Recently I've been filling out applications for playwriting fellowships. A lot of them ask the same questions over and over again. The downside is answering a lot of the same questions, the upside has been being forced to answer a lot of tough questions about myself.
Similarly, I was on a plane recently headed to the Southeastern Theatre Conference (for my work at an acting school in NYC). I was reading a collection of early Adam Rapp plays. The man seated next to me if I was in theatre, we got to talking and sure enough we were both headed to the same place. He was the Technical Director for The Santa Fe Opera. He asked me about what I was reading and I told him the truth. A bad collection of plays which felt like they were written by a very young in craft playwright. (Sorry Adam, but it's true.)
Then he asked me about my own work. (I'll sometimes see this on playwright's websites, their aesthetic or what their plays themes are commonly about.) And the only way I could describe it was, "If the plays of Tracy Letts and Sam Shepard had a really angry baby." Or, "A white trash Terrence McNally with a drug and alcohol problem mixed with a lot of self hatred." (No one ever finds the last one funny.)
The example I use is, if I wrote LIPS TOGETHER, TEETH APART the pool would have been empty (except for beer cans), the couples would have beaten the crap out of each other and they all would have hard core gay sex with each other and guys next door. How about that for a Fourth of July weekend Terrence?
But I digress.
When I was a little kid people asked me what I wanted to be. I was strange and said a writer. (What 6 year old does that?)
I then spent the next 30 years in denial of that fact. Sure I wrote plays as an undergrad, but they were full of sturm & drang and were badly written. But the seeds of what I write about were planted. Not much has changed. Misplaced love, family, outsiders, misfits, broken hearts and the disenfranchised: that's what I write about.
I didn't start writing again until recently. During the last writer's strike my agent asked me if I wrote. Well I did write. I was even on scholarship for it at The University of Iowa. (They didn't give out acting scholarships then.) Then I spent a long time in denial of being a writer. Years spent improvising and acting (which I'm not too shabby at), an MFA in Acting at Rutgers were I was told I wasn't really allowed to write and should just be an actor (screw that). But ultimately, after all of this time, I have come around to being a writer.
Of course I started writing again, but it was television (which I love), and grudgingly, against my will and better judgement did I go back to writing plays.
The funny thing is, I was calling myself a playwright before I actually accepted that I was a playwright. It's only been in the last year and a half that I have truly embraced writing theatre.
The theatre is my home. It's where I first cut my teeth as a writer. It's the first place that I started telling stories with people who I loved and enjoyed telling stories with.
I think that's the key. Telling stories with others who I love and respect.
Let's face it, no one is really going to make any money doing theatre. It's just isn't going to happen. Not today. Not when the regional theatre movement is dying and producers are afraid to take a chance. But I can tell cool stories with my friends.
I'm also no longer out to change the world. My stories come to me through the characters in my head. They take on a life of their own and grow deep roots into my soul and the only way to get them out is to put them on paper and turn them loose.
Are my plays political? No. But my characters have politics, as well as hopes, dreams, wishes, love, hate and rage.
As long as I have friends to tell stories with I'm going to keep telling my stories about misplaced love, family, outsiders, misfits, broken hearts and the disenfranchised.
