Sifting All Grace

While the first "movement" of Robert Blacker's class proved to be quite a disastrous enterprise, the second movement was the exact opposite: a highly beneficial and prosperous endeavor. By prosperous, I mean that I left the meeting pregnant with ideas and ready to write. The first meeting left me unable to write for weeks. I had too many possibilities to even begin writing, there were no specific moments that were clear in my mind, everything was swimming. For about three and a half weeks, I kept "All Grace" on the back burner, letting my frustration and ideas simmer together. A couple of days, I opened up the file of "All Grace" on my computer and stared at the words on my screen for just a moment before my stomach would tighten in fear and I'd shut the entire laptop down to retreat from the play completely.

Could this have been averted? Was there something that I could have done to help the experience? I suppose I could've told Robert that I wasn't ready to have a conversation about the play and left it at that, but this being an educational experiment, that wasn't really an option. Robert was using this class as a means to display the multitude of ways that conversations could be had with playwrights in order to develop their plays. I had the poor, rotten luck of being the guinea pig on the day that we were testing the value of a "silent playwright" getting questions heaved at him.

What would have been more beneficial is an experience that I had with Robert the week before the second draft of the play was going to be presented. Robert and I met one-on-one in a quiet coffeeshop to help me sift, quite literally, through all the muck and questions that had been piled upon me in class. This wasn't a "session" of play development, this was a conversation. The weeks leading up to this, I had gotten advice from playwright, Sherry Kramer; the Special Topics class; a graphic artist/ seminarian that my friend Andy knew; and Laura Farmer. More and more cooks entered the kitchen. This went completely against what should've been merely the "Laura Farmer Stage." I should've been processing the questions from one person not almost twenty!

Thank God, I was on a deadline otherwise I would've shelved "All Grace" completely. There are too many questions, this play is impossible, no one gets it. All valid reasons for giving up the play and/or giving up writing altogether. The process needs to be a means of encouraging a playwright and leading a playwright to a course of action. This is what Robert Blacker and I discussed: a course of action. What I mean by course of action is that the playwright can see for him or herself the play that he or she wants to write and the dramaturg and/or director lead the playwright through questions to that end. This is much like the way that a good director will lead an actor to answering his or her own question. For example, an actor wonders whether he should have his hat on or off at a particular time. The actor asks the director, "Should I have my hat off at this point?" The director asks, "What do you think?" And the actor responds, "Well, when I enter, I greet her by taking off my hat, but I don't want to be holding it the whole time, perhaps I can set it down on the couch after I hug her." The director says, "Try it."

This is the process that should take place in the first meeting between playwright and dramaturg and/or director. A playwright shouldn't be silent in these first meetings since, at this point, the playwright is the only one in the room who knows what he wants the play to be and knows the devices he was using. So, the kind of questions that should've been asked in that first conversation should've been questions such as "What were your goals of Couturier's opening monologue?" "Was Lipchitz a real person?" "What are you saying about the Virgin Mary?" But here's the thing, these questions should've been allowed to be answered! In most workshop settings, indeed in the Playwrights Workshop, there is the model of the "Silent Playwright" who merely takes in and digests the questions. This works more with a play that is further along (I'll come back to this), but not in an initial meeting with a playwright when the draft is fresh. Often the playwright isn't ready to answer many questions, but knowing the questions that a playwright CAN answer will help the conversation lead to helpful advice or questions that can lead to a plan of action. With an active playwright, the meeting becomes a conversation and is led, by a large part, by the playwright's vision of the play. Since the playwright explicitly describes his goals with a particular play, everyone can look at the play with a different perspective.

So, should Robert Blacker have adapted his class upon learning that my play was of an earlier draft, even if that meant that it would go against his goals of teaching a particular "lesson?" I think yes. The education of the playwright should be a more empathetic experience in which those involved in conversation learn to see the play through the playwright's eyes. Is there danger in this? Of course there is. A dramaturg can get too involved, become too sensitive to a playwright's feelings, and lose a sense of objectivity. But what I'm discussing leads less from an emotional connection and more from an intellectual connection: a connection of empathy only in terms of the material in question.

Art Borreca has discussed this in an article about the differences in dramaturgical focus in the playwriting programs at Yale and Iowa in his article "Dramaturgin New Play Dramaturgy: The Yale and Iowa Ideals." At Iowa, Art suggests a movement towards "Scholar/Dramaturg" in which dramaturgs "maintain a scholarly role in relation to the process according to the original meaning of that term: "learned." Scholar/dramaturgs seek to learn as much as possible about the play's origins, sources, and evolution; others' criticisms of the play, the playwright's interpretation of them, and the effects of the feedback session on the playwright's process and plans. They use this knowledge to determine what would be most helpful to the playwright at the current stage of his or her process" (Borrecca 65-66). In other words, there is more empathy in deliberations with the playwright. Empathy has its dangers and pitfalls since the focus is now on the play through the playwright who created it, rather than looking at the play as a separate entity for itself.

Art expressed fear that in becoming too close to a playwright, especially in this educational setting, a professor might not be able to tell a playwright to stop working on a particular play, "...if I believe a play to possess little hope of becoming stageworthy, do I encourage the playwright to abandon it? Or do I engage the playwright in the process... with the hope that it will help him or her find a way to writing a better version of the play? The scholar/dramaturg ideal calls for the latter, encouraging a loyalty to people that can ultimately be harmful to them, if they are being encouraged in hopeless enterprises' (Borreca 68).

What is flawed in this thinking is the fact that criticism can be encouraging, in effect, telling a playwright to "abandon" a play can move the playwright into new territory. The focus must always be on the playwright's movement FORWARD, whether on a single play or the next. For example, I've been told at least three distinct times to abandon a play. It's always difficult to hear, "Stop working on this play and write something else." Hearing that, my mind immediately says, "But this is my child! I can't leave it! It means too much!" But the statement is twofold. The first part is, "Stop working on this play." Harsh reality, but perhaps the best advice at the time. The second part of the statement is the most important component of the statement, "Write something else." Ah ha! This is encouraging. The effect is to never stop the flow of writing from the playwright. The words, "Stop writing" should never be the end of the statement.

A less-harsh model of this statement would be something akin to what I was told on a separate occasion, "With this play, you've learned (Insert lesson) and explored (Insert exploration), now you can use those discoveries to move onto the next play and take those things further." What is different about this statement is hopefully obvious. There are no negatives, only positives. I've heard many times and believe that each play is written in order to write the next play. Some plays lives can sometimes be relegated to becoming "exercises" in form, character, subject matter, etc., but it is important to be with the playwright on the journey.