S*M*A*S*H-up

(FADE IN on the grungy 4077th S*M*A*S*H camp, a ratty assemblage of olive-drab tents and battered jeeps set in a dusty, scrubby valley.  A crooked post in the compound has nailed-up arrows indicating the direction and mileage to various destinations:  Chicago, Grover's Corners, Osage County, Avenue Q.  The P.A. crackles to life.)

P.A.: Attention all personnel.  Due to lack of interest, this year's Broadway season will be canceled.  Also, Off-Broadway will now be Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway will be Off-Broadway, and Hoboken will be lower Manhattan.  That is all.

(JULIA and TOM, exhausted in their stylish scrubs, partake of martinis at their makeshift still in their tent.)

JULIA:  Fourteen hours of meatball workshopping.  Even my exhaustion is exhausted.  I can't feel my feet.
TOM:  I can't feel your feet either.   I propose a toast: to this place.  To our life.
JULIA:  Be it ever so humble, there's no place like development hell.

(They down their drinks.  JULIA makes a face.)

JULIA:  This tastes terrible.  I mean more terrible than usual.
ELLIS:  I put ground-up peanuts in your martini!
JULIA:  Ellis, damn it!  I'm not allergic to peanuts.  Stop doing that to everyone!
TOM:  Little ferret-face.
ELLIS:  Gotcha!  Heh heh heh heh heh.

(RADAR enters the tent with a clipboard in hand.)

RADAR:  Morning, sirs...
TOM:  Radar, we just got out of workshopping.  If you try to send us back to that rehearsal hall I'll tie your boots to your nose hairs.
RADAR:  Gosh, that's not friendly.  Nobody ever talks that way in Iowa.
TOM:  What is this "Iowa...?"
JULIA:  Flyover country.
TOM:  They have theater there?
JULIA:  Yes but they serve... food... at it.
TOM:  Ugh.
RADAR:  Captains, I'm just here to remind you that you're scheduled to give the leading ladies superfluous physical examinations at oh nine hundred hours.
TOM:  ...But I'm gay.
JULIA:  And I'm a heterosexual woman, and I only sleep with men with whom I have exactly zero chemistry.

(With a weary groan, DEREK rises from a nearby bunk.)

DEREK:  Oh bloody hell, do I have to do it all around here?  Tom, Julia, shall I just take everything off your plate?  I'll fix the musical, I'll woo the producers, I'll defile the leading ladies and while I'm at it I'll be the only one around here with even a modicum of personality?  Would that work for you?  Would that be helpful?

(Beat.)

TOM:  — Yeah, could you?
JULIA:  That'd be great, thanks.
RADAR:  Hold on.  —Choppers.
JULIA:  I don't hear any—
RADAR:  Wait for it.

(Sound of incoming choppers.  Julia, Tom and Derek wearily stumble to their feet and scramble out the door.)

P.A.:  Attention all personnel.  Incoming pages.  All available personnel to the rehearsal room.  Don't worry folks, you can sleep when you're dead or after "Phantom" closes, whichever comes first.

(Cut to the rehearsal room, where everyone's in scrubs and masks, each at an operating table working feverishly on a script draft.)

TOM: (to NURSE:) Highlighter.  White-out.  Could I get some suction here, this character arc is a disaster.  I'm going to have to resect the whole second act.

(DEREK peers over JULIA's shoulder, watching her work.)

DEREK:  Switching everything over to a male POV, eh?  Interesting technique.
JULIA:  It always works.  It never doesn't work.  Could I get some more wrylies over here please?
P.A.: Attention all personnel.  Due to conditions beyond our control we regret to report that a new play by Neil LaBute opens tonight.

(RADAR enters.)

TOM:  Radar!  Put a mask on!
RADAR:  I have a message.
JULIA:  If it's about my royalties, give it to me straight.  I can take it.
RADAR:  Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake's plane... was shot down... over the Sea of Japan.
JULIA:  Oh my God!  Oh my God!  Is he dead?
RADAR:  Worse.  He's in regional theater.
DEREK:  That poor bastard.
RADAR:  There weren't no survivors.
TOM:  Keep working, guys.  These scripts are just going to keep coming and they're not going to revise themselves.
DEREK:  Julia, that is really really great work you're doing there.  You've taken that mess of a wounded draft and turned it into one of the most brilliant scripts I've ever seen.  Pure genius.
TOM:  Well, let's hear it out loud!
JULIA:  Oh, okay, if you insist.  "Act One.  Lights up—."

(CUT TO: the mess tent, some hours later.  Everyone sitting wearily around a table, drinking coffee.)

TOM:  That was the most brilliant play I've ever heard, Julia.
EILEEN:  It really was remarkable, Captain.
JULIA:  Too bad no one will ever hear it aloud again.
DEREK:  Why is that?
JULIA:  Not sure.  But oh well.
EILEEN:  Ugh.  Why is my coffee so gritty?
ELLIS:  Heh heh heh heh.
EILEEN:  Ellis!  Enough with the peanuts!
ELLIS:  Gotcha.

(EILEEN throws her drink in DEREK's face.)

DEREK:  Blimey!  Why'd you do that?
EILEEN:  It's my character trait.  Seriously, it's my only character trait.  Now I don't have a beverage in my hand any more and I feel myself slipping away.
P.A.:  Attention all personnel.  Will Jessica and Bobby please report to the compound for this week's random distribution of background dialogue.  And it is requested that you kindly stop being more compelling than the main characters.  That is all.
EILEEN:  This damn place.  How much more can we take?  We've lost so many loved ones already.  Frank, Leo, Dev... Julia's scarves... Theresa Rebeck... poor sweet Karen...
KAREN:  I'm still here, I'm just right here.
EILEEN:  All gone, all taken away in their prime and we may never see them again.
KAREN:  I'm right here.  I'm literally in like every other scene.
EILEEN:  Those poor kids.

(KAREN gives up, slips into a Bollywood-tinged fugue state.)

JULIA:  Well, it could be worse.  We could all have—gag—dramaturgs.
TOM:  Ugh, dramaturgs.
DEREK:  Horrid creatures.
RADAR:  Yeah, I saw something about them when I was previewing our training films about communicable diseases.  Gross.
JULIA:  Hey, you.  Yeah, you.  Iowa.  Who are you, anyway?  You're not a stage manager, you're not a dancer, you're not a designer.  You could be an actor except I didn't notice any listings on the call sheet for "Creepy diminutive wide-eyed manchild."  Who are you, and why are you here?
RADAR:  I'm just someone who pays attention to what you do, and knows everything that's going to happen to you before you do.
JULIA:  ...A critic?
RADAR:  Nope.  The audience.
TOM:  Well, that explains why he keeps getting smaller.
RADAR:  —Hang on.  You hear that?
JULIA:  Hear what?
RADAR:  —Cancellation.
JULIA:  I don't hear any—
RADAR:  Wait for it.

(Freeze-frame.  IVY belts "Suicide is Painless.")

Traumaturgy

Let me note for the record that I love dramaturgs.  I think they're little-understood and underappreciated, not unlike leeks.  My first exposure to the frank and open practice of dramaturgy occurred when I was an intern in a literary office, where the hectic stress of daily life -- arguably endemic not so much to literary management as to anything that gets done in an office -- led my superiors to coin the term "traumaturgy," which I subsequently stole and used as a title for one of my early plays, a comedy about a dramaturg, which hasn't been produced very often, because it is a play about a dramaturg.Still, point is: dramaturgs.  I dig 'em.Still, in developmental contexts there can be a tendency, I think, even among the most brilliant and insightful dramaturgs, to focus so exhaustively on the condition of the script that they lose sight of what makes for a great show.  They really are concerned, God bless 'em, with the integrity of the script, the needs of the script, what the script is doing and what it's not doing and what the script wants to be -- in that rehearsal room they are the Lorax, they speak for the text -- and occasionally it seems like that degree of loving and microscopic attention might come at the expense of how well the script functions on its feet as a play.  I say this as someone whose ass has been saved many times by the attentive intervention of dramaturgs, so I do recognize how crucial they are.  I also say it as someone who's worn the dramaturgical hat myself -- though not as often nor as credibly as the talented people I've had the good fortune to work with -- and has myself attempted to inflict unnecessary fixes on others' scripts.  It was my job to find things to give notes on, so I gave notes on everything.  We don't know a lot about her background and family, maybe fill in some of that detail here.  This scene plays great but it's a little unclear what it means in the play as a whole.  These were sensible comments there at the table, and 100% true -- I was totally earning my dramaturgical keep -- but I neglected to consider whether the eventual audience gave any kind of a shit about the character's background and family, or whether achieving greater clarity with that one scene would actually give audience members less to talk about on the way home.It kind of comes with the territory.From the playwright's perspective, it's like going to the doctor for a checkup and the doctor identifies a few things that really need attention and a few other things that really aren't going to impair your quality of life, but what's the doctor going to do, not mention these things?  She's a doctor, and it's not like the oath included a clause that said "First, ignore some stuff."  So now you're shelling out co-pays and clogging your schedule with labs and follow-ups and things really kind of would have been better if you hadn't gone to the doctor at all.  Except for those other, bigger things that would have really fucked you up if she hadn't found and fixed them.  So it's good that you went to the doctor.  Apart from these other tests and things.I guess I'm hypothesizing that looking at a play as closely as a dramaturg is supposed to is going to turn up problems that need fixing and problems that don't.  And maybe that second category consists of problems that, counterintuitively, are better left untreated.  I've gone into developmental situations with a script that was baggy and unfocused and problematic and emerged with one that was sleeker and streamlined and efficient, and in these cases I've always regretted shaving away all the weird craggy idiosyncratic bits.  I needed the play to get better, but I didn't need to make it that much better.  I needed to fix the halting, troubled, bloated guts of the thing but I didn't need to spackle and sand its every gap, didn't need to polish its outer layer to such a fine, unblemished sheen.  (You'd think I could just go back and undo the stuff I wanted to undo and keep the rest, but that's harder to do than you might think, which either means that plays are complicated organic structures of interdependent strands or that I'm not as good at rewriting as other people are.  Or both.)Taylor Mac has a great line in his brilliant recent manifesto: "I believe all plays are flawed except the extremely boring ones."  He goes on to say "So stop trying to make my play perfect," though that sounds more confrontational than I feel about the thing.  I've had a handful of nightmare experiences with notes and feedback but none of them involved directors or dramaturgs; if anything, my experiences with those creatures have been characterized by extreme sensitivity and a compulsive reiteration of the mantra "You don't have to take any of these notes if you don't want to," indicating a general awareness that the dramaturgical process is diagnostic but not prescriptive.  (It also suggests a perception that playwrights as a species are fragile, highly suggestible, and/or easily offended.  I assume they have some experiential basis for this impression.  BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT DOESN'T HURT!)The burden is on the playwright, obviously, to take action on those notes that will improve the play and ignore the others, but would dramaturgy at its most effective produce only the former notes and leave out the latter?  In my experience, dramaturgs routinely defer to playwrights in terms of who actually has authority over a script, but do they typically envision themselves as realtors -- showing their clients an array of options while knowing that most of them won't be right for them -- or do they personally feel that addressing each and every one of their notes would in fact result in a superior draft of the script?  I'm pretty sure that's how I felt about my notes back when I was recklessly practicing dramaturgy.  Of course, in my case, I was -- as I so often am, in so very many contexts -- wrong.In the meantime, if someone would be kind enough to dramaturg this essay, I'd appreciate it.  I know it lacks theatricality and momentum, and the main character is wildly unsympathetic.

Playwriting Tips and Handy Hints

* Writing stage directions that can't be staged is sooo five minutes ago.  What are all the cool kids doing now?  Stage directions that can't even be written.  Go!* Parenthetical adverbs attached to your dialogue is a bad idea because it tells actors there's only one acceptable way to say the line.  Leave them out.  There's still only one acceptable way to say the line, of course, but now the actor doesn't know what it is.  Their destabilization shifts the power dynamic in your favor.  Which is to say: now you'll have something to silently resent the actors for when they get it wrong.  And we treasure our silent resentments.* Silences tell you story.  They also make it easier to get to eighty pages, especially if you signify silences with lots of hard returns.* Beckett envied composers because music was never condemned to explicitness.  So slip the bonds of explicitness.  Write without nouns.* Talkback, shmalkback: an audience's reactions during a reading tell you everything you need to know about a play.  Watch for subtle nonverbal cues like: sleeping, eye-rolling, watch-checking, leaving, seizures, projectiles.* You may dread the fate of being developed to death.  But there are worse things.  Like being flayed, for instance.  Or tickled.  Perspective!* Base your work on people you know.  It's soooo much easier than making stuff up.  Plus: the fewer friends you have, the more time you have to write.  Win/win.* Artistic directors and literary managers just don't read new scripts any more.  Save your time and money and just send your plays to the people you know will probably look at them.  You've got your mom's address; use it.* When a theater politely passes on your script, they very much want to hear about your resulting feelings of hostility and despair.  They went into the theater.  They love drama.  Give it to them.  Everybody wins.* Write every day.  No writing time is wasted.  Unless you write something bad.  In which case, yeah, you probably should've done the laundry or spent time with your kids or something. 

Why I'm a Playwright

When ACCIDENTAL RAPTURE was produced by the 16th Street Theater they asked me to write something. I tried to explain to them: I'd already written something! What was I, a machine? But anyway, this is what I wrote:People often ask me why I’m a playwright. That’s not true. People often ask me to move my car. Apparently I’m not supposed to park there. Frankly I’d prefer it if they were asking me why I were a playwright. If they did—if they asked me why I’m a playwright, and honestly I don’t know why more people don’t ask me that, it’s really pretty fascinating stuff—I’d probably say something about the vibrant immediacy and political vitality of live theater, about the collaborative dynamic, about how Tom Stoppard said writing dialogue is a respectable way to argue with oneself in public. Some stuff like that. Only I’d make it sound good; I work with words for my job thing, after all.Really, though, it’s about the white space. I’ve done other kinds of writing, and most of them require so many words. You have to fill almost every inch of your blank page with the things. Like poetry, playwriting can occupy obscenely vast expanses of pages’ real estate with remarkably few words. Playwriting is a wasteful landowner of a genre, looking smugly over its sprawling and underpopulated Beckettian vistas, reveling in the pleasure of having so much more room to stretch out in than over in those Dostoevskian tenements where words huddle crammed together, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty to a line.Too much? Yeah, I’ll probably fix it when I revise this. I’m a writer, after all, and revision is one of the tools we have for to make the words more better.Point is: what do writers in other outlets use to fill all that white space? Everything: what the characters are wearing, what their surroundings look like, what they’re thinking and feeling, how and when they move, what they ate that morning. Playwrights, unless they’re Eugene O’Neill (and who is, nowadays?), don’t care about that stuff, because playwrights have other people around who care about that stuff for them: designers, directors, actors. It sounds like I’m lazy. And indeed I am. I really don’t want to have to move my car. But also: every time a play is produced, the playwright has the pleasure of seeing how all these other people have helped to fill in that white space, with the result being a play that’s not really at all like any of the plays this script has been before.