The Graves

I used to write plays. Lots of plays. I’ve been fortunate to have seen them produced, both locally, and in places as varied as Bowie, MD, West Palm Beach, FL, and Manhattan, NYC (the last not as impressive at it sounds, trust me. A broom closet down a sketchy Manhattan alley is still a broom closet).

Some productions were good. Some were not so good. That goes for the plays themselves, too. Sometimes people came. Sometimes they didn’t come. Sometimes I made a few dollars. Often I ended up in hock. My only rule on the financial side was that I’d never write a play where the scenery could not fit in the back of my car. So no scenes set on the ocean with a boat full of men attempting to spear a white whale. Instead, a few chairs. Some booze and glasses. A few photos on the wall. Whatever the theater might have backstage in the prop room was fair game. An old couch or a makeshift bar is always a bonus. I do not require a carpenter, in other words. My most successful play features a lawn chair. That’s it.

Writing a play is hard. You have to be a little bit crazy to think you can do it, and crazier still to pull it off. Even writing a bad play is hard. It takes patience and a willingness to take days of work and send it virtually into the recycle bin. Patience is not my thing. It never has been. There is frayed wire in my brain that expects me to finish a play the same day I start it, which is probably the same wire that convinced me that writing plays was a good idea to begin with. STARTING a play is a bit like starting a marathon. You know it’s gonna be painful.

Plus you gotta do this in your “spare time”. I can imagine being a “full-time” playwright might be interesting, in that you could focus on things like character development and dialogue without trying to stay awake at the keyboard at 11pm on a Tuesday night after working a full day doing the type of work makes you want to go to bed a long time before 11pm. I don’t know how many playwrights there are in the world who actually do it for a living. I suspect it’s about the same as the number making a living on the PGA tour.

We need actors. I used to think musicians were odd. Musicians are like milk-drinking door-to-door Mormons compared to actors. Don’t take this the wrong way. For the most part the ones I’ve worked with have been lovely, engagingly eccentric, irrepressibly weird, and an absolute joy to drink with. But actors are cracked in ways too numerous to count. Musicians have complexes. An actor’s complex has its OWN complexes. Actors can somehow memorize 2 hours of brand new lines in a few weeks, but are liable to show up to rehearsal wearing 2 different color socks with a barrage of unpaid parking tickets flapping from their windshield wipers. Actors have talents that a playwright will never understand. They are ventriloquists and magicians at the same time. They are willing to go places the average person would never go. If they have an ego, it’s generally deserved. They work harder than you do, and they make even less money. They are all sleep-deprived. They all look wrecked….until opening night, when they turn gorgeous. Every playwright crafts his characters with specific actors in mind, whether he admits it or not. And every playwright walks a fine line between playing it cool, and gushing like a fan-boy when they hear their own words in the mouth of a great actor. I love working with them, even though they inspire terror. I never want to know what makes them tick. That would be like understanding the magic trick. Who wants that?

I directed one play, and I’ll never do it again, mostly because writing a play doesn’t mean you know how to portray it onstage, any more than writing a song suggests you know how it should be recorded. A good director finds things in your script that you didn’t know were there. A good director can suggest moments of silence that mean more than any of your meandering monologues. A good director knows when an actor needs to be either reigned in, or pushed off the cliff. A good director is as crazy as the people he or she is directing. The writer is a pain in the ass. The writer is Nurse Ratched. The director is R.P. McMurphy.

The reason I’m telling you all this is because I’ve written another play. My first one in a long time. I don’t know if it’s any good or not. I suppose I wrote it just to prove to myself that I could still do such a thing. It’s a 2 Act, 2 Character, full length play that deals with all sorts of things…..rock and roll and tragedy and regret and loss and redemption, not necessarily in that order. It’s rambly (is that a word?) and dialogue heavy and I am alternately appalled and proud of it, depending on what time of day you catch me. I have no idea if it will ever reach a stage. Most plays don’t. I’ve been away for so long that I’m not even sure where the stages are anymore. But some of the old guard are still around, and they might be willing to take a chance on a guy who used to be in the club.

I don’t want luck, but I’d love to hear the phrase “break a leg” again.

In a bit….

—tf