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.
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