Whenever I hear a play referred to as a playwright’s “baby,”
my skin crawls just a little bit. It’s
the same feeling I get when I hear a child over the age of 10 called a “baby,” and
I get it for the same reason. It
suggests a desire that the “baby” not grow up, not go out into the world, not
be tested, not succeed or fail as it merits, and not become independent of its
creator.
Yes, the script development process can be discouraging, and
productions can go horribly wrong. A good
script in the wrong hands can be enough to make you stop writing. So yes, the instinct to protect one’s creation
is natural and healthy -- but only up to a point.
I’ve seen too many authors fall into the same traps: they micromanage their productions, abuse
their directors and treat their actors like marionettes. To
them, their internal vision is true north and everything else is a
deviation. If you are a creative person and this is what
you believe, then my advice to you is “Don’t be a playwright.” Find
some other creative outlet where you’re not so dependent on other people’s
interpretation of your work. Theater
works best when everyone on the team takes turns creating, clarifying, adding
depth. The
vision takes on flesh and becomes less perfect, but more real. That incarnation -- that miraculous
incarnation -- is what everyone on your team is there for. It’s what your audience comes for. They are not there for the playwright. They are there for the play.
IMHO, the greatest achievement a storyteller can have is to
lose ownership of the story. To create something of such value that everyone
else lays claim to it. They re-tell it. They reinterpret it. They make it a part of themselves.
Is your script ready for production? Is it tight and stageworthy? Then it is no longer your baby. It is your 18 year old going off to college,
stumbling its way to maturity. It is
heading out into the big, bad world, and for both your sakes you must start
letting it go.
You know what, Mark? There's another side of this coin.
ReplyDeleteYes, there certainly are playwrights who micromanage the productions and demand that everything look and sound like what they first pictured when they wrote it. But "letting go" only works when you are putting your script into the hands of people who are really studying what you wrote, internalizing the artistic vision that is intrinsic to what you wrote, and committing to it. The scenario that happens a lot in the lower echelons of Off-Off-Broadway, when you have inexperienced playwrights, directors, and actors is that the director and the cast want to make the play into something entirely different from what the playwright intended, and feel entitled to treat the playwright as an intruder if the playwright speaks up at all. Such people practice what I have termed "milkman theory": the view that the playwright should do with the play what the milkman does with the milk, just drop it off at the door and go away.
The paradigm that I would suggest for any situation where the play is not published and the playwright is around for the production is "collaboration." Now, there's nothing original about my saying this: the term has been around for ages. But exactly what does the term mean? For starters, everybody truly wants to know how everybody else feels; everybody is truly committed to learning something new from everybody else; nobody gets made to feel like an intruder. If letting go means being open to such collaboration rather than wanting unilaterally to control everything, then I'm with you, but it shouldn't mean more than that. The playwright (when it's a new play and not a published one) must never be the milkman.
Put in brass tacks, in my opinion, any reminder to the playwright about the importance of not trying to control too much needs to be coupled with a reminder to everyone else that the playwright is still a full participating member of the artistic team. There's trying to control too much, and there's also not being involved enough. Either way is a mistake. It's a balance.
Thank you for your reply, Ben.
DeleteI am wracking my memory to see how many productions I have ever had like you describe, where I truly felt shut out of the whole process and no one cared what I thought. I can think of 2 instances since I wrote my first play in 1987, just about 25 years ago. I don't think this is a bad average, especially when you consider that one of these cases was in college and the other was in 1994, less than a year after I came to New York. As you yourself said, this sort of nightmare can happen when everyone is a beginner. But it’s difficult to imagine such a thing happening to me now. I simply know too many good people who know how to act professionally. And I think you do too. The nightmare scenario you describe shouldn't still be happening to you, and if it is, it makes me wonder if there is something else going on here which is isolating you from the rest of your cast.
Two red flags went up for me in reading your post which might explain what you describe.
The first is your desire to speak up during rehearsals, to ensure that everyone knows exactly how you feel, and to not be made to feel like an intruder when you do these things. To this I would say: consider how many blind alleys you charged down when writing your play. Consider how many failed experiments you conducted. Your director and cast need to do their version of the same thing. If you are present during these experiments and you insist on the right to tell your whole team that what they just did was completely wrong, then frankly, you are intruding, and worse, you are undercutting the authority of your director in front of the cast. If you insist on the right to share everything that you feel instead of taking into account the feelings of your team and filtering out the harshness, then inevitably you are going to alienate those people, just as you would if you told everyone exactly what you feel in real life. Instead, you should wait for the experiment to end, then discuss your issues in private with your director.
This brings me to the second red flag: you and your director. Did you and the director discuss the play exhaustively beforehand? Did you listen to each other's interpretations of the script and of each character? Have you done your utmost to clear up any potential confusions? These things need to be done before the show is cast and rehearsal begins. Ask yourself: WHY has the director wanted to make the play into something entirely different from what you intended? Is it possible instead that your intentions in the script were not as clear as you thought?
"Control" isn't your watchword. "Clarity" is. You're not there to hold the reins. That's the director's job. You're there to fill in the blanks and resolve confusions. You will get a lot farther explaining your vision (and leaving the door open for tweaking that vision if and when it doesn't quite work) than insisting on control.
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ReplyDeleteMark: I definitely want to clarify that none of my bad experiences happened in recent years, and not with anybody in the WorkShop. I also want to clarify that I envision the same ideal scenario that you describe in this latter post, and I think your latter post was a helpful clarification of what you meant. All I ever really meant to say was that the playwright should be sure of the things that you describe in your latter post. (I certainly didn't meant to imply that I want to speak up in the middle of rehearsals or hold reins on anything.) So I think we're ultimately advocating the same thing, from slightly different angles.
ReplyDelete>>So I think we're ultimately advocating the same thing, from slightly different angles.
Delete*nodnod* It sounds like it, although I would add that some playwrights I know, who are no longer beginners, are still falling into the traps I mention in my original post.