"It's gonna be rough, guys."
-In Control
It's Wednesday night, almost midnight, and I'm sitting in my condo with the script of "In Control" open in front of me. For the first time since the premiere production in 2011, almost three summers ago, this show is having a reading. After years of revisions in my dorm room, bedroom and home office, trying to think of all the things that could be tightened up, improved, removed, or replaced, on Saturday afternoon, I get to hear how the show plays in its new form, and determine if the changes I made were for the better, or if they themselves need to be changed.
A few members of the original cast are returning in their original roles: Dave Mahokey, who wrote a great deal of the music and lyrics, is returning as Steve, and Nicole Stouffer, who originated the role of Rachel, will be back in her old track again. The rest of the reading cast is either new to their role (I am reading Jude instead of Darren, after three years of reading and performing the role), or completely new to the show. I'm hoping for a fresh take and a fresh start for the project, which spent too many years with the same people. While those people contributed incredibly to the resulting show, as a playwright I now need to see how that show runs with different people, people who didn't have a hand in creating the roles they play.
A few members of the original cast are returning in their original roles: Dave Mahokey, who wrote a great deal of the music and lyrics, is returning as Steve, and Nicole Stouffer, who originated the role of Rachel, will be back in her old track again. The rest of the reading cast is either new to their role (I am reading Jude instead of Darren, after three years of reading and performing the role), or completely new to the show. I'm hoping for a fresh take and a fresh start for the project, which spent too many years with the same people. While those people contributed incredibly to the resulting show, as a playwright I now need to see how that show runs with different people, people who didn't have a hand in creating the roles they play.
Maybe some of the difficulty I am feeling has to do with the way "In Control" was born. As a young and inexperienced playwright, I had always assumed that writing was simply something you could, or couldn’t, do well, especially creative writing. The playwriting course I took in college did little to challenge these views. We had no textbook, no master class text or even any major rules. We read plays, we watched plays, we discussed plays, and in between we took loose, free-formed stabs at writing plays with no real direction. The central philosophy of the class seemed to be “if you could think of it, you could do it.” Then the class would discuss in group-seminar fashion, reading aloud and seeing what worked and what didn’t. Even the standards for success and failure were somewhat arbitrary. If a piece felt “right” both on paper and when read aloud, it was declared to be adequate for the moment, with the understanding that further readings or productions would bring further changes.
Did that method work? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Since taking the course three years ago, I now have had three of my scripts produced professionally, and have contributed as ghostwriter to a number of others. Yet this only proves that, as is often posited, one can “learn by doing” and by practicing. The reading and discussion model provided by my professor, Dr. Denise Pullen, is based on the way that she herself writes, and the playwright’s club seminars that she holds for fellow-minded writers. The method as a whole is extremely free-form and anti-authoritative, which led me to take a free-form, anti-authoritative style when writing "In Control."
When “In Control” was first conceived, it was written and performed as a chamber comedy piece, performed more or less “in concert” in a series of basement readings by the writers, interspersed with songs performed on guitar or piano. As such, the tone of the early script drafts is loose, sloppy and decidedly “at home.” The “imagined audience” was simply our team; we were writing whatever made us laugh, or whatever made us go “wow, that’s good.” If it worked, we threw it in. The only “actual audience” for the piece were ourselves and the friends and colleagues who made it to the private basement shows. Naturally, this yielded a somewhat self-indulgent and unfocused piece of theatre full of private jokes, context-specific silliness and very little genuine substance that would make sense to anyone but the immediate circle exposed to the original drafts.
Did that method work? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Since taking the course three years ago, I now have had three of my scripts produced professionally, and have contributed as ghostwriter to a number of others. Yet this only proves that, as is often posited, one can “learn by doing” and by practicing. The reading and discussion model provided by my professor, Dr. Denise Pullen, is based on the way that she herself writes, and the playwright’s club seminars that she holds for fellow-minded writers. The method as a whole is extremely free-form and anti-authoritative, which led me to take a free-form, anti-authoritative style when writing "In Control."
When “In Control” was first conceived, it was written and performed as a chamber comedy piece, performed more or less “in concert” in a series of basement readings by the writers, interspersed with songs performed on guitar or piano. As such, the tone of the early script drafts is loose, sloppy and decidedly “at home.” The “imagined audience” was simply our team; we were writing whatever made us laugh, or whatever made us go “wow, that’s good.” If it worked, we threw it in. The only “actual audience” for the piece were ourselves and the friends and colleagues who made it to the private basement shows. Naturally, this yielded a somewhat self-indulgent and unfocused piece of theatre full of private jokes, context-specific silliness and very little genuine substance that would make sense to anyone but the immediate circle exposed to the original drafts.
Upon getting a contract to produce a stage version of the show in the Greensburg Garden Civic Center as an experimental summer offshoot of local professional theatre Stage Right!, the producer told us, in no uncertain terms, that most of the script and some of the characters had to go. “Think of your audience,” he told us, “think of the kind of show that will appeal to theatregoers in a real theatre. You’ve written a basement comedy piece, and it works as a basement comedy piece. Now let’s turn it into a play.” Over the next year, we did.
"Killing your babies," in show business, is the act of cutting things that you really liked from the finished product, because either they don't belong anymore, or because you were the only one who liked them. It's one of the toughest and most painful parts of the revision process- Dave and I nearly mourned as we cut some of our favorite characters, scenes and songs from the show to turn it into a better, more focused script. (The sarcastic and irritable Saint Peter, two stoned rock and roll roadies and a lesbian concert promoter are among the most missed former characters.) But there is no question that, sentimental memories aside, the show is better for the changes made.
"Killing your babies," in show business, is the act of cutting things that you really liked from the finished product, because either they don't belong anymore, or because you were the only one who liked them. It's one of the toughest and most painful parts of the revision process- Dave and I nearly mourned as we cut some of our favorite characters, scenes and songs from the show to turn it into a better, more focused script. (The sarcastic and irritable Saint Peter, two stoned rock and roll roadies and a lesbian concert promoter are among the most missed former characters.) But there is no question that, sentimental memories aside, the show is better for the changes made.
Walter J. Ong, a theorist whose article "The Writer's Audience Is Always A Fiction" is published in the "Cross-Talk" text, provides a unique look into the realities of writing for the stage as both similar to and distinct from argumentative writing on paper. “Although there is a large and growing literature on the differences between oral and written verbalization, many aspects of the differences have not been looked into at all," Ong writes. The central thrust of his argument is that the audience for any written piece is “always a fiction,” as the author must make assumptions about who will be receiving the work and how they will be receiving it. This point, however, raises a paradox when writing for the stage. “The spoken word is part of present actuality and has its meaning established by the total situation in which it comes into being,” Ong posits, going on to state that “[c]ontext for the spoken word is simply present, centered in the person speaking and the one or ones to whom he addresses himself." This present actuality and spontaneity is intended to contrast ideologically with the nature of writing- particularly academic writing- as set in stone, frozen in time, and final, or at as a more stable and less responsive medium.
I'm sorry, did I get too wrapped up in my academic side? What I meant is, according to Ong, the written word says what it says, how it says it, and it's up to the author to determine what they want to convey to the audience and how they want the audience to take it. But when you take a written script and give it to a director, the director interprets it to the actors, who then interpret it to the audience- a real audience, and not a theoretical one. Audiences have so many more layers to respond to than simply "the words on the page." They will be responding to how well the actors act (and more than that, how they feel about the actors from previous work or exposure, how attractive they find them, etc.), how well the production is directed, their own mood from the day, the theatre atmosphere, and so on and so forth.
That sort of "fictional/real audience" is why readings like the one on Saturday are so important to creating a play that stands on its own two feet. Trying things in front of different audiences, small ones, big ones, private and public, enables me to see what works for different types of people, and over time, what seems to work for EVERYONE.
I'm sorry, did I get too wrapped up in my academic side? What I meant is, according to Ong, the written word says what it says, how it says it, and it's up to the author to determine what they want to convey to the audience and how they want the audience to take it. But when you take a written script and give it to a director, the director interprets it to the actors, who then interpret it to the audience- a real audience, and not a theoretical one. Audiences have so many more layers to respond to than simply "the words on the page." They will be responding to how well the actors act (and more than that, how they feel about the actors from previous work or exposure, how attractive they find them, etc.), how well the production is directed, their own mood from the day, the theatre atmosphere, and so on and so forth.
That sort of "fictional/real audience" is why readings like the one on Saturday are so important to creating a play that stands on its own two feet. Trying things in front of different audiences, small ones, big ones, private and public, enables me to see what works for different types of people, and over time, what seems to work for EVERYONE.