Tracy Letts, author of August: Osage County, recently said in an interview with Elvis Mitchell that every time he gets to write a play he forgets how to do it. He looks at his bookshelf of the plays he's written and doesn't remember.
I know what he means.
Every time I sit down to write a play I wonder if I'm going to be able to do it. Still. Even after writing plays since I was 20 and going to NYU for graduate school. It's still a struggle. It's a delight and a joy and a privilege as well. But it's a struggle.
I wonder if I'm going to keep getting better with each one.
I wonder if it's going to be any good.
A few years ago, I wrote three plays in a short amount of time. None of those plays are plays I'd show to anyone. They are plays that I had to write to get to the next place in my playwriting. But most likely none of those plays will be produced. I needed to know that I could still write. I had written a play a few years ago that people seemed to like, even though I considered it pretty imperfect. So I wrote these three plays in quick succession.
One was about an Asian family in which the matriarch was so concerned with achievement that she had slept with her son years before to keep him focused on success.
One was about a man who traveled to China to thank the tigers who had sacrificed their penises to make natural viagra which helped him recover his sex life after he had cancer.
And the third was a transexual update of Medea in a post-apocalyptic world.
Now that I type those descriptions I realize that a big part of the problem of those plays was tone. I'm not even sure if those plays are comedies, dramas, satires. And that confusion definitely made its way onto the page.
But I wrote them fast. And I wrote one right after the other. Probably in a period of about six months or so. Even out of those "failed" attempts, people liked the first one. And the second two were well written.
Then I got the idea for my play, THE SNAKE CHARMER. And it changed the way I structured my plays. It marked a period for me where I set myself free. I started researching plays for the first time. I was writing about a piece of art and I wrote it in three separate time periods and story lines. I also wanted four actors to play multiple characters. It's a play I love and a play I'm still trying to get attention for.
Then I wrote OPEN the following year. I wrote it after a conversation with a friend of mine who's an agent and who encouraged me to ditch the pilot idea I had about open marriage and instead write a play about it. I wrote it during the Playwrights Union writing challenge two years ago. I wrote 55 pages of something. It had no end in sight. So we read it out loud and based on the comments I got from the group, I knew exactly what the play was about. It was about honesty - various degrees of honesty. And I wrote a draft of four scenes in four days. It has expanded over the years and it's now nine scenes. But this latest draft is really exciting.
I decided that last year was going to be "the year of rewrites." And I did rewrite OPEN and THE SNAKE CHARMER during that year. But I also got an idea for a Seven Deadly Sins project, of which OPEN would be the first play. And I started working on a commission application for Clubbed Thumb based on this Robert Altman's Nashville idea. I liked the parameters that they set up so much that I already decided I would write the play even if I didn't get the commission. I didn't get the commission. And the play is the next one I will write. It's a big idea and will take a long time to complete. I think. I have 25 pages of something. But I've read a lot for it. I've done a ton of research and I have a lot more to do.
But that brings me to this new play I'm writing, which I'm now calling AFTER AND BEFORE. It's the story of a priest that becomes disillusioned with the metaphysical. It's about loss. It goes backwards. And it's got three characters. This is the first time I've ever written a play with this small a cast. It's very big in terms of scope. It takes place over the course of 30 years. But it only has three people in it playing three characters. No double casting here. And it's challenging me in a new way structurally. I've never written a play that goes backwards. I was influenced by one of my favorite musicals, Merrily We Roll Along in the idea that it goes from cynicism to optimism. At least that play does. I realized as I was writing this first act and as I listened to Alfonso Cuaron talk about Gravity that this play is really about someone going from Experience to Innocence. He mentioned William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. And that really struck a chord with me.
The play is not an intellectual conversation about how someone doesn't believe in God any more. It's really about someone who has lost and no longer has a need for the metaphysical. The play is a memory play. It's a life review. It's so human and it's so sad. And it's me dealing with the death of my father. I didn't realize that when I started writing it.
It also has a lot of music in it. I think there are things about it which are musical. I have these homilies which anchor the play. And they seem like the big breakout into song moments. They are these monologues where we get to know how our lead character tries to portray himself to his congregation even though his internal life and his personal life tell an entirely different story. And there's actual singing in it. I like it when characters connect to each other through another medium, another form of expression that tells what they can't say themselves.
Liza Minnelli has said that the lyrics of Fred Ebb gave her the means to express herself in ways that her own words failed her. I think that this is the case for Don. The music and the shared love of music between Don and Mike is something that bound them when they didn't have the words to speak their love to each other using their own words. At least that's Don's limitation. Eventually, Mike found the courage to do that in his own life.
And I've come to the end of Act One and 62 pages. I now know that I know how to write this play. I know I can finish it. That's really the important thing. Sometimes there are plays you write and you don't know how they will wrap up. That doesn't mean they aren't full of ideas or that at one point you did know how it would end. It just takes off somewhere else. That doesn't mean that I'm an advocate for neat and tidy. Not at all.
I have the feeling that I'm overwriting this play like I overwrite all of my plays in the first draft. But since I am not at the end of the play yet, I won't know what information is necessary to lay out and what isn't. So I'm giving myself lots of opportunities to lay out that information and take away what I need to when I need to.
But 62 pages in 11 days. That's an accomplishment.
I am grateful to have written Act One of this play so quickly, without rushing it.
I am grateful to know where I am going with it.
I am grateful that the idea of it is so clear and the intentions of the characters are so clear.
I am grateful that I am open to the process of letting it happen.
I am grateful that I can finish this soon and that I have other projects that await me and that I am excited about.
I am grateful to take the weekend off from working on it.
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