The Writer As Director
by Dominic Orlando
The Workhaus Playwrights Collective is
beginning our first season in residence at The Playwrights’ Center
with my A Short Play About
Globalization. Short
Play has a preview
on Friday, September 7th and opens on September 8th—in
other words, we
start tomorrow. I’ve been in rehearsals now for several
weeks with two amazing actors—Randy Reyes and Sara
Richardson. To call the piece a “two-hander,” though,
would not be accurate. It isn’t that they play multiple
characters, exactly. It’s more like they—well,
they—how it works is they—hmm. Come see the
play.
Directing your own work is either brave or foolish,
depending on your point of view and how much sleep you
got the night
before. I studied directing separately and many years
after I studied writing—but that separation becomes
more difficult in the rehearsal room. In order to be
effective
you have to literally separate yourself into two people.
It’s gotten to the point where I refer to the author
of Short Play not
as “me” but “The Playwright.” As
in—“I’m not sure what The Playwright
meant, actually—I’ll talk with him and maybe
we can clean up that speech.” It makes the actors
smile at first but eventually they come to understand
the conceit: if I’m to stop constantly rewriting
the play and start bringing it to life in three dimensions—that
is, to move from being primarily a literary and conceptual
artist to a visual artist—at some point I have
to let the script go. Far, far away. To think of it as
a finished
piece I have no power over—at the moment. Of course,
new plays always evolve in the rehearsal process—that’s
part of the thrill—but just like any other director,
I need to wait until rehearsal is over to even think
about working through changes with the playwright.
Case
in point: Working on the first scene of the play last
night, Randy had a small implosion. The scene is
a Mexican
jail—Randy is an American who’s run afoul
of the Mexican police in the wild border town of Ciuadad
Juarez.
Sara is an officer of the municipal police. The action
is an interrogation. But there’s a twist: Sara’s
officer seems to have four different agendas running
at once—she speaks in rapid-fire non sequiturs,
and though she makes it plain Randy will never leave
until
he explains why he’s come to Juarez and what
he’s
doing, she won’t let him talk. Randy was baffled
and frustrated by this—all his character wants
is to communicate, yet the script gives him neither
the opportunity
to do so, nor any direct confrontations with the officer’s
confusing methods (e.g., “Will you shut up and
let me talk!”). How was he supposed to play the
scene?
There was a moment—the actors looked to
the Director for guidance. Unfortunately, the Playwright
was sitting
in his place, wondering if there was something “wrong” with
his play. Wondering if the scene was poorly written,
if Randy was “right” and the character
wasn’t
getting his due. The pause… stretched. The actors
waited. The stage manager coughed.
And then the Director
said to the Playwright, “This
is my job, not yours.” Randy is reading the scene
exactly as it’s written—so much so that
he’s
feeling the same frus-trations the character is feeling.
The emotions of the character—frustration, feeling
hopeless, feeling trapped—have leapt off the
page and into Randy’s body. Now step aside and
let me work with this new, possessed body Randy’s
found.
The Playwright stepped aside. The Director and
the actors worked. Randy’s body flew around the
room—Sara
became even more viciously opaque. The play… was
alive. |
