Sobering Thought

A depressing/sobering article, if not exactly news, from fellow playwright George Brant. Puts into perspective the idea of "making it," and makes me think (again) about day-jobs.


http://artsblog.freedomblogging.com/2008/01/17/a-career-in-theater-is-a-fast-track-to-poverty/

Bummer of a thought of the day. In better news, teaching acting continues to re-teach me what I know about theater. More on that later. But a good truism: "if you want to learn, teach."

Pearls of Wisdom from Sherry Kramer

Each of the pieces of information below could probably be a separate post. But they all came at me fast and furious the other day, in an hour-long meeting with Sherry about my play, "Summer People." I'm still digesting it all...but here are a few of the pearls of wisdom, pulled out of context.

1. In tragedy, we need to work for "RETROSPECTIVE INEVITABILITY." We should get to the end, be able to walk backward through the play, and see how EACH ACTION OR DECISION, taken in order or context, led to the final climax. Be careful that one domino leads to the next. This is something Sherry also talked about (as have others) in terms of SET UP and PAY OFF. You HAVE TO pay off what you set up, and you HAVE TO set up what you pay off. Go through the play. Look for S. Dietz's "questions at the top of each page..." THEN (oh, duh, right, of course) CHECK TO SEE THAT YOU ANSWER THEM!!! That's the part I think I forget.

2. Maybe there is ROOM for repetition onstage. "ONE OF THE WAYS WE SIGNIFY VALUE IS THROUGH REPETITION" -- think of "The Piano Lesson" and how many times some things are brought back -- like no, Berniece won't sell the Piano, and by the way, the land Boy Willie wants used to be worked by his family as slaves. The rule of three (if you want the audience to remember something, say it three times) exists for a reason.

3. Says Sherry, "THE WAY TO MAKE SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS IS BY TELLING MORE, NOT LESS" Sherry's a big believer in magic onstage -- think Kushner's "theater is magic with the wires showing". She argues that "if you say something is magic, then it is" -- but it's more complicated than that. Think (again) of the Piano in "The Piano Lesson." How does August Wilson imbue the piano with power?
a) He references it, without telling us much "oh, that piano B.W. keeps talking about"
b) He surrounds it with mystery, elevating it -- why won't Berniece play it? What's with the carvings? Why can Maretha play it, but not Berniece?
c) He uses it in a story. "This is the story of the Piano. THIS is why it's so important"
d) He uses it for Final Effect. Now we know it's important, Berniece USES the piano to drive away the ghosts -- it turns out the thing DOES have power to CHANGE what is happening in the play.
She also argues that objects onstage need LITERAL meaning or use for their metaphoric power/magic to float free. Basically, that roots something so that it can float into metaphor rather than acting simply as an "unidentified flying symbol." It gives it a REASON to be in the play in the first place.

4. LAW OF FUTURITY -- Sherry brought up the Hitchcock example. 12 men in a room. They talk for 10 minutes. A bomb goes off. VERSUS: We see a bomb in a room. 12 men come in and talk for 10 minutes. A bomb goes off. In which instance do people pay more attention to what the men are saying? In the second. Sometimes knowing what will happen makes everything happening in the present more important.

5. YOU HAVE TO give your audience enough explanation of things that they know what they're following. YOU HAVE TO pay off what you set up (yes, I already said it. I'm repeating it, so sue me. See #2).

On Dramaturgy

From Daniel Alexander Jones's Dramaturgy class.
What does a dramaturg on an old play usually do?

Research, and lots of it. Looking at history, language, politics, social underpinnings, coded talk...the job of the dramaturg is often to awaken a sense of the many contexts in which a play is/was operating at the time of its inception, to bring to the surface the multiple forces that impinge upon a play.

The play, in other words, is not a static, closed entity.

Of course, neither is a NEW play. And the New Play Dramaturg can work much the same way, helping the playwright to investigate his or her own impulses, and to examine the multiple forces working on his or her own play.

A good question: Where did you get the first impulse to write this play? Those are wonderful seeds from which to grow a conversation about the play.

DEFINITIONS, SHERRY KRAMER

Sherry is teaching a class that rests largely on the idea of metaphor.

One of her principle assumptions is that theater is AUDIENCE-centric, that whatever we do onstage is really about Making Something Happen in the Audience. She thinks that there should always be hope in the room...not sure what that means yet, but I'm putting it here anyway, to think about later. These are some definitions she threw us on the first day of class.

Metaphor: To transfer or carry. A fusion chamber creating fresh comprehensions of the world. A transfer of ENERGY, a sharing of POWER, part of a system.

in my words: When one thing becomes a way of talking about something else, and that substitution asks you to rethink both. A juxtaposition.

Symbol: Represents or suggests another thing because of a relationship or convention. Unlike metaphor, there's no surprise, no doubleness in a symbol. There is already a clear relationship, because of our own pre-existing understandings or assumptions, between signifier or signified.

So actually, over time, metaphor can BECOME symbol. Think, for instance, of the broken-horned unicorn in THE GLASS MENAGERIE. By now, we all know that as a symbol of broken dreams, lost hope, etc. But when Williams wrote the play, it still operated on the level of metaphor, where those connections were new, surprising (and as a result probably MORE poignant).

Then there's ALLEGORY: "arbitrarily assigning meaning to things" -- meaning, says Sherry, is the "heaviest thing there is -- flattening and collapsing dramatic arc wherever it lands...so bring in the meaning at the end, or folks are going to say "oh, the play's about X" and stop paying attention.

All interesting to think on.

Symbol Exercise

Jot down a list of things that are symbolic in our culture. Examples: The Red dress, cindarella's shoe, Desdemona's handkerchief, seven-league boots, statue of liberty, etc.

Now think back to an object that was really important to you in childhood, that you imbued with meaning...maybe even saw as having special powers.

Write a scene that includes both your object and one of the other symbolic objects.

DREAM EXERCISE

From Sherry Kramer

Write down a dream you (or better, someone else) have had. Choose two particularly evocative images. Take five to ten minutes to start a play using those images.

Current Personal Statement...looking for suggestions

Below is my current personal statement, followed by a few thoughts. I'd welcome any suggestions on the P-statement, since I'll be using it relatively soon and I'm terrible at writing them. The "THOUGHTS" stem from the P-statement, and the work I've got in the pipeline

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I consider myself a theater practitioner first, a writer second. As someone who spent my first twenty years in theater on the receiving end of scripts both finished and unfinished, I always try to remember that my play is the opening volley in a larger, embodied conversation that can (and must) exist in space and time, on the bodies of its participants. It will be up to them to find any music in the words I’ve handed over, up to them to carve out a space in which to reach our audience. Language is my first tool as a playwright, but I ignore other stage tools – light, color, tempo, spatial relationships, audience – at my peril, because of course a play can only be fully realized in real time, as one element of a wider, dangerous collaboration.
Why dangerous? When theater is at its best, anything can, and does, happen onstage. It tests the limits of human behavior, emotion, and imagination – when a king’s incestuous marriage throws a country into famine, when Angels make prophets of dying New Yorkers in the middle of AIDS epidemics, when a soldier returns home unable to distinguish between past and present. Most theater plays it safe, or over-explains itself, or falls into a wasteland of ordinary language, ordinary imagery. The real danger in creating theater is in forgetting to be dangerous.
To be engaged in play-making is to be engaged, always, in the act of breaking ground. It is my aim, when I write, to create a new language for each play I write, both in the words I give my characters, and in the world I ask my collaborators to inhabit. I try not to limit my writing to one set of themes or questions. I try to remember that as there is a music to speech, so too is there a music to movement, to the carving out of space, and to the sequence of events I employ in the service of story.
Summer People, the play I am submitting for your consideration, is a good example of my discursive relationship between page and stage. This is a piece that began as a series of five interwoven monologues, telling the story of a tragedy on the Maine coast. I directed the piece in a local festival last year, working with actors for two weeks. The more time we spent in the rehearsal room, the more obvious it became that I would need to rewrite the play in a different form. With each draft, I focused on a new stage tool – as a result, transitions in time are instantaneous, as a result, soundscape is my eighth character. Through every draft, I pushed myself to find what was dangerous in these characters, to trust my collaborators, and my audience, to follow me across a rocky coastline.

If you've hung in this far, here are the "THOUGHTS" that go along with it.

I'm half-way through grad school, and have gotten a lot of opportunity to work my "story" muscles -- really sitting down to think about plot, narrative, motion, turns. The question that stays in the front of my mind these days, though, is "what is the role of the playwright in a theatre landscape that seems dominated by devised work?"

My current projects include:
(1) An adaptation into stage form of a screenplay I wrote -- the professor has asked us to try to write our first drafts in three days or fewer
(2) A project where I'm inventing characters, aiming a video camera at myself, and basically forcing myself to stay in character for three hours at a time, telling their stories as they come out, then going back later to edit and transcribe, then write from there.
(3) An adaptation of a greek myth...but I've approached a director and a very movement-oriented actor, and we're going to build a small ensemble, then generate the play out of our improvisations, found text, free writing etc. I'll be the one piecing it all together and "speaking for the trees" -- keeping a narrative line going. So I'll be the playwright, but in a very different setting.

I think the challenge I'm setting for myself, for the next year and a half, is to keep in the front of my mind that this IS an embodied art form, and to find as many different ways of ACTUALLY WRITING A PLAY as I can. What, in other words, are the models available to me, beyond sitting down to my keyboard?

It could be a total disaster. But it might be really cool.

Finding a Balance

I've spent most of the break writing, writing and re-writing a play that just won't come. The other day, I went back through all my previous drafts and realized how far I've moved from my original idea.

Sometimes, of course, this is exactly as it should be. But in this case, I realized that the further I got from the core impulse that led me to write the play, the more the work felt like slogging, and the slower I moved. So, after two days off, I'm back playing patchwork with various drafts, trying to find a balance between whimsy and motion (a big word at school). So far, so good.

Finding a balance, especially at graduate school, can be a real challenge. I'm sure it is in any context as a playwright, especially as an emerging playwright, since so often we are put in the position of supplicant, asking established organizations (and established artists) to take us, and our work, on. It's an act of faith on their part, and we're expected (usually) to be open to changes. Fair enough. I know that's what I'm signing on for.

At graduate school, I know I'm signing on for three years working with established playwrights and teachers who have been around a lot longer than I have, have worked places I want to work, and know more than I do about the business and craft of playwriting. The challenge, here, is to balance a respect for that (and I DO respect it, and to be in graduate school you need to respect it, to some degree) with a respect for you own point of view, your own vision, and your own taste. It is far too easy to let your professors' tastes become your own, to let your professors assumptions become your own. On the one hand, in grad school, you're asking for that -- but you have to keep questioning the things they present as fact, and you have to test it against your own taste, your own experience...otherwise you'll turn into a sheep. Even if that makes you a well-pedigreed, talented sheep who writes great plays and gets recognized for them, you're still a sheep.

So here's a New Year's resolution. To remain absolutely open to the wisdom my professors, mentors, predecessors have for me -- but to accept none of it blindly. To trust them, and to trust myself.