MeyerBros

the SSDC and the DGA are entangled in an all out (sometimes legal) battle over copyright issues. everyone, surprisingly, wants to be paid for the work that they do.

i’ve been reading the latest issue of The Dramatist, a magazine that i recieve as a member of the DGA. i love this magazine as much as i hate it. every issue is thrilling, inspiring, angering, pathetic, self-centered, energizing, smug and insulur. what more could you ask for in a publication. i am reminded with every issue that New York is the only important place in the world (with the occasional minor exception of Chicago), playwrights are the only important people in the theatre, and nearly everyone is out to get me. i can also read back-to-back articles by Marsha Norman and Richard Nelson, the former listing her simplistic rules of playwrighting (which she teaches at Juilliard) and the latter arguing that such rules are the bane of playwrighting (which he teaches at Yale). neither one, you will notice, is too far from the center of the universe, which is Broadway. and neither one dares question the centrality of playwriting in that universe. this is, after all, “The Journal of The Dramatists Guid of America, Inc.” the issue concludes with a playwright’s legal battle against a former director in copyright issues. i disagree with both sides of that one article. that’s a lot to disagree with, but as a young anabaptist radical i consider myself up for that sort of third-way challenge.

playwrong: perfect theatre

I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world.

And then I like to put this—with some sense of struggle remaining—into a classical form, a Greek form, or a beautiful dance theatre piece, or some other effort at civilization. - chuck mee jr.

i’ve taken several classes in playwriting (and various other sorts of writing), all of which have stressed the editing and polishing process for perfecting plays. and in every case there is an assumption that plays can be polished, at which point they will work and be perfect. or not. Don Yost, my first playwriting prof at Goshen College, did talk about the need to stop at some point, decide that a play is done, and move on - but only after the play was appropriately perfect. and his are perfect. they follow the rules, they rise and fall, no word is wasted, and everything falls into place by then end. perfect.

the current theatre paradigm for new play development is based on this concept, and a clear understanding that the audience, the actors, the director and everyone else in the world know best exactly what a play needs to achieve it’s perfect state. mainstream theatres no longer produce original work unless they can workshop it and fix it and change it and make it perfect. playwrights are told that this or that character doesn’t have the appropriate arc, or journey, and what’s his or her motivation anyway and act two felt awkward and the build was wrong and that just drew them out of the world, you know, so fix it. and that’s the way i learned to do theatre. motivations were consistent, build had to flow, characters had journeys and arcs and everything was comfortable and nothing was distracting.

but i’m not sure i believe any of it any more. directing Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and now Fear/Falling i’ve been fighting my own battle to find the balance between my training to clean it all up (and fear of excommunication if i don’t) and my desire to leave it rough - to paint in broad and sometimes mis-placed strokes with bold colors (or the lack of bold colors!) and create something that feels rough and real to me.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE AUDIENCE? they’ve been taught exactly what i’ve been taught about theatre, and they have spent much less time questioning those theachings. and if i begin to change the rules, how will they know? i don’t know. i wish they would talk to me about it. it’s really my main complaint with Andrew Hughes’ review of Danny…Blue Sea - he wanted something clean and i didn’t. when he says there were some jagged edges, a scathing critique, i take it almost as a compliment. we’re looking for different things.

and yet there is such a thing as bad theatre. i’ve seen it. sometimes it is rough and sometimes it is polished. we have to find new criteria and new words to express it.
do you know what an ombuds is? an ombuds is sometimes hired by a government or company to represent the will of ‘the people’ - who otherwise might not have a voice within the organization. that ombuds can become an internal critic of the organization. if we drop the whole ‘will of the people’ part - wouldn’t it be fascinating to have a theatrical ambuds embeded in every theatre company? my job as ombuds at NWA would be to critique our season and each of our shows from within, and with a strong knowledge of our mission and goals. I would look at Danny…Sea, not as a reviewer for the edification of the general public, but as a co-artist responding to the stated goals, for the edification of the artists involved.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 3:28 pm by eric and is filed under writing, theatre, risk, playwriting, art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.