On Writing, Playwrighting, and Theatre

In the last couple of days, the conversation on Twitter with @DramatistSteve and @DGFund and on Facebook have been on writing: what keeps you writing and what started you writing. Now, the context has revolved around the theatre, but my writing history and my theatrical history are not linked. I've been writing, in general, at least six years longer than I have been a playwright (which is clocking in at fifteen years.)

I feel like most people who have found their lives in theatre, had a lot of early theatrical experiences. It seems like a lot of people either had very active theatre families, or they got involved in the theatre at a very early age. There are of course other stories from people who stumbled into it, and I feel I probably fall into the later category.

My family wasn't a theatre family. The first show I ever saw was “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” adapted by Richard George, and I don't know for certain where or when that happened. Early grade school for sure. I remember we had pen-pals, and we took a field trip to meet them. I seem to recall it being at least an hour's bus ride away, but I'm fairly certain that the show coincided with the pen-pals trip. I didn't have anything else to do with theatre until the seventh grade. It was accidental, really. In my Junior High, there was a rotating electives program encompassing Art, Typing, and Science. This one particular year, they added Theatre to the mix, and we became reacquainted. I took a year off, and took Beginning Theatre as a freshman in high school, and then took another year off. For some reason, my junior year, I applied for the Advanced Theatre program, and got in. For the next two years, I managed to squeeze in enough theatre to become a member of the International Thespian Society. I participated as an Actor, Fly Op, Spot Op, ASM, and Stage Hand. After High School, I took a One Acts program at the Community College, and then disappeared from the theatre for a while. A couple of years after that, I discovered playwriting.

If you were to ask me what my most formative moments were in the Theatre, I could answer quite quickly. The first would be my Junior Year in High School when I was cast as Tully Bascombe in “The Mouse That Roared” adapted by Christopher Sergel, based on the book by Leonard Wibberley. It was my first major role and it was my first year in Advanced Theatre. I was so excited, I had the script memorized in a day. And yet, that wasn't what was so formative. One of my fellow actors who played the Duchess Gloriana, wanted to ad-lib a stage kiss in the final scene. I couldn't do it. I didn't want to. I had never even had a real kiss yet, and I didn't want my first one to be a stage kiss. I took the matter very seriously. In retrospect, I would say that was a mistake on my part. The thing that made such an impact, though, was that I realized I didn't have the chops to be a real actor. I couldn't separate myself and the character, and that would limit what I could play. If I was going to be an Actor, I didn't want to be the kind who limited themselves. I took a step back at that point. I still acted, but it was with a different eye then before.

The second moment would come two years later. I had graduated, but my sister was now taking the course and they were doing a production of “Inherit The Wind” by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. The actor playing Bertram Cates was rendered unable to perform a day before opening night. The teacher, Mrs. Monica Hall, had no understudies. Remembering my capacity to memorize a script, and (I must assume at this point) the fact that I was a least a tolerable actor, she called on me to step in. I did. Opening night, they announced I would be filling the role (I had Act 1 memorized), but on the next night they didn't (and I was off book.) At the end of the performance, one of the other actors stepped forward after curtain call and announced it himself. I received a standing ovation.

So why did I step away from the theatre? I really couldn't say. I know part of it was work schedules. Another piece, perhaps, could have been that I had decided I wasn't going to be an actor, and though I loved being involved with theatre, I think it all just slipped away. Now, if we want to understand when I became a playwright, we have to talk about writing, and that takes us back, again, to the Seventh Grade.

The first time my fingers stroked the keys for my own sake and not the sake of teachers and homework was probably partly a development of boredom. My family had just relocated, and I didn't know anyone. Couple that with me attending a school in a different district than the other kids in my neighborhood (as well as being a third son), I became rather used to my own company. Of course, all the writing back then were attempts at crafting High Fantasy with all the gusto and imagination of an early adolescent boy. We all have to start somewhere I suppose.

The truth of the matter is, no matter how well I can throw words down on a paper, the content of my early work was prosaic... Uninformed, with pretensions of a maturity exceeding my age, it was drivel. There is a saying, “Don't lose the forest for the trees.” At such a young stage, I never understood how to write beyond the obvious. I never understood what was visually or literally important. I do understand why, though. I don't have a visual imagination. Words on a page are just that, no matter how vivid the description. I often describe my imagination as conceptual. I can see concepts and 

interconnections with a greater aplomb than the colour of the sky when I'm looking at it. That never stopped me from writing, though. #keepwriting

You're probably wondering at this point (if you're still reading), where does playwriting come in? I've never been much a journal-er, but there was one really rough spot when I took to the pen to purge the growing emotions of the time. It started off as a bit of a verse monologue, but it quickly turned into a conversation. I had some rather undeclared scene changes that occurred as the moments within my life moved from one issue to the next, but the conversation would return like old friends catching up. Everything I wanted to say about setting and so forth, was mentioned in the conversation. I didn't use stage direction at all. Honestly, why would I? I was journaling. Toward the end of that period as my affections shifted from pain to hope, I decided to end the conversation. And I mean end it. Not stop it and never think about it again, but actually end it. So I did. I remember realizing as I finished, as I sat flipping through the pages and pages of dialogue, that that was all it was. Dialogue. I realized all of my terrible attempts at fiction mostly moved through dialogue. And this? This was so much better. Gone was my (let's be honest) terrible, terrible prose. In its place were thirty pages of verse dialogue, and I knew in the core of my being I would have to try and do that on purpose.

Looking back, I remember thinking, how hard can it be? If you ever have the chance to read my early work, let me apologize now. In structure, I tried to follow my homeboy Shakespeare, but stylistically I attempted to emulate Milton. Why heroic couplets, I'll never know. It failed miserably. Each script that would follow became a refinement on process; of verse and of narrative. I also stopped writing about myself. It turns out I even bore me. In my quest to write ever more interesting characters, I found myself digging (often unintentionally) into social issues. I found myself wanting to talk about them. I know one of the major issues facing so much social activism is the ignorance of the uneducated and the bigotry of the uninformed. Like every step along the road so far, I accidentally became a Creative Advocate.

It would be a lie to say have been totally absent from the theatre in the years since College, but the truth of the matter is I have been neglectful. Being a writer whose work nets zero dollars, and at times working 60-70 hours a week between one-to-three day jobs, not even counting writing, I have found it difficult to get there. But the pen has always been there, and the theatre has too. How can it not be when I want to give actors the same emotions I was left when I was one myself.