The collaboration of director Michael Blakemore and playwright Michael Frayn collaboration goes back to 1980. They've collaborated on eight premiere productions of Frayn plays, including Noises Off, Benefactors, Here, Copenhagen, and the current Democracy, coming to Broadway in the fall.
In his book Making Plays , Duncan Wu interviews a number of playwrights and directors (seperately) to talk about their collaborative processes, and I liked this bit from his interview with Blakemore:
Our arrangement is that he’s welcome at rehearsals anytime he likes. He usually comes to the first reading… then he goes away, and says, "Ask me back when you want me back."…The only thing about the writer, if the writer attends, is: he’s either got to be there the entire time, so that we get used to him, or come when we’ve got something to show him. In a rehearsal room you’re asking people to shed their inhibitions and this requires candor and trust. Everyone there becomes bonded by the terrors ahead and a person who comes in from outside (particularly if he has the authority of the author - who is after all, the court of final appeal) can introduce tension into the rehearsal room, which isn’t productive. If the author’s there every day, fine; if he’s not going to be there every day, it’s nice if he comes when we’re ready to show him something.
I think that's exactly right, and I wildly prefer the latter option. Bear in mind, I'm an egomaniac. I can read my own plays over and over again, marveling at my own wonderfulness. I'm a damn genius, y'all. You heard it here first. But sitting in on rehearsals of my own plays, watching a director have a group of actors perform the same six lines of dialogue twelve times in a row to find the perfect callibration of dynamic... I nearly hemorrhage from boredom.
Now, on the couple of occasions that I've directed my own plays, I haven't been bored, because I had things to pay attention to, the myriad tiny details that accrue into a directorial vision. I suppose I could pay attention to those details while sitting in rehearsal as a playwright, but I don't, for one very simple reason: it would drive me insane.
The director has to be allowed to direct the play. Only one person in the production should be thinking like a director. Directing involves making ten thousand tiny decisions that cohere into a unified whole, and no two artists are ever going to agree on more than one-tenth of those decisions. So if you as the playwright start thinking about those ten-thousand tiny decisions, you're either going to end up
1) stewing in impotent frustration, or
2) meddling with the directing.
Then first is unpleasant. The second is disastrous. We playwrights must NEVER, NEVER interfere with the minutiae of directing in process. All of my posts on this subject up to now have involved defending the playwright from excessive meddling by the director. But now we're at the stage of production where the shoe has entirely switched feet and now the director needs protection from you. If they're the wrong director, replace them or suck it up. But even if you replace the director seven times, you're going to have to leave the the eighth director the hell alone to do their work.
As I've said before, I've never been involved in a process where the director asked me not to attend rehearsals. In fact, I've never personally heard of such a situation. (Maybe somebody out there has.) I would never work with a director who asked me not to attend rehearsals. Period. It's a deal-breaker.
But I would happily work with a director who asked me not to attend certain rehearsals. The directors I've worked with have been very solicitous of my feedback, and some of them have told me I could attend whenever I liked. But Blakemore's point is well-taken: the playwright is just not useful to a rehearsal process on a day-to-day basis. Wait 'till they have something to show you.
One interesting and problematic scheduling thing I've noticed over and over again: very often I'm invited to the first off-book rehearsal. This may be because the first off-book rehearsal is also the first stumble-through of the entire play. My presence at that rehearsal, which is already a bit freaky for the actors, becomes doubly so on their first day without scripts, when they will inevitably be struggling with getting their lines right. The fact that I'm watching seems to make it harder. These rehearsals always seem to end with actors coming up to me and apologizing.
I'm usually pretty cool at handling these situations. As Sean pointed out yesterday, my whole "My words! My beautiful words!" joke helps put actors at their ease. But also, the best way to get others to chill is to be chill yourself. I tell the actors that I'm an actor myself, and I know what the first day off-book is like, and I know from experience how difficult my dialogue can be to memorize sometimes.
But I do wonder if there's some way I could instead be invited to the rehearsal that takes place two days after this one, so the actors can have their stumble-day in peace without any visitors in the room.
What if the director asks for rewrites in rehearsal?
Good question. (And continue to bear in mind: this whole series is modeled on the no-money Off-Off Broadway This-May-Never-Be-Produced-Again model, which excludes workshops and out-of-town tryouts.)
Most rewrites requested after rehearsals begin are practical ones: "Can we move the line where she offers him coffee to after the part where she reads the letter? We can't have her reading a letter and pouring coffee at the same time." In general, I think playwrights should accomadate as many of these changes as possible. If a simple, harmless rewrite can spare a lot of other people a lot of difficulty, for god's sake, do the rewrite.
But sometimes a scene or a moment just doesn't work. The director shows it to the playwright. It's not working. Well, the playwright can go home and do a rewrite. Or if it's not too tricky, they can do it out in the hall or in the corner, as I've done on a number of occasions.
But what if the playwright thinks the moment is working, or isn't working due to misdirection?
I think once it becomes clear that the writer and director are at loggerheads over a scene or a moment, they need to take it outside or table it until after the rehearsal. I'm strongly against actors being involved in writer-director conflicts. At best it's a distraction, at worst a faction-creating mess.
As far as how the playwright ant director should work it out... I mean, obviously there is no blanket advice. There's too many variables in theater. One thing that's helped me out on a couple of occasions is to get off the my-way-vs-your-way track and have a more abstract conversation about what you each want to accomplish with that scene or moment. Forget the specific lines and talk about the impact you want to make there. Usually you'll find that you have more in common than you think, and an approach neither of you had thought of will emerge.
Another thing to remember is the problem moment may not be the real problem moment - it may be that what looks like the problem moment just wasn't properly set up earlier in the play or isn't properly paying off later in the play. Keep the whole play in mind. It might be that if you fix a problem somewhere else, they contentious scene will suddenly make sense to both of you.
I'm not quite done with the rehearsal process. I'd like to devote an entire post to the issue of stage directions. Sure, the director needs to stick to the words you wrote. But do they have to realize your stage directions exactly as you wrote them? That's next...
--SlowLearner
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Posted by: JasonTell7 | June 29, 2007 at 04:12 AM