How Do You Like Your Plays Delivered To You? (metaphor/realism/etc)

I actually can't recall having seen a play with an inanimate object as character, though I've seen a lot of plays so I feel I must have at some point. I guess I've never seen a really good one. Generally I like realism, when it's very sharp (Tennessee Williams is my favourite playwright), although I love a good absurdist play too, like Beckett or Christoper Durang (who just finally won a Tony). I actually think all really great plays are more than "simply what they appear to be"-- a good realistic play isn't necessarily simple and straightforward. That might just be a matter of semantics though.

Also, I would definitely like a play delivered to me, they can leave it in the hall.

... both approaches are okay by me.
Though there are times when I wonder if metaphorical productions aren't half-baked, especially when you deconstruct them and find the theories being propounded are neither original or complete. Just spruced up to look so and appear impressive. But that's just on occasion. Usually I write off such assessments as me being jealous of not being able to create such myself or not having the courage to. And it does take courage to write such. You're laying your beliefs down, front and center, rather than camouflaging them.

It doesn't matter to me how it is delivered.

I want a great script, great acting and a theme that challenges me. Something that attacks my beliefs. Changes how I see the world.

Several years ago, I attended a reading of a musical that was in the early stages of development. Even though it was just a reading, it was far closer to pornography than I was comfortable with. Most of the audience was offended. BUT it changed forever, how I look at advertising aimed at young teens. That made it a great play to me.

I once attended a talk by a world famous stage director. He asked us what was accomplished if we presented a play that said George Bush is a great President to a room full of people who thought George Bush was a great President.

As a playwright, I write realistic plays. That's where I do my best work. I've had several of my short (5 to 30 minute) plays produced. I'm getting better but I still haven't written a good full length play. I just finished my first 'good' one act play.

As a director, I'm slowly moving to the off beat plays, plays that have no sets, plays that are dark, plays that challenge me as a director. I still do comedies - they help pay the bills, but more and more I'm looking for sophisticated comedies rather than slapstick comedies. A couple of years ago, I directed the comedy "When Bullfrogs Sing Opera" By Carl Williams. It is a laugh out loud, pee in your pants comedy that addressed issues like breast cancer, sibling rivalry and trying to be someone you're not.

The secret is that a great production of a play starts with a great script. It can be realistic, metaphorical or just take place in the characters head. As long as it is a great script, with great acting, it will work for the audience.

Just my thoughts.

Doug

PS: If you post I will respond. I have lots of thoughts about EVERYTHING!!!

I would worry less about how people want plays delivered to them, and more about how YOU want to deliver plays. There is an audience for realism and an audience for the most avante garde, and there certainly isn't anything saying that you have to strictly stick with one or another.

My plays are often very realistic with a touch of surrealism here and there. For me, that is part of taking people and putting them in extraordinary circumstances. I don't worry about limiting those circumstances to what might be possible or probable here in our world, because a play isn't in our world. But quite frankly, that choice is up to you.

Tracy Letts is a fabulous example of the kinds of ways that plays can be delivered. Look at August: Osage Country, which is presented in a very realistic style, then look at Bug, which is so surreal that it's almost impossible to say what exactly happens in the last ten minutes or so. Most good artists wander around through styles and experiment with different things, even if it looks like they stick to one delivery system.

So, keep writing and reading. Don't be afraid of writing badly and horribly, that just comes with the territory. After you write some truly terrible scripts, you'll start writing betters ones. And before long, you'll write something that you know is really great. So keep going!

The scary thing abut writing plays is that after we write them, we have to deliver them into the hands of actors and directors. While it is difficult to create a great production out of bad writing, it is not completely impossible. on the other hand, it is quite easy to take a wonderful play and butcher it.

Sometimes a play looks odd on the page, but comes to life in performance.

The single best play I have EVER seen in my life (I am prone to hyperbole--I can't say it was the best play ever, just the one that affected me the most) was a production of the Brother Sister plays at Steppenwolf in Chicago. The play is nothing more than sophisticated "story theatre"--a genre I usually hate. It traveled through time and space, had no set to speak of, employed a "Greek chorus" of sorts (ugh...just writing it makes it sound dreadful) but the converging talents of the writer, actors and director (the brilliant Tina Landau) spun the play into pure magic.

The best show I've seen this year was a weird little play called There is A Happiness that Morning Is, based on the poems of William Blake--it's written in verse and is the story of 2 English professors at a small New England college who have sex on the lawn in front of a bunch of students and are forced to fight for their jobs by giving competing lectures about Blake's paradoxical stories of Innocence and Experience. It was fucking hilarious and brilliant and I loved it.

I also loved The Book of Mormon and a lovely production of Light Up the Sky, by Kaufman and Hart. So there you have it.

Characters. Conflict. Ideas. Heart. Humor. And a story. Add a director with vision and some damn fine actors and anything can happen. I don't care what the genre is.

I won tickets to The Brother Sister plays. It was magnificent. The writing was so beautiful, and the production itself was superb. One of the best things I ever saw in Chicago.

StoryGirl:

I've written here several times about our festival of locally written ten minute plays. We try very hard to pair the right director with the right play but sometimes it just doesn't work and the play gets butchered. I try to attend rehearsals of the plays to make sure everything is going right but occasionally something falls through the cracks and a nice play is made into something that the playwright never contemplated. Two or three plays out of 60 plays over the past eight years - so it isn't a big problem but it really bothers me when it happens.

One play comes to mind where a sweet play was turned into something dark and chilling. I told the playwright that I will find a time to do the play again.

In general, our directors do a good job with the plays they are assigned.

I have found that autobiographical plays are the hardest to do. The playwright has such an investment in the play that every nuance, every line has to come out exactly the way that the playwright lived it.

Several years ago, I wrote a short one act play about the next to last time I saw my father alive. He was well into dementia and it was almost impossible to carry on a conversation with him. I turned the play over to a director I totally respect. She murdered it. She changed my father into a humorous person. I was going to pull the play. (Unlike most playwrights, I have that power in our theater.) I talked to another director whom I respect immensely. He said it was very different than what I had written but very good. The play was a big hit - some said the best short play they had ever seen.

Looking back some six or seven years later, I can see that what she did was right. From an audience point of view, my play as I lived it would have been a long, depressing play. The humor she found lightened it for the audience while keeping it true to the theme as I had written it.

And, yes, you can make a good play out of a weak script. I've seen it done many times. But it sure is easier if you start out with a great script.

The best play I have ever seen was The War Horse. I got to see it at Lincoln Center in NYC shortly after it opened. Five minutes into the play, the puppets cease to be puppets and became real horses. A tour de force of theater.

Doug