More Rewrites...

I have a major love/hate relationship with rewriting. I love getting feedback, but sometimes I get bogged down by the changes I want to make to “fix” all the problems people had with the play. The fear that I have is that I’m a bit overzealous when it comes to rewriting. I think to fix one thing, I have to change several other things, and before I know it, the entire play is switched around and I’ve cut out a ton of things that I loved from the play, including, in some cases, the one scene that made me want to write the play in the first place.
So, it’s a skill to figure out what’s important and what’s getting in the way of the audience understanding what I’m trying to say. I don’t feel like I should validate everything for an audience, but I don’t want them asking stupid questions. Maybe part of the problem are the people that are giving me feedback. There’s a sense of competition to find something wrong in the writing and to pick and pick at every unanswered question.
With this play, Holy Schmidt!, I’m trying out a style that I love, but haven’t written in before. Well, all my plays have this sense of animated comedy to them, the humor is somewhat random and based in association, but Holy Schmidt! blows the concept out of the water. I tried not to hold myself back from making the strange jokes and the funny situations and playing around with theatre itself. My first draft felt good, but somewhat empty. I remember a lot of people asking what the point of the play was, what characters’ motivations were, and I remember one person in particular telling me that my play’s not funny and I shouldn’t try to “rewrite the rules of comedy.” I was never trying to rewrite the rules of comedy, I was going by very solid rules in the comedy of the animated comedies that I grew up and still watch. But I do think there was a lack of clarity in the characters and what they were really doing in the script. The main character of Alyssa is one character that was just around as a deivce, someone that the plot revolved around, but didn’t have any power in it. In my further drafts, I need to get her to be more active and more in control of herself and her surroundings. While I do want her swept up in the events of the play, she does have to make and stick to some strong decisions.
Right now, I have just finished with a major overhaul of the structure of the play, moving scenes and deleting other scenes. It feels stronger in the way that the story unfolds, but there is still a major problem with the characters not really having big enough wants. The stakes aren’t high enough to validate the entire scope of the play. I’m still trying to work out for myself what these characters really want, but here’s the thing: every time I try and answer one question, another one pops up. There are no easy ways of fixing these characters and their wants. I have a specific structure, I know where things start and where things end up, but getting the characters from the beginning to the end is something that’s holding me back. Someone once told me that my plays were “too easy” and “too nice.” This translates into my characters giving in much too easily and coming to agreements. But they have to come to agreements in order for the play to move forward. They have to make some kind of concessions to another character in order to get things rolling, but how does that become feasible and realistic (in the world of the play)? And that’s where the problem rests. I know what I want to happen, I have lots of images for scenes, I know what I want to get out of the play, but how do I shove characters into their “roles” while still keeping them real?