DCTC New Play Summit

So thanks to the warm heart of Herr Dietz (yes, Steven Dietz, I don't know why I insist on calling him that in blog-land) and the generosity of Suzan Zeder and the UT playwriting program, Frances and I are spending the week at Denver Center Theatre Company's third annual New Play Summit. Four staged readings of new work in progress, three fully mounted world premieres, two and a half days, dozens of theater big shots. And we get to be flies on the wall.

We got here yesterday, and sat in on Steven's workshop rehearsal, also Lee Blessing's. Two very different rehearsals...perhaps a reflection of different stages in the development process, perhaps a reflection of the personalities involved, hard to tell. In any case, in the course of two hours we met Mr. Blessing, Susan Luce Booth from the Alliance in Atlanta, dramaturg Liz Engleman, and Bruce Sevy, the artistic director at DCTC. Yes, everybody was nice, but what matters here is what we observed about their working processes.

STEVEN'S was a roundtable rehearsal, where they did a read-through incorporating his rewrites from the previous day. Then the director started asking questions of the actors, almost as if Steven weren't in the room, and the actors answered her questions about motivations, backstory, etc, as best they could. They argued, they debated the exact word to describe a character's interior state. Steven listened and took notes, as did Liz. At some point, Steven started to ask the actors questions about their characters. And then the actors started to tell Steven and Susan about things that were bugging them -- lines or moments that felt inconsistent with other parts of the script, things that rang a little false to them given their understanding of the character...rarely did Steven try to "explain" why the line or moment worked...he took it in, he said "yeah, you got me on that," he asked another question to draw out what, EXACTLY, was at issue...it seemed like most questions fell into two or three parts, and the real challenge was to get to the bottom of the question, to what was really at stake. Once in a while, Steven would flag another part of the script, or say what he imagined a line was about...but it was more about the actors and director explaining the script to each other until they couldn't, and Steven listening for what he could clarify or complicate based on what they were saying.

LEE BLESSING and his director were at a different point...the script seemed more fixed and it was more about staging the reading, figuring out who moved where or helping the actors to get a particular series of lines right. Mr. Blessing was changing a line here or there, but it seemed like the work of the room was about getting the thing ready for public eyes, and letting Lee get a clear listen of what he had. It was a later, maybe less muscular workshop process.