Why is Pinter So Dour?

It’s been said that he’s equal parts Hemingway and Beckett but to me Pinter is Alfred Hitchcock. Re-reading The Birthday Party- discovering it for the first time, previous readings were like skimming - the suspense, tension, uncertainty - like a rug is about to be pulled out and someone is about to crumple down and fracture. It’s like a car accident, you’re horrified but mesmerized. It’s where every moment the stakes are incredibly high and one or two sentences in the whole play reveal, rather hint, only hint, at what the real action is, what the possible objective can be. I am scared for the people in the play - but who is the perpetrator, or is it a macabre accident, that these people are in the room. Chekhov, in a way, not in the language - but characters who are always at the boiling point or about to get there, and can be pushed over, a fractured structure that doesn’t follow climax/resolution formula. I used to think that Chekhov gave me permission to throw a bunch of characters in a room and let them run around complaining - that’s what it took to write comedic tragedy. This is not reality, it’s a heightened prismatic interpretation of a dream that you throw on a stage, yet an invisible, taut string holds it together and it vibrates through the play. Pinter is brilliant like Eugene O’Neill for me because I can read both as literature, I don’t need to see them to appreciate the drama here. The words, spare, repetitive, or blown out like wind sails in O’Neill’s case, carry a compelling narrative.

Pinter wrote The Birthday Party in 1957, his first (or second) play.

Does Harold Pinter’s private life shed light on his plays? - Jan 13, 2010, The Guardian

The following is from Harold Pinter, Writing for the Theatre (1962)

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections.

When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

There can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.  ((Related: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. - (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II))

We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: ‘Failure of communication…’ and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rear-guard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

Each play was, for me, ‘a different kind of failure.’ And that fact, I suppose, sent me on to write the next one. 

Do Playwrights Deserve Nurturing?

From The New York Times today:

…. close relationships between playwrights and theaters are increasingly rare these days, and developing more of them is one of the chief recommendations of a new study of the state of the American play that the nonprofit Theater Development Fund published in book form in late December. Yet several obstacles stand in the way, according to the study, which also looked at playwrights’ struggle to make a living and which has set off a debate in some theater circles. See Playwrights’ Nurturing Is the Focus of a Study, NYT, 01/14/2010

prnyc punctuation!

Today I completed the first draft of a new full-length prnyc. How do you know when you complete the first draft? You reach a state of complete exhaustion and you cannot gone on. There is nowhere, in this milieu, beyond the last line. Life goes on beyond the play, as it inevitably will, as it must, just as life existed before the wisenheimer protagonist opened his mouth to piss off the bestial antagonist.

Of course, this is not the end of this process; in many ways only the beginning. Today it is a punctuation! Good enough to send off for feedback and the beginning of the process leading to the reading. How did this play begin?

A year ago I wrote a 10 min. play called WHITE NOISE; it played for eight performances at H-B Playwrights Theatre, Bank St, NYC, as part of “The Waiting Room” series.  In the play an over-zealous New York PR guys puts the moves on a crazed marketing exec in the waiting room of a therapists office. They test each other for 10 minutes and resolve to meet, after the PR guy rants about his horrible boss nicknamed The Beast.

What if that guy actually went to work the next morning? I asked myself, on my way to work one morning, as the bitterly cold wind whipped around Riverside Park. I used the 10 min. play as the the first Scene and built on that for a full length play. The Play was called PUBLIC RELATIONS and we went through two readings in Donna De Matteo’s playwriting class. At the end of that process I realized that:

• I had no idea what this play was about
• There were too many characters
• The action was too diffuse
• There was no climax
• I failed to establish the language and rhythm necessary to carry this play

I realized that as long as I was tethered to the 10 min play the full-length play would not be able to find its own life. So I:

• Deleted Scene 1; started at Scene 2
• Deleted 6 characters; pared down to 5
• Compressed action time frame to 48 hours
• Wrote the ending first, then the climax

In other words, I took Lee Blessing’s advice. Thanks Lee.

The Theatre

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It’s got five or six
people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people
have worked together a lot.  Michael J. Fox

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental.
It’s so much like life.  Arthur Miller

thanks to Nancy at nycplaywrights

Reserve For The Maharini Now

See more on The Maharini - background, map, ticket info

The Whole City is a Theater

Pumping, thumping, on stage, in the audience, speeding underground, grabbing a cab, power walking to Fairway, the grit, the dirt, the smells, all of it, bury me where the BQE merges with the LIE, my life is a permanent traffic jam and this song is my mantra. These streets will make you feel brand new, these lights will inspire you. Let’s hear it for New York.

The Cold Reading

I have used Bruce before in cold readings. He knows what he’s talking about and he always brings something active, something alive to the reading, no matter what the role. Thanks to Nancy McClernan at nyc playwrights for producing this video. What he’s saying: if you don’t get the reading you expect, don’t blame the actor. Look to the writing. Also - some actors can be great in the cold reading and bring nothing further to the performance, and the other way around. It’s a tricky business.

Put money in thy purse

The repetition of that phrase frames this scene that ends of course with Iago’s vow of double knavery against The Moor. I can watch Branagh over and over as Iago or Hamlet. He goes to so many levels, dances and descends, and always seems to be in the moment, reacting to Roderigo as his weaknesses become apparent, as the moment develops, like a true sociopath, always fixated on the objective that is buried deep, protected.

The Terror of The Reading

Last week I succumbed to a torturous and necessary ritual of playwriting called the reading.  A ’reading’ in playwriting parlance means gathering  a bunch of actors to read your play, with a critical audience to give  feedback. This time it was at Donna De Matteo’s playwriting seminar at H-B Studio on Bank Street.  I consider this my ‘home group.’ Although the audience can be tough, they are never mean. The terror here is mostly self-inflicted. The class had heard pieces of THE CAREGIVERS before. This was the first time for a read-through of the entire 80-90 minute full-length. 

There is a cadre, notably led by Nancy McClernan of NYC Playwrights, that believes the purest, most effective ‘feedback’ a playwright gets is from unfiltered audience reaction, not skewed and baggage-laden critique. Do they clap, laugh, glower, fall asleep, groan, fidget?  How is the audience, the ultimate arbiter of the value of a play, reacting? What else do you need to know?

I go the other way. I believe you need verbal feedback to get insight into your play. In fact, you should crave feedback as much as the infielder who wants the ball hit to him, no matter how wicked the hop (Sorry, I’m thinking Derek Jeter, the Yankees). Critique can be a hellish experience, full of extreme terror and psychic humiliation … but no pain, no gain. In the critique process you absorb pain, try to identify the most useful comments and dominantly espoused points of attack. What hurts most is usually the most useful. Lee Blessing is right (see Lee Blessing on Playwriting). It’s about causing discomfort, a play is a disturbance. If that whirlwind tension is not there, what do you have?

The goal of this process is a fully rounded play that is a complete experience, believable in its own world; a play that sets an expectation and achieves it, ready to get ‘on its feet,’ into production. So far, just a dream for me. Why?  Because everybody was ready for my reading - the actors, the class, me … except the protagonist. He didn”t show up. “It’s like having a party without the guest of honor. We kept waiting for him to show up” - one comment.  “You can’t write a protagonist who is inaccessible.” And then the unkindest cut - “Maybe your protagonist is too normal.”  Normal? Not that. They all loved the female lead - specific, quirky, believable, accessible. I spent the summer on her, digging into her history, psyche, culture, physicality, spiritualism. It was a huge accomplishment to ‘get’ her - but I forgot about him, the guy who is driving the action. Whose story is this anyway? Maybe it is really hers. Forget the protagonist? How stupid is that? That’s a hole so big you can drive a Hummer through it. There is always a period of self-flagellation that occurs after a critical reading. The reaction you want - the reaction all playwrights want  - perfect, don’t change a word, you don’t need to do anymore, let’s get it on the stage immediately - is really a fantasy. How many versions of Leaves of Grass are there? How many versions of Shakespeare’s plays?

I knew something was missing in the first three scenes, despite all the activity. I scribbled in my notebook: It’s Flat. Why is it flat? It’s in motion but it’s not moving anywhere . It’s not the actors - although good casting helps immensely. You can ‘hear’ flatness because actors don’t have the dramatic elements to work with. Actors develop and train by running great scenes, finding the truth in the words as they are acted in Death of a Salesman, Streetcar, Strindberg, Chekhov, et al.  Ultimately this has to be on a stage and experienced by an audience that is highly critical, moment to moment.

A credible reading, if it serves its purpose of improving the play and not as a destination unto itself, can shave months or years from the process. You never really know what your play is worth until you hear it read by actors, and hear it critiqued by playwrights and dramatists who, hopefully, are invested in your success.

Last year I did not have this perspective and readings were tougher. In the Playwriting Lab, Freehold Theatre in Seattle, summer, 2008, my first readings of pieces of THE CAREGIVERS felt like descending the gates of Hell into a sulfurous torture pit. To give voice to my terror, I wrote my raw feelings in a notebook as my play was being read. Here they are, as written IN CAPS:

• I WANT TO DIE.
• PLEASE MAKE THE PAIN STOP. I CAN’T TAKE IT.
• I WANT TO PUKE AND COMMIT HARI KARI AT THE SAME TIME
• I CAN’T WRITE. WHY DID I THINK I COULD WRITE? I HAVE TO STOP! SOMEBODY PLEASE STOP ME.
• WHO WROTE THIS CRAP. WHAT AN IDIOT.

And this is my favorite …

• IF I QUIETLY LEAVE, DO YOU THINK ANYBODY WILL NOTICE?

Yeah, but what’s underneath that? And underneath that. A great scene or play can be run through one of those checkout laser scans - every angle you look at it, it fits together, there is some logic, even if the world of the logic is invented, as it is in a play.

How Deep Is Iago’s Love?

Is Iago’s love as deep as his resentment? What if Iago is not methodically calculating and he is actually confused, struggling with his own desires, making it up as he goes along? I am not what I am - what does that mean? These are some of the questions Philip Seymour Hoffman asks as he approaches Iago in the (sold out) Public Theater production of Othello opening today in New York (see video below). I am reading Othello anew, examining the angles, enjoying the language, watching the videos of Laurence Fishburne, Kenneth Branagh and Irène Jacobs from the 1995 production. How much in the text is not what it seems? 

The seed for this production of Othello was planted a number of years ago over a Princeton lunch table, when novelist Toni Morrison issued Peter Sellars a challenge. To answer this challenge, Sellars has launched a five-year project, of which this production is the first installment. Parallel to it will be the creation of a new play by Toni Morrison entitled Desdemona, which will engage, debate, and complement Shakespeare’s play.

In Morrison’s words, “The only reason Desdemona loves Othello, or so she says, is the stories he told her. She listened to these stories of his, of his travels and his adventures. Where are those stories? We need to hear those stories that are not in the play.”

The artists will return to Othello and Desdemona over several years, developing them in tandem with a view toward ultimately filming each play on location. This will create a body of work that can go into high schools across America, offering penetrating, poetic and insightful language and up-to-date images that address the challenges that lie ahead for a new generation.

Perhaps the 21st-century can respond to Shakespeare’s prescient and painful allegory with new structures and new relationships that reach toward shared understandings of simultaneous global realities, and that might reconcile the cries for justice across the sexes, across class, among nations and across cultures.

See the Public Theater YouTube channel