Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

I don’t think playwrights should write about society. Society as a proper subject for plays—there’s no such thing. I think I’ve always written about people; I always meant to. I was terribly surprised to find people saw ‘The Little Foxes’ as a social play. I just saw it as a drama about people who thought in particular ways, who operated in particular ways.

“Lillian Hellman Talks of Love and ‘Toys’” New York Times, February 21, 1960

I made digests of twenty-five books before I started writing ‘Watch on the Rhine.’ Political argument, memoirs, recent German history. My notebooks for the play run to well over 100,000 words and, do you know, I used material from the notes for only two speeches. Sometimes I wonder—you can’t help wondering—if there is any sense in all that research. But I seem to have to do it before I can be sure that I know what I’m talking about.

“Of Lillian Hellman,” New York Times, April 20, 1941

Marguerite Duras
April 4, 1914
Gia-Dinh, French Indochina (now Vietnam)

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic. I did it. Writing never left me.

Writing
by
Marguerite Duras
(French translation by Mark Polizzotti)

Jane Chambers
Columbia, South Carolina, USA
March 27, 1937

I’ve come out of many experiences, and I want to write about all of them.

Jane Chambers
Play’s Theme: Lesbians With Out Apology,
New York Times, Feb 8, 1981

Ketti Frings
Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A.
February 28, 1909

I was not too bruised by its lack of success. You can only learn from your mistakes.

Ketti Frings on the
cool reception of her play
Mr. Sycamore, 1942

Something I rarely do I’ve done twice since September: leave a play at the intermission. The first was a play I looked forward to. It was directed by someone of acclaim, and I have enjoyed his interpretations previously. The acting was good, and the production values were lovely. The material left me cold; English class issues with comedic over and undertones galore. I’d certainly seen the same subject matter done over and over again as film. Some of them even great films. What was the point of a play? Just because we can, should we?

Perhaps I was cranky, still recovering from the September power outage that lasted over a week in our neighborhood. The Beloved was unable to hide her glee as I ushered her out at intermission and into the parking lot to escape.

The second play was so awful I could not even listen to the script. The central character in the hands of so bad an actor he responded as though he’d only met each character for the first time on the street despite the dialogue which clearly told us these people had been to hell and back together.

It was the Beloved’s birthday, so I let her make the call to leave.

Both times I sat in the theatre impatiently thinking, “So? Why are we doing this?” There was nothing in either show to suggest why the material at hand required being a play. I wondered why the bother, why all the time, money and expertise had gone into bringing these shows to life. Yeah, well, there’s an audience, yadda yadda yadda, and it’s not me.

I’m bored by narratives well-crafted but not well-written, and so dully un-stage-worthy. Undoubtedly, the reason I enjoy musicals is because there is so much inherent theatricality to them. I am always amused by those who declare, “no one bursts out singing like that.” Well, duh.

I am usually more forgiving about theatre.

I’m restless, and having some trouble focusing.

Pondering the play I have not finished, I feel it has been fun to write, but trivial in scope compared to the new plays nagging at my brain. I want to set it aside and move on from it. I haven’t left a play unfinished… since when? Ten years, perhaps. Is there something to learn in stuffing the unfinished work into a drawer and leaving it there? Or is this a wave of a series of unfinished plays about to take me over? Just because I can finish it, should I?

Yes, overthinking quite a bit. More to be revealed, no doubt.

To conclude…

• Fountain pens mean using inks of all colors and flavors for one pen.
• Piston filler pens mean an easy way to fill pen with ink.
• Bottled inks mean no consuming of little plastic ink cartridges which end up in the landfill. Unless you use plastic bottled ink. Oh dear.
• Vintage fountain pens mean a form of recycling/re-using something that still performs.

A correction to my first post, Nothing But Pens: My pal, MBH, doesn’t throw a box of Bic pens in a drawer for a year. He throws a box of PaperMate pens in a drawer to age them. Some special, skinny kind of PaperMate, as he’s tried to explain to me, but his explanation goes over my head.

The last few weeks have been quite sleepless. Our Dog had nighttime diarrhea, and finally all-time diarrhea. I won’t go on about her flatulence, which was 100 times regular dog flatulence. Our Dog is some 13 years old, which physically compared to human years is like 72. It’s dog years and physical size that determine the comparison human years. The larger the dog, the older she is. Her doc has determined she’s got IBS. She seems to be on the right combo of food and meds for the moment, and she’s finally sleeping through the night.

Last Sunday, a 2-3 hour wind storm took down a ton of trees and power lines. We were without power until Friday. There’s many folks still without power. Not sure in retrospect what exactly caused such sleepless nights during the outage. I only know I didn’t sleep until Friday. Grocery stores and restaurants continued to function, neighbors looked out for each other, and our updated California earthquake kits came in very handy. We are not poor, infirm, or sick, and so the lack of power was not threatening to our lives in any way. You gotta keep at least one eye outside your own life, and see what’s happening around and beyond you.

I can’t write when I’m exhausted. Well, I could. It wouldn’t be any good. During these last few weeks, I’ve mostly made notes about new play ideas which are grabbing hold, reading and researching for some of those potential plays. And obsessively following the U.S. campaign for President. I’m looking forward to the debates beginning, and making our way to November. I’m pulling for an Obama landslide, in case you wanna know.

Today I am feeling replenished. I’ve set myself a modest writing re-entry goal: Five pages on the play I haven’t finished. If they don’t come, I’m putting that play in a drawer and moving on.

One of many examples of trees downed in my neighborhood.

The model for the play workshops I’ve participated in have essentially followed the outline below. Certainly, what follows is not the only model. It’s merely the one I’m familiar with.1

1. The playwright brings ten to twenty pages to Group.
2. Actors read the pages.
3. Playwright hears words out loud.
4. If she has any, the playwright asks the Group specific questions about the work.
5. Regardless of questions, the Group’s feedback on the pages ensues.2
6. Finally, the playwright returns to the pages, to re-write or move on to new ones.
7. The process repeats itself at the next Group meeting with re-written or new pages.3

The limitation of this model is that at some point you need to hear the entire play in one piece. It all depends on what stage you’re at with your play, and your own personal development as a writer. The last group I was a part of would schedule an evening specifically to hear a complete draft whenever a writer was ready. This was a very informal evening, much like the regular “pages” kind of night, except the focus was on one playwright’s complete play. When the writer wanted a more public, more formal reading, we were fortunate to have a relationship with a theatre that allowed us to hold readings in their space.

I’m cutting this installment short. Am off to Chicago to see Superior Donuts.

Why, some of you ask, do I harp on about learning “structure?” My major reasons are

• Structure imposes limitations, and limitations forced us to stretch our creative muscles.
• It teaches you to purposely use all the elements you put into a play, and to discard meaningless indulgences. As Chekhov wrote,

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.

• It teaches you the nomenclature of playwriting, like “foreshadow,” “inciting event,” “character arc,” so that you can converse with others.
• Often, the answer to why your play isn’t working is found in understanding the structure of your play, whether you’ve followed tradition or not.

While I believe the following things cannot be taught, I feel, if you have a natural affinity for them, they can be honed:

• Voice
• Imagination
• An ear for dialogue
• A sense of theatre

This cannot be said enough: Theatre is not the same as a novel, television, or a movie. It should not be; although (‘nother sigh) there are those who continue to bring us the movie of the week live at your local playhouse.

IMHO, it is not enough for a story to be on the stage. It must be theatrical by making use of the stage, its limitations, its realizations, and its immediate connection with an audience. On stage, Sweeney Todd’s bloody barberous moments can be depicted quite chillingly with red light, with red ribbons, or (big sigh), if you must go for realism, stage blood. On film, the blood becomes “real” in its depiction, losing its theatrical quality. With enough imagination, everything becomes possible on stage.

Plays are not crafted by the pen, pencil or keyboard alone. Not even by our own sole imaginations. Playwrights know this. Yet how many of us let our work evolve or, worse yet, stagnate without ever hearing it outside of our own heads? How many of us are waiting for the elusive spots at the O’Neill, New Dramatists, or Sundance? How many decent playwrights exist outside of major cities, which may or may not have workshops?

I am not alone in thinking playwrights need to take charge of our own developing work. It’s not a radical idea. It’s an essential part of a playwright’s toolkit. How else do we develop our writer’s ear for what works?

It requires sitting through a ton of readings…

A piece of dialogue, or a line, can feel of such great import as I write it. Then I hear an actor bring my words a different inflection than the one in my head. A different actor brings something else in response to the first. I find what was so important is lost completely, and I go back to the pages, re-write the words or toss them out without mercy. It requires sitting through a ton of readings of your work, and the work of others, to understand the difference between a badly written line and a badly delivered line. Sometimes the two intersect…

Some 15 years ago, four friends, and the one professional actor I knew at the time, read my very first play out loud in my living room. I captured the audio with a microphone plugged into my VCR. I paced in the kitchen until they were done. I hid the tape in a drawer until I could listen to it. The experience was painful, thought provoking, and necessary.

I knew something was wrong with the play. None of the lovely five people who read in my living room could, would, or knew what to tell me. They loved me and thought I was brilliant, brave and talented. Nice thoughts. Just not very helpful. I tried to find, uh, professional help. I called the local theatre association, and was told they had no resources to offer playwrights. I talked with the theatre which had a training program for actors, and got the same response. For a long while, I agonized over going back to school, into more debt, to get an MFA in playwriting. (My M.Ed. did not prepare me for the theatrical arts. For some of us, life is a process, much like playwriting… )

Finally, I found a group of actors and playwrights who met weekly to hear our works in progress. It took another year before I found the man who became my mentor. He taught me the foundations of playwriting, and told me point-blank what was wrong with my play. This was a frickin’ relief, and a major turning point in learning how to craft plays.

Just when I feel I have a handle on the new site design, it all falls apart. Suddenly, all the design ideas, the rules, the declarations, all the CSS/PHP/WordPress/Ajax/JavaScript/JesusHChrist means nothing. I question my sanity, much less my abilities. Who do I think I am trying to write this thing myself?

Time to put the code down, take a walk, get some protein, and focus on something else. Come back later, and  go through everything step by step.

Time to … take a walk, get some protein, and focus on something else.

Playwriting can cause similar head spinning. What seems like a good idea, falls apart, often near the end of the first draft. Sometimes by page 30. Sometimes in the second or third draft. Whenever. I find the play1 always falls apart at some point and necessitates a break. Sometimes a short coffee break will do. Sometimes a break requires a whole summer or two.

A dear friend, a wonderful writer who has been away from playwriting, is trying to pick up where she left off with a play from some eight years back. She kept referring to a pile of notes from a workshop we’d been in together, facilitated by a mutual mentor. She ran in circles, writing scenes from scratch, re-writing work she’d previously written, and worrying about those old notes. “They contained such valuable suggestions,” she kept saying, yet couldn’t bring herself to read them. The notes were keeping her from moving on. She’d let her Editor’s Mind create a great Distraction from writing.

I reminded her of her longevity as a writer in many other forms, her vast knowledge of theatre, and her great dramatic instincts. I suggested she set aside two hours, pick up the pile of notes, read through them, and then put them away. Perhaps keep a notepad nearby to capture good suggestions, or new ideas that came to her while reading. To read only the notes and enough of the script for them to make sense. To not linger over them in order to not treat the notes themselves as genius. When finished reading to put the notes back in a box, a drawer, the trash, or the fireplace. Be done with them. Move on, and return to the present, which happens to be writing now, not eight years ago.