Writing the "Beyond"

In my newest draft of All Grace, which I'm now prepping for production during the Columbus Arts Festival in June, I attempted to create a space in which the past blends easily with the present, where dreams and memories intrude on daily life. One way to describe it is how my friend Toni put it: "beyond space." After reading the play, she asked:

"How on earth did you manage to work with this 'beyond' space? I've been struggling with working in an unreal reality for a while, and I have figured out how to go about it. Obviously, I am still plugging away at it, and I'm not giving up any time soon..."

I had to think about it for awhile but came to this:

"I took some cues from Tony Kushner and his dream sequences, but what really helped was to imagine a large black void. No walls. Just darkness. And then 'turn on' a single light in the space. That single light is where your play happens. Now, in the telling of the play, characters can easily come into the light from the darkness, or can just take a step back and disappear into the darkness. But you also have control over the light: you can move the light quickly to somewhere completely different, move slightly over to reveal something new, the main thing to remember is to never come to a wall. Doors, interestingly enough are fine, but walls... Walls don't help. Walls can't be permeated. But the darkness allows things in and out at will. If you write the play from there, you will somehow find that 'beyond' that you're looking for."

This is how I write my plays, imagine the light in the void. It helps me filter out unnecessary bits of realism and naturalism to keep me focused on the fact that what's going on between the characters is most important, not the fact that there's a sink or French doors, or a window, or anything like that. Keep it simple. Toni's response to my void advice was:

"What I find interesting about what you said about working with a spread of darkness and just a spot of light, it comes from a director's eye, I think. I don't think I would have thought of that. Or maybe I would have, I don't know. But it's a good place to start. The flexibility of the darkness and light does create a world beyond. It's as if the worlds of the characters are off in the darkness, going on before and after what you see in the light, continuing on. We're always told that plays, stories, they start before we read the pages or see the first scene, and continue on after that. And to me, the before and the after kind of fades in and out. Like the before and after are in a fog. As the writer, I might know what happens before and after, but it's foggy. I am going to think more about this, because I like thinking about it. It's something different I haven't thought about before when it comes to plays, so that's good."

Her response got me thinking more and more about it. How did I come to understand this void as the womb of my plays? It wasn't like that when I started writing plays... Then, I thought back, and realized that it;s from my "director's eye" as Toni put it. The void was birthed when I directed one of my plays. I thought back to my writing of Dialogues with Lars, my "first" play, which followed the story of a young playwright, Phillip, who just got dumped and is trying to find his way to recovery through the writing of a new play. Complicating matters is a young woman in a trenchcoat named "Lars" who pushes and prods her way into Phillip's life and home. As is common with stories like this, "hilarity ensues."

The story of Lars moves from a diner where Phillip and Lars first meet, to Phillip's apartment, to the subway station for the N & R trains in Times Square at 3 am. After finishing the play, I sent it off to several theatres, including one that asked for shows with "minimal or stock sets." I received a letter back from them, castigating me for not "reading guidelines." What did I miss? All you needed to do Lars was a table, a couch, two chairs, and a bench. How is that not "minimal?" I decided to stage the play myself for my own gratification, to show that the play could be done minimally.





As you can see from the photos, (taken by Kristin Gillespie and featuring Tom Mamminga, Emily Dussault, and Carrie Fattig), there is a great, black void behind them. Black curtains. That was the background. We even had a free-standing door. No walls. Sure, it was done out of budgetary and logistical concerns, but what artistic decision isn't? Even Hollywood movies have budgets, right?

So, that's where the void came from as a director, but as a writer, the change didn't come until later. Two or three plays after Lars, I found myself writing about my family for the first time in my career in a play called De Colores. I essentially put my characters into rooms in my grandmother's house: her den, her kitchen, her living room, her bedroom. I had such a concrete vision of the space, it made it easy for my characters to move around in the space. I knew where the fridge was, the stove, the sofa, the beds, the sofabeds... The rooms were full to the brim. Then came the possibility of having a production in the Iowa New Play Festival. It didn't happen, but it got me thinking: how was I going to have the play work on stage? The director's eye came back out and smashed all the walls.



What was interesting to me was that one of the largest images of the play was the Sandia Mountains of Albuquerque and if you were to literally rip the walls from my grandmother's house, you'd get a clear shot of those beautiful mountains, pink and glowing. (Sandia is Spanish for "watermelon," and when the sun sets, the mountains turn pink) In an effort to share the discovery I had made with any would-be directors of De Colores, I wrote this production note:

"The sets should be minimal, sparse and not create realistic “rooms,” but hints of the space. The space should be open, no walls."

I should've written something about the Sandias in the background...

This is the way that I finally began thinking of plays existing without walls, without "rooms." Did it happen as consciously as this entry makes it seem? No. Only looking back on it do I see the evolution of the ideas and understand the way that the "beyond" came to be a necessary part of my process as a playwright. (and as a continuing part of my process as a director)