Teaching Pirates Dramaturgy

© 826 Valencia

“Everyone here knows what the fourth wall is, right?”

Stares. Heads shake side to side. “No.”

“That’s great!”

It is probably true of any profession. Any obsession. Anything one spends their time doing: it is easy to forget that not everyone knows the lingo. Why would writing tutors at the famed 826 Valencia know that the fourth wall is the invisible, nonexistent wall that separates actors onstage from the audience—that it is the line that separates the fictive from the real? They aren’t playwrights. That’s why I’m there, standing in front of them in a room designed to look like the hull of a pirate ship, stumbling through the basics of playwriting and dramaturgy in my allocated hour.

To forgo all suspense: it went great, and next Tuesday 20 freshly-minted new-play dramaturgs will enter the field. 826 Valencia is teaming up with A.C.T. and the project-based Downtown High School to help students “who have not experienced success in the district’s comprehensive high schools” craft monologues and 10-minute plays that will be published in a fully-designed book.

The experienced 826 tutors have taught fiction and essay writing, but never plays, so I was asked to come in and answer a few simple questions: “What are the differences between plays and other genres—especially film?” “What are the parts of a play?” “What are some tips you can give the tutors to pass on to their students on how to make their plays stronger?”

Wow. Great questions. And spending the past two weeks thinking about how to answer them strengthened my belief that if you want to do, you really should teach first. I learned academic writing by teaching freshman comp. for two years. I continue to learn how to write for dramaturgical publications by mentoring our yearly fellows. And now, for the first time, I was articulating for myself what a play is. What the role of the dramaturg is.

I said a lot of stuff yesterday morning. Theater is different from film because of proximity, focus, and language. Instead of going into Aristotle’s parts of a play—which I never really got behind—I talked about the loss of and search for stasis. I broke monologues down into categories. I explained how scripts are the beginning of a collaboration, not an end in and of themselves. Nothing surprising. But I was proud that I distilled new-play dramaturgy into a simple two-part formula:

“What are you trying to say?” —> “This is what I hear.”

We’re compared to consultants. Therapists. Editors. But really, dramaturgs are professional audience members—that talk back. It isn’t our place to make plays better: it is our place to help playwrights understand what they have so that they can craft their plays into what they want them to be.

© DC Comics

The Thrill of the Deadline

I’m about 80 pages into the first draft of a 2-act play—cobbled together over months of writing on Saturdays and holidays. Seeing what I still have left to do with it, that feels about right. I just mapped out what generally needs to happen over the rest of the play. There are some mysteries to uncover—and lots of rewriting to be done—but my characters have had a strong Saturday, taking me on a tour of their world with an unusual amount of clarity today, and I feel good, even with my deadline looming (March 6).

So why have I stopped? To start this play, I found it necessary to start writing a different play—its prequel—to figure out who the mother and father characters were before they were a mother and father. I recommend this little trick. Not only was it ridiculously helpful, but now I have another play that awaits my return. Unfortunately (perhaps) I have to go back to it now, because I have to figure out another huge piece of the father’s history, and it won’t service this play to gloss over it. It’s got to be exact. And working through it in the context of the prequel will actually be the fast way to deal with it. Presumably.

There is a certain thrill in the detour. My playwriting professor told us that the best plays are the ones you write to avoid writing the play you are supposed to be writing. And there is always a bit of joy when you can find an honest reason to procrastinate. Procrastinating is like readying a catapult: you turn the wheel and turn the wheel and turn the wheel, letting the tension build, and then you release at just the right moment.

I was telling our dramaturg this week that the institutional support of a playwright is great, but what playwrights need more than anything is a deadline. As that deadline gets closer, it gets harder not to write. As I’ve said, there is nothing easier in the world to do than not write a play. Anything that makes it harder not to write is a wonderful gift. As a deadline approaches, fear of failure takes over. Not that you’re play will fail (you’re pretty sure it will), but that you will fail to finish it. It’s like those reality television shows when the contestants just want to send something down the runway, put something in front of the judges. Anything. Decisions you’ve agonized over have to be made now! Scenes you’ve written and rewritten in your head have to make it onto the page now! There’s no time to be sentimental. There’s no time to let your words be precious. There’s no time to stop and write a blog about it. Oh. Whoops!

What’s the fun of writing what you know? You already know it.

For those of you who don’t know about the Bay Area phenomenon known as Casual Carpool, it will blow your mind. Basically, drivers pick up random passengers at designated spots on the East Bay and drop them off at the designated spots in San Francisco: the drivers save time (oftentimes, considering the shittiness of Bay Area traffic, they save lots of time) by driving in the carpool lane and going through the carpool toll; the passengers save money on a BART ticket. Some friends tried to explain it to a couple New Yorkers, and they flipped their shit. “Wait. Wait. Wait. You actually get in the car? With strangers?” Yep.

The rules of en-route engagement are up to the driver: he/she chooses the radio station (if any) and sets the tone of the conversation (which usually consists of silence). It’s early. People don’t usually want to talk, especially not to strangers. Casual Carpool is transaction of mutual convenience. But not last week. We get in the car, and this driver turns the radio off, introduces himself, and the chatting begins! He is a therapist at the VA hospital, so I tell him about the Theater of War project I had heard about, and about Sophocles’ Ajax, which I  just read for the first time. We get on the topic of my writing. He asks if I write plays about my own life, my family, etc. I reply, “That would be a really boring play. I have had a blissfully uneventful life. I’m more of a research-based writer.”

Which I guess is kind of true. Maybe. It feels true this week as I start working on a play for Just Theatre’s New Play Lab. They’ve asked me to resurrect an idea I had three years ago when I was living in Chicago about a battered husband dealing with the fact his son is basically invincible—an examination of masculinity. I didn’t actually know if “battered husbands” were even a thing when I came up with the premise: I was simply intrigued by the contrast. Research has revealed it is very much a thing, and a scary thing at that. Now I am sifting through the heartbreaking tales of men terrorized by their spouses for “useful” material. I feel a bit like a vulture. It doesn’t feel good. But I tell myself that if I finish this play and people see it, it could help spread awareness that there are male victims of domestic abuse too . . .

I’m not planning on doing a day-by-day account of this process like I did when I was writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Hostel, and I probably won’t even share much of the research I find because it’s upsetting, but here is one of the least disturbing items I found tonight.