On Play Development

Lucia’s reaction to people’s comments about Athena reminded me of an odd truth. Jack and Jill in the bleachers feel free to critique a play in a way that no one would dream of doing in an art gallery or a concert hall, or in a library with a book in their hands. Why do secretaries and math teachers think they know better than the playwright how the play should go? The living playwright, I should say, for Shakespeare is never subjected to the same use (though his directors are). No doubt everyone assumes he is being helpful, but such help is impossible to use because it is based on random preferences or unexamined expectations which cannot help but clash with the random preferences and unexamined expectations of other audience members. In the day since we closed, I heard one person say the basement scene was the best and culminating scene, and another that it was irritating and unnecessary. What is one to do with those contrary perceptions (both from intelligent theater professionals)? When it’s Shakespeare we don’t get, we assume the fault is ours, but when it is someone alive, someone possibly in the audience, we suddenly assume an egalitarian perspective which reigns nowhere else in the arts. Of course we see the one little fault which the author missed which, if addressed, could raise this flawed work to perfection. I remember my freshman star critiquing the language of Night, Sleep without even a hint of embarrassment. I remember a plump Atlanta housewife saying she was “thrown out” of the action of The Faith Healer because one of the characters had a name which reminded her of something, presenting that fact as though it were my fault, and my place to do something about. We approach all art with preconceptions and prejudices, but when it concerns theater, we think, somehow, those the preconceptions and prejudices will be valuable to the creator, must be valuable to the creator if the creation is eventually to succeed. Part of this comes from the way new plays are treated in America, the “development” process in which a script weathers perhaps years of contradictory, sometimes ignorant or malicious, critiquing before it approaches a stage, when even then it is not considered a finished product, but rather that it has opened itself up a new and broader (and less well equipped) panel of critics That as many plays are ruined as helped by the development process cannot be doubted. Those which survive have had their edges rubbed off, not necessarily a good thing. If “development” involves more than a few truly perceptive professionals, all that it achieves is a state of least possible objection. You answer this objection and you answer that objection, and finally you are left with vanilla pudding. The script must be OK now because no one is griping about anything anymore. I think playwrights should keep a copy of their first draft in reserve, to judge how often “the process” has actually improved it.

Some of this attitude derives from a sense of ownership of the theater, and that part is good. The audience is telling us what they are willing to laugh at, what will make them cry, and that part, at least, should probably be listened to. Every actor knows that the audience tells you where the laughs are and how to get them, where the tragedy is and how to milk it. The playwright can profit from this, too, but only by exactly the same process which informs the actors, in the midst of performance and almost never by listening to what the audience says later, when it is trying to intellectualize its own response. When I cry out with laughter or sorrow in a theater, it is pure truth. When I try to explain later why it happened, I am almost certain to be wrong, and even certainer if I have come to the moment with what I suppose to be sophistication. The way to make playwrights is to produce their plays. Their own ears listening, their own eyes watching, will tell the good ones what they need to know. The others will not be heard from again.