, or Wasn’t

and

Playwright Adam Szymkowicz’s blog

and

Theatre Boy

The original email which claimed ‘foul’ came to me from three different reliable sources, and I do not believe that email was a hoax.

Finally, from the NY SUN, Playwrights Protest…

Needless to say, the funds for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference remain in dire straits. That’s the state of the Arts in America, folks.

On the heals of a thought provoking Dramatist Guild article about playwrights and royalties, here’s this
post about the O’Neill Playwights Conference from

Adam Szymkowicz’s blog.

Very bad, disturbing news for play development

I wish I had known this before I submitted this year.

Now, gotta retrieve the application.

Oh dear.

…they are only abandoned.” I’ve heard that quote attributed to John Guare, and a number of other playwrights. It’s a great quote, whoever said it.

The art of playwriting is not to abandon the play too soon.

The re-write of my latest play was “finished” last week. “Finished” meaning there are still re-writes of this re-write to be accomplished. I’ve got two sections with some important exposition that need to be revealed more ingeniously. My friend, MBH, after he read the newest version of the play, said quite plainly, “pages 60 through 64 put me to sleep.” Ah…of course, thank you! That scene on those pages, as well as another scene, where the characters, “talk, talk, talk,” will ultimately be replaced by some, uh, drama. My goal in upcoming re-writes are to create scenes that reveal the same information in a way that keeps the audience, uh, awake and engaged in what’s happening onstage.

Eons ago, I thought re-writing meant polishing up a draft. Polishing, for those of you don’t know, is when you change a word here and there, remove a line or two, add a tiny bit of clarification to a draft. I now approach re-writing as throwing out whole chunks, sometimes all, of what I’ve already written. The main story itself remains the same. How it gets told is refined. Hopefully smarter ideas get revealed.

In the case of the current play, I had a very complicated subplot involving blackmail of the main character. I had to dump the subplot. When I first began writing the play, I thought the blackmail was necessary to answer why this man would keep a seemingly simple event a secret from his wife. After hearing the play twice, in different evolutions, it became very clear the heart of the play got diluted by the blackmail stuff going on. In taking out the subplot, everything changed between the married couple. The play is more intimate; the events more harrowing and poignant.

I just had to dig deeper into my own emotional and creative reserves to get at the characters’ truths.

I do a funny thing in my early drafts. I insert the most non-threatening reason or event or emotion. I don’t do this on purpose. It happens because sometimes I am afraid to get to the heart of the matter. A clear example is in a play I wrote about suicide. In the original version of the play, the main character is worried about her ex-girlfriend killing herself. The other characters in the play included stories about three important friends in her past who had killed themselves. In the final version, the main character must decide if she is going to join her mother, her brother and her best friend, all of whom had killed themselves. Uh…this is a rather dark comedy of sorts. At any rate, I hope you get the idea of how much more central the theme of the play became when it became much more personal to the main character. And so, in the current play, I gave the main character an out with a blackmail scheme, instead of calling his character acutely into question.

I’ve set the current play aside for a couple of weeks to work on some other pressing ideas. My hope is once I’ve re-written those expositional scenes, I will be able to “abandon” it,  and it to send out into the world.

I don’t want to write the most boring non-threatening thing. It happens. When I don’t recognize it, someone else will. Hopefully, I’ll listen and write a better play.

That’s the goal, isn’t it? To write the best play possible.