DIRECTOR VS. PLAYWRIGHT PART 2 - REWRITES!!

The New York Times has a piece on the hell of perpetual workshop that some playwrights (I hear, anyway) get caught in, and Hunka’s got some great reactions. Dan and I also wrote about the subject of feedback a while back, and more recently Comtois added some thoughts

But whatever one’s feelings on feedback from friends and colleagues (and I continue to find it useful if I process it the right way), feedback from your director is different.

Your feedback friends are gonna come up with a few things to tell you, and then their relationship with the play will be over. Your director is anticipating a long relationship yet to come with your play and is trying to think what to tell everyone other than you in order to make your script a physical reality. Their level of investment makes each of their feedback requests worthy of microscopic consideration.

Say I write a play and my friend Jordana will direct it. The play begins with a scene set on a stoop in front of an apartment building. A guy and a girl are sitting on the stoop smoking. The guy seems to be trying to admit something to the girl, but we can’t tell what yet. A total stranger approaches them and asks for a cigarette – but it’ll turn out later he’s actually after something else.

Jordana isn’t thinking about what to tell me about this scene as she reads it and pictures it in her head. She’s thinking of what to tell the actor playing the girl on the stoop - should she know her friend is hiding something, or should she play it more oblivious? Jordana wants to know what to tell the lighting designer about what time of day or night it is, where the light sources are coming from, and whether or not the audience should be able to see the stranger lurking downstage left before he approaches. She’s trying to figure out how subtle the stranger is in pursuing his objective so she’ll know how to tell the actor to calibrate his first few lines.

And if she can’t figure out what to tell those people, Jordana’s gonna come to me to ask for an explanation or an adjustment.

Now Jordana reads twelve pages further along in the script. The stranger takes out an old yearbook. Seeing the cover, the girl has an over-the-top reaction inconsistent with the shrewdness we’ve seen her display thus far. Wathing the scene in her head, Jordana feels jarred by this sudden and (apparently) unmotivated change in character. And unless the girl’s outburst is justified by something that happens later in the script, Jordana’s gonna ask me for an adjustment.

Isaac mentioned the director’s role as an advocate for the audience. Exactly. Where a feedback-buddy would say, “I feel like these three pages just reiterate a theme you’ve already established,” Jordana would experience the same problem in a different, more urgent fashion. She reads the three pages and, picturing it in her head as though she were watching it from the audience, thinks, “Why am I suddenly wondering where I’m going to eat later? Either something’s missing from this moment, or this moment shouldn’t be here at all.” So she comes to me and asks me to make an adjustment. She’s advocating on behalf of an audience that doesn’t want to be bored or talked down to.

These are great reasons for a director to ask for a rewrite. The best director-dramaturgy grows out of a thought-process where the director

1) imagines the realized form of the play,
2) figures out what to tell everyone involved in the production in order to reach that realization
3) figures out in which moments she would have no idea what to tell some of those people because the script’s internal logic has broken down, and
4) in doing all this, figures out exactly what play you’re writing and in what ways you’ve fallen short of writing it.

Of course, there are also bad reasons directors might ask for rewrites, and playwrights have to watch out for them if we’re going to protect our plays. If the director is asking for certain rewrites in order to

1) push the play toward a style they like or away from a style they don’t like
2) push the play toward a message or theme they like and away from a message or theme they don’t like
3) feel you out to see how pliable and controllable you are, or
4) to create a visual or aural moment or physical bit they’ve always wanted to stage that doesn’t fit your script, or
5) to make the lead a more natural fit for their boyfriend/girlfriend

then you’ve got to make a stand. (More about "making a stand" later.)

(Obviously I’m only serious about the first four, but I bet the fifth isn’t unheard of.)

But getting back to the good reasons for rewrites: what if a director gives you an honest, honorable, and well-thought-out rewrite note, and you still think it’s wrong? That’s next.

--SlowLearner

Comments

[R. Drapkin]

Generally speaking, when you've got a director who feels the need to tell the desingers how to do their job in analyzing and translating the play into visual media, you've got BIG problems.

[Mac]

To fill in others, R. Drapkin above is a genuine professional lighting-designer. Go here and hire him! He's good!

http://www.rpddesign.com/

I totally defer to R. on professional director/designer dynamics (like I said, this whole discussion is based on the no-money Off-Off Broadway model), so R. - what do the director and the lighting designer have conversations about in a more professional model?

[R. Drapkin]

That, of course, can be a loaded question. However, I've found that the most successful collaborative relationships come when the team begins by discussing the subject matter of the play. I am able to gain much more insight into the directors line of thinking by discussing the play than by discussing what he/she thinks it might look like.
A wonderful example comes to mind from several colleagues of mine who were just sitting down to the early meetings for a production at a fairly well known regional theatre. Anyhow, the first words out of the directors mouth to them were along the lines of "I want all the furniture to be white." The immediate question following was "Okay, well, why white?" As it turned out the directors intentions were not that things be white but merely that they be plain. As many of you well know, white in a room is plain. But on stage it's as strong a statement as everything being red, but for different reasons.
Overall, these conversations vary greatly according to the personalities involved, and the relationship. I frequently find that in the case of a director and designer who have not yet worked together, the director is likely to feel the need to instruct on exactly what it is they think things should be. Whereas in a more developed relationship in which trust has been built, the conversation is more likely to begin with the play and general impressions rather than specifics. Which I find helpful in gaining both insight into how the director works, and allowing the team to dig more deeply into the material given us.