Winter Classes Start Tomorrow!

The Acting Studio winter term playwriting classes begun tomorrow night.  There is still room in each class.
The Advanced class meets every other Monday evening for ten weeks, 7-10 PM.  We are reading a full-length play for each class (tomorrow is Sophocles' Antigone; the next play is Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder), discuss it and then hear each others' work.  Students must have taken Beginning Playwriting or its equivalent.  Class is at Shetler Studios, 244 West 54th Street, 12th floor.  Tuition is $200, payable at the first class.  We have a diverse group of students this time around-  different ages and backgrounds.  I'm looking forward to teaching it.
The Beginning class meets every Wednesday evening for ten weeks, 7-10 PM, starting January 30th.  There is no prerequisite other than a desire to write.  For each class, we will discuss a short play, and do in-class writing exercises.  Homework consists of reading a short play, and rewriting work begun in class.
For more information, contact Acting Studio manager Angelo Berkowitz at actingstudioinc@yahoo.com, or leave a message at 212.580.6600, and he'll get back to you.  For a full list of classes and faculty, see http://www.actingstudio.com

Free Workshops, Continued

I must say that I had such a great group of kids on Saturday for the writing monologues workshop. They ranged in age from mid-teens to early twenties. They were focused, talented, respectful of one another and incorporated my notes into their second drafts effortlessly. I was really impressed. And Executive Director James Robinson and Program Director Arthi Sundaresh could not have been more helpful. I only hope that I can teach there again some day.

Reading Plays

I have read a lot of plays, and I still do. I read plays because I’m fascinated by how they work (each them its own little kingdom), and because I love stories. Another reason I read plays is because if I’m writing a play about characters or a situation that has been a play already, I want to read it. I don’t want to make the same mistakes another playwright already made. I want to make my own, different ones.

There are many people who don’t like to read plays. I remember actor friends from college who’d complain bitterly about the reading list we had to slog through. It was quite extensive, and there are certainly plays on it I have no desire to ever read again (“Secret Service”? “Fashion”? I shudder at the thought). But I always thought it was weird that my pals complained about reading plays so much. They were all readers; they read history and novels and whatever else. But plays were somehow more work to read.

I’ve had playwriting students who don’t like to read plays. Somewhere they’ve read, or someone has told them, that playwrights should not read plays written by other people. That they will somehow be unduly influenced by reading other writers, and lose their own voice. I admit I did used to go through a period if I was writing a first draft of a play, I didn’t read other writers. I don’t need to make that demarcation as clearly anymore. I’m not so afraid of another style creeping into mine anymore. But I admit I find it counter-intuitive to ignore millennia of plays that have come before us.

Plays cost money to buy- I’ll grant you that. I have been building a library of libretti for the past two years, and it hasn’t been cheap. But I do hit the good book sales, and I know about the secret weapon: Project Gutenberg (link is above). Project Gutenberg has hundreds of plays in the public domain, in many languages. It also has foreign language (including Middle English) plays in translation. It is a wonderful, wonderful thing! It has poetry and prose as well.

I have heard Edward Albee say (and I’m paraphrasing) that he doesn’t understand why people don’t like to read plays. A play is as much of a story as a novel, and it takes a fraction of the time to read. Makes perfect sense to me.

Ada-wha?

I got an email from a playwright friend yesterday, which I responded to this morning. I had to think about what she’d written before I could write back anything of substance. She is adapting some myths into a play. She’s done adaptations before, as have I. But this adaptation is different for her.

I know how she feels. I tried to think of one adaptation I’d done where it was the same process as another I’d done, and I couldn’t think of any. It’s always different. It always has to do with the nature of the material, plus the original author’s intent, and where it intersects my intent.

So it’s in that context, I can truthfully say I don’t have a clue what adaptation is. Has Sarah Ruhl, the critics’ darling of the moment, written an adaptation of Eurydice? I bet she’d say no. Has Steve Sater written an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening? Probably, but it isn’t a slavish adaptation, however true it is to Wedekind’s intent. Even though I knew even before I read an interview with Sater there are scenes in the musical that aren’t in the play. The father-son scene makes complete sense, it’s emotionally satisfying, it isn’t jarring in the least. However, I know enough about the original play, and European drama and societal attitudes of a century ago, to know that Wedekind never would have written that scene. In his authorial context, in his world, it wouldn’t have made sense. But in Sater’s and our world, it makes perfect sense. I think that is what makes that libretto particularly admirable. If he did a word-for-word adaptation from the German, or from Eric Bentley’s translation, that’s all well and good, I guess. But to get into the world of a play and figure what is going to resonate emotionally with a contemporary audience, while not violating what Wedekind was trying to say- to me, that’s the whole point.

Never fear, there will be more Dramahound on adaptation. I’ve spent years of my life trying to figure it out.

Immortal Magyar

When I was researching Hungarian history for what turned into two plays (“Maura and Katinka” and “Geography”), I was looking at a list of famous Hungarians of the 19th century. There were some politicians, some composers (like Liszt) and a guy who I had never heard of: Ignaz Semmelweis. Who the hell was he?

Well, if you’re a woman and you’ve ever given birth (or if you’re not a woman and you’ve ever had surgery), Semmelweis is kinda huge. He discovered the importance of antiseptic surgery 15 years before Joseph Lister did- though I know I was told in high school that Lister was first. Semmelweis was from a working class family in Pest. He studied at the General Hospital (Allgemeines Krankenhaus) in Vienna and specialized in obstetrics. He noticed that the women giving birth in the charity ward had a lower death rate from childbed fever than the wealthier women. In some European hospitals up to a third of women giving birth died from childbed fever, so this was no small thing. The reason was that the poor women tended to be dirtier, and the doctors would wash their hands between deliveries. The rich women were cleaner, so the doctors didn’t bother.

But nobody in power in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, believed him. They thought he was at best an upstart, and at worse a nut. Semmelweis finally retreated to Pest, and ran an obstetrics clinic there. But still he was undermined: one of the nurses had a grudge against him, and didn’t bother to change sheets between patients, even though she’d been told to; things of that ilk. This went on for years- Semmelweis battling to save women’s lives, and carrying incredible guilt when he was unable to. He had doctors wash their hands with soap, sterilize them with a chemical (carbolic acid) and then rub their hands with oil, so that the germs (not that anyone knew what a germ was yet- this was all observation on his part) wouldn’t get into the pores of their hands (no rubber gloves in the 1850s).

Finally, in the summer of 1865, Semmelweis lost it and cracked up. His wife had him committed to a sanatorium outside of Vienna. What no one knew was that during one of his last obstetrics cases, Semmelweis had cut his finger. He developed gangrene, and was dead in two weeks. The day before Semmelweis died, in England Lister began using carbolic acid to sterilize his hands before surgery. Fourteen years later, Louis Pasteur identified the bacteria that caused childbed fever.

There is a building in Pest that’s part of the general hospital that has Semmelweis’ name on it- I’ve seen it. But there’s not much else to remember poor old crazy Ignaz, who saved so many lives. “Immortal Magyar” is the name of an old biography of Semmelweis from 1950.

Careful What You Say

I am very careful about what I say in a theatre or in the lobby during intermission if I don't like the play. I have overheard things about my work that I wish I hadn't more than once. I remember seeing a show 15 years ago in I think the Royale, one of those old great Shubert houses on 45th Street, and I was with my parents. We were sitting in the orchestra very near one of the boxes. I'd been backstage in that house. There is a curtain hanging underneath the box, and if you go behind it, you are backstage. At that time there wasn't even a door. At intermission my mother starts- ranting would be the right word- about how she hates the acting. I'm begging her to shut up or lower her voice because at best she's entertaining the stage management staff, and at worst she's undermining the actors' confidence. Which I told her, and which, of course, didn't stop her.

In Manhattan, there's the ten block rule. You have to be ten blocks away to say Anything negative, however much you're dying to, to whomever you saw the show with. I really try to stick to this rule, which it's always easy if you've sat still for three hours and had your head brimming with what you want to say. An old boyfriend of mine extended the ten block rule to include cars with the windows closed.

But once in awhile when you're the target, you hear something good. I worked on a 24 Hour Play Festival in Kansas when I was playwright-in-residence at the Inge Center. It was not the best of circumstances. I'd be there 36 hours, my divorce lawyer was having a hard time with my case, I had bronchitis, I was on antibiotics and had a raging fever. My play was in the first half, and the lead actor had far from mastered his lines so there was a lot of the other actors milling around onstage and trying to feed the lines to him. So the only thing for me to do at intermission was go out for a smoke. There was a family already out there- mother, father, adult son. They talked about what they'd just seen. The more obvious and cliched the situation, the more it was like a TV skit, the more they liked the play. So then they got around to mine. "I didn't like it," the son said. "Why?" asked his mother. "Because you didn't know what was going to happen next," he said. Which to me is the the best thing he could have said. If you do know what's going to happen next, then what's the point?

Smith & Kraus felt otherwise; it's coming out in their "Best Short Plays for Three or More Actors" this year. It's called "Body Shop."

Dramahound Dramaturg

In school, I learned that the first dramaturg was Schiller. He was helping Goethe out on a play. But they had a difficult time figuring out exactly what Schiller should be doing, so he only had the job a few months before Goethe let him go. In German, "dramaturg" is "dramaturg" (the "g" is hard). In French, it's "dramaturge" (the "g" like a "j"). In Polish and Romanian, dramaturg actually means playwright. In English, people seems to spell it without the "e," but pronounce it either the French way or the German way. Which is strange. It's like when I was a kid, the accepted spelling was "theater." But somehow, by the time out of college, all these theaters were spelling it the French way (or aping the Brits, spelling it that way).

Dramaturg means different things to different people. Some theatres say it's the equivalent of a literary manager. Others say a dramaturg is the person who helps the director with his research- both the history of the era in which the play is set, and the production history of the play if it's a revival. To me, being a dramaturg is more like being a copy editor. You have a piece, you want to keep the writer's voice in in and your voice out of it, you want to keep it accessible and clear. You don't want to leave big black paw prints all over it.

Particularly if I'm working on a good play, being a dramaturg is fun. You get to observe somebody else's writing process, you're the second set of eyes, you help them make the play better. Very rewarding, emotionally and intellectually if never financially, but that's okay. Very like teaching, actually.

But if it's my play, dramaturgs make me really nervous. I had a bad experience with one early on, who insisted a comedy of mine really needed marijuana-induced jokes in it, and I couldn't get away from her fast enough. Would have totally undercut who the characters were, and the world they were in. Or as David Chase had Carmela say to AJ when he was smoking dope at his confirmation party, "You're an animal!"

In the best of all possible worlds, to steal from M. Voltaire, I am blessed with a good director who has worked on new plays before and knows what he or she is doing. That is a complicated enough relationship; adding a dramaturg is like having a third person in bed with you. Of course if it's not my play, it's totally different.

More Drama, Less Hound

Over the past few days, I’ve noticed this blog is more “hound” than “drama,” and I’ve asked myself what’s up with that. I’m not unqualified to write about theatre. I went to college, then grad school, joined The Dramatists Guild (http://www.dramatistsguild. com/), wrote plays, wrote more plays, taught, dramaturged (not a pretty word, certainly not when used as a verb; it basically means helping the playwright shape their play into what they want it to be, either before or during rehearsal), wrote the libretto and lyrics for two short musicals, taught, wrote, etc.

Part of my reticence is never wanting to sound like the voice of God. I can’t get a roomful of students to agree on “what a play is”- nor should they. A playwright without opinions can’t be much of a playwright. Some years ago, I had an incredibly talented student who kept blowing off my class. He didn’t even bother to be sneaky about it- I’d see him hanging out in the hallway with his girlfriend. When I confronted him, he said, “You’re trying to tell me how to write.” I was astonished. Really. I said, “I’m trying to give you tools to help you write. I’d never tell you how to write. What would be the point of that?” He never missed a class again.

Writing plays is sort of a strange process. Unless you write with a partner, it involves a great deal of solitude; the discipline to not let the rest of your life (blogging, friends, bills, email) distract you for blocks of time; the continuing act of will to keep at it, despite the fact you will invariably be rejected many more times than accepted (I mean, of course, the work being rejected, though it often feels infinitely more personal than that); and the willingness to commit something of yourself to paper. A very smart director friend said to me once that the act of writing a play means that you believe that something that is emotionally true for you is true for everyone else. She was right, and I’ve never forgotten that.

And then, if you’re lucky, you go into rehearsal, and everything changes. You talk (to the producer, the director the designers); you take notes; you ask the director questions; you rewrite scenes that don’t work. You listen (to the director, the actors, the designers, the producer). You rethink characters. You rewrite lines that assault your ear like a car alarm. You invite someone you trust professionally to rehearsal, and listen to what they say. Finally, you reach the day that the script has to be frozen (no more changes, not even moving a comma), or the actors will rise up and kill you. And then, you can’t do anything. Which in its way is the hardest part of all.