On Blue Slacks

I remember my reaction upon seeing Death in Waiting for the End of the World come onstage in pastel blue polyester slacks: My heart stopped. Stopped, got up, said, "That's it, I'm leaving," and headed out of the theater. It was my first real introduction to the power and effect of directorial interpretation.

Let me say for the record that directorial interpretation is not a bad thing--usually. I've had directors do very good things with Dinner for Several and Bob's Date, for example. But when a director's vision rams up against the far left-field wall of what a playwright had in mind, it can get ugly.

Death's blue slacks were a minor offense. I know a playwright who wrote a mime into a script whose job it was to make set changes. That was it. The play gets produced elsewhere, and the video copy finds it way to him. And there, caught on tape, is his mime...always on stage, now an integral part of the entire show, just as he had never intended the mime to be.

Who makes the judgement call? And how?

The thing that brings this up is this: At some indeterminate time in the recent past, I saw a play which shall remain nameless to protect the innocent. In this play, a non-specific number of people are sitting around a table talking about their jobs. One character is helped into a rabbit suit by another and begins crawling and sliding around the stage while eating a carrot; another female actor gets changed from men's clothes into women's; a third changes from business attire into a burglar's outfit: black sweatshirt, gloves, ski hat, and sunglasses. To top it all off, the lights change to a sort of disco-frenzy scheme, club music pumps over the speakers, and a body builder, who's been helping with some of the costume changes and doing barbell curls in the background, gets up on the table and starts doing push-ups.

I'm not much for "modern" theater, so I sat there in the wake of this...thing and wondered what it was I was missing. What had the playwright been trying to say? Fact was, I'd missed a lot of the dialogue because my brain was trying to process a bunny suit.

After the show, my wife had a chance to talk to some actors who'd been part of the evening. And as it turns out, none of the weird stuff--bunny suit, burglar, push-ups and disco lights--were in the script. None of it. But the director felt the script "needed something." Mind you, this is a script that was chosen out of a bunch of entries, presumably on the merit of how it was written.

Plays pass through filters before they are seen by an audience. A director filters it through his or her vision; they "see" how the play could look, what it could mean, how the setting could play into the vision. Actors filter it through their perception of the characters; who they are, what they want. But those filters shouldn't be so thick as to obscure what the playwright had in mind and why they felt compelled to write the play in the first place. And "compelled" is not a word I choose lightly. We write because something in us stirs. We have an idea, a thought, a concern that we need to process through the medium of the stage play. It matters to us. No one writes simply because they have nothing better to do; and certainly not someone whose intent it is to have their work seen by the public. We write, and as we write, the piece becomes more a part of who we are, a metaphysical extra limb, one more vital organ. And when someone then validates all that by agreeing to produce and perform it, what we are hoping--and let me speak for all playwrights here--is that what appears on stage is as close as possible to what we had intended when first we were moved to write.

I can say with all honesty that if the bunny-suit play had been mine, there was no way I could have remained in my seat and let it go on. I would have stood up and demanded it be stopped right there. What that director did--and I think anyone who saw the piece would concur--was to rip that playwright's metaphysical extra limb off and beat her senseless with it. He left her work battered and twitching on stage in a pool of professional disrespect, beaten beyond all hope of recognition. And that should never happen to a playwright's work. (In case you're wondering, I don't think the playwright had any input. If I am wrong, and someone involved in the production happens to read this, kindly correct me.)

Every play eventually gets reworked a bit somehow; settings change, physical bits get added, costumes are modified, lines get cut or reworded. It's the nature of theater and the process of putting up a show. But it's part of a director's job to make sure that when the play passes through the requisite filters before it hits the stage, the playwright's intent and vision also remain as clear as possible. After all, without that primary intent and vision, you wouldn't have a show to begin with.

John Shanahan
June 30, 2005

The Realities of Rejection

Here’s a simple fact of the craft: If you’re going to write, and you’re going to submit your writing, you’re going to get rejected. If you’re new to this, take a moment to re-read that sentence, and if it scares you, please stop writing.

Or read this:

Rejections say almost nothing about your writing. Rejections speak to your choice of market.

Okay, some people can’t write. Period. They try, but they don’t have the chops. But for the most part, if you’ve taken the time to work on your craft and you’re constantly refining and learning and never being entirely satisfied with what you’ve done and you don’t think you’re the most brilliant thing that’s ever hit the writing world, a rejection is more about the luck of the draw than anything else.

When we write something, we do so foremost to please ourselves. We have to like what we’ve created; we have to believe in it, believe in its ability to leave the house and find somewhere to be. All well and good. But we can’t expect an editor or artistic director to look at that same work and think, "Hey, you wrote a play that was good enough for your own standards! I should produce it!"

The second hurdle any work faces is the editor—and here, by "editor" I include whoever it is at theatres who reads incoming scripts, whether it’s for contests or consideration for a season, whatever. Fiction-wise, it would be an editor. The next person to consider your script has their own set of ideals. At a theatre, it may be the company’s mission statement or just the type of work they want to be known for producing. If I take a light romantic comedy like "One Before Forty" and toss it at a theatre whose last five productions were dark, socially relevant, current-events-based dramas, I’ve just wasted paper and postage. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad play. I chose poorly.

Look at the Tracker page. I have sent "Grievance" to nine different theatres. As of this writing, four out of the five that have responded have turned it down. The fifth has said incredible things about it, about how it impacts the actors, how much they’re enjoying working with it, how it has something to say. It’s been placed as the closer for the NEAT Festival, based on that.

What did he see in it that the other four didn’t? As far as submissions go, with "Grievance" I have a success rate of exactly 11 percent. I’m batting .110. If I was a baseball player, I’d be shipped to the farm leagues. Or Litle League. Does this make a bad writer?

Of course not. Submission is as much a numbers game as anything. I know playwrights who’ve shoved out far more plays in the course of a month than I do in a year, and they get the same kind of return. It’s not the quality of the material, it is its applicability to the needs and expectations of the markets it’s sent to. One man’s piss is another man’s Perrier, I’ve always said. I happened to be reading "Discoveries" by the Jacobean poet and playwright Ben Jonson the other day, and I came across this quote: "Opinion is a light, vain, crude, and imperfect thing; settled in the imagination, but never arriving at the understanding, there to obtain the tincture of reason. We labour with it more than truth." Generic’s opinion was that they didn’t want "Grievance". Same with Hovey, Theatre@First and NewGate. But NEAT did. To me, that’s a success. The piece will get performed; it’s already had an effect on a director and actors, and now it has a chance to effect an audience.

That, my writing friends, is my personal measure of success.

If you’re going to write, and if you’re going to send your work out into the world to be judged by others, you are going to get rejected. You are going to get rejected. But there is one thing, one mantra, that you need to take with you:

Rejections don’t make you a bad writer. They make you a working writer.

John Shanahan
June 14, 2005