Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

Last night an actor in my playwrights’ group, exclaimed a familiar refrain: “I love the process.” Something so many of us have said, writers, actors, directors, whatever our theatrical role may be. We love the creation and the discovery of what we all bring to the play and beyond.

I am blessed to be in a regular workshop. The workshop meets weekly, with time off in the summer and for the year-end holidays. The originating idea of the workshop was for each playwright to bring in a maximum of ten pages a week of whatever project the writer was, uh, well, writing. Actors read the pages cold, so that we can hear if the dialogue, narrative, or lack thereof, are generally working. The workshop has been going on for around twenty years, with some of the originating members still participating.

Feedback by writers and actors alike ensues in between readings of a playwright’s pages. When a playwright has a complete draft, an evening is set aside for that play only. Again, there is little, if any, rehearsal. These evenings are for development, and while they are not “public” these evenings are not necessarily completely private. Actors, after all, love an audience. (Okay, we do too.) The point is, there is no pressure for the writer to perform for outsiders, per se. It’s our place to stumble, fall, create, revise, and ponder. There are other avenues for staged, AKA rehearsed, AKA public, readings. Our workshop is truly a home wherein we discover our plays.

The writers pay the rent for our meeting room, and we bring food for the actors. A writer’s membership is gained by some basic criteria: (1) You must have been produced. (2) You must attend a couple of meetings and ‘audition’ your pages. (3) The mystery of chemistry with the other playwrights. I have been a member of this workshop for a mere three years and counting. I was invited by a long standing member to attend with my ten pages of current material. “Hmmm…” they said, “why don’t you come again next week?” And so it went. And so it goes. Week after week, we all show up, writers and actors alike.

The group contains less than ten playwrights, and more than a dozen actors. I am the youngest playwright, and I do not mean young by age. I mean young in experience. My fellow writers have been at this process for a lot longer than I, and I have been writing plays for over ten years. Some of them with Off-Broadway credits; all of them with a preponderance of Regional credits. The group, for me, has been like playing tennis with great players. There is a quiet confidence these playwrights exude about their work. Within the workhshop, they are not competitive, vying for time and attention. Everyone gets their say; all pages are read. Feedback is to the point, truthful and uncallous. Playing with them week after week has made me a much better, and, yes, even confident playwright. The workshop is a great gift.

While the playwright sits alone to craft out the pages, plays are, ultimately, works which are brought to life by a collective of people. We have to hear our pages to know if the play is working. I have come to call our cold readings of entire plays a kind of “proof of concept” reading. It’s when I learn if what I have laid out works dramatically or not, in the plays entirety. Even in cold readings, the actors worry over their performances. They do not understand the ears we have developed for hearing if the play is working, regardless of the performance. We can afford, because of the private nature of the workshop, to suffer an “off” reading. We can hear when an actor elevates the material, and know the dialogue is not up to par. I cannot explain how this has happened to the playwrights in my group, or if it happens to all playwrights. I only know we have sat through hundreds and hundreds of cold readings, staged readings, rehearsals, good plays and bad, and somehow the ears are honed to hear the writing and not the trappings.

The trappings are great, mind you, and I do not mean to diminish them by even any means. For this moment, I am focused on the initial birthing of our plays into something whole. The trappings, the actors, directors, staging, the physical theatre, on and on, are the point, after all, down the line, and it’s the getting there that contains so much fun, joy and trepidation.