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.

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

Thanks to Bryan Willis, playwright-in-residence at Northwest Playwrights Alliance, for organizing the get-together with Lee Blessing at the Seattle Rep, August 9, 2009. 30-40 or so of us showed up. Lee was personable and accessible and insightful and most important, he inspired me to sprint the final few yards to finish the latest draft of my current play in workshop.

We started with an exercise – we paired off, wrote progressive dialogue that advanced a storyline meant to make the character uncomfortable. The point: characters react to discomfort, not polite banter. That’s drama.

Some recollections (as I perceive them, not necessarily as Lee spoke) from scribbled notes:

Playwrights today are too polite/too timid – Be intense. This is not creative writing. 21st century playwrights are not 19th century novelists. Get to the point, write intensely, make plays transactional with characters who try to get something from each other.

Understand the audience – The audience arrives at 8:00 PM, leaves at 10:00 PM (or so). They bought expensive tickets, drove into town, they are captive, sit on uncomfortable seats, their standards are high and get higher as the play progresses, they want something clear, focused, intense, that culminates in a way that surprises them, is fulfilling. A play can be a landmark in their lives, moves to a climax, characters who make each other uncomfortable, makes the audience uncomfortable. Playwrights overestimate what an audience is willing to wade through. Audiences are more interested in solutions than problems. We have enough problems. In Richard III he thinks – if I just kill all these people I can be King of England. That’s his solution.

Suspense trumps mystery – Suspense is deeply valuable to dramatists, much more than mystery. Young playwrights often mistake mystery for suspense. No time involved in mystery, audience has no control over it. Mystery is evocative, great in novels. Mystery is intellectual and cerebral. Suspense is emotional. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – George and Martha are reviled in the beginning, in the end they prove to have the stronger relationship, they are survivors, we see ourselves in them, they surprise us. Our relationship, our marriage is put under the microscope.  In Streetcar Stanley at the opening seems to be okay – he’s employed, has friends, has good relationship with his wife – Blanche is the intruder, unsympathetic.

Go big  – What is the biggest statement I can make? What do I care about. Be ambitious. Don’t be afraid to take the last step. In Streetcar the rape did not need to occur – Stanley already prevailed over Blanche but he needs to destroy her. Go where you’re uncomfortable. Confront yourself.  Find an issue important to you and explore it in a way that the audience has not thought about before. Identify audience blind spots and attack – show them how much they’re missing.

Humiliation is good in drama – It is harder for audiences to watch humiliation than violence – it is a dramatically powerful, useful tool.

Plays work in people – We sometimes forget that.

Know the climax before you start to write – Audiences want a climax, the explosion. Amazing that playwrights sometimes don’t even realize that there is a climax.