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At work on play
Getting a new script just right requires more than the lonely labors of the solitary playwright
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH


ACT I, SCENE 2. Early evening. The curtain opens on a bright-yellow room. Tattered posters of Spanish art hang crookedly on the walls.

A wind that stings like alcohol on an open cut rages in Copley Square. Its gusts rattle the windows of a third-story meeting room at the Community Church of Boston, where a semi-logical arrangement of fold-out chairs, tattered couches, and tables are awash in the garish glow of fluorescent lights. People amble in casually. Some have come straight from work, so there are apples consumed and coffees sipped amid the gathering crowd. Close to 7 o’clock, people take seats. One woman plunks herself on the couch and kicks her feet up. Janet Kenney, all tousled hair and smiles, heads to a table near the door and sorts through a stack of collated papers. These are copies of her play’s script, which is to be read aloud tonight. Joe Byers, who carries himself like an athlete, waves loiterers to empty seats. An actor-cum-playwright whose play was performed in 2002 at Abingdon Theatre Company in New York, he’s the evening’s facilitator. There are 15 people in the room at its fullest.

JANET KENNEY: There’s goldfish and Easter candy on the table there. It is a full-length so I don’t want anybody getting sleepy on me.

JOE BYERS: Anyone have any announcements?

PATRICK GABRIDGE: They’re gonna do one of my plays at the Hit and Run Theatre Company in Salem. Anyone else ever get anything done there? It’s the same play that was done in the Boston Theater Marathon two years ago. And I was in New York yesterday. I got something in the New York City 15 Minute Play Festival down there. I have one in the Boston Theater Marathon this year, too.

JOE: Kathleen’s play is in the Marathon, too.

KATHLEEN ROGERS: And Joe’s!

DAWN DREISBACH: I’m new and I have a one-act being done at the Footlight Club in May. Mine got turned down for the Marathon. Footlight in Jamaica Plain picked it up. I’m new, but I figured I’d meet other playwrights.

This exchange of hits, misses, and hints carries on for several more minutes at Write On, a writers’ group with a membership list that’s 38 names long and counting. The number of attendees at a monthly meeting ranges from a dozen to 20. At the gatherings, members hear others’ plays and offer feedback. The work might be a one-act, a 10-minute short, a collection of scenes yet to be arranged in its final order, or a full-length play. Some meetings serve specialized purposes. A session last October, for instance, was packaged as a festival of readings of 10-minute plays. That’s because looming over the horizon was the deadline for submissions to the annual Boston Theater Marathon, 10 hours of 10-minute plays by New England playwrights that takes place on April 18. The Write On gathering offers an opportunity for writers to hear their pieces read aloud and polish them before the deadline.

Whether a playwright has had dozens of projects produced or is hammering away on a first play, there comes a point when the characters he or she has put down on paper must be personified by human voices to see if the play "works." Enter the workshop.

"Often playwrights have things going on in their heads that they’re trying to accomplish through the characters, and oftentimes hearing it for the first time, they can make decisions as to whether they’re accomplishing what they set out to do in the script," says Joe Antoun, who founded Write On in 1994. "They also get an idea if the dialogue is the style they intended. The key thing is they get feedback. They get other playwrights talking with them about it with the intent not to critique it, but to help them write the play they want to write."

Antoun is artistic director of Centastage, a small theater company that rents space for Write On. Centastage produces new works exclusively, and many come through the Write On pipeline. In fact, says Antoun, finding new scripts was a major reason for establishing the group.

Writers sign up for a time slot months in advance of a session. Since many members have experience as actors, readers are selected on the spot, though sometimes a playwright brings in actors for the occasion. After the reading comes the feedback, which follows a precise format: the group addresses what they like about the script, and what troubles them — which might involve a character’s development or the trajectory of a plot. Then the playwright gets a chance to ask questions. Throughout, the guiding principal is that comments must be framed as impressions, not suggestions. It’s the writer’s job to iron out the wrinkles in the characters and mend holes in the plot.

At a recent Write On meeting, the spotlight was reserved for Janet Kenney’s play, Globus Hystericus, which was commissioned by Theater Emory, in Atlanta, for a festival of staged readings of new work about ecology and politics to be held next February.

Kenney, who is playwright in residence at UMass Boston, distributes scripts to six readers. As they begin the first scene, she squirms slightly in her seat. The readers, who sit facing the group, acclimate to their characters tentatively, as though breaking in a new pair of shoes. The lines start flowing more easily and Kenney squints as the readers’ voices shed new light on her characters. She nods subtly once in a while, and is prone to sudden spurts of notebook scribbling, but mostly she just watches, her expression like that of a parent scrutinizing her child in a recital. The child is performing a routine the parent knows inside and out. But now, before an audience, it’s different.

A script is the product of a solitary mind, as characters are conceived, a conflict is contrived, and words are laid down. But the very nature of theater is collaborative. The handiwork of numerous contributors — from the director and the actors to the lighting, set, and sound designers and, of course, the audience — ultimately appears on stage. That’s why it’s almost unreasonable to suppose that a script might be delivered fully formed from a playwright’s printer. Like a living being, it undergoes stages of gestation, not the least of which is its first exposure to an audience, its emergence from the womb of the playwright’s mind.

"Hearing your play in a reading or in rehearsal, you may think you have an idea in your head, that something might be funny," says playwright Patrick Gabridge. "Sometimes you’re right, but sometimes you bring it in and the easiest stuff to spot is what’s really overwritten. Or maybe the audience is really bored. That’s the most important thing. Or I’ll write something that’s really personal, sometimes I’ll write something I don’t think people will get. Sometimes I’ll write something that seems so specific to my own experience and I’ll see that people really relate to it — not in the same way I’m relating to it, but that’s the Holy Grail. Why do you keep going back to write a play every day? What’s the reward? You’re not going to get rich. You’re probably not even going to get famous. But there’s something vital about the artistic connection with the audience. When it works, it’s really exciting. And you can affect people’s lives, which is neat. When you hear an audience laughing or crying, you know you’ve done something. Readings give you a sense if you’re on the right track."

Sometimes, though, too many chefs can spoil the broth. In a group of a few dozen attendees — with varying amounts of experience — many find that not all suggestions warrant the same amount of consideration.

"I’ll be frank, almost nothing I’ve heard in Write On has made me change anything I’ve written, and almost all the plays I’ve written have had a production somewhere," says Kathleen Rogers, who’s had several works produced by Centastage. "I take it with a grain of salt. There are huge categories of feedback that I’ll reject, like things that smack of academia. For instance: ‘This is how it should be structured.’ I’m not an academic playwright. Everything I know about theater has come from acting training, or working on plays. What I find useful is when people tell me where they lost the story."

But many find that weeding through responses to a work is indispensable to crafting a script, says Lisa Burdick, who runs Shadow Boxing Theatre Workshop, which meets twice a month at Green Street Studios in Central Square. "You work on something alone in a room and do it for the love," she says. "Okay, so you’ve been dreaming; now comes the time to get it on stage. I’m the one who tells the writer to get practical. I might tell them, ‘Look at all these characters and scene changes. No one will ever want to produce that.’ The upper limit is six characters. My job is to get it so that it’s a piece that some company will want to produce in a new-works festival."

Legend has it that Arthur Miller banged out Death of a Salesman in a week, but rare is the play that emerges without being chiseled and hacked in draft after draft. And the act of listening spawns revisions. "For some, hearing their work is a charge. For others, it makes them cringe. They get defensive and upset," says Burdick. "They don’t want to hear suggestions. And people don’t know everybody, so it takes a while to learn who to trust and who’s making good suggestions. Many have to learn to say, ‘That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not what I want to do with this play.’ "

According to Ilana Brownstein, the Huntington Theatre Company’s literary manager and dramaturge, there’s a clear distinction between good and bad play development. "Bad play development is when you take your script and throw it to the wolves and you’re sort of just at the mercy of people who are not conscious of the fact that it’s in an early stage," she says. "Things change, nothing’s set. The goal, really, is to take the new-play-development process and put it in a room where the writers don’t feel like they have to get defensive about hearing commentary. So if it’s coming from a trusted source, you can actually hear somebody when they say to you, ‘Act II has a structural problem,’ which maybe you can’t hear in another venue."

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Issue Date: April 9 - 15, 2004
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