88 The Art of Writing for the Theatre editors dealing with space constraints. The New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley said that when he was starting to write reviews for Elle magazine, sometimes his word counts were so severe, he felt like he was writing a haiku instead of a review. Of course, now that more people read reviews online rather than in print, this is not as much of an issue. Lyn Gardner, theatre critic for The Guardian, feels that the internet has also leveled the playing field. The days of a handful of critics at major newspapers having the power to make or break a show doesn’t really exist anymore. Nowadays, anyone with a blog can call themselves a theatre critic. Many people feel this is a double-edged sword. Theatre tickets can be very expensive, especially in places like Broadway and the West End. If someone is having a night on the town which includes two tickets to a show, dinner, and perhaps the cost of parking and a babysitter, they want to be sure what they are seeing is going to be good. They crave the opinion of someone they can trust and a critic with some credentials to advise them on this expenditure. On the other hand, critics who go to the theatre almost every night for years at a time can often become jaded, especially when it comes to mainstream, popular entertainment. Sometimes, they only like material that is drastically outside the box. In this regard, having a review from John Q. Public on a blog post can have its advantages. Remember: Artists Have Feelings, Too For reviews online or in print, keep in mind that the people about whom you are writing will most likely read your reviews. Certain critics develop a following because their style is punchy, vitriolic, and downright mean. While this might make for a fun read, sometimes it becomes more about the ego of the critic showing how clever and witty they can be as opposed to really reviewing the play. John Simon was a New York-based theatre and film critic for many years who was known for his poison pen. He once said of a prominent celebrity appearing on Broadway: I always thought Miss _______’s face was deserving of first place in the beagle category. Less aphoristically speaking, it is a face going off in three directions simultaneously: the nose always en route to becoming a trunk, blubber lips unable to resist the pull of gravity, and a chin trying its damndest to withdraw into the neck, apparently to avoid responsibility for what goes on above it.
Criticism 89 How does that help anyone decide whether or not to see the play? For obvious reasons, the actress was very upset. Simon reviewed my work twice and said, “The direction is by someone who calls himself Luke Yankee.” The implication was that I had made up that name (which I did not) and that he found it a ludicrous moniker. How did my name and whether or not it was authentic have any impact on my direction of those productions? Nowadays, the internet gives one a certain level of anonymity. When you comment on an article or a YouTube video, keep in mind that the creators will probably read what you have posted. They are artists with feelings. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be honest in your critiques; but there is a difference between being constructive and being destructive. Some artists never read reviews. Either that, or they wait until well after the play has closed to read them. That way, they cannot be swayed either way. Producers need to read them because they can affect the box office. When I am directing, I always feel compelled to read them for several reasons. First of all, the director works very closely with the producer, and as stated earlier, producers have to pay attention to them. Second, if an actor reads a review, it can greatly impact their performance. If it is a bad one, they may want to change a moment or become self-conscious about it. They might be thinking, “Oh, here comes the scene where that dreadful critic said I look like I’m fretting like a spastic gazelle.” The actor then makes different choices that may or may not support the other actors and the production as a whole. If I am the director and I know that this behavior is stemming from a negative review and not just a temperamental actor or actress, I will handle it differently. Another way producers rely on critics is for quotes to use in publicity and advertising. I’m sure you have seen ads for plays and musicals with banners proclaiming, “‘The best show I have seen in years!’ Ellen Rodriguez, The Chronicle.” If someone reads a quote like that and Ms. Rodriguez happens to be a critic they respect, they are more likely to plunk down their hard-earned cash for a ticket. There is a story about Walter Kerr, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York theatre critic for more than thirty years, from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. This was back in the days when there were only a handful of newspapers and a solid review from someone like Kerr could make or break your show. One of his reviews started with, “First of all, I must say Mrs. Kerr loved the play. I, on the other hand . . .” at which point he ripped it to shreds. The following week, the newspaper banner ad read, “‘Mrs. Kerr loved the play!’ Walter Kerr, the New York Herald Tribune.” While this might be creative advertising, it doesn’t serve anyone in the long run.
90 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Theatre critic Peter Filichia tells a story in Chapter 4 of this book about seeing the original production of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. The piece is a musical revue about the singles scene and people trying to find love. As someone in a long-term relationship, Filichia didn’t really relate to the musical, but he saw that most of the audience did. He stated in his critique how everyone around him was laughing and having a wonderful time. It may not have been his cup of tea, but he couldn’t negate the response it was getting. The producer circulated that review extensively, and it helped contribute to the musical moving to an Off-Broadway theatre, where it ran for years. Conversely, when a show is popular, some critics will pander to it in their reviews. There is an old adage in Hollywood when a new film script is circulating around the studios. Someone may ask an executive, “What did you think of the script?” The executive replies, “I’m not sure. What did other people think of it?” In terms of criticism, don’t be afraid of not having the popular opinion. Remember, it is just that: your opinion. When to Keep It to Yourself When one starts learning how to critique a play, it is natural to want to show off what you have learned. Still, this isn’t always the best course of action in all circumstances. Let’s say you are a college student and you have been studying theatre for at least six months. You go to see a local community or school production with a friend who is not involved in theatre; in other words, someone who just goes to the theatre to be entertained. I refer to them as “civilians.” I mean no disrespect with this term. They are simply people who are not in the theatrical trenches. We need these people to be audience members. When one works in or is studying theatre and you go to a play or a musical with a civilian, this can often be the experience coming out of the theatre (I will use the initials TP for “Theatre Person” and C for “Civilian”): TP: So, what did you think? C: I liked it. I had a really good time. TP: You liked that?! C: Yeah. I thought it was really entertaining. TP: As someone who knows theatre, let me tell you what didn’t work about it.
Criticism 91 The Theatre Person then goes into a litany of reasons why they hated the production. This makes the Civilian feel stupid and inferior, and in many cases, they feel wrong for having liked it in the first place. In the future, they might not go to the theatre anymore. Or they certainly won’t go with that person. Instead, why not try this approach? C: So, what did you think? TP: What did you think? C: I liked it. I had a really good time. TP: That’s great. Tell me what you liked about it? In this scenario, you are empowering the Civilian and teaching them to begin to hone their critical skills. Once they say what they liked about it, do not offer your negative opinions. You might save them for another Theatre Person, or not. If pressed, you might say, “It didn’t entirely work for me, but I’m glad it did for you.” If they ask you why, give them a short or vague answer. It is not your right to ruin someone else’s experience just to show them how theatrically savvy you are. I have a friend who even goes so far as to say, “Let me tell you why you shouldn’t have liked it.” This is insulting to the Civilian. Also, you’re basically saying, “Your opinion doesn’t matter. I know theatre and therefore, I’m right and you’re wrong.” Since any kind of art is subjective, you must let others have their opinions. In addition, as we all know, there are a number of people whose philosophy is, “When I go to the theatre, I want to be entertained.” They don’t want to see anything dark or moody. They’d love a nice, toe-tapping musical over Hamlet any old day. The theatre needs civilians as much as it needs critics. Also, I always employ what I call, “The Two Block Rule.” I never say anything remotely disdainful about a production until I am at least two blocks away from the theatre. Have you ever had the experience of turning to your companion in a crowded theatre lobby and saying, “Wasn’t the leading man just awful?” only to realize his mother is standing right behind you? That’s why The Two Block Rule is sound and sensible. What to Look for When Writing a Critique It’s important to know what you are looking at when you are writing a critique. Have you ever heard the expression, “I left the theatre humming the
92 The Art of Writing for the Theatre scenery?” That means you loved the sets but hated the music. But what made that so? Perhaps you are not used to evaluating certain production elements and you aren’t really sure what to look for. Let’s say you are an actor, but you have very little experience with sound design. How can you tell if it’s good or not? Or perhaps you are a designer, and you don’t fully understand the intricacies of the directing process. Here are some points to consider. These were created by the Los Angeles Stage Alliance for the voters of the Ovation Awards (the LA equivalent of the Tonys). Not all of them will apply in every instance, but if you are writing a review and you aren’t sure how to evaluate a certain area, this list will help.2 Acting 1) Does the actor serve the play? Do they help tell the story? 2) Is the actor in their body? Do they appear comfortable in their own skin? 3) Is the actors’ voice emanating from the center? Does it sound connected to the body or is it thin and disconnected? 4) Is the actor affecting the other characters in the scene or are they in their own world, disjointed from others in the scene? 5) Is the actor making strong choices and committing to them? 6) Is the actor living in the moment or do they appear to be aware of being watched? 7) Has the actor prepared enough to deliver a performance that is absolutely believable and personal? 8) Does the actor convey physically and vocally the style of the piece whether it is a classic, farce, drama, musical, or contemporary comedy? 9) Does the performance seem forced or is it completely relaxed and natural? Directing 1) Is there unity of theme in the design elements? Does it look like there was thought put into the world of the play from a design point of view? It doesn’t have to have a lot of money behind the design, but it needn’t look slapped together, either. fi
Criticism 93 2) Is the staging competent and interesting? Or does it seem like the director did not put any thought into where actors stand on the stage? 3) Is there an arc to the story that has been created by the director? 4) Did the director seem to have a good grasp of the material? 5) Did they bring something new and interesting to the production? 6) Was the play well cast? Were the performances polished? 7) If a style was imposed on the play, was it to the detriment or enhancement of the play? 8) Were the actors served well by the direction? 9) Were the sets and costumes appropriate? 10) Were music and sound effects properly employed? Is there a unifying concept for the production? Can one detect an overriding metaphor that helps to create the world of the play? 11) Are there unifying production elements? The designers may design it, but the director is the final arbiter. 12) Has the director been true to the intentions of the playwright as can best be surmised by what’s written? 13) Has the director made good choices that belong in the world of the play? Have they allowed anachronisms (inaccurate historical or chronological references) to exist because it’s easier (or due to sloppiness)? 14) How is the rhythm and tempo of the show? Does it feel slow and draggy? Or rushed? 15) Emotion: the actors execute it, but the director orchestrates the emotional flow of the show. Does the show work on an emotional level? Do the actors make choices that seem too big or inappropriate? 16) Do certain actors seem miscast? 17) Can you distinguish the difference between the playwright’s intentions, the director’s interpretation, and the execution by the artists? Playwriting 1) Does the play create a world that is both recognizable and unique? 2) Do characters behave and speak in a way that is logical—for them? 3) Are the mood, tone, and energy consistent throughout? Does the plot make sense?
94 The Art of Writing for the Theatre 4) Is the world of the play plausible according to its own rules (even if it is a fantasy)? 5) Does the dialogue sound real (within the chosen style) or cliché? 6) Does each scene and character have a purpose? Are they driving the story forward or revealing something new? 7) Does the play fulfill its expectations? Do you know within the first five to ten minutes “when you get to go home?” In other words, do you know the central theme and conflict? 8) Are characters distinctive from one another, particularly in the way they speak? 9) Are the stakes high enough? 10) Are the story elements clear (inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement)? 11) Does the play inspire visceral feeling? Do you care about what happens to the characters? 12) Is this a story that needed to live on stage? Or would it have worked better as a book or a film? Scenic Design 1) The set design should express good principles of design, use the playing space appropriately, and be visually appealing. 2) Does the set design create a proper sense of atmosphere and represent the period, style, and concept of the play? 3) Does the scenic design enhance the story or detract from it? Does it hold your attention? 4) Does the physical placement of elements (walls, doors, furniture, entrances, levels, etc.) make sense? 5) Is it well crafted? Is it constructed and painted well? Does it fill the space? Does it have enough detail to enhance the storytelling? Costume Design 1) Does the costume design suit the play (and the genre or style of the play) and reflect the director’s concept? 2) Does the costume design support, enhance, or define the characters in terms of age, status, personality, and style? Does everyone seem like they are in the same play?
Criticism 95 3) What do the costumes tell you about the character? Can you tell who the person is by what they are wearing? 4) Does the costume design help the actors? Or hinder them? Can the actors inhabit the clothes or do the clothes overpower the actors? 5) If it is a period piece, how well do the costumes evoke the period and the subtleties of the characters within that period? 6) Is the design innovative and imaginative? Does the costume design use fabric, color, texture, line, form, and silhouette to its advantage? How much attention has been paid to detail? 7) If it is a musical, does the movement of the costumes complement the movement of the actor? 8) Do the costumes merge with the character so seamlessly that they’re just accepted as what the character would wear naturally? Lighting Design 1) Lighting design should capture the intrinsic qualities in the play and describe them in terms of light. Does it compliment the actors, set, and costumes while setting the tone and mood of each scene? 2) Are the actors visible? Are the performers able to communicate their intentions visibly through appropriate lighting? 3) Is the design imaginative? Is it strong, clear, and consistent with the overall production style and concept? Does the use of color support any symbolism or emotional context that is consistent with other stylistic elements within the production? 4) Does the lighting design help focus the audience’s attention? Is the movement of the light rhythmically consistent with the style of the production? 5) Are cue placements appropriate, or do they seem arbitrary? Does the lighting design guide the audience from one scene to the next? Sound Design 1) Does the sound design support the pace and tempo of the production while giving the audience an exciting aural experience? 2) Can the performance be heard and understood by everyone? Does the sound design contribute constructively to the production?
96 The Art of Writing for the Theatre 3) Does the sound design enhance the audience’s experience by conveying specific emotion or information? 4) Are microphones being used? If so, are they subtle or glaringly prominent (both visibly and audibly)? 5) For a play, is there a level of artistry and integration of the soundscape with any music used? 6) For a musical, is there a proper balance of vocals and instruments? Or does one overpower the other? Hair and Makeup Design 1) Does the makeup enhance the actor’s portrayal or detract from it? If the actor has character makeup (for instance, old-age makeup), does it look realistic? Or is it too heavy and exaggerated for the size of the performance space? 2) If a character has a specialty makeup (for instance, if they are playing a monster or an animal), does it support their performance or is it art for the sake of being artistic? 3) Do the wigs look like wigs? Or do they look like the person’s hair? What about mustaches, beards, or other hairpieces? Like the costumes, do they look and feel authentic for the period? Overall Design 1) The design elements should help the actors and director express the story, meaning, and theme of the play. Also, the design must make sense in the context of the script. 2) The designs must be well executed and support the production. The production shouldn’t struggle against it. 3) How does the design reflect the intention of the production? Does it establish a period, reflect a psychological state, or evoke a feeling? 4) Is the design an integral element or is it merely window dressing? 5) Do the designs (scenic, costume, lighting, sound, projections, hair, and makeup) seem well collaborated and integrated with each other? Do they all look like they are part of the same world? 6) Most design elements should eventually disappear and the characters playing out their stories should be more prominent. Is this true? Or are there design elements you find distracting from the storytelling?
Criticism 97 Choreography 1) Does the choreography support the story and help to move it forward? Or is it simply pretty dancing? 2) What does it tell you about the characters? 3) Does it have the proper style for the period and the show? 4) Does it play to the strengths of the performers? Or are they trying to do movements beyond their capabilities? 5) It is important that you know the difference between what has been recreated from an original Broadway production or tour and what has been created by the choreographer. Sometimes it will be listed in the program, and sometimes not. There are many wonderful productions that use original choreography, and while it is hard work to recreate and translate that choreography to the stage, it should not be judged as that choreographer’s original work. 6) Sometimes, a play will have stylized staging underscored by music used to facilitate set moves and scene transitions. This is a form of choreography. Is it artful and imaginatively conceived? 7) Is the choreography bold, impressive, and innovative? Does it make you feel something? 8) Is there fight choreography? If so, does it seem realistic and exciting, with an element of danger? Is it well executed by the actors? Musical Direction 1) The musical director is ultimately a collaborator. They need to combine musical taste, leadership, and a collaborative sense of storytelling. 2) The musical director can be a combination of any or all of these facets: rehearsal pianist, “repetiteur” (from opera: the person who goes over the notes for the singers to learn), conductor, accompanist, therapist, and colleague. Their collaboration starts with the director to make sure that the musical story is told, making sure all the words are heard and being sung appropriately, which means they look after the lyricist and composer as well. 3) Is the production an original work? If so, the musical director’s job is much more involved. They had a much bigger hand in the “sound” of the show.
98 The Art of Writing for the Theatre 4) Did the musical director do any of the arrangements (vocal, dance, and/or music)? The musical director should be given more credit if they produced some great arrangements. 5) Is the musical director also the conductor? If so, give a little more credit to a conductor who gives a spirited performance. How tight does the orchestra sound? Much of that is at the mercy of the sound designer, but nonetheless, it should be considered. 6) Very important: In a musical, the vocal performances of the actors should count for 50 percent of their work. How is their diction as a group? Can you understand the lyrics that are being sung, especially in big group numbers? Again, if the sound is bad, you can’t penalize the musical director, but all those factors need to be considered. 7) Outstanding musical direction is more than just having taught the notes, and playing or conducting the songs. Is the cast inspired musically? Does difficult music seem easy? Is the cast competing with the orchestra (or band, or accompanist) or supported by them? 8) Does the music sparkle? Is the band “hot” or “flat?” Does the show flow with the music or stop every time a song comes along? Does the music seem part of the musical (almost like another cast member) or are you taken out of the story by the music being dull and clueless about what is happening on the stage? 9) Weak musical direction is loud, unconnected, and has no musical focus. In essence, everyone seems to be out for themselves. Is this the case? Ensemble Acting 1) Gary Sinise of the Steppenwolf Ensemble Company once said, “The principle of ensemble theatre is to put people together over a period of time in a collective way, without the sense that the lead character in a play is the star and the smaller roles are not important. The actors listen to each other and learn from each other and develop as actors together.” A great ensemble gives the feeling of a cohesive whole. The level of talent is consistent throughout the cast. The acting styles of each individual actor meld and are not disparate. The actors work with each other in a way that is collaborative and supportive; they are really talking to and listening to each other rather than merely showcasing their own talent. The spectator
Criticism 99 senses that the actors as a group collectively agree upon and share a common understanding of the tone and style of the material. The singular ability of a unified company to conjure truth elevates the author’s intention and powerfully enhances the overall impact of the production. 2) Is the play about the journey of multiple characters? Are the performances equally authentic, nuanced, and well executed? 3) Does the group of performers have consistent and effective technical skills such as use of dialects, use of language, and vocal and movement abilities? 4) Are all the actors matched in the level of their fluency with the material? 5) What level of difficulty is inherent in the demands of the material and the number of characters in the play? Do some actors play multiple roles? Projection Design 1) Is the multimedia worthy of being a design element of its own? Is it simply replacing another discipline’s capabilities, or does it expand the environment and world of the play? 2) Does the use of multimedia fit the texture of the other disciplines’ contributions and the performances? Has it been crafted in ways which blend when necessary and stand out when necessary? 3) What does the use of multimedia tell us about the story? How does it expand the world of the play beyond a texture or setting? 4) Does it draw attention to itself as a “technology”? Is that in congress with the presentation? Is the use of multimedia a statement in and of itself? 5) Is the function or flow of the show’s multimedia and its cueing crafted in natural and organic ways? Are the cues presented in clear and organized structures which make sense with the lighting, set shifts, soundscape, and story needs? 6) Is the content crafted or manipulated in ways where breaks, loop points, or edits are not jarring (unless needed)? 7) How has the designer structured the presentation to respond to live performance? When applicable, is there flexibility in cueing to allow for the performances to drive the technical elements? Or do the technical elements lock in the performances?
100 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Other Elements 1) Were there any special effects? If so, were they well executed? Did they enhance the storytelling or were they simply there to be flashy and create a spectacle? 2) What about the language? This could be a component of the writing, the acting, the direction, or some combination thereof. If the language was highly stylized or structured (as with Shakespeare, Molière or certain characters of Tennessee Williams or David Mamet), was the story clear— even if you didn’t understand all of the language? Did you understand more or less of the language than you expected? Was the use of the language interesting and compelling? Did the actors execute it well? This is a fairly thorough and comprehensive list of points to consider when critiquing a play. As stated earlier, not all of these will apply in every instance. And if you are writing a critique with a word count, you may want to consider choosing a few of these points in particular. Hopefully, this list has helped to increase your vocabulary of what to watch for when viewing a production. Critiquing Other Forms In the chapter called “The Brass Tacks,” there are some links to online reviews and articles on criticism from well-respected critics in theatre and several other areas. A number of excellent books exist on how to critique a film, a book, a dance, or a piece of sculpture. I will touch upon those briefly here, just for the sake of understanding their differences. As discussed earlier, a play is dialogue driven. A film is propelled by visual images, so that would be the main thing on which you would focus. A dance piece is all about the human form and how it moves through space. A book is obviously about the words and how they are used. And a painting or sculpture is about the medium and how it is used. But ultimately, any work of art in whatever medium is based on how it makes you feel. Were you moved? Did you laugh or cry? What emotions did it evoke in you? Since art is totally subjective, so is criticism. One person may admire something you simply abhor or vice versa. We have all heard the expression, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” And in the theatre, anyone who buys a ticket fancies themselves a critic. But knowing what to look for and how to articulate it is a skill which in time can become an art. Flexing these artistic muscles will enhance other areas of your work in unforeseen ways.
Criticism 101 Exercises 1) Watch a scene from a play or a movie without the sound. How much can you pick up through gesture, setting, costume, etc.? Then, choose a different scene and watch it without the picture. How much can you discern just from dialogue and inflection? 2) Take three of the “Points to Consider” in this chapter from an area with which you are not terribly familiar. Watch a play, movie, or television show and really think about those three points. Does thinking about elements of performance or production you might not have considered in the past give you a greater appreciation for it? 3) Make a list of at least ten of the most descriptive words you can think of. You might want to use an online dictionary or thesaurus to really help you stretch beyond your literary limits. Then add another ten. Or, if you hear a word that strikes your fancy, add it to the list. Keep this list handy and the next time you are writing an essay (or better still, a critique), see how many of these words you can put into your writing. 4) Write down a highly visual scene as if you were telling it to someone who is blind. Obviously, you would have to be as descriptive as possible. How does this affect your writing style? Does it make it more specific? Is your choice of words perhaps clearer and stronger? What if everything you wrote had this level of power and clarity? 5) In a paragraph or two, describe your favorite play in writing to your best friend. Now, write the same description, but this time choose someone else with whom you have a more formal relationship, like a teacher or your employer. How did your writing style change between the two drafts? 6) When you are watching, reading, or listening to something you like, ask yourself why you like it. What is it about the particular style or genre that appeals to you? You can ask yourself the same question with something you don’t like, but in either instance, make sure your answer is as specific as possible.
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4 The Interviews: Conversations with Acclaimed Playwrights, Critics, Librettists, and Lyricists Chapter Outline A Series of Master Classes 104 On Starting Out 105 “What Should I Write About?” 109 On Structure 114 A Writer’s Process 117 Readings and Play Development 122 On Taking Advice on Your Script 125 On Collaboration 126 On Writing Musicals 131 On the Writer as “The Outsider Looking In” 134 On Critics and Theatre Criticism 135 Advice for New Writers 140 What Do You Love About the Theatre? 145 Discussion Questions 148
104 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Every time I start a new play, I feel like I’m an absolute beginner. I feel like I’m learning how to write all over again. And I can’t bring the prior physics of the earlier work, the work I just did into the room of a new play. It has to be its own house, it has to have its own structure, and it has to work according to its own rules. I don’t know what those rules are. I don’t make up the rules. I find out how the world works as I write. —Octavio Solis, playwright A Series of Master Classes I felt it was important to have different perspectives, so I reached out to a number of playwrights, critics, lyricists, and librettists from varying backgrounds and ethnicities to share their thoughts on the craft. My favorite part of writing this book has been doing these interviews. When one sits alone all day staring at a computer screen, it is often difficult to have a sense of community. Doing these interviews reminded me that I am a part of a unique and special tribe: the clan of theatre-loving wordsmiths. It reminded me that there are many brilliant scribes out there who go through the same angst, the same joys, and similar struggles when they face the blank page or the blinking cursor. Knowing this takes some of the mystery out of it (not to mention the sting) and reminds us that deep down we are all the same. One of my favorite quotes about artists (which really applies to all human nature) is from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. In a dialogue between two actors (and forgive me for paraphrasing the great Mr. Stoppard), the very seasoned actress tells the junior member of the company how nervous she is on the first day of rehearsal. The younger actor replies, “Why would you be nervous? You’re an experienced professional.” She answers, “Every time I start work on a new project, I say to myself, ‘This is the one where I get found out.’” I think we all feel that way. It’s the ultimate imposter syndrome. I shared this quote with a number of the writers in this section and every single one of them said, “Yes, absolutely! That is exactly the way I feel!” It’s both comforting and disconcerting to know that even after winning Tonys, Oliviers, Oscars, and Pulitzers, that feeling never goes away. While each interview lasted over an hour, I have included some of the highlights broken down into different topics: “On Starting Out,” “What Should I Write About?,” “On Structure,” “A Writer’s Process, Readings & Development,” “On Taking Advice on Your Script,” “On Collaboration,” “On
The Interviews 105 Writing Musicals,” “The Writer as the Outsider Looking In,” “On Critics & Theatre Criticism,” “Advice for New Writers,” and I ended each interview by asking, “What Do You Love About the Theatre?” Each of these conversations was exciting, revelatory, and tremendously fun. In fact, I left each interview in a state of euphoria, feeling like I had just attended a master class. This was not only because of what I learned from these brilliant people, but in addition to the aforementioned fear of “getting found out,” there was also a sense of, “Look, if I can do it, you can do it!” Each section contains pearls of wisdom, but feel free to jump around to a topic that is of particular interest to you. A bio on each person interviewed is included at the end of the book. On Starting Out Beth Henley My mother performed at the community theatre in Jackson, Mississippi. I fell in love with the theatre and playwriting in general when I used to cue her on roles like Blanche DuBois. She was very specific about every pause, and the exact wording. Tennessee Williams was a huge influence. And his dialogue, the poetry of it. Really, she was right. If there was a comma, it needed to be a comma. If there was a period, it needed to be a period. If there was a long, long sentence, you needed to do it all the way through. He had such a fine ear. In this way, she showed me her love for the thing that she cared about. It wasn’t that the play was being done in the amateur theatre for local people. For instance, when she was playing Laura in The Glass Menagerie, she would go around the grocery store with a limp, and her commitment and courage and care really informed me, because I really think there can be beautiful theatre anywhere. David Zippel I was in New York, and had little, part-time jobs, and was trying to make my way in the theatre. And at that point, and even today the advice that I would give to myself or to people starting out is to write as many songs as you can, with as many talented people as you can. And encourage your talented friends who are cabaret singers to sing them.
106 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Charles Busch I was writing full-length plays at age eleven. It’s odd that my teachers all thought me so completely unexceptional and invisible because I was always writing. Often, I’d write the lead role for myself and it would be a fantasy version of me if I’d been born in some exotic setting. It didn’t occur to me as a teenager that I would be a writer, like a lot of kids or people who become writers. I saw myself as a performer first. And I became a playwright really to create roles for myself to be on stage. Peter Filichia In 1987, I was walking along the streets of New York. I passed a newsstand and I saw this thing called Theater Week and I looked at it. On the cover, it said, “Volume One, Number One.” And I know that when a magazine is just starting out, they need writers. So, I went to my girlfriend’s house, and I said, “I saw this thing called Theater Week. I’m going to call them tomorrow.” She said, “Don’t, don’t do that. That’s crazy. You know they’re not going to pay any decent money. Call The New York Times, give them article ideas, they’ll give you articles.” And I said, “Yeah, but the thing is, this is Theater Week. And that means I can get in every week. The Times might give me an article or two a year that they’ll throw me. And I won’t get a reputation. This way every week people read me, and it might lead to a better job,” which indeed it did. Samuel D. Hunter In a weird way, I didn’t start writing plays because I thought I’d be a great playwright, it was because I wanted to be a writer, but I wasn’t very good at prose. And something about the messiness of the language of playwriting really appealed to me. It wasn’t about constructing beautiful sentences, it was about pulling together a ton of common, everyday, messy lines of dialogue and letting them add up to something beautiful, something that exists outside of the language itself. And I didn’t know it at the time, but the collaborative nature of theatre really agrees with me—it becomes about something bigger than me, it’s about an entire community of artists coming together to tell a story.
The Interviews 107 Donald Margulies The lessons that I learned early on were to trust my instincts. To be more assertive when I feel things aren’t going well, to take more control. More than my deficiencies as a playwright, being less passive in the making of theatre was something I had to learn over time. Not deferring so much to others to make certain decisions and assumptions about the work.1 Ben Brantley I come from a family of writers, editors and academics for whom criticism was not only a profession, but also an everyday philosophy. Even when I was a theatre-struck child, I couldn’t get away with saying at the dinner table that I simply liked—or, more probably, “adored,” as I was an affected little thing—a play. My parents insisted, gently, that I had to be able to say why. And was “adored” really the word I wanted? Reviewing fashion—just out of college, with no background in the field—was great practical training for reviewing theatre. You had to focus on a fleeting vision, which materialized on a stage (or runway) for a matter of seconds, commit it to memory, and instantly pass some sort of judgment as to its viability. Kia Corthron Howard Stein was a legendary theatre educator who was the head of the playwriting program at Columbia. One day, he said something like, “Kia is the political artist.” It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I was an anomaly. I just didn’t realize I was the only one until that moment. Even though obviously no one else was really, at that time, writing stuff in the same way that I was. I think in my head I thought, “Oh, these are their practice plays before they get to the political stuff.” I should say that was terribly condescending because I don’t think everybody has to write as I do. But it’s actually the only thing that drives me to write. I think frankly, it didn’t occur to me that there were other things that people would want to be writing about besides social justice and all that. So, that’s fine that they did, but it was just a little awakening that I realized that not everybody does this.
108 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Sheldon Harnick I hadn’t been in New York that long. My brother was already in New York and working. He was in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I believe, and he called me one day and he said, “How would you like to see a backer’s audition?” And I said, “Oh, I’d love it. I’ve never seen one.” So, we went to see the audition and when they started to sing the songs, I thought, “Oh, my God. These songs are brilliant.” And I’d never heard of the songwriter. I thought, “If this is a score by somebody who’s an unknown, if the unknowns in New York write like this, I might as well go back to Chicago.” I was very depressed by the end of the backer’s audition. And my brother said, “Would you like to meet the songwriter?” I said “No.” But he introduced me, and he said, “Sheldon, I’d like you to meet Stephen Sondheim.” So, we became friends. When I went home, I looked at the theatrical ads in the newspaper. I thought, “I have to see a musical that’s terrible,” and I looked at the ads to see whether there was a title that might suggest that the show would be bad. And there was. The show was called Ankles Away. I went to see it that night and I said to myself, “Maybe there is a place for me in the New York theatre after all.”2 Stephen Adly Guirgis I was asked to write something for an evening of one-acts, and I did, and I guess what I discovered somewhere in writing the first one is that . . . you know, I’m an actor. You can’t act until somebody hires you. But I found that when I was writing the play, even this little one-act, that I could be acting through the characters, living out the journey with the characters, which sort of satisfied the absence of abundant acting work. Then also I discovered that I could write about stuff that was going on inside me, that was bothering me, and sort of put it out there and exorcise it. Donald Margulies Like so many young artists of any kind, I was very invested in early success. I really wanted it. I don’t really know why, but I did. By my early 30s, after several disappointing would-be breakthroughs, rather than self-destructing, I was able to concentrate on the work. Revenge became a very strong
The Interviews 109 motivator for me. The “I’ll show them” element. I’m sure it was because I was raised in very modest circumstances, and I always had an artistic drive, and I did want it. And then when it didn’t come as easily or as readily as I would have hoped, I eased up on myself. “What Should I Write About?” Stephen Adly Guirgis Write about what means something to you. You can learn structure, and I think that anybody who’s honest will admit that you’re learning about structure and craft until the day you die. But if you’re not writing from a personal place, if you’re not willing to put yourself on the line, if you’re not willing to tell on yourself, the chances of you writing something that’s going to really affect another person really goes down. I find that when people are willing to do that, audiences will give you a big benefit of the doubt if you’re writing about something that’s clearly personal, that clearly means something to you. But if it’s not substantive to you from the jump, then what are you doing? It’s an exercise. It’s like, “I’m going to build a house because I feel like building a house. I’ll build a chalet.” How amazing is that chalet going to be compared to somebody whose father’s dying wish was to have a chalet and he missed the train, so he didn’t get there. Beth Henley I’ve always been attracted to split images: the grotesque combined with the innocent. A child walking with a cane, a kitten with a swollen head, a hunchback drinking a cup of fruit punch. Somehow these images are a metaphor for my view of life. They’re colorful. Part of that is being brought up in the South. Southerners always bring out the grizzly details in any event. David Lindsay-Abaire Somebody in the class was having trouble thinking of an idea for a play. “I don’t know what to write about. What do I do?” And Marsha [Norman, the instructor] said, “Well, here’s a great idea. Go back to a time when you were
110 The Art of Writing for the Theatre really scared or think about the thing that terrifies you more than anything in the world. What is it? When were you feeling that? What is that thing that you’re terrified of? Write about that; that’s always a good play.” I was in my early twenties, and I remember thinking, “Gosh, this sounds like great advice. I don’t know what that is. A drive by shooting, maybe?” When you’re that young, you’re fearless in a lot of ways. Of course, I was afraid of my family passing away, I guess. But it wasn’t until many years later when I became a dad and when my son Nicholas was around three or so, and my wife and I heard two or three stories in a short amount of time about friends of friends who had children die very suddenly and unexpectedly. And as a relatively new dad, I experienced fear in a way that I never had before. And in feeling these incredibly terrifying feelings, I remembered back to what Marsha had said at Juilliard, and I thought, “Oh, finally. I now know what the thing is that scares me more than anything. I could not bear that kind of loss. I can hardly try to imagine it, but I should because it might be a play.” And there were other things, too. Most of my other plays were absurdist comedies. And I had been wanting to try my hand at a naturalistic play as an experiment. And so, I thought, “Well, what if you slam these two things together? Let’s see what happens.” And so that’s how Rabbit Hole came to be. Charles Busch Assuming a female role for me comes from a very profound place. It’s so connected to my creative spirit. I’m very comfortable with both the male and female within me. I love them equally. There’s no big sense of transformation. To go from the male to the female for me, it’s as simple as walking through a door. Many times, I’ve played female characters in staged readings or recordings and I’m not in drag, and I still feel the same sense of female authenticity. It’s a part of me, it’s not about a costume. With the conversation of transgender issues and everything becoming much more complex today, it’s allowed me and forced me to be more reflective and honest. If I have spent forty years of my creative life writing and acting female roles, clearly, it comes from some very profound place. If there’s a transgender spectrum, I might be somewhere in the middle there because I’m rather complex in some ways that I am equally comfortable in my maleness as I am in my identification with women. When I played my first female role in college, it just released something in me that was so natural and so comfortable, and
The Interviews 111 it seemed right from the start that this place of femininity in me was a place of authority. Samuel D. Hunter A few years ago, I kind of just realized if I’m going to write good plays, I have to really put something on the line. It has to be a play that’s hard for me to write, where I’m really struggling to work something out. Because if I’m not doing that, if I’m not struggling with something, if I’m not engaged in an active way, then I can’t expect an audience member to be.3 David Henry Hwang I continue to be fascinated by the relationship between external events and our internal sense of self. This has often led to my writing about how individual identities are shaped by social and political forces. I don’t believe that character is inborn, but largely determined by one’s context. Therefore, when that context changes, our identities can transform into something very different. When I initially said that I feel I was trying to understand something I still explore, which is the relationship between my being a person of color or Asian in the United States and how the context of being born and raised in this country affected the person that I’ve turned out to be. I think that’s true. I mean, it’s a little bit like V.S. Naipaul, who said that he felt that if he had been born white in Britain, he wouldn’t have become a writer. Part of his exploration is to understand the degree to which his sense of self and the way he sees the world has been affected by his particular socio-political context. As I’ve grown older, I hopefully have not remained static, and I’ve changed as well. The writing changed me into someone who began to explore what it meant to be Asian-American, and then what it meant to be a minority in America, and then the effects of racism. Then that led me to become politically active. I feel we all have kind of a plot of soil that’s the most fertile soil for us, and that’s where our plants grow. We can’t necessarily determine what that soil is. I mean, you can try to expand that plot and you may find out that, “Oh, actually, it’s a larger plot than I thought it was,” or you might find out, “No, it’s not. I sort of need to stay within the previous perimeter.” It depends on some writers, that’s not where they’re fertile. I happen to like to write about big issues, but that’s just me.
112 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Naomi Wallace There is too much focus on how to write and not why to write. To me, why we write is far more interesting, and the answers to this question could be more dangerous. I think it’s an important question to ask what kind of theatre we’re interested in writing, which would go to my idea of whether it’s an inclusive or exclusive theatre, a theatre that challenges and provokes or one that comforts or reaffirms. But when we must ask ourselves, “Why are we writing?,” the answer could be, “Well, I want a career in the arts.” But I think we have to stay with that “why” and what kind of theatre we envision writing for. The how is important, although I’d say I think the what is out there, too; it requires much more reading of each other’s work and of what our past colleagues and those who are no longer with us, what were they writing, to learn from reading the work of others. I don’t think that happens enough. So much emphasis is on the fact that we’re going to write and getting the writing out rather than knowing that part of the writing is the learning and the interaction with the works of others. Octavio Solis I don’t think of myself as a Latino playwright; that’s a label others place on me. I’m just writing for the theatre. Because of my upbringing and my past, I inevitably delve into issues of my Latino heritage, but it’s not my Latino-ness that dictates what I write. There are stories that take place along the border near El Paso because that’s where I’m from, and because I think that region is full of untold stories. But even as many of my characters are of Mexican descent, I feel that their tales are universal stories of love, betrayal, and loss. I go back and forth with this term, “Latino playwright,” and wrestle with its ramifications. Sometimes it means I’m appreciated more, but only within this rubric, and sometimes it makes me visible to a wider audience with no access to the culture. So, there are benefits and pitfalls. Still, if I don’t tell these stories about the people I share my culture with, someone else will. I feel a responsibility to share what I can.4 Joe DiPietro I have to be obsessed with the topic to write about it because it takes so much of my life. So, if you have a show, you have to love it and you have to love
The Interviews 113 working on it and exploring that issue of the show for years. I have to be sort of obsessed with something about it. I feel like I am a lifelong student of not only theatre and narrative, but of human nature, of politics, of history, of anything to do with people. I’ve been approached about various projects over the years, and I was like, “You know what? I just don’t care about this. I just don’t.” I was offered one project recently. It was a fictional project about a country singer, and I was like, “It’s too soapy. I know I am not going to wake up every day and want to write this subject.” Whereas, when someone brought me the story of Memphis, I thought, “I’ve been wanting to write about race in America, and I hadn’t figured out an original angle, and this was it.” When I say “yes” to something or have an idea, generally I’m all in right away and I get obsessed. Who knows what exactly that is, but if there’s anything, I would say it’s a reflection of what’s happening in my life or the world at the time. Marsha Norman Here’s the best secret I know for knowing what to write about. If you tell somebody a story, you say, “Oh, I’m thinking about writing about what happened when I was on this raft journey down the Colorado River.” That’s all you say. And then, somebody says back, “Oh, man, I was on a river trip once.” And then, they proceed to tell you a story back. So, if you give somebody an idea . . . not the full idea, just a little bit . . . and they tell you a story back, then you know that you have landed in a pool of stories. Stories of what happened as we were on our way down the river, whether it’s Huckleberry Finn, whatever it is, is the story of people on a journey. Kia Corthron I think it was back in grad school when I read Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. What has stayed with me these many, many years was the notion that if an audience member were to leave the theatre feeling so devastated that all she could do was to throw up her hands in despair, then that’s all she would do. If, on the other hand, the audience member was provided with a little hope, then she might actually act upon it. Since reading that book, I have always worked toward that hope. It must be truthful—to fake a happy ending is transparent and silly. So sometimes, with more bleak subject matter, unearthing that sliver of hope has proven exceedingly challenging. But I’ve almost always found it.5
114 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Donald Margulies I firmly believe that in middle age, our childhoods are inescapable. They are always with us. They form our worldview. They give us a frame of reference to either rebel against or to embrace, or to question. Even when not writing autobiographically, I’m writing about things I care about or that are on my mind, so in that sense, they are autobiographical. And it’s arguable that whatever it is I think or see or feel now is a product of the life that I have lived. The values that were instilled in me as a child are what I have spent the subsequent decades either undoing or trying to untangle, or figure out, or reinvent, but it’s all better. So, in one form or another, maybe we’re all wrestling with that. My own experience is usually a starting place for me. On Structure Naomi Wallace Handling formal elements is something I’ve been learning from various writers all my life. I studied Eugene O’Neill, trying to understand how he built his plays, and steal some of his genius. More recently, I wrote a play that is roughly written in the form of a Shakespearian sonnet. One reason I decided on that form is because I feel the play is closer to my own life than most of what I’ve written. So, I needed to keep the play on track by imposing a strict form. I’ve often found that the more restrictions I place on my form, the more freedom I have within those same restrictions.6 When I wrote that play, it made me think, “What would it mean?” So, I wrote A, B, A, B, C, D, C, D, in the Shakespearian style. Then I wrote to somebody, and I said, “What would it mean for a scene to rhyme with another scene? So, if you’ve got A, B, A, B, what would it mean for the first scene to rhyme with the third scene, not linguistically, but in another way?” Now, I don’t think I did that much with it going through, but it made me think in a different way. When my imagination is uncomfortable, that’s when it stretches. So, I think for young people, it’s very important that they get uncomfortable sometimes with their writing because almost all the time, new writers are surprised at their own capacities. I think sometimes when we give ourselves complete freedom, what happens is that we tend to write the way we usually write. We get out our top ten hits of the things we’re good at doing. Maybe
The Interviews 115 it’s dialogue, maybe it’s an image, maybe it’s an exchange, maybe it’s a certain kind of humor. When I give myself certain restrictions, I’m forced to use my imagination in a way I might not use it. That’s where I feel the fresh and unexpected can come into one’s writing. David Lindsay-Abaire I think it is probably disingenuous of me to pretend that I don’t think about structure, and certainly I didn’t when I started writing. I was very willful, because I had seen lots of plays that I loved and knew how they worked, so I just wrote instinctively. And I think those early plays have an inherent structure to them. But actually, when I started writing films, they’re much stricter about structure. I resisted it for as long as I could, but then when you get a little bit older you realize, “Oh, you know what? My plays are already structured. If I actually think about structure, this will make my job so much easier.” I try not to be a slave to it, but if I reach a point in the writing where something is bumpy, or I can’t quite get myself out of a scene, I go back to structure or, “What is this play about? What does your main character want? What is in your character’s way that’s preventing them from getting what they want? How can I make this scene more interesting? Can I ratchet up the stakes and the conflict?” Just very basic dramatic structure stuff that I didn’t really think about early on, but that was silly of me not to think about. Marsha Norman Plays are pieces of architecture. In other words, if you had a ski lift that did not take you to the top of the mountain, that would be a failed ski lift. It’d be a whole failed idea, right? So, what you have to have is the person on the ski lift that wants to see the top of the mountain. That’s you buying a ticket. And so, they get on the ski lift . . . that’s when the play starts . . . and it takes you to the top where you get off the tram. And you look, and you go, “Wow.” And that’s the story. Or the story is the ski lift stops halfway, and you go, “Uh-oh.” And then, it falls. All kinds of stories begin with one person that wants one thing. Samuel D. Hunter I think if there’s one thing that consistently excites me, it’s when I feel like the playwright is invisible. So often when I’m watching a play and I get
116 The Art of Writing for the Theatre bored, it’s because I see the playwright at work. I hear the jokes as written, I see the scene construction, I understand the plot as just that: a plot. It becomes an experience about the artistic ego of the writer, not the play itself. But when I’m truly sucked into a play, I forget about the artifice of theatre and am totally immersed in the world, the surprise, the catharsis. And it’s hard to pin down exactly why that happens with some plays and not with others. It’s something to do with honesty—when a playwright is truly honest about what they’re writing, meeting their characters on their own terms instead of muscling them into saying the thing you want them to say. When you feel a writer engaging with the material in that honest, open way, it no longer feels like just a piece of writing, it feels larger than that. And that can take any form, from the most wildly experimental play to kitchen sink realism. Octavio Solis Sometimes I feel like I’m writing a play, but the play suddenly just takes on a lot of descriptive language. And I’m thinking, “I’m sounding like a novelist,” because I’ve read so many novels, and I love the way they use language. You can take the time to describe a place or a day, and they can still feel like the story is moving forward. In a play, you don’t have that luxury. In a play you’ve got to keep moving. It’s like, “So what happens next, and then what happens next, and then what happens next? So, if there is a descriptive passage, it’d better have a forward momentum and it’d better lead to something. It can’t exist for its own sake.” And so, I temper myself. I say, “I’ve got to pull the reins in on that.” I remind myself I’m writing a play. I have only at one point written something that I thought was going to be a play and it was actually a story. And so, I gave up on it and I wrote the story. And I felt much better about it. Ismail Khalidi There are many dramatic structures. I mean there’s not only the Aristotelian dramatic structure of The Poetics or of modern contemporary American drama, there’s also the dramatic structure of Eastern storytelling, of African storytelling, of indigenous storytelling of the Americas, et cetera. I would say study them all and expand your toolkit. Let them be tools that you can break out and you can hold your work up against as needed, but
The Interviews 117 don’t be limited or imprisoned by them. Know how to use them because sometimes it is necessary. You do need to understand The Poetics and understand dramatic structure as it is understood by most theatres and be able to employ it, but also find ways of subverting it and don’t be too caught up in it. Donald Margulies I’m very much a structuralist. Not that I insist upon creating the wellmade play, but I do pose fundamental questions like, “Where is the conflict? What is your play about?” Basic pedantic questions. But the truth is that people really need to identify and articulate their subject. It seems revelatory to them sometimes. “Wow. What is my play about? What am I trying to say?” I think it’s essential, particularly in drama, to know what is at stake that must be resolved in 90 minutes or two hours.7 What was the event, the trigger, the last straw, the change in temperature, that caused something to be revealed now? This harkens to another one of my lessons, which is the Passover question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” In other words, why are we seeing this now? Why aren’t we seeing what happened last night or what’s happening next week? What is it about now that is stageworthy, demanding of attention? It’s great fun to flip the switch and prompt young writers to think, “Oh, yeah, that’s a really good question. I can’t answer that, but it’s something I need to figure out.” A Writer’s Process Sheldon Harnick I find that walking helps. Walking and swimming are very useful to writing lyrics. I don’t know what it is, but I would much rather walk than sit in a chair with my rhyming dictionary or thesaurus next to me. I think I was working on “Tonight at Eight” [for She Loves Me.] The first time I heard it, I couldn’t wait to put lyrics to it. So, I’m walking in the street and not watching traffic, and as I’m crossing the street, I hear this horn blasting. I turned and there’s this truck that’s about two inches away from me. The driver is cursing me, and I said, “It’s okay, I think I got the lyrics!”8
118 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Marsha Norman Plays are about survival. If turtles wrote plays and risked coming together in the open to watch them, the plays would not be about the joy of crawling in the sand or memories of the happy days before Mommy died. Plays by turtles would be about things you had to know if the species was to survive, where to bury the eggs so that more turtles would stand a chance of hatching. They would be about what not to eat, when to fight, and when to back down. They would be about what happens if you break the long-established rules of turtle life. Plays by turtles would contain the things that the species must remember, even if they are forgotten by individual members. Anything else would not be worth your turtle time. And you would probably swim off in the middle of the show and go eat dinner.9 Samuel D. Hunter When I think about process, it always helps me when I listen to artists who aren’t writers, who aren’t theatre makers talk about their process, because when it shifts the context away from something I’m doing, I can understand how it applies to me and my own craft a little more clearly. There was some interview with Philip Glass where he was talking about his journey as a composer. And he talked about when he was writing early on, it was “student music.” And that really resonated with me. It wasn’t until he found more interest in Eastern music and stuff that was a little bit more experimental, that he started going toward the kind of music that he writes now that’s so iconic and so undeniably Philip Glass. And what was so interesting to me was the music that Philip Glass writes right now is arguably very simple. That’s what he became interested in as an artist. Octavio Solis Every time I start a new play, I feel like I’m an absolute beginner. I feel like I’m learning how to write all over again. And I can’t bring the prior physics of the earlier work, the work I just did into the room of a new play. It has to be its own house, it has to have its own structure, and it has to work according to its own rules. I don’t know what those rules are. I don’t make up the rules. I find out how the world works as I write.
The Interviews 119 Beth Henley I work from a lot of notebooks. I write down bits of dialogue I hear that may or may not even fit in this play and I write down tone. Tone is so important. I think that’s the soul of the play. If you can get the tone, that for me is the most difficult thing. And I write down character images. I knew for instance, there was a bridal dress that matched the bone ivory shoes, images like that. I wasn’t sure whose dress it was, so it’s images, it’s dialogue. It’s ideas for scenes.10 I have notes on character, notes on dialogue, notes on random dialogue, notes on story, notes on theme, images, research. I’ve got all of that going in a notebook, so I’m kind of working under chaos. So, I fool myself into creating something that’s not really plotted out. But then I’ll go to the computer and put all of the information on character and type it in. I mean, this is grueling and really boring to do, but it gets the seeds planted. It becomes more organic, and it gets the play more into your body. Ben Brantley I think one of the great things about theatre criticism is that theatre-going is a physical experience. We forget that. Movie-going is too, but it tends to be more of an individual relationship with you and the image onscreen. When you’re in a theatre, there really is an exchange of energy between you and the actors. Any actor will tell you that they have a different relationship with the audience every single night, and you’re part of that relationship. There have been plays that kicked me in the stomach. Every night before I’d go to a theatre, before a play would begin, I would feel this anxiety, that I actually used to feel before I’d go onstage when I was performing as a kid. Because you really want it to be good, you always do, and you think how nervous they must be. And once the curtain goes up, the nervousness disappears, and you’re in this moment of real communion. It’s like you’re feeding from the same pool of electricity, and I think you do want to convey that. The other thing I have noticed (and it took me a while to figure this out) is that when I like something, I smile. It could be the bleakest of Greek tragedy, but if it’s really working for me, I’ll just go, “Yeah.” I mean, this kind of smile of admiration, of wonder. And so, sometimes, as I’m taking my cerebral notes, I’ll check-in with my face. And if a smile was there, I’ll know the show is doing its job.
120 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Naomi Wallace I think as artists, we should not be ashamed of being pleased at times. It’s rare, but to think “I got that, I got what I was trying to do.” Someone else may say it doesn’t work, but to feel that moment of, “I can feel the ground beneath my feet for a moment, it’s going to shift again.” What I will say is that I have seen productions that I feel satisfied with, but that’s because other artists have come in and given life to the script. But there are times when I do feel, “this works” and it’s less a mental thing than a physical thing. The whole thing of, “Is it perfect, will it not be changed?” interests me less, but we get the feeling that we’re, again, headed in the right direction with that. What’s funny, though, is that I can read a new play or draft, let’s say it’s the fourth draft. One day I’ll think, “This is pretty darn good,” and then I’ll go back a few days later and I haven’t changed anything, and I’ll say, “Oh, this is so clunky. It has no momentum.” So, somewhere in between is probably the truth about what one has written. David Henry Hwang I often say that the artist creates the work, but the work recreates the artist, and there’s a reciprocal relationship where I created the thing, which then changed me. Over the last 30 to 40 years, there have been times when I’m like, “I don’t know if I want to be the Asian playwright,” but most of the time when I go back to my original work, the most personal stuff, I’m mostly interested in the same set of issues, which is not unusual for playwrights. I think it’s pretty artistically organic. For better or worse it’s not something I ever imposed on myself.11 Donald Margulies I like staying busy, so I always have more than one project in the works, each at a different stage of development. Most of my work begins with snippets of dialogue, chunks of monologues, and overwriting. I don’t know where I am going when I start out, only that I have a visceral feeling that something is indeed there, and I have to locate it. I can only find it by writing. Sometimes the writing isn’t toward it but around it or nowhere near it. I don’t always start at the beginning; I start wherever I think my characters will have the most interesting things to say. The structure begins
The Interviews 121 to emerge from the pages. I rarely know how a play is shaped when I’m starting out.12 I mean, in the case of Dinner with Friends, for instance, I wrote a scene because I wanted to write the scene. After I wrote it, I thought, “This is where the play should end.” And I was way early in the process, and certainly not knowing at all where the play would end. I had a destination. It was then a question of, “how do I get there?” But it felt satisfying, and it felt right, and it pointed the way. But I wouldn’t have known that if I had just sort of postponed, delayed, the gratification of writing that scene when I felt at that moment that I had a grasp for what I wanted to say. It only helped articulate everything in retrospect or informed everything that was to come.13 Charles Busch I know myself very well as an actor, both my strengths and my limitations. I write dialogue for myself with all of my line readings laid out. It makes rehearsals go by very swiftly. That said, I love when I play scenes with a wonderful actor whose spontaneity forces me to change those prepared line readings in rehearsal and in performance. I think that’s sort of endemic to when you’re a playwright/actor. There are a few of us who do that, and I haven’t spoken to anybody else. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone else who really does that. When I’m writing it, I’m hearing it as playwrights do. So, I write, and when I write a role for myself, yeah, I kind of write it with knowing how I’m going to say it. Therefore, I arrive at the first day of rehearsal, not only memorized, but basically the performance is 85% set. It’s very good for the director, because imagine how wonderful that is that you don’t have to spend any time with the center of your play, it’s all exactly the way it’s going to be; you just have to bother with the people around. So, you can move very, very fast. David Lindsay-Abaire I deliberately make most of my protagonists female. I think it helps me to give myself distance from the protagonist so that I’m not writing about myself. Of course, I am writing about myself. It’s a stupid little trick. My mother was a huge influence on me as a person, and she was very much a storyteller and the center of every family event. And so, my mother is definitely in there, but I think the main thing is I am always writing about myself, and that
122 The Art of Writing for the Theatre makes me feel uncomfortable. If I make the character a woman, then I’m not writing about myself, I’m writing about this woman that doesn’t exist except in my head. But really, I’m writing about myself all the time and all the characters and everybody I love. They were all in there. Sometimes they don’t know that I’m writing about people that I know. Readings and Play Development Marsha Norman Real playwrights just naturally listen to how people talk. And this is good because it’s very hard to teach someone how to create the impression of real speech onstage. Stage talk isn’t actually real, but it sounds real. It’s something slightly larger than real talk in size and quality, which, if delivered well by an actor, will shrink slightly on its way out to the audience and then strike them as perfectly natural once they hear it. It’s also difficult to teach people how to listen to their characters as they write them. So, they can draw clues from those characters as if they were real people. There are also verbal rhythms that work well on the stage and some that don’t. Real playwrights know this instinctively and are musical in their souls. And the sentences they write just sound good from the stage. This is the famous “ear for dialogue” you hear about. If the audience detects something false in the way the character is talking, you will lose them. Characters must pass a certain reality test that the audience administers. Sheldon Harnick It’s so difficult to get a production that when a show of mine is in rehearsal, I attend every day. It’s a gift. My role is to listen and to see if I can make suggestions that will help the performer understand the lyric and be able to perform the lyric better. Also, I listen and make sure that technically they are singing the song, that their diction is right, they’re pronouncing all of their consonants, things like that, and in general to try and be as helpful as I can in every way. When we did Tenderloin and we were on the road, we found that we were in trouble. I realized that I had not studied the book enough to be of help. I resolved at that point to become thoroughly familiar with the book
The Interviews 123 of every show I did so that if there were troubles, I might have suggestions in that area as well as the area of lyrics.14 Beth Henley I had a lot of friends who were actors, and they were very generous. I always think that’s the most exciting thing—to do the very first reading. I don’t give the actors any notes. They just show up and they may have read the script and studied it, or they may be reading it cold. And I just kind of go with what their instincts are, and if they have questions about the script. I don’t sit around afterwards in a big circle talking, but just intimately with people afterwards. I don’t like that public talking about something. It becomes more distant because people, whether they know it or not, are worried about what other people think about what they’re saying. And it changes the questions I ask. Naomi Wallace I’ve often tried deliberately not to give the public answers but let them find their own. I develop a sense of what I want to feel from the play, and I develop the motion of the play and where it’s going, how it gets there and what is to be revealed. I know there is something that the characters want and so I know the feeling of the scene, I just may not know how to write it.15 Peter Filichia There was a new theatre company in New Jersey that was just starting, and they didn’t expect me to come because they were new. But I said, “Sure, I know it’s important to do this, to have reviews because you can get grants by showing reviews. It makes you look more important. When do you want me to come?” “Thursday night?” “Sure.” And Thursday came and I got a phone call, “Listen, could you come tomorrow night? Would you mind?” They said, “We’re not ready. We’ll be ready by tomorrow night.” I said, “Well, look, what if I come Saturday?” “Oh, great.” So, I went on Saturday, and they still weren’t ready. But you know something? They were close. And I knew that by the Sunday matinee, they’d get it. I know they
124 The Art of Writing for the Theatre did. TV and movie critics, they get their digital downloads, and they go to screenings, that’s a finished product. But theatre always evolves. I mean, yes, we have all seen shows that have devolved as time has gone on. People get tired of doing them. But at the very beginning there’s no question that everybody wants to improve. And so, I reviewed the show that I knew I would’ve seen on Sunday because in fact, theatre reviews are technically obsolete the moment they’re written. It’s very important to keep that in mind. These are living, breathing things and they can improve. And if you tell people anything else, you can tell people they are good. People love positive feedback. Marsha Norman What we’re doing when we write for the stage is telling stories people need to see. We do it for the same reason we put up stop signs: because it’s important, for some reason, for people to stop at this place and look around. Our place at the playwrights’ table is determined by how many people remember the stories we tell. And people remember the stories they feel they will need someday, just like life. Urgency is the key to a good story. Fear is the force that keeps it moving. The good news is that humans are so hungry for stories that our brains invent them even when we are asleep. So, they need us. It is a great privilege to be a storyteller. And if it hurts, we can take it. Donald Margulies If I am in the throes of something, I’ll have a pad by my bed and jot stuff down, and sometimes I feel the need to go and sit at the desk. But that doesn’t happen a lot. I write sporadically. I can’t say that I get up and read the paper at 6:00 and start to write at 7:00. My life hasn’t really worked out that way. I write when I have to, when it becomes a kind of biological necessity. I think I learned a long time ago that to have a career as a playwright and a produced playwright, there will be inquiries I need to respond to, there will be a play that I am casting that is part of the day, or another play that I am rewriting or preparing for publication, or a screenplay that I am writing, or material that was sent to consider for something else. That’s all part of it. And even if it’s not actually writing, it’s a part of the business of being a playwright.16
The Interviews 125 On Taking Advice on Your Script Kia Corthron Never feel the need to take unsolicited advice. There are a lot of people out there who would love to rewrite your play for you. Do ask the opinions of those you trust, and in the case of a post-show discussion for example, listen to the thoughts of strangers as well. Be polite, but work hard to stay true to your own intentions, which may mean discarding 95% of what you hear, but that usable 5% might prove to be invaluable. David Henry Hwang My first play, FOB [which stands for Fresh off the Boat], had been to the O’Neill. [The Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center is a well-known summer festival in Connecticut to workshop new plays.] I got a lot of notes and then tried to incorporate them. At the end of my four-week residency there, I ended up throwing all of those rewrites out. I learned that despite the fact that somebody is older than me, more experienced than me, and presumably well-meaning, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their notes are right. So, I began to learn how to filter criticism. A couple of weeks later we did a reading of FOB for [producer] Joe Papp at the Public Theatre. I was 22. I wanted him to like me, and so he said, “I like this play, but I have some notes.” We went into his office, and he gave me his notes and I didn’t actually agree with them, but I didn’t want to say that. I just listened and then at the end of it, he said, “Do another draft and send it to me and I’ll decide if I want to do it.” I went back to the San Francisco Bay area where I was living, and I waited about three weeks and I sent him back the exact same script. A couple of weeks later, the phone rings and it’s Joe Papp, and he says, “The play is great, we’re going to do it.” That’s how I got my first production. I think the lesson for me was that I didn’t know that when I went to The O’Neill, which is why I did try to incorporate the notes that everybody gave me. But I guess where I did have confidence was that at the end of it, I didn’t like the rewritten version of the play. Maybe it’s because I was writing about subject matter which hadn’t been written about much in those days. Therefore, I felt I had more authority over the story than maybe another writer would feel.
126 The Art of Writing for the Theatre Beth Henley I’m on my third draft before I give a new play to anybody, and then I try to give it to one or two people to read, and then do revisions from that. I ask actors that I know to come to my living room and to read it. I don’t give them any direction. It’s very safe. The characters just come out of my heart and into the universe when I hear the actors speak the lines. It’s exhilarating. If there are big bumps in the play, I generally know it’s my fault, because the actors are so good. And I keep asking myself, “What is this play about? Anger, revenge?” I keep searching for the answer. And hopefully it won’t be about any one thing.17 Sheldon Harnick During the first show that Jerry Bock and I did, The Body Beautiful, when songs were cut, that was difficult. Maybe not heartbreaking, but it was frustrating and very sad. But by the time we did Fiddler on the Roof, I had learned that the name of the game is rewriting. When a song does not work or is not right, you have to replace it. So, by the time we did Fiddler, when songs were thrown out, I thought, “Yeah, that’s a nice song. We can’t use it.” But the problem was to write something that really was right for the show, that would make the show better, make it more successful. So, I can’t say I was that unhappy when a song was cut.18 Marsha Norman I tell people you can’t work on a play longer than two years. What tends to happen as people revise plays is that they get bad advice and obscure things that were clear and do over-obvious things that were fine, and mess them up in a tragic way. The audience needs to be clear about what’s up on the stage. Often the playwright is the last person that can know how to make that happen because the play is already perfectly clear to them.19 On Collaboration David Zippel The lyricist is the bridge between the book and the music. And so, ideally, you want what you create to sound like one person wrote it. I think the best
The Interviews 127 way to do any of this is to make sure that whatever you’re doing is characterdriven. And in a lot of ways, it’s interesting to see how characters become three-dimensional, but the book writer may take the lead in creating the characters. But as the lyrics become more specific and the stronger you adhere to who that character is, he or she, the better or the more likely it is that it’s going to sound like the same person who is singing, as the person who was speaking minutes before. And that’s the key, so that when someone breaks into song, it doesn’t sound like a different character, but actually the same person who started. Ismail Khalidi I think every collaboration is different. The ones that endure change and evolve over time. I think the ones that matter most endure. I would say, first of all, I do encourage everyone to certainly experiment with collaborating and writing. Even just in terms of getting experience for a writing room if you want to write for television, which are collaborative spaces. But it’s certainly not easy to collaborate. In the case of working with Naomi Wallace, we had developed a relationship over many years of friendship and camaraderie. I think for us, that worked beautifully. It’s that collaboration eventually sprouted organically from our friendship and our professional connection and political affinities. We would always give each other permission when we were passing pages back and forth, to change what the other person had written. If something is incredibly important to them, they have the right to say “No,” and they have to then make an argument why it’s got to stand. Honestly, I don’t think I could count on one hand the times where one or the other of both sides really fought for something that the other person has taken out. That’s very much from the start been one of our protocols in the kind of culture of collaboration that we’ve cultivated, and that’s worked for us so far. Marsha Norman I think collaboration is basically everyone bringing their best game. And with that, there’s a notion of respect for what the other person does and understanding all of you and developing a common language in which to work on the principle and getting a single sentence that describes what you’re doing. One of the things I’ve learned is that I believe it’s important to write
128 The Art of Writing for the Theatre with someone who is around your age. If you write with someone who is much older than you are, or someone much younger than you are, you find that your language is not the same. Your understanding of situations is not the same, of what’s dangerous and what’s not. And if you’re writing with someone much older than you are, you have to understand that they have been scheming at this for a lot longer than you have. You have to have interests, interests that are commonly aligned. You shouldn’t write with somebody that’s 30 years older than you are, or younger, because what’s in it for you is also going to be really different, not just your understanding of the subject. But what’s interesting to you, as a story, is likely to be really different, too.20 Joe DiPietro When I met David Bryan [lead singer for the band Bon Jovi, who became the composer of Memphis], the only musical he had ever seen was Fiddler on the Roof and he knew nothing. He literally didn’t know what musicals were. What was great about that was he brought a rock and roll idiom to musical theatre that I loved, that I was finding hard to get people to really key into. So, I immediately gravitated towards his type of music. I’m not taught. I don’t know music or music theory, but it’s basically, “Do I like this melody? Do I like this music? Does this music tell a story to me?” That’s what I look for whenever I work with David, certainly, but when I work with other people now, too. David’s a great guy, and one of the reasons he’s one of the very few rock stars who’ve been successful in musical theatre is that he’s collaborative. He doesn’t write his tune on a napkin and give it to you and say, “Here it is. I’ll be in Monte Carlo.” We’ll hash things out, and he’ll say, “Do you like this?” But what I always tell David is, “Make sure you always have a rock and roll, pop, modern sensibility to everything you do. Never try to be theatre-y.” Because oftentimes we’ll be talking about a song, I’ll play him a couple of songs from the theatre world, and he’ll play me a couple of songs from the rock and roll world. He’s like an encyclopedia of that stuff, and I know all the theatre stuff, and we’re like, “Let’s make this our own.” But what he definitely taught me was to make it a song, which is generally verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus to the end. He continues to teach me what it means to have a song that’s going to appeal to a wide range of people. Conversely, I had to teach him how to put a button on a song. Because when Bon Jovi sings Living on a Prayer, they’ll just fade out in the concert, and everyone claps. But in the theatre, we need people to know the song’s over, clap, and we’re moving on to the next story point.
The Interviews 129 Octavio Solis There was a generation where the writer was a writer and that’s what they kept to, and they worked on the play, and they didn’t mix it up with the actors. And God knows the director didn’t want them in the room when they were directing. I insist on being in the co-pilot seat. I think I need to be there. And directors, once they know what my orientation is, they want me there too, because then they can address some issues they have, or problems, some road bumps they have with the text, and I can be there to help immediately; they have my ear, but it works the other way around, too. If there’s a point where they get stuck on something, I try to help, especially if the director is open. They are automatically inclined to want to at least hear my suggestion. I won’t pretend that my suggestions are always the best. Sometimes they’re really downright corny and wooden, but it pushes them to think in a different way to a different solution and they say, “I know how to solve it now.” But sometimes, I’ll state what the obvious solution could be to this snag, and they’ll say, “Great, thank you.” Or after they wrestle with it enough, I’ll approach them and say, “I can fix this in the writing. Do you want me to fix this in the writing?” Some directors will say, “No, the writing is fine. This is a directing problem.” At other times, an actress might approach me and say, “I’m having trouble with this line. I can’t get this line out of my mouth.” And I’ll say, “Well, then what do you want to say?” And then later on, I’ll give them either exactly what they said back to them and say, “Say that as the new line,” or something in between, something that will help them, because I feel like if actors are really, really struggling with a particular text, and this is not on the first or second day, they’re all going to be struggling with it later in the process. If they’re really constantly stumbling over it, something must be wrong with the line, something that I can easily fix. Or maybe it’s just the wrong line. Maybe it’s the wrong sentiment. And they don’t quite know. Some actors are really articulate about expressing exactly what’s wrong. Others just know that it doesn’t feel right. And I’m attuned to that. Donald Margulies I think that I’ve been very lucky in terms of collaborators because I’ve worked with [director] Dan Sullivan for 20 plus years. Dan is just an extraordinary thinker and collaborator and a kind, smart man. In terms of trusting my instincts, very often it applies to seeing something go awry and not speaking up or trusting that others will see what I am seeing and not saying anything,
130 The Art of Writing for the Theatre and assuming that it will take care of itself. In the past with Dan, very often, if I say, “That isn’t working over there,” he would say, “Give me a week.” So, I would learn to trust my collaborator. But there were a couple of collaborators that I’ve worked with (who will remain unnamed) in whom I put a certain amount of faith, but it was not really respected. And that’s too bad. I think that, particularly in the work that I’ve done as a screenwriter, asserting myself in those situations of seeing something that is taking a wrong turn and saying, “That really just doesn’t feel right,” instead of being the passive writer for hire, it really does behoove one to speak out. Sometimes in a rehearsal, an actor will come up to me, and say, “Donald, what do you think about this?” I’ll reply, “What did Dan say? You should trust that.” And then if this persists, if an actor is sort of not observing the protocol, the hierarchy in a rehearsal setting, I will go to my director, and say, “She’s been asking me about this. Can I talk to her about it?” He’d say, “Yeah, go ahead.” But I would never have done something like that years ago. I would have just sat back and hoped for the best. But at least I’m given an opportunity to assert myself. I would use that opportunity. But not being dogmatic about it, but trying to respect the protocol of a rehearsal process, which is that it’s the director’s domain. And as long as I have the blessing of my director, I will otherwise remain silent. Sheldon Harnick The way I worked with [composer] Jerry Bock was this. Once we knew what the project was (in this case, it was an adaptation of the film, The Shop Around the Corner, which became She Loves Me), I went home to my studio and began to think of song ideas. And Jerry, who was living in New Rochelle, went to his studio in his basement and began to think of musical ideas. When he had a musical notion fleshed out and thought, “Okay, that’s as much as I want to do with it now,” he would record it. Eventually, he would send me a tape. And there would be anywhere from eight to twelve songs, and he would preface each one by saying, “I think this one is for Amalia” or “This one is for Georg.” The most exciting songs were the ones where he would say, “Sheldon, I don’t know what the hell this is, but I like it.” He was very generous because on any tape of fifteen songs, there might only be one or two that coincided with ideas that I had or that I really loved and couldn’t wait to put lyrics to. That’s the way we always started. I think I got about half the score written before I would come up with an idea or feel like I didn’t want to be constrained by music. This was the third show we’d written, so I
The Interviews 131 knew that when I gave Jerry a lyric, he would set it superbly. And he would quite often surprise me, because I would write what I thought was a march and it would come back as a romantic waltz, and it was better like that. I’ve never worked that way with anybody else.21 David Lindsay-Abaire When you find an amazing collaborator like Jeanine Tesori (we did Shrek, the Musical together), working with her was the best part of that. We also had a gaggle of Hollywood producers and a lot of other people. We’re going to open our new show in the fall, and nobody has seen it for the longest time. It was just me and Jeanine working in private. It was the most glorious experience that I’ve had as a writer because she was a true collaborator. Currently, we are adapting one of my plays (Kimberly Akimbo) into a musical. So, the framework was already there. But finding the song moments and talking it through was fun and collaborative. And every time I put something in front of Jeanine, she made it better. She would ask a question or pull out something that would make the song better or the scene better. That’s what you want in a collaborator—someone who’s going to open you up instead of shutting you down. And that’s just like a marriage, honestly. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s hard to find a collaborator that you jive with so well, and as hard as Shrek was, I knew that the Jeanine part of it was great. And I wanted to latch onto her and say, “Let’s do this again without any of the hard stuff.” On Writing Musicals Joe DiPietro The big difference between musicals and plays as an author is that when you write a musical and you get in the rehearsal room, there are many, many more people there. There’s a choreographer, there’s a musical director, there’s a director, there’s generally many more actors. Everyone has an assistant; the assistants have assistants. I had just had a four-person play produced. There were literally the four actors, the director, me and two stage managers. It was eight people. That to me is almost the essence of the difference, which is
132 The Art of Writing for the Theatre musicals are highly, highly collaborative. Your job is to write the roadmap of the musical and to make that as tight and as interesting and as lively as you can. But in terms of the actual writing process, the difference is in a musical, the songs, by and large, deliver your big emotional moments. So, you are writing scenes that deliver to that big, emotional moment. You have to, as a writer, give up that moment to music. Whereas in a play, you write every emotional moment. Harold Pinter writes silences as emotional moments. Can’t really write a lot of silences in a musical, right? You have to write succinctly and with a real sense of direction of your character’s wants and your character’s needs to get to the music. Whereas in a play, you don’t need as much plot. The really great musicals tend to have a lot of plot, and in plays you can write a ten-page scene which is essentially mood or atmosphere with a lot of subtext happening. I’ve never seen a successful musical do that. With a musical, you want to know who the main characters are, what world they are in, and then what is the plot essentially of what they have to go through to change and learn and grow or not. Also, I always think writing musicals are a little more akin to writing screenplays than writing plays, where you think of the musical numbers as close-ups. You have a movie star. You always hear about screenwriters who write pages and pages of dialogue they love, and then you put a camera on Meryl Streep’s face, and you don’t need to really write. They’ll tell you a lot. Well, you’re doing that in a musical, too. You’re writing dialogue to get to the song, which is going to deliver the character’s emotional journey. Sheldon Harnick Any successful lyricist has to be part playwright and has to be able to put themselves into the minds and the hearts and the souls of the characters they’re writing about. That’s part of a theatre lyricist’s talent.22 David Lindsay-Abaire Structure is incredibly important to musicals, but clearly the bulk of the heavy lifting has to happen through song. And so, when writing a musical, you want to pick a story that “sings.” And generally, the problems need to be bigger, and the emotions need to be larger. A lot of plays have big, giant emotions as well, but you have to have that in a musical to justify someone bursting into song and opening their heart and putting it into music. That’s a
The Interviews 133 thrilling thing when those emotions in plays are generally subtext or unspoken a lot of the time, or they come out as fights sometimes. In a musical, you have the luxury of seeing inside of a character and just letting them sing it or sing it to each other or sing it to the audience, and it elevates the drama in a way that is so unique and specific to musicals. It’s very hard to accomplish those same feelings in a play, just because it’s this magical thing that music does to the body that even the most wonderful monologue spoken by the most amazing actor, center stage cannot; it’s hard to get that same buzz that you feel when thirty people are tap dancing and you just listen. Initially, it was a very hard transition for me, because as playwrights, all the work that we do is internal. We’re by ourselves all the time and no one is going to see this script until we’re ready to show it to them. And so, you have the luxury of it being sloppy for a long time and figuring it out. And I can get to two drafts and it’s not until the end of the second draft where I realize, “Oh, I know what this play is actually about. Now, let me go back and figure it out.” In a musical, you are sharing all the time. You have to be comfortable just putting your mud on the table and saying, “Is this it? Let’s pick through this together.” If it’s the lyricist and the composer that you’re working with, that’s one version. The version that I like is if I’m a lyricist and the book writer, then I’m just doing it with the composer. Sometimes there are directors involved early on, sometimes producers, then that’s even harder because then it’s a committee of people and it’s closer to working on a Hollywood movie with a studio. I don’t prefer that. David Zippel Becoming a lyricist is sort of like becoming a shepherd. You can’t really train for it. And even if you do, you have no idea whether there’s going to be a flock or an opportunity. Marsha Norman Musicals, to me, have so much more impact. And you have so many more tools in your kit. Music can get around any defense that anybody can put up. Musicals are about joy. It’s hard to write a play about joy. You can go so much farther in song than you can in dialogue. And I think that’s why I’m there. The form is so flexible. You’re not the only writer in the room, which is really good. It’s a little bit aggravating that the composer has seven people on his
134 The Art of Writing for the Theatre or her staff, and you have just you. Musicals are the theatre of emotion, and drama is the theatre of thought.23 On the Writer as “The Outsider Looking In” David Lindsay-Abaire I’m racking my brain quickly to think if there are any playwrights I know who aren’t outsiders. Not off the top of my head. I don’t know if that’s what makes us writers, but for sure if you’re writing a good play or a good drama, it’s about characters in conflict. And so, if you’ve spent your entire life in conflict or feeling like, “Oh, how do I get in there? How do I solve this? How do I be a part of that thing?” Then your characters are going to go on that same journey. Maybe everybody feels like an outsider. I don’t know that if it’s just the writers; maybe there are some people that are totally comfortable in their skin and always happy and well adjusted. I don’t know any of those people. Naomi Wallace If one looks at some of our great playwrights of the 20th century: Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, James Baldwin, Adrienne Kennedy, Yussef El Guindi. These are playwrights who many would call “political.” I would call these writers deeply engaged with the world, with systems of injustice. Writers who challenge repression, who envision new social relations, new ways of being human. I’ve always been captivated by how people work and live and love and die, about the myriad ways they are diminished—and their fierce resistance to that diminishment. This is what impels me to write. Stephen Adly Guirgis My father was from Egypt. My mother was Irish American. We were kind of the poor people in the neighborhood, so I didn’t quite fit in with the other kids, although I did have friends. Then I spent my formative years uptown where I fit in more economically, but there weren’t a lot of white kids, and it was fine. It was a great time and I have no regrets, but I spent a lot of my childhood desperately
The Interviews 135 trying to figure out how to fit in. When I headed uptown, I would roll my pants up a certain way, and then when I came downtown, my socks were up. I was desperately trying to assimilate, and that required listening and observation skills. Sometimes social acceptance or even your immediate safety depended on that. I think that the voices that I hear, whatever talent or ability I have for language and diverse characters just comes from that; at an early age, really out of necessity needing to observe and imitate. I just wanted to fit in. Donald Margulies When I was just starting out as a writer, I used to imagine that time and experience would make writing come more naturally, that it wouldn’t always feel like, well, work. Instead, I have discovered that it hasn’t gotten any easier. The expectations that accompany honors and a growing audience make writing more difficult. There are more eyes on you. People are eager to see what you’ve come up with next. Critics compare your work and rank them.24 In a way, I need to relearn how to do it every time. And I know that doesn’t comfort young writers, but it may also prepare them in a way. I’m reminded of something that Tom Stoppard said when he visited Yale. Somebody asked the great playwright the dreaded question, “What are you working on right now?” And he was incredibly honest, and said, “Well, nothing right now, truthfully.” And I was like, “Wow. How refreshing was that?” I’m sure he has said this hundreds of times, but when he said it that night it certainly was a revelation for me. He said, “I have a stack of magazines and books in my office, and I flip through pages, and every once in a while, I’ll come across something and I’ll think, ‘Oh. There’s a play there.’” And it was a wonderful image. He said, “It’s like a pinprick, and you go, Oh. It’s like you’ve drawn blood. There’s a play there.” I can identify with that because I know it when I feel it, and I know it when I don’t feel it, when I’m faking it, or I’m just overly hopeful that it will find its way. On Critics and Theatre Criticism Ben Brantley Theatre reviews were very important to me. When I was in love with theatre, growing up in North Carolina, reading Vincent Canby or old
136 The Art of Writing for the Theatre reviews by Brooks Atkinson and Kenneth Tynan, and whoever was reviewing for The New Yorker; they tended to sort of shift through critics fairly quickly in those days. I write for people who will see plays and people who never will, but again, going back to what I experienced in childhood, reading reviews, that’s who I’m writing for: the kid or the internal kid, or the grownup, or whoever, who is in love with the theatre and wants to know what it was like to be there. Theatre criticism is like sports writing. You’re recording in a way, making a document of a live moment, when something extraordinary may have happened, and it will never happen in exactly that way again. And I do think theatre critics often tend to the hyperbole of sportswriters in that sense—that sort of, “Oh, my God, it’s going over the fence!” And that’s part of the excitement of live theatre too, and that’s something you want to convey. Lyn Gardner One of the things I’ve learned along the way is to remember that writing a review is not an exam. There is no right or wrong answer. All you can try to do as a critic is to keep an open mind and try to be a midwife, not a gatekeeper. Respond with your heart as much as your head and always be honest in your response. Write what you really think and feel, not what you think you ought to think and feel.25 I think I probably learned this over a period of time, and I think the issue around being a midwife rather than being a gatekeeper comes very much from the fact that the relationship between critics and artists has often been one of suspicion in the past. I think the internet has changed that. It has allowed for greater dialogue between artists and critics. Perhaps in the past, if an artist felt upset about something that a critic wrote, they would pen a sorrowful letter to you late at night. Maybe after several glasses of Merlot. And you could then write back, whereas now with email it’s much easier for people to engage and talk with each other. But I also think that, quite simply, the way that journalism and journalistic platforms and outlets have embraced the internet means that it’s been possible to have much more dialogue below the line, and I think that’s only been a good thing. I think because I think that critics and artists really need to understand each other and where they’re coming from.
The Interviews 137 Peter Filichia I went to see a new musical called I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change in Teaneck, New Jersey. And there it was, a tiny production in a tiny theatre. It’s about single people dating and trying to find mates. I was already with my girlfriend for sixteen years, so I didn’t have this problem. I couldn’t relate to the show. I’m not saying it was bad. I’m just saying I couldn’t relate to it. The problems of the people were not mine. However, the audience loved it. As a critic, I always look around to see how the audience is responding. Are the husbands awake? Because so many times husbands are dragged to the theatre, and they don’t even want to be there, and they go to sleep. And many of them have had tiring days. But no, the husbands were awake, and everybody was having a wonderful time. So, why should I write a negative review just because it didn’t speak to me? So, I said, “Single people, you must go to this show because if you think you’ve made an ass of yourself in single’s bars all these years, wait till you see what these people do. You’ll feel so much better about yourself. And by the way, it’s in two acts. So, who knows who you’ll meet in the lobby during intermission? You might not even be single anymore.” Well, the next day, the artistic director called me. He said, “Peter Filichia, you didn’t like it, did you?” And I said, “No, Jim. I didn’t.” He said, “No, that’s all right. I could see what you were doing. You gave us the review that we really wanted. And lots of people saw that review and they’re coming to see the show.” And they moved it. It ran for twelve years and achieved international success. So, it really is a wonderful thing that it had the life it has. The reason I’m positive as a critic has a lot to do with Walter Kerr, who was the critic for the New York Herald Tribune and then The New York Times. Because I will never forget when he said, “Sometimes when I read my review the next morning, while I’m having breakfast, I wish the show was as good as I made it sound.” And that’s where I got that from, because I realized what he was saying. Because we are inundated with so much product and the reader isn’t, we should really accommodate the reader. Samuel D. Hunter I think in general I’ve always been really inspired by writers who have this almost workman-like approach to playwriting. They continued to write and produce even if they fell out of favor with critics or audiences. They just