A few years ago I was at a Christopher Shinn play at Playwrights Horizons. When I heard there was going to be a talkback after the performance, I decided to stay. It wasn’t that I wanted to hear the comments so much as I wanted to see how Shinn would respond to them.
The tone was conversational and polite. The artistic director would field comments and questions, then Shinn would respond. After about 10 minutes there was a lull. The artistic director said, “Okay, if there isn’t anything more…
An older man to my right thrust his hand aggressively into the air. The artistic director paused, then called on him.
The man leaned forward, eyes lasered on Shinn.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s the problem with your play…"
I wanted to dive under my seat. I felt implicated in his rudeness simply by physical proximity. But Shinn handled it well. He raised his eyebrows a bit, then smiled and nodded.
Ah, the smile and nod! Where would we playwrights be without it? It covers everything. Like a burka.
I hate public talkbacks. I agree to do them because I want to be a good sport, but I never do them willingly. I suspect most playwrights feel the same way. To my mind, it is an absolutely bizarre situation. It would be considered unspeakably rude to put the actors up on the stage after the reading and publicly criticize them. Yet it is perfectly commonplace to do this for playwrights, who have worked hundreds of times harder on the piece than the actors. And any response from the playwright other than “Thank you” is considered defensive.
And thus is it born – the smile and nod.
About three weeks ago my play Another Girl was read aloud. The reading was to be followed by a talkback. The talkback was not public, but it was before a large group of people whom I knew slightly at best. This time, however, my arms were not folded in front of my chest. There was no smile plastered to my face. I wasn’t stretching my neck to prepare for 20 minutes of vigorous, moronic nodding.
I was leaning forward. There was a pen in my hand. The pen was not a prop used to write fake notes as a way of momentarily relieving the pressure of public criticism. It was to write down everything that was said so I wouldn’t forget it.
The difference was not the quality of reading. The people who read it did a perfectly fine job, but they are not actors. The difference was the quality of the room, and the people in it.
The occasion was the opening weekend of PlayPenn, the new play development conference I recently attended. The conference begins with the selected plays being read simply, by non-actors, to experience the text. By chance, my play was the last one to be read. So by the time of the reading of my play, not only had I heard 5 wonderful plays, I had heard the response to those plays by the people in that room, the writers and directors and designers of PlayPenn.
Often public talkbacks are prefaced by artistic directors, like the one shielding Christopher Shinn. They try to give an audience a heads up about the most constructive way to articulate their thoughts to the writer. Such a talk would have been ridiculous in this group. This group began with great respect for the writer. They never spoke just to hear their own voice. They spoke from a passion for plays and playwriting.
This doesn’t mean every response to my play was positive. A prominent director actually told me I should cut one of my characters (he later recanted). But even that came from a place of respect, a desire to see my play come to its fullest fruition.
Mostly, people offered impressions. An artistic director mentioned a pair of juxtaposed images in my play (a stack of blank diaries, a handwritten document hundreds of pages long) that I had never noticed. Another director articulated what I had always thought was the biggest problem in my play in terms that made it very easy to speak of and deal with (“I feel like the ending goes from 5 to 12”).
Some of the comments were more helpful than others, but I never felt defensive for a second. It was an excellent place to begin the work I did over those two weeks.
It’s pretty easy to see the differences between the talkback I just had and the one Christopher Shinn endured those years ago. The one I had creates a standard that is, obviously, impossible to uphold. Plays will not always be read to a room filled with 35 passionate, accomplished theatre professionals.
But I think there is something that can be taken away from my experience at PlayPenn that speaks not only to what is special about the conference, but is something I think could be used to create better talkbacks in the future.
PlayPenn understands that plays are not problems to be solved. They are not cars with a bum transmission – just replace it and zoom! There ya go! Plays are living breathing things created by other living breathing things. If you happen to be lucky enough to be let in on the process of creation, you should tread lightly and carefully, with great respect. But not only respect. Also joy. Joy in the possibilities in the work and in the things it has already achieved. This is not done to protect a playwright’s fragile ego. It’s done to honor the difficulty involved in creating art.
I’m going to write one more post about the actual work I did at PlayPenn. But to understand that work you have to know the environment that nurtured it. That environment was, essentially, that room I described. I was very, very lucky to be there.
