Saturday, November 15, 2014

Working within boundaries in theatre

I managed to get 5 or 6 pages of The Study Group written while on this trip to Saskatchewan, which is basically the opening 10 minutes.  I probably could have gotten a bit more done but the people in front of me in both directions spent the whole time in my lap.  (I'm really starting to hate flying...)  My characters have started to come to life, which is gratifying, though there are just too many people in the scene, so I am going to start sending a few of them off-stage.  You just can't split the audience's focus (and leave that many actors with nothing to do when they aren't going to have lines).  This is definitely one area where you might do something a bit differently in film than you would in a play.  That said, I think Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead has far more characters (it's set in a restaurant), and he tries to juggle between them, but I'm not entirely sure it works.  Or rather it would work better had he pruned more of the characters or at least taken a fair number of them off-stage for longer stretches.  Classical theatre tends to work best when there are dyads and triads, not groupings of 5, 6, 7+ actors.  That said, I think there will probably be 5 or 6 characters on-stage for most of The Study Group.  It is becoming just slightly too much like The Breakfast Club, but so be it.  One thing that I haven't even seen on stage and rarely on film (though possibly Election comes close) is how intense (smart) high school kids can be.  Their brains are like sponges at that point, and some can be frighteningly smart, but their hormones are still a mess and generally their social skills are weak (at least in part hampered by said hormones).  If I can capture some of that, I think it will be worth it (and not simply using the play as a quasi-homage to my youth).  I think I will have them attempt the time travel prank, but Trevor (the intended victim) will just see through it immediately and play along.  That seems far more realistic and probably funnier than making this a farce where the audience has to agree that this super intelligent boy will be taken in and actually wonder about time travel actually becoming a tangible reality.

In terms of the research, I am pretty close to being done.  I'd love to come across a really old ACT study guide, but I think that is a bit unlikely.*  However, I haven't entirely given up, and I'll see what else is on the Web, as well as at the education library at UT.  I think I have gotten a pretty firm handle on what kind of pop culture things they would reference: a Miami Vice episode from Season 2 (which I happen to own on DVD), Back to the Future, Brazil and possibly The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and then the 1986 Van Halen tour (in the wake of the bitter break up with David Lee Roth).  I've put together a list of songs that would have been in heavy play on the radio in late 1985 through the first week of March 1986.  I think my wife and I have the majority of them already, certainly all the New Wave hits, but all the missing ones should be on Youtube by now.  I don't need to reference them, let alone quote them, or put together a soundtrack or any such thing, but just listening to a heavy concentration of music from that era will be a bit of a time capsule to help me get back into the state of mind I was in at that time.  Quite a lot has been coming back as I have started working on this play.

While I probably could write close to 2 hours of this study group doing various things, I'd like to try to keep it as a one act play that would max out at about 75 minutes.  (I tend to think it is a bit cruel to older audience members to have a one act play go the full 90 minutes.)  I can't really see enough of a double climax to justify two acts, and I think that would really break the mood to have the intermission and come back in.  So that's one way where theatre is quite different from film where you really can have sort of a sustained piece for 2+ hours and not be completely compelled to have TV beats or what have you.  (While I have not written for TV or film for that matter, network TV seems to be even more constrained by the limitations of having to write a full story in 22 minutes with 3 distinct break points to allow for commercials -- this wouldn't interest me at all!)

So I thought I would take this opportunity to get down my thoughts on how playwrights should or at least could consider the nature of the stage when writing a play, given that plays really are so different from screenplays.  About a year ago at the Firehall in Vancouver I saw Travelling Light -- a work in progress by Jordan Hall.  It was basically about a physicist who managed to vaporize himself and perhaps turn himself into an entity of pure energy -- hard to say actually.  But whatever she thought she had done, she really had written a screenplay.  There were many scene changes, which are so deadly in theatre.  The required set was very elaborate.  There were implied flashbacks and so forth.  All of which make sense in film but generally translate very badly to the stage.

Another issue, though not too much of a problem in Travelling Light, is a character brought on for only a handful of lines.  Good playwrights will make sure to double up roles and so forth, as there is almost nothing more annoying for an actor than to have to attend rehearsals but with little to show for it.  Now, in a film, this may not matter much at all for bit parts where the actor can shoot for a day or so, and then be released, but it does not work that way in theatre, though I guess for an extremely complex play, one might only be rehearsing Act I on certain days and Act II on others.

I actually had created a fairly thankless role in Dharma Donuts, and I realized that this character didn't have much to say, i.e. was not much more than window dressing to indicate that this was a functioning donut shop, and that the subplot in which the character would have figured was just a distraction.  If a director really needs some people in the shop for verisimilitude, then the stage crew can sit at a table for the first minute or two, then head out, coffee cups in tow... However, had I been shooting a movie, I probably would have left that character in.

Now that we hear about the role of economics everywhere, it isn't surprising that the economics of putting on plays (always a pretty dicey business even in good times) raises its head more, and playwrights ought to pay at least some attention to that.  For instance, there is no question that Broadway and Equity companies in general are really looking for smaller and smaller casts (with 3 or 4 becoming the new ideal).  However, it is just as true that regional theatre and particularly high school drama teachers want large casts in order to find a part for everyone that wants to be involved.  Halcyon Theatre frequently put on productions with very large casts.  The dilemma is that until you are established (by having a play or two on Broadway) you can't get the play published and then available for these regional companies.

It has never been particularly easy to get plays produced, and in that sense, it might even make less sense to write plays than novels.  However, some playwrights do get attached to companies or even form companies if they have any resources at all just so that they can get their work read.  I wouldn't say that playwrights need more affirmation from outsiders (relative to other artists) but their forum is so public that some feedback can be really helpful.

Now I was never fortunate enough to be an in-house playwright, but I did have a fair bit of exposure to the artists and actors at Halcyon, and I was able to have them do some table reads and a staged reading of my work.  I think in general it came off quite well.  What I noticed is that as I was doing edits and rewrites in preparation for the staged reading, I did change up the parts a bit to match the actors I had in mind.

I actually liked this a lot for a couple of reasons, including that I paid more attention to everyone getting at least a couple good lines (not that everyone had to be the next coming of Dorothy Parker!) and that their role actually advanced either the plot or a significant subplot.  However, I found the main advantage was it forced me to pay attention to details and look for distinguishing characteristics.  It can be extremely difficult for a "cerebral" writer who lives mostly in his or her own head to write distinct voices for the various characters.**  Drawing on specific people and getting a bit of their background and speech patterns can help enormously.  At least that was what I found, and I do hope to continue further in this vein some day.  I would not say that I would totally change what I am writing to fit another company, but I would tweak and emphasize different things to bring my vision closer in line with something that worked for them.  I may possibly have found a company that could do justice to The Study Group, and as I get a bit closer to having a solid second draft, I will reach out to them and see if we can come to some mutually beneficial arrangement.  Were I still in Vancouver, I would probably try to touch base with the group formerly known as the Ninja Pirates, but I'll start with a group closer to home and see how it goes.

* Actually in 2016, I did find the appropriate study guide, and wow what a difference between the pre-1989 revisions and post-1989 revisions, particularly in the Social Studies area.  Some high level changes are noted here. I may even need to put a note in there to dramaturgs that this was heavily researched. 

** One general complaint that I have heard about Tony Kushner is how similar his characters sound -- and they are almost all over-educated.  This is not entirely true for Roy Cohn and Emma Goldberg in Angels in America, but for many others character in his various plays.  It never really bothered me, but I can see how this is something that would both people who are really attuned to character and dialogue.  (I'm trying to think whether Tom Stoppard is also guilty of it.  A lot of characters in The Coast of Utopia all had kind of over-the-top attitudes towards all kinds of things, but reading Russian Thinkers, they pretty much were a group that took extreme positions and didn't engage in that much idle chitchat.)  I actually wonder how recently has this been seen as a valid complaint -- that characters need to be seen as totally distinctive, even in their speech patterns.  I would imagine in the remote past, characters were supposed to act in different ways and have quite different motivations but not necessarily to sound all that different from each other.  Still, I might be way off base here.


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