Saturday 3 – June 16th – Day 12

As Anne Cattaneo explained on Friday, the first week of the lab we examined the roles of the playwrights and directors and designers and actors in bringing a new play to the stage. We spent the first part of this week looking at the actor – director role and relationship (pretty basic and redundant for most of us) and over the weekend we are going to look at the director playwright relationship. To do this, LCT put an experienced playwright with a group of ten directors. We are collectively to write a play (of whatever we are moved to do) and present it to the whole group on Tuesday.

Our group worked with David Grimm who teaches play writing at Yale. This guy is absolutely top drawer in getting us to put pen to paper and come up with something. I selected this group because he is working on character development. We spent six hours with one short break writing and sharing with each other. We sat around on the floor. And we wrote. And we wrote.

He started us off by having us think about our favorite play. Then he gave us a half hour to write it. I picked Enchanted April. I know I can’t write it in thirty minutes so I strip it down to the essentials: Two women find the advertisement and decide to spend a month in Italy. Rose has a melt down, Frederick arrives and Lottie has a closing monologue. About fifteen minutes into he tells us we have five minutes to write the ending to the play. Then we share the work.

Next is a “Rant”. Pick something in our lives that is really pissing us off and write about it. Don’t think about what you are writing just put the words down. If we get stuck, just write the last word over and over till we start again. Then we share them. Wow!!! What writing and what problems we all have.

We kept doing writing exercises that gradually built a character and then we had a dialog with that character. When we broke for lunch with instructions to write down dialog we heard from other people. We all felt like spies. When we got back we read the snippets and David made a list of phrases we heard. Each of us then picked one and wrote some dialog that included that line. Great fun.

Then he put a lot of small objects. I picked a small highly polished stone. We then described the object then transferred those attributes to a character. We then put the character on one side of a door. The character wanted something that someone on the other side of the door had.

Anyway, the whole day went like that. It was wonderful. I couldn’t imagine a batter day. THis one day (with the promise of Sunday) was worth the cost of the entire trip. Not that it’s the only day I have felt like this.

The good news is that he told us to type it up last night so he could have a hard copy. The bad news is that I can’t share a lot of it with you. Here’s what I can tell you:

The attributes of my stone were: Smooth, sculptured, strong, sensual, warm, true, important, soothing. I won’t tell you what I named my character but it was based on a woman I know. The thing that really surprised me was that the more I wrote dialog for her, the saltier her language became – (definitely not true of the woman I named her after) – by the end of the afternoon her language would make a sailor blush. Remind you of A.I.R.E.?????

Before I move on, here is David’s sure fire recipe for writing a play:

Act 1 Get the character up a tree.
Act 2 Throw rocks at him.
Act 3 Get him down.

During the evening, we met in small groups with low and mid level playwrights to explore how the process of bringing new plays to market works. There are a lot fo issues but everyone agreed that a personal relationship between the playwright and director is the single most important factor. We struggled to find ways to get playwrights and directors together.

On one hand, most theaters have a specific type of plays they do. At most they have one new play slot a year but even then it can’t push the audiences too far outside what they expect from the theater. On the other hand, most playwrights write far broader material and it make take several theaters to produce the varying works.

There is a real feeling the if a play if done outside of New York first it is dead to New York. No one wants to produce a play that has had it’s world premier in a regional theater.

I have pages of notes from our discussion but I don’t know that I’ll ever get to type them up.

Now to the fun part: Remember the laughing thing we did in the clown class? Remember that we (not that I was actually a part of the decision) decided to do it on the plaza in front of Lincoln Center Theater? Well, some warped mind decided that we should do it in Grand Central Train Station. So thirty of us hop the subway to 42nd street, change to the Grand Central shuttle and up to the main concourse of Grand Central (which is really a very pretty place).

Two of the directors from other countries made me promise to call their embassy’s if we were arrested.

We split up and spread out around the concourse in ones and twos. I started with John the laugher from Wednesday night. We were at the bottom of an escalator. I can hear people laughing over top of the background noise level of the station. John is next to me laughing his ass off. It makes me laugh too. For some reason we start to move together into a group – it’s so much more fun to watch the others laugh. In about five minutes four VERY large soldiers show up. No guns but these guys were big enough not to need guns. They didn’t do anything – just kept an eye on us. Then someone official came out and said we were disturbing people and we had to stop. As we move back to the shuttle our military watchers kept us in sight. We tried laughing on the subway but it seemed to make people uncomfortable.

We stopped at a bar for a beer for dinner.

Then back for the evening session then home at 11 and write up my stuff for today’s play writing session.

At least we didn’t get arrested. Lincoln Center would probably not be too happy having to come down and bail us out of jail.