| The Forest for the Trees |
| Friday, 11 September 2009 |
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I’ve been working on a collection of short plays, Baby You Can Drive My Car, for the better part of a year. One 10-min play in the collection, Pumpkin Pie, was included in the 2008 Theatre Artists Studio’s Holiday Festival. Several other pieces have been workshopped at Space55 in Phoenix. People are excited about the collection and want to continue developing the work for production next fall. It’s too bad this piece isn’t even close to what I intended to write. Collaboration in the development of a script is unique to theater. Sure screenplays are revised by committee early on, but once they’re sold, a writer ceases to have any influence on what happens to the work. By contrast, a playwright walks into the forest of notes after the completion of the first draft. Early readers or a group of fellow playwrights are generally asked for feedback: what works, what doesn’t, what was confusing, and so forth. From there a second draft is pounded out, and the writers and perhaps a few actors and maybe even a director handle the material. Rewrite, read, repeat…. The trees are thick; the forest grows dark. As I brought a play or two forward, the work was in front of many eyes and passed among many sincere and insightful theater artists – people I love and respect. Not surprisingly, their individual visions for this collection were as varied as a tech week is long. As I assembled their notes, I was hard pressed to find three notes headed in the same direction, making rewrites confusing. I wanted to solve all of their concerns that seemed to circle around issues of staging, casting and writing for an imaginary audience. I was getting pretty scraped up racing among the trees. And inevitably I lost the forest for the trees. The project typed and bound in front of me didn’t look anything like the hard and funny play that I originally wanted to write. I capitulated and in so doing I wrote a play that does solve all of those concerns, and now tastes like flat cream soda. Seriously. In a last ditch effort for fresh and unaffected eyes, I sent the script to one of my Canadian colleagues, Sterling Lynch. He had no knowledge of my hesitations. Not only were his notes specific to the forest and each tree, but he also threw out the same five plays that I would choose. Finally. I finally recognize where I am and where I want to go. I need to leave the trees of staging, casting and writing for the imaginary audience behind. I want to find the writer in me who didn’t know any better. The one who only wrote the story whether there was a 15-year old boy, a submarine, or squirt guns on every seat in the house. The story is my forest; productions are the trees. And I have no business wandering among the trees in the dark. |
