Recently, a busy LA theatre director and dear friend remarked, “Heaven deliver us from playwrights who have casting ideas.” Because she’s a friend, I made appropriate sympathetic noises and patted her shoulder but inside I was thinking about a part in one of my plays, written for a specific actress who performed it brilliantly in a reading before I cut the entire part. People who saw the reading loved the character and the actress but cutting her was the right thing to do for the play. Would I have cut her sooner if I hadn’t had that beloved actress in mind? Would I have even written the part?
As a playwright, I believe even the most structured writer, who maps and outlines, pulls material from the preconscious mind. I try to honor and pursue every imaginative impulse, even if it leads me away from my original concept because maybe it’s going someplace more exciting than what I had planned. And if not, I cut it; but if I salvage one terrific line, it was worth the trip. Also, and this is as mystical as I get, I believe cut material leaves its ghost behind in the script as a deep but inaccessible subtext. For me, a new play is mysterious. The forces that shape it are not dead when the play’s first director begins to guide it toward that first production.
New play production in Los Angeles seems to be energetically engaged in a Renaissance. New plays are hot; a growing number of theatres have new play reading series. The Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights recently hosted a panel of local play development leaders for a symposium on dramaturgy. TDF offers a newly published book called Outrageous Fortune that chronicles new play midwifery and the struggle between directors and playwrights. There’s plenty of information around. We need to absorb it and use it.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest there are two different mindsets a contemporary director needs to cultivate. It’s not that directors don’t make discoveries about a play in the rehearsal hall, but directors need to be strong. A production needs an essential unity only a director’s vision can provide. In the case of a classic, or at least a play that has had a few productions and perhaps a New York run plus publication, a director is almost obligated to reinterpret the script. Directors can achieve fame by taking older work and making it fresh again. But I would argue that working with a new play requires a different skill set.
A director needs to be strong enough to hold the production elements of a new play together and at the same time be secure enough to allow the playwright to pursue his own vision. A writer acquires craft by participating in the mounting of the play and, yes, by learning from mistakes. And “mistake” might not be a valid term in this context. A playwright and director can sit together and go scene by scene through the script telling each other what they see and asking the other, “Is this what you see?” “Is this what it means to you?”
If the director and playwright don’t see the same thing, then the playwright needs to use this new clarity to rewrite and the director needs to use this new clarity to adjust her vision or they both need to realize this isn’t a good partnership. The sooner the better.
Playwrights struggle toward production. Having won over a production entity, they aren’t likely to give up easily. They are more likely to keep their mouth shut and watch as an auteur director takes their play in a direction they never intended. In the best of all worlds, director and playwright achieve a Vulcan mind meld and never disagree but in the real world both parties are obligated to show some maturity and recognize that when disagreements arise, they are there for a reason, and that reason impacts the meaning of the text. The real work is figuring out what’s causing the difference in point-of-view and solving the cause.
A play is not work for hire and yet the playwright who directs her own work deprives herself of something. It takes two eyes to perceive depth. The director’s vision is necessary but it wouldn’t exist without the playwright’s vision. Respect each other. Help each other. Every person who loves theatre is your collaborator. And for me the best of all possible worlds is the world of the theatre.
Playwright Henry Murray on the multi-award nominated set of Treefall at Rogue Machine where the play made its world premiere.
