Had an epiphany last night.  The reason I never got around to talking about my current play “Love Song” is that I didn’t know what I was going to write about after that.  I now know.

I also think (that’s too weak:  I KNOW) I’m spending too much time on this Journal.  It takes me about three hours to write 1,500 words.  For some reason it takes me two hours to write 500 words.  I think it was Shaw who wrote a letter to his friend and said something like “I don’t have time to write a short note so I’ll have to write a long one.”

On to Love Song.

I’ve written about it before but I spend a lot of time trying to find the four or five shows for our season.  The vast majority of the scripts I read or shows I see don’t appeal to me (at least from a producing or directing point of view).

I have to digress.

Several weeks ago, three of us went to Seattle to see plays.  Between the three of us, we saw five different plays in three days.  One of those plays, “To The Naked Eye” was about  . . . well, here is what the theater company said about their play:

“Six comedic vignettes paint the canvas of our multifaceted perception around the meaning of nakedness. Beauty, innocence, and purity, or corruption, perversion and scandal? This poignant and funny evening ultimately strips away our preconceived notions and reveals three simple truths:

Naked people are funny!

Naked people are beautiful!

Naked people are people!”

Gives you a pretty good idea what the play was about.  Nakedness.  Unfortunately I didn’t get to see that play.  Instead, I went to see a show that turned out to be terrible while the two who went to see Naked Eye thought it was good.  Not great but good.  There were some vignettes that were well done and others not so much so.  Anyway it was the source of a lot of good laughs during our after theater comparison of the plays we saw.

Fast forward to last Thursday:  A dozen of us went out for the third birthday party for one of our group.  (Like my wife said as I was heading out the door:  How many birthday parties are you going to have for her?)  We’re actors.  We party.  Get over it!!!  😉

As you might guess, the topic of the Naked Eye came up and engendered a lot of laughs.  We talked about the impossibility of doing that play here.  After all, we are a VERY small community.  Who would get up on stage in front of your friends and neighbors without your clothes on?  Well, if I can trust the show of hands, three of the women and none of the men would do it.   Can I ever cast it?  Probably not.  Am I going to get the script and read it to see if I like it?  You bet!!!  I love pushing the envelope.  Does that make me weird?  No.  It’s really all about good theater.  Really!!

Back to Love Song.

In the 15 years I have been running our theater, I have read hundreds and hundreds of plays.  Out of that number, there have been a half dozen that just screamed “do me”.  “Lend Me A Tenor” was one.  I read LMAT when I was in the middle of directing a run of the mill farce and wanted to stop directing that and do LMAT instead.  Unfortunately, we were too far along so I had to wait two years before I could fit it in.  Same with “Arthur:  The Begetting” which I have written about previously.  “Wait Until Dark” was another.  Same with “Love Song”.

When I read Love Song for the first time, I thought I really had something I couldn’t wait to present.  It was one of those plays that just grabbed me right from the start.  I read all the reviews of prior productions of the play that I could find:  Chicago, Off Broadway, London’s West End and a couple smaller theaters.  The reviews were really mixed:  What I would call either two stars or four stars (on a five star basis).  No one seemed to be lukewarm.  They really liked it or really didn’t like it.  When you see reviews like that (with almost universal praise of the actors involved) it tells me that it is a play that the director will make or break.

When I read it, i was just coming off a couple of plays that, while successful, did not draw the audiences I thought they deserved.  (“Arthur:  The Hunt” and “Moonlight And Magnolias”).  In between those two plays a good friend had directed the very popular “Almost, Maine”.  I was second guessing myself.  Had I changed so much in my taste in plays that I had lost our audience?  Had I lost my ability to pick good plays?  I talked to a lot of people who had not come to see my recent plays.  A lot of excuses not reasons.

I passed the script around to several friends for comments and got almost universal praise for the play.  There was some concern expressed that the language and themes would require a “mature audiences only” warning.  In itself, that didn’t bother me – after all we had done the play “Torso” which had language and nudity issues – but I didn’t know if if I was emotionally ready for another low attendance show.

We had an upcoming Board of Directors meeting for our group so I put it on the agenda.  We had a wonderful discussion – one that left me on top of the world for a long time.  We are one of the few theaters that make money without relying on donations.  While we don’t solicit donations (except for specific items) we gratefully accept them but never use them for operations – donations go to capital projects:  New seats, new lighting fixtures and so on.  Since we have money in the bank we have the luxury of not letting financial considerations be the overriding factor in decisions we make.  The loud and clear message from our Board was the need for high quality theater.  As long as we are providing high quality theater and tell the audiences what to expect (mature audiences), go ahead and do what I thought was best.

Will finish this tomorrow. . .

A friend (not in the theater) asked me how I bring a play to life. Here is my response:

I have to start out by saying that plays are very different than books or movies. A play only exists at the moment it is being performed. Unlike a book which you can put down and return to later or a movie where you can put it on pause to do something else, a play starts and runs to its conclusion. Even more interesting, to me at least, is that you are watching real, live people saying real, live words. That intimacy is what compels the audience to sit there for an hour and a half or longer to watch the characters say words that someone else wrote for them.

I think of books as being about ideas, large and small. Movies are about pictures. Plays are about words. Other than moving around on a fixed set, all the actors can do is relate to each other. They can dance, they can fight, they can laugh, they can cry but whatever they do, it must be something that the audience can see or hear.

After writing for a couple of hours, I realized I was answering the wrong question.

So here we go again.

To bring a play to life, I will spend two months reading it. I will read it from the perspective of each character. I will read one scene at at a time, I will read it cover to cover without stopping, I’ll look for sub-text, I’ll look for what every character wants in life, in the play, in the scene, in the beat.

I will make notes on what each character says about themselves and what other characters say about them. I read reviews of previous productions. I’ll start to see the set. It may not be what the playwright describes because of our stage constraints. I’ll set the rehearsal schedule: 35 to 45 three hour rehearsals depending on the length of the play and it’s complexity – and hour and fifteen minutes to an hour and a half of rehearsal for every minute of the play.

I’ll start to get an idea of the characteristics I want in my actors. Casting is the single biggest issue in the ultimate success of the play. I obsess over it. I’ll start calling actors I want to look at in auditions. Ultimately, I’ll have a cast.

The first rehearsal is easy and relatively short. All the actors need to get to know each other, particularly those with close relationships on stage (husband and wife sort of thing). We will read the play. Interesting fact: That first read through will give me the best estimate of the final running time of the play until about a week before opening.

The second rehearsal is when the real work starts. The script says: As the lights come up, “A” is sitting on the sofa and “B” enters from the bedroom. I start to ask the actors questions. I hardly EVER tell and actor what to think. I NEVER tell them how to say a line.

Why are you sitting on the sofa? What are you doing? What were you doing five minutes ago? One minute ago? Do you know “B” is coming in? What do you think about “B”? What do you want? How do you feel about “B”‘s arrival? For the next two months I am going to ask thousands of questions of each actor. If the answer is not what I want to hear, I ask them another question and another until they start to get a picture of their relationship with their character and all the other characters.

Here is an example:

Me: How do you feel about “B”.

“A”: I don’t like him.

Me: Why not?

“A”: He’s not nice to “C”.

Me: Why isn’t he nice to “C”?

“A”: “C” stole his girlfriend.

Me: Well, that wasn’t a nice thing for “C” to do. Put yourself in “B”‘s place. How would that feel?

“A”: Pretty bad, I guess.

Me: Wouldn’t it help if you were nice to “B” to help him get over his girlfriend?

“A”: I guess so.

And so on for hour after hour.

While this is going on, we are working on the rough blocking (how they move on stage). The actors are also memorizing their lines. This lasts about a month (half the rehearsals).

As they start to understand their characters and the interrelationships, I add “personalizations”: Find someone in your real life who you feel about the way your character feels about “B”. Never reveal who you have personalized. Don’t be afraid to change it if how you feel about “B” changes. Don’t pick someone close to you: Spouse, sibling, child: Those relationships are too complicated. Pick someone from TV or a movie, someone you would like to know, someone you know casually. Those simple relationships project well off the stage.

The next break comes when we take the scripts out of their hands. It’s a crisis. They have lost their security blanket. The next few rehearsals are going to be terrible. Actors can call “Line” and the stage manager will give them a hint. This process will go on until about two weeks to ten days before opening when we don’t let them call for lines any more. Another crisis time. They have to say something. The audience hasn’t read the script so as long as they are the character they can say pretty much whatever they want. There is usually another actor on stage who can help bail them out. It’s an art to be able to work through those moments.

Once they are comfortably “off book” (no scripts), the real work on the play can start. More questions, finer blocking (It’s hard for an actor to carry two glasses of champagne when he has a script in one hand.) By now the actors are sounding real as they speak their lines. They sound like two people really having a conversation, just using words that someone else wrote for them. For me, as director, I start to hear lines that don’t ring true. I’ll ask: “Why did you say that?” Nine times out of ten, the actor will respond “I don’t know”. More questions.

Now we start to address the hard parts that we left for now: Fight choreography, crying, undressing, kissing (far harder than you might think), and things like that.

By now we should have a set (depending on the theater) so the actors can go up or down stairs, the doors are where they’re supposed to be. We find out that actor “A” doesn’t have time to exit through door #1 and run around back stage to enter door #2 on time. The sofa the prop people got doesn’t fit in the space allowed for it. Changes have to be made, the actors have to adjust. On top of all of this, the character development is just about complete.

Realize that in all this time I have never told an actor how to say a line: Be happy here, you are sad here. Those are results. The actor will act the results and it will look and be false. If I want the actor to be sad, I have to find a way that they can really be sad.

Crying is particularly hard to address, particularly for men. I tell my actors: It isn’t whether you cry or not, we need to see you struggle to not let us see you cry. Then you can win or lose the battle and either will be right for the audience. I suggest to the actor that they find something in their life that makes them want to cry, the death of a favorite pet, the loss of a loved one. One actress who could cry easily, always cries when she thinks about how we are destroying the earth. Whatever works. I also tell my actors not to worry if a trigger no longer works, sometimes you have just expunged the devils in that moment.

Now the theater lighting is added, another throw for the actors. The costumes arrive. OMG!! They make me look fat/skinny/jaundiced. They’re too tight, they’re too loose, I don’t like the color. “A”‘s dress is prettier. Why can’t I wear . . . My shoes don’t fit.

In spite of all of this somehow we get to opening night and everything works just like I envisioned it months ago.

That’s how a play comes to life.

Doug B

Our small community theater usually presents five full productions a year.  I usually direct three or four of them.  I used to direct all of them but my Board of Directors is getting concerned about a succession plan in case something happens to me, (I don’t think 72 is THAT old!) so I have slowly been getting others to produce and direct our shows.  As I said above, it takes me about five months to do a play so doing four or five in a year keeps me pretty busy.

Over the last fifteen years that I have been running our theater, we have pretty much settled on what kind of play to do in what season:  In February, we do a comedy or a farce (people want to have fun during the long winter months), in April, we have our festival of locally written plays, in July something simple (because we are already well into rehearsals for our September play), in September we do something off beat; something that may not have broad appeal to our audiences (“Brilliant Traces”, the two Arthur plays, “Torso” and now “Love Song”).  We usually have another play in November or December that can be any genre  – often Holiday oriented or family fare.  “Tracers” is an exception which we did in November.

See?  I told you I would get back to “Love Song”.

But I need another digression first:  How do I come up with the plays we present?

It’s hard.  There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of plays out there that have had several productions and listed are in the catalogs published by the royalty houses.  Samuel French and Dramatists Play Service are the two “biggies” although there are dozens of smaller houses.  Many of the smaller houses specialize in the type of plays they list: Religious plays, plays for younger actors and so on.  If you want an idea of how many plays and playwrights there our there go to www.doollee.com.  As complete as that list is, I know a handful of produced playwrights who are not listed.

I have family in Florida and get to see them every two or three years.  I usually spend half time visiting them and half my time going to the theater.  I have a string of theaters that I visit.  I also get to Seattle two or three times a year to watch plays.  I usually find something to follow up on.  Sometimes it is just finding a playwright whose work I think has merit even if I don’t like the specific play I saw.

There are many theaters that do the kinds of plays that appeal to me.  I keep an eye on them looking for plays that I haven’t heard about.  We’ve all done “Noises Off” and “Arsenic And Old Lace” and “The Odd Couple”.  I’m looking for something I’ve never heard about.  A recent example was the new play “When Bullfrogs Sing Opera” by Carl Williams.  I was visiting family and drove up to Ocala Civic Theater because I know they do good work.  I saw the play and was intrigued.  It is a sophisticated comedy with a serious undertone (mindless or stupid comedies of farces usually play better to our audiences but they aren’t a lot of fun to direct.)

When I come up with a play that might interest me, I go on-line and read the reviews of other productions (preferably at larger theaters where the reviews tend to be more unbiased).   If I’m still interested, I purchase a review copy of the script.  About one out of every thirty scripts I read appeals to me after reading.  Occasionally, the play appeals to me but I realize that I’m not the person to direct it.  In that case I pass it on to a director whom I think will do it justice.

Remember the play “Tracers” I mentioned?  It’s a gut wrenching play about Viet Nam written by a group of Vets who had been there.  They managed to catch the good, the bad, and the horror of being there.  The problem is that the play required nine young men able to play soldiers.  I am old enough to have had friends who fought and died there but there aren’t a lot of 20 year old guys that fit that mold any more.  I passed the play on to a woman who is very active in veterans affairs to look at it.  She loved it.  It took her a few years to get enough young guys interested in the play.  She went so far as to post audition notices in the men’s rooms at our local bars (there comes a time in every man’s life when you just have to stand still so you might as well read what’s on the wall in fromt of you).  Anyway she came up with a cast, trained them to be soldiers, as a group they studied the Viet Nam war and the political and social environment of the time.  The result was wonderful.  The play opened on Veterans Day weekend and was a smash hit:  The old timers came to remember what it was like “In Country” and the young people came to see their friends.

The same with another popular play “Almost, Maine”.  “Almost, Maine” consists of 8 short plays that take place in the imaginary town of Almost, Maine.  It barely made my “maybe” list but I passed it on to a director I thought would like it.  Shortly after that a very small theater did the play in a nearby community.  Four of us, who would be involved with the production if we did it, made a road trip to see it.  It didn’t impress any of us but the potential director saw great potential in it and we went forward with the play.  Another big hit.  Also another play that had a lot of young actors it it.

Another source of plays comes form our local playwrights.  Our theater sponsors an annual festival of locally written plays.  Each year we select seven short (ten minute) plays (out of 15 to 20 submissions) and fully produce them. By the time we present the plays we have almost 50 people involved:  7 or more writers, 7 directors, 14 to 20 actors, 5 on the stage crew, 2 or 3 in the tech booth and associated house managers, ticket takers and on and on.  By the time 50 sets of friends and family come to see it, it’s always a big hit.  Next month we will have the world premier reading of a full length play by one of our local playwrights.

The wild card in finding plays to do come from unsolicited plays.  I regularly get query e-mails from playwrights offering their most recent work.  If the query contains enough information on cast size and ages and the subject of the play, I might ask for a full copy of the script.  I read about 50 plays a year from this source.  I have developed a pretty ruthless way to sort the wheat from the chaff with these plays: I print out the first 25 pages and carry them with me to read when I have a moment.  If I’m still interested after the first 25 pages, I print out the next 25 and so on, until I give up on the play or get to the end of it.  I probably get all the way to the end of the play in 10% of the plays I read.  If they have had a prior production we might do one of them every couple of years.

Over the years I have come to know (on-line) several playwrights who I think have great potential.  They regularly send me work and I comment on it for them.

Now a wrinkle:  It takes lot of extra time to get a play from a new playwright ready for the stage – more time than we can spend.  “Torso” was in rehearsal and rewrites for two YEARS before it opened in Seattle.  We have just begun a program of public readings of new unproduced plays.  When I hear them read out loud I get a much better feel about the potential of the play.  It helps me generate comments that I can share with the playwright to improve the play.  When I am excited by a play, I will ask a couple of actors to read it to me so I can hear it.  That’s how I knew that “Love Song” was a real winner.

It’s still a struggle to keep enough good plays in the hopper.  Sometimes I don’t know what play I’m going to do next and other times I have plays lined out far into the future.  Sometimes a play just jumps out at me and I have to drop everything to do that play.  That’s a really exciting time in my life.  That’s what happened with “Love Song”.  (See I haven’t forgotten about “Love Song”; I’m just working up to it.)

I have a staged reading of Jeffery Hatcher’s wonderful play “Three Viewings” that opens tomorrow so I’ll be busy for the next few days.  It’ll give you some time to catch up on your reading.  By-the-way, Jeffery Hatcher has written my favorite book on play writing:  The Art And Craft of Play Writing.  If you think you might like to write a play, get it!!!  I’ve bought a half dozen copies.  I loan them to people and forget who I gave them to.

See you in a couple of days.

Doug B