Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

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.