EXTRA CRITICUM

A Playwright's Nightmare: Workshopping Albee & Ives to Death

Imagine for a moment if two of the most brilliant plays now running in New York by two of our most imaginative living playwrights--David Ives and Edward Albee--had been subjected to the sort of dramaturgical “help” most of the rest of us endure on a regular basis.

Here for your enjoyment are some imaginary notes given by some well-intentioned dramaturges during the developmental workshopping of Venus in Fur and Lady from Dubuque, which thankfully apparently they never endured.

Using the Accident

This post had been percolating in my head for a while, but John Yearley's excellent post about "failure" and a quote I came across the other day seemed to be telling me to set this down, so here it is.

I'm doing some work for hire that I can't talk about just yet, but I can tell you that the other day I researched special effects legend Douglas Trumbull's animation work on the Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I also held in my white-archival-gloved hands a copy of an early draft of 2001. My mind was blown.) Here's a Trumbull quote from Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood.

Failure

“Failure” is such a dirty word.

People in the arts talk a lot about bravery, about having the courage to follow your impulse no matter where it leads. What this means, in practical terms, is that you have to give yourself the right to fail. You have to accept failure, make friends with it.

Still, people don’t really talk much about failure. It’s considered rude.

Are the standards sinking? (or am I just turning curmudgeonly?)

In the past month, I have seen at least four (maybe more--my memory ain't what it used to be) new American plays produced in Off-Broadway or Broadway houses that display a crippling lack of skill, the kind of skill one might expect would be at least addressed in any of the myriad MFA programs that spit out new playwrights year after year.  I thought about writing about the one I sat through last night but then this morning it seemed that to do so, to single one out, would be unfair. Because the problem is bigger than any one play.

Note to self: Character trumps plot. Every time.

A couple years ago I had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with Rick Eid, co-creator of the brilliant re-imagining of the Battlestar Galactica series. Something he said has stuck with me ever since and I've been especially aware of it lately as I return my attention to revisions on my play about the rise of Ted Kennedy.

He told me that whenever it came time to make the tough choices regarding what to cut and what to keep (a daily exercise for writer-producers of television) he and his collaborators stuck to one simple axiom and it never failed.

Eat, Pray, Show Up, Do the Work

I just watched a wonderful TED presentation by Elizabeth Gilbert about creating art.  Gilbert is the author best known for her book Eat, Love, Pray which was then made into a successful movie starring Julia Roberts.